I started this little ritual in January with one fuzzy idea in mind: that if I kept track of what I read every month, I might learn something – about books, about myself, about how time moves. Now it’s December, almost a whole year later, and I’m sitting here trying to make sense of it all. I’ve read 114 books this year. One hundred and fourteen. That’s a real number. I triple-checked.
And honestly? I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to take from the exercise. It didn’t make me smarter or kinder or particularly more well-adjusted. But it did give me a structure, a shape, a place to put my brain when everything else felt unplaceable. This was a profoundly unsteady year – if you’re reading this and you’re still standing (or crawling, or hiding under the blanket, no judgment), I salute you. We made it. By the skin of our teeth, though.
These books were my companions. I fought with them. I cried. I scratched my head and rolled my eyes. Some were brilliant, others baffling, and all of them gave me something – even if just the reminder that I was still capable of finishing something. Their ghosts will live inside me forever. They’ll whisper lines back to me when I least expect it. They’ll fuel late-night conversations, awkward dinner debates, inner monologues about heartbreak and power and desire and loneliness.
I don’t know if I’ll keep this going next year. What do you think? Should I? I’ve always written this for me, and maybe the seven of you who read it (hi, I love you, never leave me). But mostly for me. For the version of me that needed something to hold onto, something to catalogue, something to make sense of the mess.
This was that thing. This is that thing.
But I digress. You’re here to read about the books that saw me through December. Here they are.
Theft, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Riverhead 2025
This one snuck up on me like an old memory with a new face.
Gurnah, bless his heart, doesn’t so much write stories as quietly unearths them like slightly bruised fruits at the bottom of the bowl – tender, still sweet, somehow riper for the waiting.
Set against the backdrop of Tanzania’s tourism boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, Theft explores a country still grappling with the aftershocks of colonialism, now caught in a different kind of power dynamic – one dressed in the sunhat optimism of foreign visitors. In this landscape, Gurnah’s characters navigate memory, identity, and the quiet disruptions that don’t always make the history books but still shape a life.
There’s no capital‑P protagonist here. He moves from one voice to the next, like someone walking through a house where every door is slightly ajar, and you’re allowed to listen in for a while. It’s a refusal, really – of the idea that some people matter more than others, that stories must have a spine and a centre.
Which is a nice way of saying that Theft doesn’t care if you’re the kind of reader who wants a clear hero or a “what happens next.” You get little collisions instead. Moments of sadness that sound like someone quietly closing a drawer. Uncertainty treated not as a crisis, but as the sea we all swim in.
There’s a beautiful kind of soft chaos in the way this book unfolds – like sitting in the passenger seat of someone else’s life, half-listening, half-dreaming. You could call it slow. You could also call it real. The kind of slowness that life demands when it’s not performing. When it’s not afraid of blending the heartbreak with the mundane. Because let’s be real, when something you built your days around disappears, you grieve, yes, but you do it while replying to emails and making a mental note to buy dish soap. There is no separating the two.
I don’t know if I’m making any sense right now. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this book reminded me – in some way – of this simple fact: the one thing that can’t be stolen from you is the act of reimagining yourself – over and over again.
Lili Is Crying, Hélène Bessette, translated by Kate Briggs, Fitzcarraldo, 2025
Oh my god. This book felt like jumping into freshwater with your clothes still on. A little jolt to the system in the best possible way.
I went in knowing I’d like it. Being a lifelong Marguerite Duras fangirl has pre-conditioned me to crave the elliptical, the ironic, the emotionally perverse. But I wasn’t expecting to be so smitten. Bessette’s voice is incredible, and what she does here is so very unique. Especially if you consider the fact that the book was written in 1953. It could’ve been written yesterday. Today, even. That’s how sharp it is.
Structurally, Lili Is Crying is a novel that wants to be a poem. Or maybe a fever dream. Or maybe something else altogether. Imagine The Odyssey rewritten by a post-war Parisienne with a bruised heart and a wicked turn of the phrase. Or an Ali Smith novel that accidentally wandered into psychoanalysis. The form is fluid, undisciplined in the best way – sentences scatter and reassemble, narration shifts without warning, time folds in on itself like warm laundry.
