My 2025 Reading List

In 2025 I read 31 books, including one re-read, 5 memoirs and 3 other non-fiction titles. Lots of good ones for the year but if I had to pick a single Book of the Year it would be The Last Unicorn (#12 on the list). The usual rambling impressions are below.

1. Three Wild Dogs (And The Truth) by Markus Zusak

Anything Markus Zusak publishes is an automatic must-buy for me. This is his memoir of the three crazy dogs that his family adopted over the years. I almost want to say that it's a must-read for any rescue-pet owner, but of course it does involve inevitable pet death, and so is inescapably heart-breaking as well as laugh-out-loud funny. But absolutely brimming with love, and searingly beautiful, even (especially) when it makes you cry. "There are terrible and poetic things in our lives, and so often they're one and the same."

2. Juice by Tim Winton

This book was pretty hardcore. It was a book full of a quiet rage. The climate-ravaged world of the future still holds some pockets of beauty, but as the mysterious plot unspools and you learn more about the secret organisation that the narrator has joined, and its ultimate goals... well. This is actually quite difficult to review without spoiling, but it asks some fascinating questions. Hardcore.

3. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

This has been sitting on my to-read shelf for a year or two, and I was finally prompted to pick it up from an anecdote in Markus Zusak's Three Wild Dogs, where one of the titular dogs chews on a copy of this book, and Markus calls it "the great surf memoir". I enjoy letting literary coincidences like this guide me into what to read next. This is a memoir of surfing through the ages, across the planet, on all sorts of different waves. The history of a sport and a culture, and the zen sort of obsession that all surfers have with the ocean.

4. The Messenger by Markus Zusak (re-read)

I've read this many times before and it's always been my favourite Zusak book (even though he's much more well known for The Book Thief). I had the great joy of meeting him at an author talk at my local library early in 2025, and he signed my copy of The Messenger. He says The Doorman - a big, stinky, sooky, coffee-drinking giant of a dog - is still one of his favourite characters. Ed, the narrator of The Messenger, is certainly one of mine. I think this is one of my favourite books of all time. It's like hugging the universe and getting hugged back by it.

5. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

Easy reading historical fiction. Some day I really must get around to watching the film version with Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. I think I picked this up to read because I saw the musical 'Six' this year, about the six wives of Henry VIII. And like a good librarian I decided to do some background reading.

6. The Secret River by Kate Grenville

This is a very well-known literary title in Australia, about the early colonial and Aboriginal history in a part of the country that's a stone's throw away from where I live. It's the story of a convict who became a free settler, and is in some ways a fairly sympathetic take on convict life, in the sense that the convicts were brought to Australia against their will, and even once freed had no realistic way of making it home to England or making a life there even if they could get back. You see through the eyes of the narrator and grow to understand him, and his attitude to the local Aboriginal people, which becomes an obvious problem as conflicts mount. The writing deliberately makes you complicit in his worldview, and then brings you to a devastating conclusion. It's not a comfortable book.

7. Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature by Anna Beer

This was a very niche book for feminists who studied English Lit (and I do love when things are so squarely in my niche). Impeccably researched, very well written. It's a series of long essays focusing on specific female writers through centuries of history. I bought it for the title alone.

8. Willowman by Inga Simpson

A book about cricket, cricket bats, making cricket bats, and people. I really like Inga Simpson's writing, but to be honest, that's about as much detail as I can remember about this novel.

9. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Autobiography of Winterson's severe childhood and upbringing in northern England. About literature, love, adoptive mothers and biological ones.

10. Paris by Starlight by Robert Dinsdale

This was such an odd little book and it took me a while to make up my mind about it. It really walked a delicate line between well-done magical realism and hitting its reader over the head with the blunt club of metaphor. In the end, I decided I admired it for what it was trying to do, even if the results were a little bit wobbly. It's about refugees and cultural clashes, but there are magic glowing flowers, folk tales, and underground jazz clubs. And Paris, which is always a bit magical.

11. Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

There is not a huge amount of straight-forward plot going on here, but like other titles by this author, it's driven more by internal character exploration and ideas. It's about an atheist moving into a convent, but it's not really 'about' that, you know?

12. The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

I think this was my Book of the Year. The Last Unicorn was originally published in 1968, and is a timeless classic. Sometimes this reputation can work against a book when reading it as an adult for the first time, but in this case, I could tell within a handful of pages that its Classic status was absolutely well-deserved. A beautiful, magical, melancholy little book; like reading a dream from long ago.

The no-longer-young-and-virginal Molly Grue meeting the unicorn was everything. "Where have you been?" she demands, and the unicorn says at last, "I am here now." I have to transcribe this passage:

Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. "I wish you had never come, why do you come now?" The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.

