2025 Reading Round Up: My Highlights!
I still post my thoughts about each book I read on my Instagram page (I’m @trishtalksbooks), with very few exceptions. Occasionally there’s a book that I didn’t finish that I have no interest in writing about, and sometimes one that’s just so terrible that I have no interest in doing so. But that’s rare. I tend to find something I like in most books, and prefer to highlight the good, while not glossing over the negative too much.
I continue to strive for a mix of books that include releases from the bigger publishing houses, as well as those from smaller, independent presses. Several times per year an author reaches out to me with an ultra-small press or self-published book, and sometimes those books surprise me in how well they’re written, and the unique stories they bring. It goes to show the immense amount of writing talent out there. I’ve been particularly impressed by some of the Canadian literature published by small to medium size publishers this year that I’ve read.
Writing on this blog takes some discipline, but I continue to like and need the longer format to blather on about the books that cannot be contained to the IG limit of 2200 characters. One of my goals for the new year is to create more and varied content for the blog.
Here are some of my 2025 literary highlights:
📘 I’ve continued to review both fiction and nonfiction books for The British Columbia Review. I was recently featured on their YouTube channel!
📘 I reviewed two poetry collections for Arc Poetry Magazine.
📘 I continue to co-host the Canuck Reads Book Club, which meets online and in person (Vancouver). We read Canadian books, from classics to new releases and the discussions are always great.
📘 I have been hosting an online classics reading group. It started with Anna Karenina, then we read The Moonstone, and finished up with an October of Edgar Allen Poe short stories.
📘 I host my twice-yearly Tackle Your TBR Challenge each January and September, where a group of readers on IG read books we already own for a month and chat as we go along.
📘 I’ve continued my Author Chat series on the blog, interviewing authors about their books. It’s such fun!
📘 I’ve been muddling through my Author in Depth: Albert Camus project…but I’m stalled. I’ve got to decide whether or not to continue.
BTW, you can sign up for the Canuck Reads, Tackle Your TBR, or classics readalongs by emailing me at trish@trishtalksbooks.com, or DM me on Instagram.
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So many good books! Here are my picks for the best books I read this year, along with some fun categories at the end.
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So many good books! Here are my picks for the best books I read this year, along with some fun categories at the end.
Favourite Fiction
📘 The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
Summit Books
The Director is an amazing novel that takes a look at the career of real life film director G.W. Pabst, a German who began his career there before WWII, then travelled to America during the rise of fascism. Unsuccessful, he returned to Germany at the behest of the Nazi government and made films during the war. This is a tale of the overwhelming power of art, but also its ability to compromise the artist. This book spoke to me, in both the process and the content of the writing. It is beautifully written, at a sentence level and structurally, chapter to chapter. Further, Kehlmann addresses really interesting and important issues, using a compelling story to address the complex themes.
📘 Held by Anne Michaels
McClelland & Stewart
Held won the 2024 Giller Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Its chapters follow four generations of a family, weaving back and forth in time, almost like short stories. The writing presents short snippets of prose or dialogue, sometimes less than a page, so that the writing is akin to a series of photographs that together make a collage. The connected characters hold the story together, but the striking themes are even more pronounced as a through line. What stays with me long after reading are the resonant notes about deep connection to others, the nature of war, and the focus on the small and intimate in the face of unsettling change and trauma.
📘 The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
Summit Books
The Director is an amazing novel that takes a look at the career of real life film director G.W. Pabst, a German who began his career there before WWII, then travelled to America during the rise of fascism. Unsuccessful, he returned to Germany at the behest of the Nazi government and made films during the war. This is a tale of the overwhelming power of art, but also its ability to compromise the artist. This book spoke to me, in both the process and the content of the writing. It is beautifully written, at a sentence level and structurally, chapter to chapter. Further, Kehlmann addresses really interesting and important issues, using a compelling story to address the complex themes.
📘 Held by Anne Michaels
McClelland & Stewart
Held won the 2024 Giller Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Its chapters follow four generations of a family, weaving back and forth in time, almost like short stories. The writing presents short snippets of prose or dialogue, sometimes less than a page, so that the writing is akin to a series of photographs that together make a collage. The connected characters hold the story together, but the striking themes are even more pronounced as a through line. What stays with me long after reading are the resonant notes about deep connection to others, the nature of war, and the focus on the small and intimate in the face of unsettling change and trauma.