The plot, loosely speaking, is this: Lili, a single woman living under the (very heavy) shadow of her domineering mother, is trying to find a husband. That’s it. That’s the setup. But that’s not really what the book is about. It’s about power, gendered compliance, the absurdity of social roles. It’s about what happens when women try to assert themselves inside the very frameworks that erase them. It’s about mothers and daughters and the impossibility of separating your own voice from the one that raised you.
Also, I’m begging you not to assume you know where this is going. I can promise you: you don’t. There are narrative curveballs. Perspective shifts. And an ending that made me do the internal equivalent of blinking three times in disbelief and then immediately texting a friend.
There’s something in here that reminded me of The Years by Annie Ernaux, but inverted. Instead of collective history as personal memory, it’s personal psychodrama rendered universal – almost allegorical. A scream across a politely set dinner table.
You could write an essay about how the text formally undoes itself in tandem with Lili’s emotional unravelling. Or you could just read it and enjoy the absolute thrill of a novel that doesn’t care about behaving.
Rosa Mistika, Euphrase Kezilahabi, translated by Jay Boss Rubin, Yale University Press, 2025
After reading Theft, it felt like my Tanzanian itch still needed some scratching, so I went ahead and picked something unique – the first-ever Swahili novel to address issues of domestic violence, sexual coercion, and abortion.
Originally published in 1971 and immediately banned, Rosa Mistika has finally found its way into English, and it reads like a blend of Shakespearean fatalism and East African social critique, with just enough emotional chaos to make you want to rip the nearest pillow in half. It has the haunted-girl energy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, if Tess had grown up in a Catholic boarding school in postcolonial Dar es Salaam and had a sharper sense of irony.
There’s something fable-like about it – the language is tight and unsentimental, the plot deceptively simple: girl tries to get an education, girl is punished for being a girl, girl suffers, resists, gets betrayed, reclaims something, maybe. Maybe not. Some readers have called it melodramatic, too soap-opera-ish, and I get it – but I also think melodrama is sometimes the only form that can match the absurd stakes of being a twoman trying to survive patriarchy with your dignity (mostly) intact.
The book is slim – painfully so. I wanted more. But in some ways, its brevity is the point. It burns through its pages like a matchstick. No detours. No distractions. Just fire.
Reading this right after Lili Is Crying was like staying in the same emotional weather system – same storm, different continent. Both books sit with female trauma, but where Lili dissolves into poetic fragmentation, Rosa Mistika sharpens into something brutal, direct, and quietly political.
It’s a story of resilience that doesn’t dress itself up as empowerment. No girlboss energy here. Just damage, faith, betrayal, and the small, stubborn fight to keep going.
What We Can Know, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape, 2025
I’m always excited to read McEwan because he’s a genre flirt. He doesn’t commit. He plays, he shifts, he swerves. He’s slippery like that – and What We Can Know is no exception. In fact, it’s two books in one: part speculative future-dystopia, part historical domestic noir, connected by one of the more haunted narrative devices I’ve seen in a while.
The first section is slow. Meandering. A bit like wandering through a wax museum that occasionally glitches. Think Midnight in Paris if Gil had stayed in 2020 and everyone was on Twitter and mildly despairing. I imagine many readers bailed here – it’s dense and distracted, humming with climate anxiety and low-grade philosophical ache. But I stayed. And I’m glad I did, because the second part, when we’re flung into the past, throbs.
This is where McEwan shines – the domestic, the interpersonal, the buried violence between people who once promised to love each other. Vivien, the woman at the heart of this story, is one of his finest characters. She is written with both sharpness and softness, a bruised complexity that refuses to be neatly boxed as either victim or monster. Guilt, complicity, self-deception – the usual suspects, but rearranged to look like new crimes.
