{"id":11473,"date":"2025-07-15T11:09:03","date_gmt":"2025-07-15T11:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/11473\/"},"modified":"2025-07-15T11:09:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-15T11:09:03","slug":"from-flashlight-to-a-marriage-at-sea-the-best-books-of-2025-so-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/11473\/","title":{"rendered":"From Flashlight to A Marriage at Sea, the best books of 2025 so far"},"content":{"rendered":"

A truism about stories (courtesy, more or less, of the novelist John Gardner<\/a>) is that there are only two plots: a person goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. The joke is that they\u2019re the same story, from two different perspectives. In the first half of 2025, I\u2019ve found that my favorite books have lived up to the claim. <\/p>\n

The best books I\u2019ve read so far have all been preoccupied with the problem of travel, of leaving home, of being visited by strangers: how it broadens us and how it damages us, its attractions and its horrors. They are about how frightening it can be to enter a strange new place, and how frightening it can be when a stranger enters the familiar place we\u2019ve known all our lives. <\/p>\n

In the books I\u2019m going to tell you about, a married couple is stranded on a life raft for four months. A spinsterish aunt leaves home to become a witch. And a woman sexually attracted to airplanes travels from one airport to the next, searching for the plane that will marry her. <\/p>\n

For your convenience, I\u2019ve further divided these books about our fair travelers into two categories: the whimsical and the arduous. (There\u2019s overlap, of course, because how interesting can whimsy be if there isn\u2019t a touch of work to make it worthwhile? And how can anyone make it through unrelenting toil without a dash of whimsy?) These should help guide you to the perfect book to accompany you on your summer travels. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.<\/p>\n

Books in which homebodies go on whimsical journeys <\/p>\n

Mona Acts Out<\/a> by Mischa Berlinski<\/p>\n

In this deceptively warm comedy, a middle-aged Shakespearean actress who is a tad high and a lot anxious spends Thanksgiving Day roaming the streets of New York City, her little dog in tow. Profane, self-indulgent, and conflicted over the recent cancellation of her disgraced mentor, Mona Zahad is indeed acting out.<\/p>\n

Although, speaking of self-indulgence, the mentor in question writes to Mona: \u201cI am dying, Egypt, dying,\u201d scrawled on a postcard that pictures Mona in character as Lady Macbeth, covered in blood. The missive, from the theatrical director Milton Katz, prompts Mona to begin her walkabout. <\/p>\n

Milton discovered Mona, but he\u2019s been fired for sexual harassment. Officially, Mona\u2019s on Milton\u2019s side: after all, he\u2019d never hidden the fact that the price of working with him was to put up with a little unsolicited handsiness. Unofficially, Mona can\u2019t help noticing that she\u2019s become a more relaxed and dynamic actress since Milton was drummed out. She knows that Milton has re-invented himself as a martyr, and she can\u2019t decide whether she wants to be a part of that martyrdom or not. <\/p>\n

Reeling from pills and emotional foment, Mona stumbles her way down the length of Manhattan, quoting Shakespeare to herself as she goes. Mona Acts Out is the only Me Too novel I have yet to read that\u2019s both sweet and sophisticated, an alchemical combination it must have borrowed from the Bard himself.<\/p>\n

Read if you: have a favorite Kenneth Branagh-directed Shakespeare and are still a little bitter he never did cast Judi Dench in one of the plays.<\/p>\n

Michael Lincoln, the hapless narrator of this metafictional romp, spends most of the events of Metallic Realms holed up in the Brooklyn apartment his parents pay for, eavesdropping on his roommate through a hidden microphone stashed in a house plant. But Mike is telling us his story from an undisclosed location somewhere in upstate New York. As we learn more about nerdy, awkward Mike \u2014 \u201cdeeply introverted, Sagittarius sun and Libra rising, Ravenclaw, Water Tribe citizen, lawful neutral, and an INTP\u201d \u2014 it becomes clear that it would take a real tragedy to get him that far away from home. <\/p>\n