📘 Days of Feasting and Rejoicing by David Bergen
Goose Lane Editions
Bergen’s portrait of an American woman working in Thailand who draws the unsuspecting into her web, threatening to devour them as she stops at nothing to protect her unstable sense of self held me in thrall. Hanging out in main character Esther Maile’s head is unsettling, uncomfortable, and terribly fascinating. It’s a psychologically perilous tale of deception, manipulation, and murder.
📘 OCDaniel by Wesley King
Simon & Schuster
An amazing book that tells the story of one teen’s struggle with OCD with authenticity, humanity, and a touch of humour. It's a middle-grade novel that introduces Daniel Leigh, who is the back-up kicker for his high school football team (read: glorified water boy), isn’t popular but is saved from too much bullying by his popular best friend Max, has a crush on a cute girl…and has OCD. Daniel is one of the best characters I’ve read for awhile, and the pages flew by. He’s realistic, genuine, and slightly befuddled by his life. He worries about performing well at football, but mostly he’s also tortured by his obsessions and compulsions, and King wrote this so very well that I felt Daniel’s distress deeply.
📘 The Exclusion Zone by Alexis Von Konigslow
Wolsak & Wynn
Toronto-based Konigslow has written a beautiful meditation on trauma, both remembered and anticipated. Renya is a social scientist who has long wanted to visit the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. She’s collecting data on the nature of fear, and her study subjects are her fellow scientists. Her hope is to develop a computer program that uses facial expressions of fear to predict disaster; she craves an objective marker of impending disaster, which reflects her own social-skill challenges and her discomfort with reading emotions. At its heart it’s a book about one person and her desperate attempts to be safe even while realizing that safety is a grand construct. In the face of this truth, Renya begins to tolerate uncertainty and engage with her fellow, fragile humans.
Goose Lane Editions
Bergen’s portrait of an American woman working in Thailand who draws the unsuspecting into her web, threatening to devour them as she stops at nothing to protect her unstable sense of self held me in thrall. Hanging out in main character Esther Maile’s head is unsettling, uncomfortable, and terribly fascinating. It’s a psychologically perilous tale of deception, manipulation, and murder.
📘 OCDaniel by Wesley King
Simon & Schuster
An amazing book that tells the story of one teen’s struggle with OCD with authenticity, humanity, and a touch of humour. It's a middle-grade novel that introduces Daniel Leigh, who is the back-up kicker for his high school football team (read: glorified water boy), isn’t popular but is saved from too much bullying by his popular best friend Max, has a crush on a cute girl…and has OCD. Daniel is one of the best characters I’ve read for awhile, and the pages flew by. He’s realistic, genuine, and slightly befuddled by his life. He worries about performing well at football, but mostly he’s also tortured by his obsessions and compulsions, and King wrote this so very well that I felt Daniel’s distress deeply.
📘 The Exclusion Zone by Alexis Von Konigslow
Wolsak & Wynn
Toronto-based Konigslow has written a beautiful meditation on trauma, both remembered and anticipated. Renya is a social scientist who has long wanted to visit the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. She’s collecting data on the nature of fear, and her study subjects are her fellow scientists. Her hope is to develop a computer program that uses facial expressions of fear to predict disaster; she craves an objective marker of impending disaster, which reflects her own social-skill challenges and her discomfort with reading emotions. At its heart it’s a book about one person and her desperate attempts to be safe even while realizing that safety is a grand construct. In the face of this truth, Renya begins to tolerate uncertainty and engage with her fellow, fragile humans.
(Author Chat here)
Viking Canada
From my BC Review article: "In This Faulty Machine is a gift, an act of generativity that offers an honest, straight-from-the-hip account of Page’s direct experience of Parkinson’s Disease, and how it relates to her multifaceted life. Her writing is for herself and for all of us: 'It is my bid to connect with both the sick and the (so far) well, to stimulate further connections between them and beyond, to spark further curiosity and increase mutual understanding.' This book speaks to the fact that most of us will face illness and aging, each in our own way. We will all have to dust off our 'sick person passport' to navigate Page’s metaphorical border crossing at some point in our lives."