It made me think (in that spiraling, itchy way you do when grief is still fresh) about how much of our lives we build on uncertain facts. How memory is a house with mirrors instead of walls. How easily one person’s truth becomes another’s fiction. The novel doesn’t answer these questions – it just lets them hang in the air, like half-finished thoughts. What McEwan did here is something akin to putting his hand in the cavernous space between what we are and what we pretend to be, and wiggling it around.
That’s what this novel does. Wiggles around in what we think we know.
You might not love it. You might not even finish it. But if you do, and you let it wash over you, something in you might shift – just slightly.
The Boyhood of Cain, Michael Amherst, Faber & Faber, 2025
I didn’t hate it. I also didn’t connect with it. So: comme ci, comme ça.
It’s a coming-of-age story, which should have moved me more than it did, but the boy at the center of it is one of those characters that just makes you… not want to be around him. A precocious, navel-gazing, self-important little snob who’s convinced he’s special (and not in a Tender Is the Night way – more in a “quotes Auden at breakfast” kind of way – you know the type). His voice oscillates between vulnerability and… well, just being kind of a dick.
And maybe that’s the point? Maybe that’s what I should have found refreshing. But I didn’t.
The prose is sparse, clipped, terse. There’s a kind of detached quietness to it that can work beautifully in other books (Grief is a Thing with Feathers, say), but here it felt like it wasn’t quite sure what it wanted to say. Everything floats – meandering and slightly vacant. You get glimmers of something (queer desire? inherited guilt? internalized Catholic trauma?), but it all stays too surface-level to cut deep.
I will say: the ending had some weight. The final section with the teacher held something that felt close to emotional truth – it landed. For a moment.
But as a whole? The characters felt too thinly drawn, the atmosphere too indecisive.
Maybe it’s a debut thing. Maybe the next one will be better.
Right now, I’m just not that interested in another quiet boy trying to decode the world by projecting his own internal drama onto everyone around him. Especially if we’re not going to go somewhere unexpected. Or at least interesting.
Still. I didn’t hate it. So there’s that?
Women, Seated, Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang, Riverhead, 2025
Oh boy. Where do I even start?
This was… weird. And not in the charming, quirky-bizarro way. More in the bland existential soup served lukewarm at a state-run cafeteria way. Which I suppose could be the point? Could be commentary? Could also be… not.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: the book is twice as long as it needs to be. That’s not a metaphor. That’s a very literal assessment. The story itself – what little of it there is – could have comfortably fit into a well-edited longform article. But instead, it stretches itself thin, like overworked dough, which wouldn’t be a problem if it were flakier, or butterier, or anything-er.
Still, it does capture something about the overt classism in a society that once (on paper) deemed itself classless. There’s a haunting undercurrent of silent cruelty, of characters chewing glass behind polite smiles.
But then… there’s the goose.
I will never recover from what happened to the goose. The goose was pure. The goose did not deserve this. That scene was the only one that gave me actual emotion – not because of how it was written, but because my sense of justice demanded it. RIP, Goose. Gone too soon. May your feathers haunt Swan Home forever.
Also: where was the boy in the final chapters? Did Zhang forget he was a character? Did he step out for a noodle break and never return?
Speaking of forgetting things: who writes these book flap descriptions? Because whoever crafted this one deserves to bite into a tasteless apple into eternity.
“But little do they suspect that Yu Ling has secrets of her own. […] How far will she go to claim her due? Taut and enthralling, Women, Seated is a high-stakes story of power and privilege, crimes and secrets, and the elusive pursuit of personal freedom.” Yeah, right.
The real theme seems to be: lower your expectations, stop wanting things, and you’ll be fine. Which, sure, sounds like my therapist on a bad day – but it wasn’t all that convincingly built here. I kept waiting for a turn, a punch, a payoff. Instead, I got something that felt like an ambient hum of disappointment, a whole novel set at the exact moment when you realize the tea has gone cold and your biscuit is stale.