The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, "She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world."

 "She would be." Molly sniffed. "It would be the last unicorn in the world that came to Molly Grue. [...] It's all right. I forgive you."

"Unicorns are not to be forgiven." The magician felt himself growing giddy with jealousy, not only of the touch but of something like a secret that was moving between Molly and the unicorn. "Unicorns are for beginnings," he said, "for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls."

Molly was stroking the unicorn's throat as timidly as though she were blind. She dried her grimy tears on the white mane. "You don't know much about unicorns," she said. 

 

13. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

There is an endorsement from the reading guru Alberto Manguel on the cover, so I thought a non-fiction book about language, reading and neuroscience would be up my alley. I did enjoy it, but this is really more of a scientist writing their first non-fiction book, rather than an author delving into a scientific subject (personally I tend to prefer my non-fiction to be just a touch more literary). This was published in 2007 but I would love to read an updated edition of this to get the author's take on how AI-slop is changing how our brains function, because I bet she'd have a lot to say on the topic.

14. Girls in Boys' Cars by Felicity Castagna

Freaking excellent Australian YA. Utterly different to the sort of YA I read when I was a teenager, in many ways; the 90s were a gentler time to come of age, where the world was full of optimism and a sense of promise. This book is set in contemporary times, about two girls in their final year of high school stealing a car and going on the run. It made me shudder with empathy for the world teenage girls are entering now; sexism, social media, exploitation, environmental destruction. The climactic chapters are set during the massive bushfires at the end of 2019, and it's almost literally a hellscape. But the characters are so real and so well-drawn that it's somehow not a total bummer.

15. There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

Three parallel characters at various points in time and three stories connected by a single drop of water. This was a beautiful book but the ending left me just a little unsatisfied. I suppose I wanted a simplistic sort of happy ending but it was not that kind of a novel.

16. Landfall by James Bradley

This is a genre-blend of a detective story set within James Bradley's classic Cli-Fi worldbuilding. The main character tracks a missing child across a climate-drowned near-future Sydney. More Australian futurism, please! Even this depressing sort is still interesting.

17. Matrix by Lauren Groff

I'm gradually working my way through Lauren Groff's back catalogue at the rate of one per year, since I saw her last year at the writer's festival. I think she is one of those authors where every novel she writes is wildly different to all her others. Matrix is about a noblewoman who gets shuffled out of the Queen's court to become the prioress of a poor and run-down abbey. What I have learned from this novel is that all historical lesbians should have aimed to become nuns, and Lauren Groff is a hell of a prose writer.

18. Provenance by Ann Leckie

Set in the same universe as Leckie's Ancillary Justice trilogy, this story was set on a much smaller and local scale. Family conflicts and political wrangling, basically. Didn't leave much of an impression on me.

19. This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham

Probably the most purely 'literary' thing I read this year, but again, solidly in my niche. A difficult book to describe. It's about the author (fictionalised, but only a bit, I think) writing a book about Leonard (and Virginia) Woolf. It bounces back and forth between Covid in Melbourne and the Woolfs in the 20th century (and the ghosts of the Woolfs speaking to the fictionalised author in the present). I'd say it's a great example of the ficto-criticism genre, which is definitely not something you read every day.

20. The Luminous Solution: Creativity, Resilience and the Inner Life by Charlotte Wood

This was more of a series of disconnected essays rather than a curated collection of writing about writing. I was hoping for a more wholistic approach. Still, interesting to read about Wood's creative process, as she is an author I greatly admire.

21. Summerwater by Sarah Moss

One day I will read a book by Sarah Moss which is not quietly devastating, but it is not this day. She sees inside peoples' heads so clearly. This book literally head-hops from one character to another, with a different POV for each chapter. Despite the short time we spend with each of them, the characters all feel intensely real.

22. For Life by Ailsa Piper

I love Ailsa Piper so much. The second memoir I've read of hers (after Sinning Across Spain), and this is about, well, life and death. The twin losses of her husband (suddenly and unexpectedly, years ago) and her father (more recently, in an aged care home on the other side of the country during the border lockdowns of Covid). Grief, beauty, nature. Sad, tender, lovely.

I saw the author speak at the 2025 Sydney Writer's Fest in May - always makes me feel more connected to a book.

23. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Certainly my longest book of the year, though not quite as long as War & Peace. Quite different to W&P, generally a lot less 'cerebral' and more about normal people doing normal things and making normal (and occasionally very stupid) decisions about their lives. I think the best compliment I can give is that it certainly didn't feel as long as its page count. I guess I'd better read a Dostoyevsky next (any recommendations??)