📘 Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
From my BC Review article: "In This Faulty Machine is a gift, an act of generativity that offers an honest, straight-from-the-hip account of Page’s direct experience of Parkinson’s Disease, and how it relates to her multifaceted life. Her writing is for herself and for all of us: 'It is my bid to connect with both the sick and the (so far) well, to stimulate further connections between them and beyond, to spark further curiosity and increase mutual understanding.' This book speaks to the fact that most of us will face illness and aging, each in our own way. We will all have to dust off our 'sick person passport' to navigate Page’s metaphorical border crossing at some point in our lives."
📘 Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
John Green narrates his non-fiction account of TB throughout the ages, an excellent and still ever-so-timely tale. He got interested in TB after meeting a boy named Henry at a TB hospital in Sierra Leone. Henry’s story is woven between chapters that detail the history of TB, giving the book an educational slant while always bringing us back to the humanity of what it is to have TB. Henry’s case illustrates the modern story of TB, in which social determinants of health–poverty, racism, unequal access to effective medications or healthcare–dictate who will get TB, and who will die from it.
📘 The Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum
📘 The Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum
Published in 2020, this short book examines the swing from democracy to nationalism and authoritarianism. Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist who also has Polish citizenship, and this book examines the shift rightwards in three countries this century: Poland, the UK, and the US, with a side trip to Hungary. Her viewpoint isn’t overly optimistic, and she echoes something I’ve been thinking about lately: that this peace/democracy/safety/secure world view that I’ve grown up with is the exception geographically and historically, and not the norm. I found her ideas of why so many of us are taken in by an authoritarian figure compelling, and actually quite compassionate. She finishes her book in 2020 with a glimmer of hope as Trump’s first presidency comes to an end. It feels a strange time to be reading the book now!
📘 I Don’t Do Disability by Adelle Purdham
📘 I Don’t Do Disability by Adelle Purdham
Less a memoir than a series of related essays on disability, motherhood and relationships, Purdham’s book was highly relatable as I sped through the pages. When her middle daughter was born with Down syndrome, Purdham had a new lens with which to see the world, and it has spurred her to become a disability advocate, both for her daughter, but also in the larger disability community. Not only was I able to learn about her joys and challenges of parenting her daughter who has Down syndrome, but I was also privy to the equal but different joys and challenges of parenting in general, and given a glimpse into Purdham’s inner work to evolve as a person. It was often starkly personal; I appreciated her putting her inner life on the page, in large part because I related to what she said very much.
Best Poetry
📘 The Great Wake by Nina Berkhout
The link is to my review in Arc Poetry Magazine online. Ottawa-based Berkhout is of a similar age to me, and her take on mid-life in her most recent collection is both humbling and hopeful. These poems hit me hard, in a good way.
📘 Forecast: Pretty Bleak by Chris Bailey
Published in Arc Poetry Magazine Issue 107, this is from my review: “In an engrossing collection that wholly transported me to the shores of Prince Edward Island, poet Chris Bailey offers an emotional ride through the often harsh and sometimes wondrous landscape that is an East Coast fisher’s reality.”
📘 Procession by Katherena Vermette
This collection lives up to its moniker: This is a procession, from the beauty of interconnectedness, through to memory of our ancestors, our own lives as grounded markers yet transient, as we end on notes of Elders passing and becoming Elders in turn. It’s full of home and joy, and–at times–subtle, practical humour. At the end of reading the book I felt welcomed into her space and her world, and I sure enjoyed being her guest.
📘 Forecast: Pretty Bleak by Chris Bailey
Published in Arc Poetry Magazine Issue 107, this is from my review: “In an engrossing collection that wholly transported me to the shores of Prince Edward Island, poet Chris Bailey offers an emotional ride through the often harsh and sometimes wondrous landscape that is an East Coast fisher’s reality.”
📘 Procession by Katherena Vermette
This collection lives up to its moniker: This is a procession, from the beauty of interconnectedness, through to memory of our ancestors, our own lives as grounded markers yet transient, as we end on notes of Elders passing and becoming Elders in turn. It’s full of home and joy, and–at times–subtle, practical humour. At the end of reading the book I felt welcomed into her space and her world, and I sure enjoyed being her guest.
Clear, personal, and precise, Rushdie dissects the events around the attempt on his life by knife attack in 2022. It’s a riveting account at the nidus of art, religion and personhood. Knife is one of the finest memoirs I’ve read recently, and I’m very glad to have chosen the audiobook, because Rushdie narrates very well. This is a personal and harrowing account, though Rushdie also acknowledges the myriad of other victims–many fellow writers–of ideological violence.
