This year’s Booker Prize jury panel included Sarah Jessica Parker who said that she had to read 153 novels before selecting the winner. To read that many books requires a kind of monastic discipline – you must renounce most of life to inhabit someone else’s imagination. By that measure, my year was modest. I read around 25 books cover to cover, skimmed another 50, and bought almost one every day. So, this list is not a proclamation of the ‘best books of 2025,’ but a gentle acknowledgment of those that stayed with me.
This was a difficult year, one marked by too much travel, too many medical appointments, and a mind that often refused to linger on a sentence. Books became my refuge and my mirror as I traversed the arc of healing, and I found myself circling, almost compulsively, around mental health.
Jane Chen’s memoir Like A Wave We Break reminded me that childhood is never quite over; it simply changes costumes. Jane writes about trauma, reminding us that waves carry both beauty and danger, and that courage is nothing more than agreeing to paddle out again. Her words became a gentle companion as I navigated my own anxieties this year.
I then wandered into Japanese and Korean literature. Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman transforms the humdrum aisles of a konbini (Japanese for convenience) into a stage where the tyranny of ‘normal’ plays out with unsettling clarity.
Baek Sehee’s I Want To Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki felt like overhearing therapy in a café – intimate, awkward and startlingly honest.
Both books capture the modern condition: the ability to articulate one’s pain while feeling utterly powerless to transcend it. Unexpectedly, fiction became my sanctuary. For me, Mitch Albom is literary comfort food. It was warm, sentimental and sincere. His latest, Twice, imagines what we might do if life offered second chances. Beneath its simplicity lies a tender meditation on regret, forgiveness, and the parallel lives we carry in our heads.
My most treasured non-fiction this year came from two European historians. Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition asks what it would mean to redirect ambition toward humanity’s hardest problems. Johan Norberg’s Peak Human makes the data-driven case that humanity, despite anxieties, has never been better off. Reading them together felt like an internal duel between my cynicism and optimism. Memoirs, too, became anchors. Malala Yousafzai’s Finding My Way reminded me that courage at 15 must evolve into resilience at 25. Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is a meditation on the shaping force of a single, complex relationship. And Aruna Roy’s The Personal Is Political maps five decades of public action with a clarity that only lived experience can offer.
I am still waiting to read Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives, but I have no doubt it will be as sharp, unsentimental, and wickedly humorous as she is. Technology books flooded the market this year, most celebrating progress with uncritical enthusiasm. Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever stood out for its willingness to question whether ‘more’ is inherently meaningful.
In parallel, Tim Berners-Lee’s memoir This Is For Everyone offered a candid reflection on the birth of the World Wide Web and its unintended consequences. One of the most moving books I read, as I navigated my own role as a caregiver, was Jerry Pinto’s A Good Life. Pinto’s compassionate exploration of palliative care does not romanticise suffering but it honours the heroism of those who sit beside loved ones even when cures are beyond reach.
A special joy was reading the advance reader’s edition of Woody Brown’s Upward Bound, due in March 2026. This debut novel set in a Los Angeles adult day care centre, offers a moving portrayal of the lives of its clients and staff. If I had to choose a single book that defined my year, it would be
Always Remember by Charlie Mackesy. Its message – one day you will look back and realise how hard it was, and how well you did – was a gentle reminder that hope often arrives in whispers.
In the end, 2025 taught me something simple: the books we reach for in our hardest seasons are not for escape but companionship.
(The writer’s views are personal)