My Favorite Books That I Read This Year
December 6, 2025
As far back as I remember, I always wanted to write a listicle. There's still a world out there for me, I know it. I'll see my byline on Buzzfeed and I'll call an album I listened to three times "riveting", before a teenager in Georgia (country or state) calls a SWAT team on me because I didn't mention the new Rosalia. Now my job is books, so I will discuss them as such. I read some of these for work, some for my book club with friends, some for myself. A few were even published this year, which is a rarity for me. I read new poetry for my job, a very exciting position to be in considering I know very little of what's hot in poetry right now. We discuss the new poetry in our monthly meetings and I get to say how I feel. If I were a better writer, I would like to be a critic, so I can tell everyone how I feel.
This list is a fair summary of the books I like to read, with the omission of the genres of contemporary memoir (guilty) and revolutionary history (which I haven't read since graduating, I'm not sure when I'll be back). My taste is down the middle and I probably like what you like; unless I'm reading for committee, I don't finish the books I don't like. These are my favorite books that I read this year.
Honorable Mention: Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard
I've read this a couple times before, which is why our dear Karl Ove is not on the list. Autumn has all of these phrases that I would describe as serene provokations, where Knausgaard says something shockingly declarative about the world, a way of being, etc, but it's woven into these anecdotes about the object of the day. You nod and say yes, (something from the migratory birds passage) is totally correct, and go through the rest of your day in a daze of assumptions. The sweat in your shoes is an evolutionary response that reminds us of being hunted, but it is also that one time in high school when you were told to leave class for speaking out of turn, and so forth. The biographic details of My Struggle are not as prominent in Autumn, which adds to the tone of universality of the anecdotes about bees and leaves. Does Knausgaard hit the mark with every truism? Absolutely not, but the effect of his prose is entrancing enough to make that not matter.
Closer by Dennis Cooper
Closer was the first thing I read this year, and I was appropriately repulsed and obsessed with it. The world of Closer is like if Gregg Araki's nineties movies were just about the evil parts, and I was pleased to see that Cooper had reviewed Nowhere and Araki was in talks to adapt Frisk.
The Rose by Ariana Reines
I re-read "HELLMOUTH," my favorite poem from this collection with my poetry circle I do at work, and people were kinda mixed on it. This made me so unbearably upset but I had to keep my cool. I loved The Rose, the poems are sexy and intense and uncompromising, gutting and enthralling. And (not gonna name him because he's a sweet old man) had the gall to be like there's nothing here? I would have yelled at him but I was in teacher-mode so I stayed chill. There's a lot here.
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
The Summer Book is divine. God bless NYRB for releasing her books in English. Sophia and Grandmother are such lovely pairings for one another.
Groceries by Nora Claire Miller
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
Stag Dance was so sick. The main story about the logging camp gets all the conversation, which tracks, as it's like a brilliant feat of writing that needs to be adapted into a movie.
I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always by Douglas Kerney
The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Sunset
November 5, 2025
There was a beautiful sunset over New York today, the pink and orange and usual colors passing through the reflected clouds, all drifting past Chinatown and FiDi, which I have a very good view of from my dirty office window. I'd like to describe the sunset in further detail, or even describe the emotion of seeing a beautiful sunset, but I find it difficult to express this. Temporal pleasures don't offer themselves an immediate analog in writing, this is especially pronounced if you're not the best writer. A patron yawned. Another patron shook used wrappers out of an advent calendar. It is November, so I wonder where she got that, and instead of trying to describe a sunset I am writing about oddities and banalities. I hate minutiae. Tolstoy wrote about Austerlitz.
I have this feeling that every time I have the compulsion to write something, I'm better served picking up whatever book is in my bag and reading a few pages. Granted, I usually do neither, I'll wait for the subway to pass Clinton-Washington so I can quickly refresh my emails to see if there's anything new I'll be not responding to. Someone just called the library, asking if this was Riverside. I told her it wasn't, and she said "Ooh, dang it," in a way that was very endearing. Like her plan had been foiled. I don't remember how I ended the call, it was brief, mind you, but I could have given her the number for Riverside, or asked if I could help her with whatever she was looking for. Instead, I think I just hung up. It was only a minute ago but it feels like a blur.
Tonight: subway, walk home, get changed, walk to subway, subway, short walk to soccer field, soccer, short walk to bar, first date *ed note: first date was cancelled*, home.
Tomorrow: wake up, morning tasks, walk to subway, subway, short walk to psychiatrist's office, appointment, wasting time, therapy, wasting time, appointment at the bank, subway, short walk to class, class, short walk to subway, subway, walk home.
I know very well that these plans are my own doing, and having my day off during the middle of the week is just an excuse for me to rip all the bandaids off at once, but this feels extreme.
Full disclosure—I am writing these in a public place. It's not like there's anything here that I don't want to be made public (yet), but I guess this is my way of avoiding feeling crazy when I'm left to my own devices. It's hard to read when I'm supposed to be alert, and I'm tethered to this computer to give the impression that there's an Authoritative Presence on the floor who can use the information highway to serve the people, so writing these with the screen theme set to Green on Black, Matrix style, makes it look like I'm doing something complicated. This is lower than a diary, this is posting for 0 likes. I didn't even tell you about the sunset, it was fucking beautiful, but I have other things on my mind.