Anyway. I don’t hate Zhang Yueran. I’m open to trying her again. But next time, someone please check the back copy before I commit to another goose-less slog.
Autocorrect, Etgar Keret, translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston, Granta, 2025
I loved this. Like, loved-loved it. This was so, so bonkers in the best way – the kind of bonkers where you’re not sure whether to laugh or scream or quietly start digging a bunker.
Did anyone else catch a whiff of Black Mirror reading this? Because I for sure did. That same feeling of this is absolutely hilarious, and also, we’re all going to die, and it might be deserved. The tone also felt oddly Murakami-adjacent – there’s a lot of drama here, but it floats, untethered, feather-light. Nothing ever screams; it just lingers in your peripheral vision until it dissolves into something devastating.
This is peak Keret: short stories that go down like convenience store snacks – easy, fast, addictive, and strangely emotional in their aftertaste. Am I meant to savor them or inhale them? (I inhaled. No regrets.)
The standouts? A World Without Selfie Sticks, Gondola, Eating Olives at the End of the World, Guided Tour, Present Perfect, Lucky Us. Honestly, I wish this had never ended. I could have gone on forever, collecting these little dystopian emotional gut-punches like Pokémon.
Every story sounds hollow – in that purposeful, echo-in-a-vacuum way – bouncing between life and death, hope and despair, empathy and apathy, the metaphysical and the AI. And then somehow, each one ends with a punchline so perfect it hurts.
Keret walks that tightrope of dark, slightly sci-fi absurdism. Jewish apocalyptic comedy, but make it micro-dosed with dread. Israeli ironic comedy, but dipped in spiritual crisis. There are affairs, dead dogs, prayer rooms, traffic fatalities, absentee fathers, awkward therapists, dashed hopes, half-hearted stabs at redemption. And somehow… maybe a flicker of hope? A glitch of grace?
The penultimate story kind of stopped me in my tracks. Made me stop for a second to fully acknowledge just how great this guy is. He just slices things open, rearranges the organs, and hands them back to you still warm, still twitching.
Read it. Then text me so we can spiral about it together.
Joy is My Middle Name, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Fitzcarraldo, 2025
This whole year, if you’ve been reading my ramblings religiously (if not, why not, are you mad at me?), you’ll have noticed I read exactly one poetry book per month. A ritual, a rhythm, a promise to myself. And I’ve loved all eleven so far, so very much.
But this twelfth one? It just didn’t land.
Joy is My Middle Name had its moments – a few poems that cracked a smile, a couple of titles that made me pause and go “ooh, that’s clever” – but mostly, it felt like the titles were doing more work than the poems themselves. And look, I get it, it’s meant to be funny and sad, witty and guttural, heartbreak via punchline. But somewhere between the wry smile and the quirk, I felt… nothing? Like I came for blood and tears and instead got a stand-up set at an indie MFA bar.
I know it’s me. I should’ve known “exceptionally hilarious” poetry wasn’t going to be my thing. Not because I’m humorless (debatable), but because poetry, for me, is meant to rearrange my insides. I want drama. I want sobbing-in-the-bath energy. I want to be wrecked. And this one didn’t wreck me. It made me nod politely, maybe grin, but then I walked away unchanged.
Still, I won’t say it’s a bad book – far from it. It’s sharply written, self-aware, and clearly the product of a very smart, very funny brain. I did kind of enjoy “Your Brain is Not a Prison” (if you’re looking for a highlight, that’s the one). But overall, it was quirky in a way that just wasn’t my kink.
I used to think poetry was impossible to rate. And yet, here I am. Three stars. Shrug.
On to the next month, and hopefully back to crying on page four.
On the Calculation of Volume III, Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, Faber & Faber, 2025
Read the first OTCOV last December. The second in January. And now here I am, full circle, one year later, with Volume III – crossing my fingers in hopes that Volume IV (expected in April) somehow gets to me sooner. I kind of love that this series became my background hum for the year – a woman stuck in one single day, on repeat, while time gallops around her. Feels… relevant, somehow.
