The four best books I read in 2025

Banal Nightmare, Horse Crazy, Lucy, Perfection

Hello from 2026! Here are the 4 best books I read last year! This year, I’m going to experiment with lower-effort posts! Happy new year!

Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler

Here’s what I wrote to a friend, L.:

I love Banal Nightmare! Funniest book I’ve ever read. I was wary about it because Andrew introduced it as “my friend’s book” and I hated the title and a couple people told me they didn’t like [Butler’s] previous books. But I think it’s incredibly good. In particular I think the title does it a disservice because it’s about being in a small midwestern town which snobby big city people, including the protagonist, would think of as a “banal nightmare” to be in. But I don’t think that’s the book’s heart. The book really inhabits and illuminates that world generously, I think—it is kind of a nightmare for all of the characters, but we’re not laughing at them, we’re feeling for them. Anyway yeah big reco from me. It’s unceasingly bleak about heterosexual relationships though, so I would beware, possibly, if you’re in one.

To another friend, A.:

Anyway when I was lying awake for many hours last night I was thinking about Banal Nightmare a lot and my opinion of it has risen a lot and I’ve also changed my mind about multi-POV novels. I realized that my top top tier of novels are multi-POV ensembles like Infinite Jest and War and Peace. And Banal Nightmare is doing a similar thing, and it also has a very specific psychological/political project it’s trying to do that it tells you about directly a couple times, and then it actually executes on it through the form of the novel. I couldn’t be more impressed with it.

Horse Crazy

The protagonist of this book made me realize I really, really didn’t want to prioritize ‘being a writer’ at the cost of trying to create a stable family life, and the antagonist made me think I gotta be as un-needy as possible.

Lucy

I wrote a post on this book:

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Honorable mention — I found this very enjoyable.