Yours truly,
Cleo
Love Mountain
October 31, 2025
Mountain climbing is very perilous, which is why it makes for excellent AI generated content on YouTube. The story is the story and there are probably one hundred Wikipedia pages about specific disasters on a given day at a given peak, like how "Into Thin Air" is just a sliver of what really went down on Everest that day. There's no need to read "Into Thin Air" because there's a movie, and there's no need to watch the movie because there's a 20 minute YouTube video called "The most infamous day in Everest history" or something of that sort, which uses the same cadence and music as the one about the 2008 K2 disaster, or the 2014 Annapurna avalanches, etc. My dad, who I'll refer to as Papá because that's what I call him, climbed mountains in his twenties. He knocked out some of the North American classics—Waddington, Rainier, Washington in the winter, made it pretty far up Denali before getting injured and turning around. I don't hate him for this. He had the drive to do these things, and he did them. I'd like to climb like that, one day. It's not as if time is slipping away from me. I have other goals, perhaps.
It does not shock me that the world of climbing, whether it be of the rock or mountaineering or trekking variety (many times these endeavors call for a little bit of all of these), has a similar approach to achievement as Rolling Stone or Pitchfork. There are awards regarding the best climbs of the year, for groups and individuals, measuring the risk of the climb, the purity of the climb, the originality of the climb. The sporting press revelled in this year's mega-feat from Kílian Jornet, who ran up all of the 14,000 foot peaks in the Lower 48, and biked from state to state doing it. He set a benchmark for others to try and break, and come the end of the year he'll probably receive some award or be on the top of a list of greatest sportsmen of the year. I have the kind of idiot brain where this kind of thinking makes perfect sense to me. I leave a show, a movie, and not twenty minutes after I will be comparing it to something else I've seen, creating an infinite list (sometimes tangible, sometimes internal) of everything I have ever consumed and everything that surrounds me. This is the best babka. This is the best subway line. This is the best designer. My life is worse than her life, and so forth.
Once I get my degree, I plan on leaving New York for a year or so. I haven't verbalized these plans to anyone, and they're contingent on getting a better paying library job than I'll get in the city (unlikely), so there's a chance it doesn't work out. I would be very happy to live in New York forever, but I have a very naughty need to do things that make me feel closer to death. This is an unbearably bourgeois attitude, and I'm sure that when I start sharing this page around I'll be embarrassed about what I'm admitting to, but I'll call a spade a spade: the idiot Englishmen who set off to die in the Himalaya in the 20th century were right. I'll take every precaution to not die and I have no plans on dying before the age of 80 something, unless I come down with some horrible neurodegenerative disorder and one of you have to George and Lenny me, but I want to feel my life in my hands, knees, and feet.
This is also a particularly masculine ideal, one that I've found to be so off putting in men.
On Desk
October 29, 2025
It's apparently bad form to be writing this directly into the code, but when I see any of the usual places where I write my essays, cries for help, grocery lists, I find that the tips of my fingers go blue. I hear keys coming down the stairs. There are so many books I have to read, for work, for school, to become more human, supposedly, but I also have other preoccupations. I received a note from a surgeon today telling me that December 9, 2026 could be the day, but like no pressure if not. I would like to stand on a stage and perform a lecture to all concerned parties, the unconcerned and the petrified, about what I want, what I'd like to do with my job, the places I'd like to travel to and why the world wouldn't end if I were to get a vagina.
That's so uncouth of me. I swear I have other things I think about. How much my coffee costs. Where to paddle out next time I'm at the Rockaways. What to tell Jason next session, to let him in on. Five years of therapy has probably left him with a significant backlog of notes on me, which he could reform and publish into a novel like "The State I Am In," supposing that all of the lurid details I've fed him can support the weak premise of my life story. Recently I looked Neve in the eye, and told her that up until that point my life has been very good. I still feel this way.
*ed note* this paragraph was redacted on 12/6/2025. my apology in the next paragraph will remain intact.
I swear to G-d, to J*sus in fact, and may both of them tag team me on my way to hell if you think this will become a purely confessional output. Again, so uncouth of me to be apologizing like this.
There have been more film crews near where I work recently. I love to see them, with all the people standing up straight, and one person so immaculately sheveled that the camera couldn't pick a bad angle if it tried. In turn, I stand up a little straighter, and pretend to walk by hurredly, neck exposed, like I have somewhere to be. I have nowhere to be, I am on my way to get my deal on tamales, but there I am walking on the same street as a star and in my mind I am superior. I work around here. I'm a librarian. I have a pretty face, *redacted 12/6/2025*, but I get paid to help people, and what do you do? You film a commercial, wearing clothing that fits you perfectly. You still have to stand on the same street as me, and if you're lucky the b-roll will catch me walking by, and everyone watching the Super Bowl advertisements will be talking about the beautiful girl in the L.L. Bean jacket with a coffee and a waxed paper box with two tamales in it. I tell myself this to keep me sane.
For now,
Cleo