best reading 2025

A bit down from last year, 9 books per month ... coupla cinderblox slowed me.

First off, there were the highly anticipated releases this year, foremost among them Christian Bök (see below), Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance Vol III (Joel Scott) [Duke], a fitting end to the trilogy, somehow timely, and Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket [Penguin], valedictory, similarly placed amongst his oeuvre as Look at the Harlequins! is in Nabokov's, self-parodic to some extent but also other-wise, all in all a fun ride (I'd rank squarely in the middle, cf biblioklept, who also compiled notes thereon) [BookMarks]. (Another fun ride was Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff's multi-meta e-pistolary Your Name Here [Dalkey], tho not up to this level.) The highly anticipated that fell short of its promise and premise was Michael Lentz's Schattenfroh (Max Lawton) [Deep Vellum], father-son dynamic amidst ekphrastic & exegetic excess from Reformation to now to Revelations; challenging read, anagram-mad, Andrei's notes & precis essential (would not have persevered otherwise), but hey, risks taken [BookMarks].

Then there are this year's releases that I didn't see coming:
Felix Nesi, People from Oetimu (Lara Norgaard) [archipelago]: historical group portrait on Timor border.
Antoine Volodine, The Inner Harbour (Gina M Stamm) [Minnesota]: gone to ground in transitioning Macau; late to US release; one of his better efforts, if atypical.
Wiesław Myśliwski, Needle's Eye (Bill Johnston) [archipelago]: age & youth, memory & mixed-taken identity, midlate20c smalltown Poland; up there with BTBA-winner Stone Upon Stone, and one of FT's 10 best translations of 2025.
and from late 2024:
Karl-Markus Gauß, In the Forest of Metropoles (Tess Lewis) [Seagull], essays on neglected Euro byways (geographical, ethnic, linguistic), excellent, tho last third falls off a bit.
Federico Falco, The Plains (Jennifer Croft) [Charco]: another rural retreat.

Catching up on what I'd missed from prior years, the best were
Ali Smith, Autumn [Anchor]
Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, Dayswork [WWNorton]
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop [Vintage]
Ismail Kadare, The Fall of the Stone City (John Hodgson) [Canongate]
Don DeLillo, Underworld [Scribner]
Mathias Énard, Street of Thieves (Charlotte Mandell) [Open Letter]
Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time and other stories (Madeline Levine & Francine Prose) [Northwestern]
Béla Zsolt, Nine Suitcases (Ladislaus Löb) [Schocken]

And, while not among the best, still to be honorably mentioned:

Explored more Korean lit, beyond Han Kang and Bae Suah (though them too), uniformly good:
Han Kang, We Do Not Part (E. Yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris) [Hogarth] up there with Human Acts but not quite, spectral ambiguities framing don't quite cohere with, tho lyric elements make up for [BookMarks]
Jang Eun-Jin, No One Writes Back (Jung Yewon) [Dalkey] picaresque random walking the dog [MAO]
Bae Suah, A Greater Music (Deborah Smith) [Open Letter] Korean's ambivalent return to Berlin; hasn't had int'l breakout like Han Kang but shoulda,best still first englishing, Nowhere to Be Found [M&L]
Ha Seong-nan, Wafers (Janet Hong) [Open Letter] more good shorts, fragmentary-multithreaded
Hwang Sok-Yong, The Guest (Kyung-Ja Chun & Maya West) [Seven Stories] Christianity and Communism clash, both as welcome as the plague; also, ghosts [MAO]
Kyung-Ran Jo, Blowfish (Chi-Young Kim) [Wildfire] artist and architect getting past family suicides [MAO]

Less poetry this year, all worthwhile, if for different reasons in each case:
Eliana Hernández-Pachón, The Brush (Robin Myers) [archipelago] poem around Columbian paramilitary massacre
The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao (1084-1151) (Wendy Chen) [FSG] unsung Song poetess [MAO]
Christian Lehnert, Wickerwork (Richard Sieburth) [archipelago] nature-oriented poetry, sub species aeternitatis
Álvaro Mutis, Maqroll's Prayer and Other Poems (Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, Alastair Reid) [nyrb] not merely pendant on the Adventures (tangled up in blue in print), impressive variety [MAO]
Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running (Karen Leeder) [Seagull] the last East German poet, Dresden, Rome, and elsewhere; Griffin 2025 winner
The Essential C.D. Wright (Forrest Gander & Michael Wiegers, eds) [Copper Canyon] sensitive selection of poetry 1976-2016 by longtime partner and editor
Christian Bök, The Xenotext: Book 2 [Coach House]: keenly anticipated, and did not disappoint; technically brilliant, long time in the making of something to outlast everything
Zhang Zao, Mirror (Fiona Sze-Lorrain) [Zephyr]: "3rd gen" Chinese poet, merging trad and western, wrapping up Zephyr's excellent Jintian series
TBR: Ada Limón, Startlement [Milkweed]

And to close, more solid archipelago book releases:
Elias Khoury, Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea (Humphrey Davies)
Halldór Laxness, The Great Weaver from Kashmir (Philip Roughton) [backlist]
José Eduardo Agualusa, The Living and the Rest (Daniel Hahn)
Gerbrand Bakker, The Hairdresser's Son (David Colmer)
Emmelie Prophète, Cécé (Aidan Rooney)