📘 This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
📘 This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
Oh, this took me back! I found so much to relate to in this memoir from a resident doctor’s diaries, both humorous and heartbreaking. I laughed out loud, cringed at some things, and felt the sadness that he felt at times. Kay left medicine after a particularly sad outcome in one of his cases, but it really was just the final straw years in the making. Medicine is a wonderful field, and those of us who have worked in it are so privileged to help others, but there’s no getting around the fact that it is difficult, strenuous and too often quite scary.
📘 Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
📘 Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
Gentle and moving, sad and horrific. This novel spoke to art and the human spirit, and also to the cycles of the victor and the conquered. It’s narrated by the author, and that’s always a bit of a dubious proposition with fiction in particular, but Lennon gave a fantastic reading of his novel. The book speaks to art and storytelling during conflict, and how it can bring enemies together. The undertones, when you think too much about it, are distasteful; however, it all still worked for me, if you grant the fact that this was the way things were. Still are, in many parts of the world.
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Special awards go to:
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Special awards go to:
What started as a marriage in trouble descended into satirical, outrageous horror. I had a lot of fun with this!
Best Indie/Very Small Press That Impressed
📘 Zoi by Jane Mondrup from Spaceboy Books
Best Indie/Very Small Press That Impressed
📘 Zoi by Jane Mondrup from Spaceboy Books
What an original take on a first contact story! This simple book had me hooked for its plot line and interesting characters.
📘 Clementine Lemons and the Lost Stones of Dohi by Ireland Von Mueller from Erin Miller Books
📘 Clementine Lemons and the Lost Stones of Dohi by Ireland Von Mueller from Erin Miller Books
From British Columbia-based writer Von Mueller comes a smart, engaging middle grade fantasy that introduces a mysterious quest for artifacts that hold the key to healing a troubled world.
📘 Salvagia by Tim Chagawa from Diversion Books
📘 Salvagia by Tim Chagawa from Diversion Books
A rather sophisticated tale of misadventure in a climate-ravaged Miami that features our long-suffering protagonist negotiating peril in the midst of a high-stakes turf war.
Best 13th Century Page-Turning Poetic Epic
📘 Le Roman de Silence by Heldris of Cornwall.
Best 13th Century Page-Turning Poetic Epic
📘 Le Roman de Silence by Heldris of Cornwall.
Admittedly, I haven't written this up for review yet, but I will! This was recommended to me by my Medieval Studies-graduate daughter Sophia, and we'll be featuring it on an upcoming Trish and Sophia Talk Books blog post.
Best Audacious Feminist Awesomely Weird Fiction
📘 Autokrator by Emily Weedon
Best Audacious Feminist Awesomely Weird Fiction
📘 Autokrator by Emily Weedon
When Orthodoxy means that males have all the power and women have none, the oppression of patriarchy twists everything to its will, in this alternate history novel that doesn’t fail to surprise. The book took a turn that surprised me, as it veered into almost cyberpunk horror territory. I’m at a slight loss to classify this part of the book genre-wise, but honestly who actually cares, because it was really interesting. Albeit, horribly and traumatically so.
This is the burb:
“The moon has turned to cheese.
Now humanity has to deal with it.”
So, I mean, who can resist that? Not this reader.
Most Compelling Characters
📘 Larkin from A Quilting of Scars by Lucy EM Black
This articulated perfectly the awfulness and joy of being a new parent. From The Loom by Andy Weaver.
“The moon has turned to cheese.
Now humanity has to deal with it.”
So, I mean, who can resist that? Not this reader.
Most Compelling Characters
📘 Larkin from A Quilting of Scars by Lucy EM Black
- He loves his parents, his horses and his farm, and lives authentically even while wracked by past trauma. I loved getting to know him.
- She reminded me a bit of myself, though I am not an artist. Grumpy and messy and real, she’s lived a long and eventful life, and embodies the spirit of survival.
- A more straightforward and no-nonsense man you will not find in fiction. He’s honest about his life and grudgingly cares deeply about others.
This articulated perfectly the awfulness and joy of being a new parent. From The Loom by Andy Weaver.
“...My hand on your chest
As you lie newly naked on the table, I bend down
And reach for a clean diaper as you spray diarrhea on the wall just behind me. Like a man miraculously
Missed by all the bullets from the firing squad,
I stand there, dazed, dazzled just to be alive.”
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That's a wrap for my 2025 year in books. Happy reading and here's to a great new year!
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