Well, well, well, if it isn’t 2026 already.
If Goodreads is to be believed, I read 62 books in 2025. I smashed the goals I set for myself to read more short story collections and books in translation (7/6 and 16/4, respectively), read exactly six stellar poetry collections, and fell just short of my goal for craft books (5/6). Can’t win em all!
I also finally finished Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad in December, and successfully led a cute little Proust book club over the summer to read Volume One of In Search of Lost Time. All in all, it was another fabulous year for books, and I’m proud of the way I challenged myself to broaden my regular reading horizons.
But we’re not done yet.
Welcome, friends, to Round One of the Best Books of 2025 bracket! 2025 may be over, but we can’t put it to bed entirely without first crowning a winner.
This is my third year running this bracket, and I’m amped to dive into these match-ups. Not only were there some absolute bangers in the top spots this year, but a lot of these books also explored many of the same themes in surprisingly complementary ways.
I think this year’s bracket is going to be a really cool reflection/accumulation of a lot of the thoughts I’ve had this year about time, space, and art, so it’s going to be interesting to see what comes out on top as a marker of my final takeaways for the year.
But enough preamble, let’s dive in! You can also read this directly on my Substack here:
ROUND ONE:
Orbital by Samantha Harvey vs. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
A tough one to start us off with! Two books in totally different genres that I loved for totally different reasons. As much as I enjoyed and feel that I have made good use of the wisdom that is Bird by Bird, I feel like Orbital set the tone for much of the reading I did for the rest of the year. The explorations of time and (literal) space, and how we navigate the physical and temporal spaces we have and the people inside of them, feel like defining themes for 2025. Plus, the kid version of me who wanted to be an astronaut still gets goosebumps thinking about Harvey’s descriptions of seeing Earth from space. For these reasons, Orbital advances.
The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee vs. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
I’m already upset because I loved both of these books so much. The Queen of the Night was hands-down the best audiobook I listened to all year, and scores points for hitting many of my favorite elements of historical fiction: eighteenth-century Paris, theatre, the circus, romance, self re-invention. But The Ministry of Time also ticked a bunch of my boxes (namely, time travel and hot Victorian love interests).
I think what it comes down to is that The Ministry of Time took an angle I haven’t seen explored in time travel fiction before, making both its characters and readers answer the same questions about the state of our current world, how we choose to share it with those we love, and the lengths we’d go to protect our version of events. For novelty and long-term thought provocation, The Ministry of Time advances, but I will forever be recommending The Queen of the Night as one of my new all-time favorite historical fiction novels.
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys vs. Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana
What I admire most about Stories from the Tenants Downstairs is how vividly Fofana captured all of the individual voices in a way that clearly distinguished them but also thematically united them. And yet, Good Morning, Midnight was the one that somehow stuck with me longer.
This may just be the nature of the format—I felt more emotionally connected to Rhys’s protagonist and her corner of Paris in a way that there wasn’t time to do with the individual characters in Fofana’s story collection. In a quieter, subtler sense, Good Morning, Midnight also feels on theme for the year with its exploration of how time changes people and places, rendering them unreliable at best and unrecognizable at worst. Highly recommend both again, but Good Morning, Midnight advances here!
Água Viva by Clarice Lispector vs. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
This is such a funny match-up to me, because even though on the surface these could not seem more different, there’s a weird thematic similarity between these two books. One is bite-sized and I read it twice in one weekend, and the other I read slowly over the course of eight weeks. One expressed itself in immediacy, in short bursts of thought and feeling, and the other had long, meandering sentences that went on for entire pages.
Yet both focus on a driving sense of interiority, with the aim of rendering that interiority into something consumable, of capturing the immediate moment as thoroughly as possible with the limited means available to the artists: that is, words. Honestly, if I were a professor, I would pair these books together in the same syllabus because I think they make a surprisingly effective companion read, but for the sake of the bracket, I’m going with Água Viva because its brevity was such a relief after a summer of Proust.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman vs. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Another devastating match-up, because I remain deeply obsessed with both of these books. Wolf Hall tapped into my formerly forgotten obsession with Tudor England with prose so freaking lovely and intimate you almost forget you’re witnessing the making of not one, but two notorious tyrants. It’s the best kind of historical fiction, and I’m so looking forward to finishing the trilogy in 2026. And yet I Who Have Never Known Men wasn’t just one of the best books I read this year, but maybe the past decade? It’s one I continue to think about months after reading, and that feels somehow uniquely tailored to the anxieties of our current society, despite being thirty years old. For sheer staying power, I Who Have Never Known Men advances.
Red Bird by Mary Oliver vs. On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle
A tough one for sweet Mary Oliver, because as delightful as this collection of poems is, Red Bird is woefully outmatched here. The third and most recent installment of On the Calculation of Volume (and frankly, the entire series) consumed so much of my reading and thinking brain in the back half of 2025 that little else seems to stand a chance.
I loved this third installment in particular for the way it somehow managed to introduce a plot into this otherwise meditative, introspective series, and for how it continued to expand the world in a way that still left you with more questions than you started with. I’m excited to see OTCOVIII face some of the other advancing books; competition seems STIFF for book of the year, but this one is definitely one to watch.
And then there were six! Stay tuned for Round 2 coming at you later this week. Would love to hear your thoughts on the results of the first round in the meantime, especially if you’ve read any of these too!
Until next time, happy reading!
❤ Catherine
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Catherine Thoms 