Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!
2025 is a year that defies any kind of platitudes for me, but it was a year full of upheaval—good and bad. I’m nearly finished with college, I moved into an apartment, I had my golden birthday…all with the looming specter of fascism overhead. Too many people are concernedly fine with that last bit.
This year, I wanted to make a concerted effort to read more nonfiction. As of now, according to my Storygraph, my ratio of fiction to nonfiction is 88% to 12%, which…yeah, there’s still a pretty obvious bias. But compared to last year, where only 6% of what I read was nonfiction, that’s a significant jump up! 6% more than last year! Yet even still, most of my 5-star reads ended up being nonfiction this year, something that I did not see coming. Granted, not every nonfiction book I read was amazing, but there were some real heavy-hitters this year. Spanning from memoirs to essays on everything from grief, art, and identity, I feel like this nonfiction exemplifies my aim this year: to learn more, but to resist the kind of person that the government wants me to be, and that’s someone who is ignorant. I don’t want to thank the current administration for anything, but I will give them this: their insistence on dumbing down the population has only made me want to learn more.
Last year, I talked about how my 5-star reads seem to shrink a little every year; I still maintain that it’s probably for the best, since I’m more selective now than I was before. (Also, it’s bound to be less since I read less and more slowly these days. I’m not blowing through 300 books a year like I was when I was 10 years ago.) And yet I noticed this year that sometimes, I was almost afraid to rate books 5 stars. I found myself second-guessing constantly: did it really move me that much? Was it that good to deserve full marks? Sure, I’ve retrospectively changed ratings of books here and there—it’s bound to happen as we age—but I just need to remember to go with my heart. And what spoke to my heart this year was an oddball bunch—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and science fiction featuring cats. All of it moved me in some strange way, giving me the liberatory knowledge to move forward and the strength to persist. So here’s to these amazing novels that moved me the most this year.
NOTE: Normally, I don’t include re-reads on my 5-star reads of the year, but in this case I’ll make an exception, since for one of them, I retrospectively changed my rating to 5 stars. There’s nothing like a book that’s even better the second time around.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️THE BOOKISH MUTANT’S 5-STAR READS OF 2025⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- The Last Gifts of the Universe – Riley August | love transcends the impending collapse of civilizations!! and there’s a cat!!
- Crying in H Mart – Michelle Zauner | This one gutted me, but Michelle Zauner has such a way with words, both in song and in prose.
- Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times – Azar Nafisi | in the midst of sweeping book bans and looming fascism, this is such a potent reminder of the power of books and reading.
- On Earth As It Is on Television – Emily Jane | A surprisingly emotional take on alien invasions, with a dose of bratty kids and cat memes. Not a mixture that I’d expect to bring me to tears, but Emily Jane sure did it. | Read my review here! *
- What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory – Brian Eno and Bette A. | A concise meditation on the power of art from one of the artists that I’ve admired most this year.
- Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed: 15 Voices from the Latinx Diaspora – edited by Saraciea J. Fennell | An excellent collection of the varied experiences of Latine people across the country, many of which struck a chord with me—Julian Randall’s “Julian4Spiderman” was a favorite of mine.
- A Closed and Common Orbit (The Wayfarers, #2) – Becky Chambers | back in high school, this was my least favorite of the Wayfarers series, to which I say to my past self…how? Why? I re-read this for my science fiction course that I helped teach this fall (I can now count my professor as one of my Becky Chambers converts), and it touched me so profoundly. What a sensitive and raw depiction of trying to figure out what it means to be a human person when everybody else seems to have it down. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.)
- The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World – Robin Wall Kimmerer | I finally got around to reading most of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s books this year, and this was my favorite. A case against capitalism and a case for a world embedded more with gratitude towards the abundance present in the natural world (despite what oil executives will tell you).
- Begin Where You Are: The Colorado Poets Laureate Anthology – edited by Turner Wyatt (anthology) | makes me immensely proud to be a Coloradan—no notes. Rest in peace to our most recent Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson. ❤️🩹
*I’ve bumped this up to the full 5 stars from 4.75 in retrospect. Deserved.
HONORABLE MENTIONS (4.5 STARS)
- The Infinity Particle -Wendy Xu | Read my review here!
- You Sexy Thing (The Disco Space Opera, #1) – Cat Rambo | Read my review here!
- The River Has Roots – Amal El-Mohtar
- Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Unknown Lands – Mike Mignola
- Life Hacks for a Little Alien – Alice Franklin | Read my review here!
- Strange Bedfellows – Ariel Slamet Ries
- Here Beside the Rising Tide – Emily Jane
- The Tainted Cup – Robert Jackson Bennett
- Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses – Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Mad Sisters of Esi – Tashan Mehta | Read my review here!
- Embassytown – China Miéville | Read my review here!
TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of these books, and if so, did you enjoy them as much as I did? What were your favorite reads of the year? Let me know in the comments!
Today’s song:
That’s it for this wrap-up of books! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
The Bookish Mutant 