It’s time for one of our favorite traditions: rounding up our reading team’s personal Best Ofs for the previous year! Curious to know more about our eclectic tastes? Which editor spent the most time reading fantasy this year? Only one way to find out (keep reading).
2025 was a strange year, wasn’t it? Even under normal circumstances, I think it would have felt tumultuous to me. I quit a job that was slowly sucking the life from me and started somewhere new, in a position that is more affirming than I could’ve hoped (catch me over at CRAFT now, too). My wife and I became homeowners. Friends got married, family got married, family came to visit, we went to visit family. It was the usual stuff and more, on top of living just outside DC where it seems new horrors arise every day.
So: beyond all your wonderful stories and essays, I didn’t save a lot of time for reading much else. But my on-again, off-again book club made a frenzied push to fit in a book before the end of the year, which is how I wound up reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer for the first time. This book was all the rage on campus when it came out while I was in undergrad at UW-Madison, where Kimmerer received her master’s and PhD. Yet, I’d never read it—and funnily enough, neither had one of my friends in the book club, who was with me at UW and even studied forestry.
I will admit: This book is far outside my wheelhouse. I struggle knowing what to say or how to talk about it when we meet to discuss the pages we’ve read for a particular meeting. But it’s a gift to see and experience the world in a new light, through the eyes of someone so passionate and caring about the landscape around her. The chapter on rehabilitating the pond in her backyard, in particular, captured me like little else in 2025.
Cole Meyer
2025 was a bit of a slow reading year for me. In addition to general malaise about the world, I had my own health scare and some family stuff, too. Because of all of that, I found my attention wandering with longer books and my desire to stick with books that I was lukewarm on was substantially diminished. So, short was where it was at for 2025, with the exception of one book, Cue the Sun by Emily Nussbaum which is an incredibly well-researched, thoughtful, and comprehensive look at reality TV. I loved every second of it. My other favorite reads this year (all short) were Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett, Counting Backwards by Binnie Kirshenbaum, Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe, and Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton. There was something very gentle and soothing about both Truth & Beauty and Raising Hare, which was just what I needed. I found Margo’s Got Money Troubles to be downright hilarious as well as kind-hearted. And Counting Backwards is just good—it’s the hardest (emotionally) of the five I loved best, but there’s nothing Kirshenbaum writes that doesn’t astonish me. She sees people in ways that always feel revelatory to me. I listened to a lot of podcasts and watched a ton of sketch comedy this year and I don’t regret any of it.
Jen Dupree
This was the year I finally sat down to read (well, listen to on my nonsense weekly six-hour drives) fantasy, as I’ve sworn for many years to my students I’ll someday make time to do. I grappled with as many of the current genre titans as I could grab (Malazan, awesome; A Song of Ice and Fire, not quite as amazing as I’d been led to believe; Sanderson, not for me; Wheel of Time, lots of fun if clearly dated at times), tried to catch the historically relevant pieces (Tad Williams and Mervyn Peake the clear standouts), and discovered some modern working writers I’m happy to throw into my rotation whenever they have a new offering (David Abraham perhaps my favorite author find of the year, regardless of genre; Anthony Ryan; Mark Lawrence; Joe Abercrombie). I’m very aware that I just barely scratched the surface, and doubly aware of the very particular shade and appendages all of those writers possess, but for a first toe-dip it felt quite successful.
Brandon Williams
Someone once told me that I write thrutopian fiction. I looked it up, and it’s a thing. The idea is that you take all the worst, or the worst that you can imagine up to this point, and you get through it somehow. I read Debbie Urbanski’s After World, which takes human extinction for a literary twirl, and finds something redeeming to tell us. There’s love even in a post-anthropocene environment. So will we raise the next generation of children to manage AI relationships? The current crop of young and not-so-young people are already in them. Afterword by Nina Schulyer goes there as she considers the consequences of breaking the bonds of marriage and death to revive a lost love. I want to consider in my own writing what is lost and what is gained when we remove the filter of flesh from relationships. If AI knows everything, is it a perfect lover, or fatally flawed?
Jill Bronfman
This seems to be my year of novels and short story collections. I’m almost disappointed. I like to share the tidbits that often get missed, but all good pieces deserve recognition. I’ve been recommending the dark speculative short story collection, Salt Slow, to almost everyone this year. Julia Armfield shares fantastic stories about weird neighbors, extremely messy divorces, and zombie girlfriends. It’s all truly next-level weird. Even though it’s a bit on the trashy side, I highly recommend Diavola by Jennifer Thorne as a road trip audiobook. For anyone who dreads family vacations, but fantasizes about villas in Italy—it’s for you.