I read this because it was referenced throughout the excellent Australian musical Ladies In Black, which I got to see performed by the Australian Institute of Music in August. I was so obsessed with it that I immediately had to read All The Books.

24. Ladies in Black by Madeleine St. John

See above - the book which the musical is based on. The musical is a delightfully faithful transcription of the book, so this was the closest I could come to seeing the musical again! It's a coming-of-age story about a bookish young girl in Sydney in the 1950s, who gets a summer job in a department store in between high school and university (that is, if her father will let her attend). I loved every single character in this book, including all of the women who take young Leslie under their wings. Another warm hug of a book.

25. The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey

Best Page-Turner. Constantly compared to Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, but in my opinion, MUCH better. (The ending of NLMG is one of my all-time-most-annoying literary Pet Peeves). You think that you're reading one type of book, and then bam, there's a whole second genre hiding underneath the trench coat of the first one. So tense in parts that some revelations made me audibly react loudly enough to startle my cat right out of the room (lots of "*gasp* Holy shiiiiit!"). I think I read at least the final quarter of it in a single sitting because I couldn't put it down. It's quite rare these days that a book makes me want to just unhinge my jaw and swallow it whole.

26. Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan

Tenderfoot, more like tender heart (my heart after this book came for it with a literary meat tenderiser).

Goddamn, Australian YA fiction is seriously something else. It's SO good. Greyhound racing and coming of age in Perth in the 1980s. A decade early and the wrong city for me, and yet this was such a perfect encapsulation of childhood in every way, a childhood on the cusp of growing up. Like a child, I kept wanting the adult characters to fall simply and neatly into categories of Good and Bad, but the author refuses to pretend that life is so easy or so simple.

27. Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

It's taken me a few tries but I finally found a Pratchett that I actually clicked with. I chortled out loud at several points while reading this. My introduction to the character of Granny Weatherwax, skilled witch and excellent grumpy old lady. I think I will give other Witch books of the Discworld series a shot as well.

28. The Salt Path by Raynor Winn 

I approached this book already knowing about the controversy in its background, and it didn't really bother me (though perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd read the book before hearing about it - more mislead, and less of a shoulder-shrug as to how truthful a 'true story' has to actually be in order to be a decent read). This was not really as well-written or as thoughtful as the other great hiking book I've read recently-ish, Sinning Across Spain. Not bad but nothing to get excited about, and I felt basically the same way about the film. I read it because I'm hoping to spend some time travelling (and hiking!) around Cornwall and Devon in the UK next year.

29. The Rose Field by Philip Pullman (final instalment of The Book of Dust trilogy)

This book really had far too much riding on its shoulders to ever live up to itself. The His Dark Materials trilogy was hugely formative for me in my early teenage years, and a quarter of a century later, this is the final send-off for Lyra and her daemon. It really read more like a 600+ page fairytale, relying heavily on metaphor and vibes - although Pullman does have the sheer writing muscle to just about pull this off. The ideas and the philosophy were much more muddled and unclear than in the original trilogy, and it even contradicted some of the original world-building in places.

Luckily I'm not one of those people who believes that a less-than-perfect sequel can 'ruin' an original magnum opus, so I am just happy to see a favourite character given a conclusion where she doesn't suddenly turn mad, burn down a city and murder thousands of people. So I can safely go ahead and get a tattoo about it now!

30. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

I think Le Guin would place in my top five for writers of prose. Lush and full of sensory imagery and emotion, her complex alien societies and characters are so vivid that they draw you right in. She is the master of telling stories about other planets, other worlds, as a way of exploring our own more deeply. Her stories about alien worlds are really, of course, stories about humanity. The opening lines of this novel articulate it perfectly:

"I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling."

And she tells it richly, perfectly, with not a word to spare.

I got this book out from the library but I am definitely going to purchase it for my own collection. It needs to be on my shelves, for re-reading and also just... because I need to have it. It's an important book.

31. The Penguin Book of Mermaids edited by Cristina Bacchilega

I began reading this collection of global folk-lore and stories in March while I was rehearsing for the stage musical of The Little Mermaid, and read it in bits and pieces throughout the year, finishing it in December. 2025 was a very mermaid-coded year for me. TLM was always my favourite Disney film; when I say it led to me getting a degree in marine science, I'm only partly joking. I've always been fascinated by the ocean, and by mermaid mythology. I've even realised, in hindsight, that I've written a disproportionate number of stories where characters are suddenly made voiceless. I also find it fascinating that mermaids in some form occur in stories from all around the world, springing up independently in all sorts of different cultures. There's obviously something innately human in this connection between the feminine and the water element.

And no matter how old you get, it's always nice to read yourself a short bedtime story before you go to sleep.