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Books I Read in 2025

I read 63 books (at least—sometimes I’m not so good about remembering to write them down) in 2025. This is more than last year’s 52, but still far fewer than I would like. Here is a list of my “most memorable books” in no particular order. Though some of them were new books, this list will include books previously released that I just happened to read this year.

Poetry

Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems by Kristjana Gunnars. Gunnars is a longtime favourite of mine, and a big influence on my own poetry. I actually took a class with her as a young person, but that was before I read her work (maybe just as well!). It’s been a while since a new poetry book from her, and I just realized that she came out with this one with a small press in the U.S. a couple years ago. It did not disappoint; her voice is just as I remember it.

A couple other poetry books I’ll mention without comment:
Wellwater: Poems by Karen Solie
Love Language by Nasser Hussain

Fiction

All Fours by Miranda July. While I didn’t fall over myself about this book quite the way some of my slightly younger friends did (my child on a Miranda July video I made her watch: “I see. It’s Millennial humour”), and even stalled for a while in the middle, in the end it’s nothing if not memorable (look up “the tampon scene”—or don’t). For the record, I preferred the story much more after I came back to the second half. What happens after the motel for me was much more interesting than the parts that happened in it.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang. Kang is a Nobel Prize– and Booker Prize–winning author from South Korea. We Do Not Part chronicles atrocities of the Korean War through the experiences of a writer who learns more about them through her friend’s family history. But that’s the pedestrian way to describe it. It’s a book with many layers of ghosts and darknesses—of a snowstorm, of night, of unconsciousness, of a guttering candle, of black paint, of a mine, of the ocean, of mass graves.

Nonfiction

A Truce that is Not Peace by Miriam Toews. I peripherally know Miriam Toews, though I haven’t spoken to her in a long time (she babysat my newborn once when I went to the dentist near her house!). I’ve met some of the secondary characters who feature in this memoir. All that adds a layer for me, but it doesn’t really matter: this book is brilliant in how it refuses to be a “memoir” and just is what it is. I don’t really believe in genre anyway, and this reads like a book that also doesn’t believe in genre. I don’t think a writer without the kind of track record she has could publish this with a major press. But publish it they did, and it’s making a tonne of best-of lists for 2025, so I don’t need to say much more.

Peggy and Balmer by Tom Radford. Radford, a documentary filmmaker, writes a history based on the lives of his grandparents, pioneering journalists in Alberta who literally arrived the day that Wilfrid Laurier spoke to mark the province’s entry into Confederation. It’s a fascinating take on journalism history, including its troubled relationship with business interests, and also a look at how Alberta got to be… Alberta. (I grew up in the Alberta. I have an usually high tolerance for wacky governments. Things are getting a bit too much even for me out there these days, though.)

Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games by Kawika Guillermo. I read a lot of memoirs this year, and though Toews’ is the obvious star player, this one is a dark horse for my favourite book of the year. Some people who know me may know that I get a bit wrapped up in video games. Unusually only one came at a time, until I’ve spent so much time on it, perhaps over years, that I just have to delete it from my computer. Until the next time a game takes over my life. Guillermo is a video games scholar, so brings a lot of deep thought and receipts to this long reflection on a life in video games (I’ve already been following up on their bibliography). It’s pretty dark in the middle (darker than the marketing bumpf would let on), but the darkness is important. Games ground the memoir and the life inside it.

Dear Da-Lê: A Father’s Memoir of the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution by Anh Duong. The writing in this one is serviceable, not literary fireworks like some of the other books here (my usual fare). But this guy’s life story brings it: he comes of age in Vietnam during the war and as a young man manages to get out of dodge on an international scholarship to… Iran. Where he has to get out of dodge a second time.

A couple more honourable mentions in the nonfiction category:
Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love by Julie Sedivy
All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey by Teresa Wong