I went back to read my notes from January – my very first A Month in Books entry – and what I said then still stands. My thoughts on form, structure, repetition, the low-grade dread, and philosophical fire – all of it still applies. What can I say? I love this woman. I love her stuck-ness. I love how she writes time like it’s an itch behind the eye.
What surprised me this time, howeverrrrr (I raise my eyebrow here), was the introduction of some very slippery, very delicious ideas on whether the world is fixable via structure or via minutiae. Big vs. small. System vs. self. I won’t say more, but Balle continues to blow my mind with how seamlessly she threads intellectual discourse through the soft body of her characters. She does this without pomp or pedantry.
Anyway.
If you’ve already started this series, congrats, you’re one of us. If not – and you’re still reading this – I beg of you: drop everything. Pen, phone, pineapple juice. Truly, whatever else is in your hands is irrelevant. Go read it. Be patient with it. Let it loop through you.
And maybe, just maybe, see yourself stuck in the same day, asking the same questions.
Not such a terrible fate after all.
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), Rabih Alameddine, Grove, 2025
If I had to choose one book to carry into the new year like a lucky charm tucked into my coat pocket, it would be The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother). I went in blind, expecting… I don’t know what, but certainly not this: a warm, rambling, chaotic hug of a novel that broke my heart and mended it with duct tape and feral cat fur.
Raja, our narrator – neurotic, introverted, perpetually single – lives in Beirut with his hilariously inappropriate and endlessly meddling mother, Zarfa. He’s a philosophy teacher, which might explain his compulsion to overthink everything, and a gay man in a country where that still comes with cost. The story flits between timelines and traumas: from his kidnapping and abuse during the Lebanese civil war to the present-day unraveling of a nation – financial collapse, COVID, the 2020 Beirut explosion. But even as these events roar through the backdrop, Alameddine’s novel insists on intimacy. You still have to go to work. Still have to feed the cat. Still have to endure your mother crashing your lectures and befriending mobsters. Life insists.
This isn’t a romance, but it is a love story – just not the kind we usually get. It’s about the exasperating, suffocating, fiercely tender bond between a mother and a son. About survival. And humor, always humor, even when it teeters on the edge of the unbearable. Raja breaks the fourth wall to talk directly to us sometimes, like an old friend ranting over coffee, and I loved that. He doesn’t shy away from the pain, but he doesn’t wallow in it either. He laughs at it. He sidesteps it. He fills the space with digressions, with details – a table from his childhood home, a cat no one else wanted, a memory too sharp to look at directly.
I adored this. Absolutely, wholeheartedly. It’s messy and loving and wise. The writing is playful but weighted, like a joke you tell with tears in your eyes. The political is personal, the historical is domestic. It’s the kind of novel that knows real life never pauses for the big events. You live through them anyway – while you do the dishes, while you fight with your mother, while you try to remember who you were before everything broke and you had to tape it back together with stories.
Please read it. You won’t regret it. Unless you’re the goose from Women, Seated, in which case – maybe sit this one out.
Closing Words
So that’s it. We made it to the end of this choose-your-own-trauma adventure they dared to call 2025. Somewhere between the small heartbreaks and the big disappointments, the meals reheated three times, the group chats left on read, the days that felt like fog, and the nights that felt like knives, I read. I read like it was a way out. Or a way back in. Or maybe both.
And you know what? I’m proud of that.
If you’re here – still reading – then hi, I love you. You are my people. We might not have it all figured out (and frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who does), but we have good taste in books, above-average emotional intelligence, and an exquisite ability to laugh while everything’s on fire. That’s something.
So here’s to us – the overthinkers, the soft-hearted cynics, the hopefuls pretending not to be. May next year be gentler. May we be a little gentler, too, with ourselves and with each other. May we read things that split us open and stitch us back up. And if not – may we at least have snacks.
See you in the next chapter. Maybe.
Or maybe not.
I’ll let you know.
