Every year, I get further and further away from the concept of an actual “Top Ten” list. I read so many books (usually between 100 and 120) every year. Tons of them are fun but forgettable, a few are challenging but worth it, and lot (more than ten, for sure) are both a delight to read, and a joy to think back on months later.

In the end, it’s probably the “thinking back” effect that most influences which ten books make this somewhat-arbitrary list. Which books can I still remember details from, weeks or months after reading? Not just details of what’s between the pages, but details of where I was and how I felt when I was reading them? I’m pretty sure Jo Harkin’s The Pretender was my absolute favourite novel this year, though even that’s hard to say, but what I can say for sure is that I read a lot of it in bed in the bunkie at Coley’s Point where I was sleeping during my June getaway weekend with my friends, the Strident Women, and the feelings the book evoked in me are imprinted onto mental images of the pillowy white comforters that cover all the beds in that house. Then there was listening to the audiobook of John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis on my headphones while hosing dirt off a bunch of salvaged bricks in my daughter’s driveway to help her build a brick-and-plank bookcase. Or diving into a bookstore in Gatwick airport just before we had to go to our gate, discovering that they had a copy of A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray, and reading it all the way home on the excruciating plane ride from London to St. John’s because we bought the cheap seats and I had to sit sandwiched between two strangers — a situation only made bearable by the sharpest and funniest mystery novel I read this year.

I love the way books, and book memories, are woven into the fabric of my life. So these are ten books I read this year that I would unreservedly recommend to anyone who likes the specific type of book category they fall into, books I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading, and books that have stayed with me and become part of my memories of this year. Here are links to my reviews of them (list is in chronological order of when I read them during the year):

Act of Oblivion, by Robert Harris
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, by Emma Knight
Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green
A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering, by Andrew Hunter Murray
The Pretender, by Jo Harkin
How to Survive a Bear Attack, by Claire Cameron
Encampment, by Maggie Helwig
The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman
Written on the Dark, by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio

I could do a whole list of honourable mentions, but honestly, you can just scroll back through this blog and see reviews of most of what I read this year. You can also see a quick visual overview of pretty much all my 2025 reading here. I guess in the category of honourable mentions, I will just say that I didn’t have any local authors on my alleged “top ten” list this year, but my two favourite books by Newfoundland writers were Angela Antle’s The Saltbox Olive and Debbie McGee’s Cautiously Pessimistic, and that I’d also highly recommend you listen to my podcast interviews with Angela and Debbie, who are great, smart, fun women to talk to.

I’ll also say that while it wasn’t one of my top ten favourite books of the year, my favourite blog post that I wrote about a book was about All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert. Just as Liz is her most unvarnished self in her memoirs, I am my most unvarnished self in this review.

Also, when I went to look for the link to my review of Encampment, I remembered there’s a small sub-category of books that I don’t post my reviews of on this blog, simply because I get paid to review them for Spectrum magazine. These are usually books that touch somehow on the topics of women and religion. In addition to the above-linked review of Encampment, here’s a list of links to those reviews, if you like that kind of thing:

Voices of Thunder, by Naomi Baker
God’s Monsters and Women and Divination in Biblical Literature, by Esther J. Hamori
Awake, by Jen Hatmaker and I Thought it Would Be Better Than This, by Jessica N. Turner (this one is a runner-up for “favourite review I wrote this year”)
Practising Justice, by Nathan Brown
Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson, by Claire Hoffman
A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, by Tia Levings
Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, by Talia Lavin

My previous experience with R.F. Kuang began with reading Yellowface, which I was totally absorbed by while reading though had some critiques of afterwards (still absolutely recommend it though), and continued on to The Poppy War, the first volume of her fantasy trilogy. I was initially really engaged by The Poppy War but ended up deciding not to go on with the trilogy because the bleakness and darkness were just too much. Bad things need to happen to characters, but I like there to be a shred of hope, even a small one, and for me there was none in that book, though I did think it was well-written.

For a writer who is one year older than my eldest child (ie, not yet 30), Rebecca Kuang is a fantastically productive and prolific writer. The Poppy War, her first novel, was published when she was just 24. Between that and Yellowface (her first non-fantasy novel), lie not just the two sequels to The Poppy War, but also Babel, a standalone alternate history/fantasy novel set in 1830s Oxford. My mixed feelings about Kuang’s books plus my love of anything set in Oxford eventually led me to give Babel a try, and the book quickly drew me in.

As an alternate history, it’s not all that alternate — many aspects of Oxford, England, and the British Empire in this novel are factually the same as they are in real history. The main difference is a single magical element — the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s geopolitical dominance have all been fuelled by magical silver, which can be activated to make things work better, go faster, shoot farther etc etc, by incantations formed by word-pairs in different languages. This means that Britain’s most important import by far is silver (and they are willing to ravage the world and destroy other countries to get it, just as historically they were willing to ravage the world and destroy other countries to get … well, anything they wanted). But its most important institution is Babel, the name given to the Tower-of-Babel-like school of translation at Oxford, where brilliant linguistic scholars from around the world learn the magic of working silver through the power of words.

The story’s main character, Robin, is a half-Chinese, half-English child brought to England from his home in Canton and raised to become one of these scholars. When Robin finally goes to Oxford, he forms a close friendship with three other young scholars: Ramy, Victoire, and Letty (in this version of history, some women are allowed to attend Oxford in the 1830s, but only at Babel, and even then, they dress in trousers and try to pass as men when they’re out and about). Babel is also the only place in Oxford where non-white, non-English students are welcomed — besides Robin, there is Ramy, who is from India, and Victoire from Haiti, as well as several minor characters.

Much of the book is a reflection about being a person living on the uneasy margins of empire, enjoying its privileges while knowing that you and people like you are never going to be fully accepted. I found those reflections, and the general theme of struggling with the evils of imperialism and capitalism while also being complicit in them, fascinating. I’ve heard people describe this book as preachy, and I initially assumed that was just because people didn’t like the fact that it’s about people from colonies criticizing (and eventually trying to bring down) the British Empire. But on reflection, I think the problem is not Kuang’s (and her characters’) absolutely justified critiques, but the fact that they are sometimes expressed in a very unsubtle way, where a bit of nuance would have made the point more effectively. However, this is something I put down mainly to a very young author, eager to get all her talking points out there on the page through her characters’ dialogue.

Fortunately reading two previous Kuang books had prepared me not to hang on in hopes of a happy or even particularly hopeful ending (though there is one note of faint positivity at the end of this one). Indeed, any attempt to bring down the British Empire in the 19th century, whether magically or otherwise, is almost definitionally doomed to fail, so as soon as rebellion begins we know it’s not going to end well. But I did really enjoy the ride. This isn’t a flawless novel, but it did keep me engaged throughout.