Amy Armstrong
In 2025 I made sure to make time for two pretty chunky novels that I’ve been looking forward to for a few years. The first of these was The Books of Jacob by one of my favorite authors, Olga Tokarczuk and translated by Jennifer Croft. The story takes place in eighteenth century Central Europe. Tokarczuk’s attention to detail and deep interiority make the era come alive. An old world of monarchs and landed gentry was dying and things were in motion for a different world. In this chaos and anxiety, charismatic leaders exploited this uncertainty. The parallels to our modern age are impossible to ignore. My other chunky volume took me to Romania in the 1970s and 80s with Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu’s Solenoid, a surreal and philosophical work of semi-auto fiction translated by Sean Cotter. Hypnotic is the best word to describe this reading experience. I could feel new synapses forming in my brain. The book resists any kind of pithy summary. All I can say by way of recommendation is that if you’ve ever wished Kafka wrote longer, weirder books, this is for you.
Finally, I wanted to give a shout out to Sky Daddy by Kate Folk. I’m a nervous flier but a writer-friend with impeccable taste recommended it and I was in. I knew from the first page that I would make short work of this book. It is so funny, so weird, so heartwarming. I’m in awe of the way Folk managed mortally serious material with lightness and humor. At the same time, the book shed new light on the timeless topics of friendship, belonging, and destiny.
Marjee Chmiel
I’m always on the lookout for unusual ways to tell stories. I picked up Debbie Urbanski’s Portalmania, expecting to enjoy a speculative short story collection in a typical form, of conceptual pieces loosely linked by theme or vibe. The more I read I realized I was having a whole new experience. The first story, “The Promise of a Portal,” lays out the book’s raison d’être. Humans are offered glimpses of alternate worlds, and they are tantalized or terrified by them, depending on their dispositions and statuses. The portals themselves are described with sweet playfulness, as if they were cherished pets. From there, Urbanski brings us on a journey into the crux of the concept: is it actually possible to take such a leap, and if so, what are the consequences?
Larger stories are broken up into small pieces that vary in tone and point of view. This has an effect that feels like light refracting through a prism. Each piece deepens our understanding of the characters, their bonds, their flaws. Being invited to connect the dots makes the work resonate powerfully.
This is not an easy read. Urbanski writes with emotional honesty about the way society handles topics like neurodivergence and sexual coercion, and it can be painful to take in. But this is speculative fiction at its best, bending reality oh so gently until it cracks open and reveals truths about the human heart. It’s a glimpse into the way the world can flip on someone when they decide they can’t play by the rules anymore. I loved it.
Laura Wolf Benziker
Four years ago I embarked on a long, strange trip—six years to read the five ancient Chinese classics (12,000 pages, in translation). It was two years into the pandemic and I was going a little bonkers (not bonkers enough to read the material in the original middle-ages Chinese) when I discovered a virtual book club just about to embark on this journey. I joined them on a whim, to find out what kind of people would plan such an intense, dry, academic, anti-social (not like you can talk about this over coffee with the other little league moms) six year reading journey. Turns out the answer is: people just like me.
Elissa Matthews
I read a lot of other random things during the year, but I have been following this same loose plan now for years. Here’s how things shook out in 2025:
January: Launch the year with a hefty classic. Something I feel like I should have read by now but somehow never have. This year it was Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. Gothic romance and simmering dread. Perfect for the dead of winter.
February: Something fun. I fell hard into the magical world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by the masterful Susanna Clarke, and was more than a little sad to turn that last page.
March: Memoir. You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith (audio) and Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. A chef’s kiss to them both. Whether you are grieving a relationship, the loss of a parent, or just really like poetry and food and music and excellent writing, you can’t go wrong with these.
April: Poetry. Then I had to get my hands on some of Smith’s poetry. Goldenrod: Poems is a beautiful little slim volume that I marinated in for a delicious week.
May: Short fiction. The Body Farm: Stories by Abby Geni, and Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima. So fun to read fiction by two Chicago-area writers whose classes I have taken!
June/July/August: Summer of … Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I got my hands on an old advance copy of Fleishman Is in Trouble (had already watched the series, both excellent), and waited patiently for Long Island Compromise (major Succession vibes) at my local library. I will read anything this woman writes.
September: Nonfiction. We Need Your Art: Stop Messing Around and Make Something by Amie McNee. Read this (or listen—she narrates the audio book) and do everything she says! Journaling prompts, tough love, inspiration. It was just the creative boost I needed.
October: Something spooky. The Upstairs House by Julia Fine—a new mother’s apartment is haunted by the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown (of The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon fame)—and Bunny by Mona Awad—a woman struggles to complete her MFA in creative writing while being indoctrinated into a coven/writing group/literary salon. School is creepy, lest we forget all that we learned from Donna Tartt in The Secret History.
November: Something recommended to me. The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans. There is a reason this is on so many “best of” lists for last year. I read it in a day and gave it as a gift to several friends.
December: Dickens in December. Always. I read my grandmother’s old school-issued copy of A Tale of Two Cities. Her thirteen-year-old self wrote a very unflattering review inside the back cover (love you, Grandma), but don’t pay her any mind. I give a tip of the hat to indulgent first lines.
Happy reading in 2026!
Dawn Goulet