Mike, Michel\u2019s funhouse alter ego, is a classic geek fanboy, unable to mention the object of his obsessions without making bombastic claims about how it has \u201cshat\u00adtered the calcified worldbuilding paradigm that dominates science fiction.\u201d In this case, however, Mike is hyperfixated on the deeply mediocre science fiction that his roommate\u2019s writing collective, Orb 4, has been churning out for fun. They\u2019ve denied Mike entry into the collective, so he\u2019s appointed himself lore keeper instead. (The rest of the group doesn\u2019t know that he believes his role requires complete records of their meetings; hence that hidden mic.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a tragedy, a story about the grinding miseries and disappointments of trying to build a life that leaves you room to be creative and make art.<\/p>\n

Michel has described Metallic Realms as \u201cPale Fire meets Star Trek,\u201d and the Nabokovian comparisons aren\u2019t off-base. According to Mike, what we\u2019re reading is the collective work of Orb 4, interspersed with annotations and historical context from Mike in his capacity as lore keeper. Mike\u2019s commentary, however, lets us in on a bigger story behind his pompous bloviating and creepy stalking. It\u2019s a tragedy, a story about the grinding miseries and disappointments of trying to build a life that leaves you room to be creative and make art. Even if the art you create is, to all but the most biased possible observer, never more than just okay.<\/p>\n

Read alongside: Pale Fire<\/a> for the structure, Vladimir<\/a> for the Nabokov pastiche, and Among Others<\/a> for the heart.<\/p>\n

Woodworking<\/a> by Emily St. James<\/p>\n

In Woodworking, the debut novel by former Vox critic Emily St. James, leaving home is the dream, the impossible ideal. To leave one\u2019s old life and parents behind, reinvent oneself, and move to a new city where no one can ever say you were anyone different, like moving out for college but with no Thanksgiving homecoming. <\/p>\n

In the case of Woodworking\u2019s two narrators, Erica and Abigail, the dream specifically is to move to a new city where no one will ever know that they\u2019re trans. For Erica, a high school English teacher, the dream feels impossible: she\u2019s already built a whole life as a man in small-town South Dakota, complete with an ex-wife she\u2019s still in love with. For 17-year-old Abigail, Erica\u2019s student and the only out trans person she knows, the dream feels tantalizingly close. Abigail already hates her parents anyway, so what\u2019s one more level of estrangement?<\/p>\n

Woodworking is a charming, sparkling, and very human novel that packs a heavy punch. Its heart and soul lies with the vexed relationship between Erica and Abigail, forced into alliance after Erica comes out to Abigail and Abigail, horrified, realizes she\u2019s going to have to be her dorky English teacher\u2019s trans mentor and teach her how to paint her fingernails. This book is a hoot and a ride.<\/p>\n

Read accompanied by: Something fizzy and sweet with a little bitter kick in the background. Blood orange San Pellegrino, maybe?<\/p>\n

Went to London, Took the Dog: A Diary<\/a> by Nina Stibbe<\/p>\n

The memoirist and novelist Nina Stibbe first arrived in London in the 1980s as a bright-eyed 20-year-old nanny. Her time caring for the children of a London Review of Books editor left her enmeshed in the literary scene of the moment, and the letters she wrote her sister about brushing shoulders with the bookish who\u2019s who became the basis of her 2013 bestseller, Love, Nina<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In her new memoir Went to London, Took the Dog, Stibbe returns to London as a 60-year-old for a year-long sabbatical from her regular life in Cornwall. She plans to write her diary, she announces, in the style of celebrity playwright Alan Bennett: \u201cHe just writes what he\u2019s been up to. Say he\u2019s had Ian McEwan over for tea \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Snoops rejoice: she does name names.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, Stibbe takes us to pub trivia with Nicholas Hornby and discusses the dishwashing abilities of her landlady, the novelist Deborah Moggach. Hilariously, she goes out of her way to sideswipe the notorious contrarian novelist Lionel Shriver. (Stibbe speaks at the same literary festival as Shriver and takes great care not to be caught alone at breakfast with her.) And all the perimenopause discourse around All Fours last summer<\/a> should meet Stibbe\u2019s accounts of prolapsed uteri and menopause-induced incontinence. Snoops rejoice: she does name names.<\/p>\n

Every so often, however, Stibbe allows us a peek at what drove her back to London. It\u2019s a trial separation from her husband, whom she never mentions by name. Likewise, she never tells us what, exactly, the problem is with her marriage, only that her coupled-up friends act \u201cas if I\u2019m going to infect their marriage,\u201d and that \u201csometimes I must forget to breathe or something and have a terrible headache afterward.\u201d Then the diary entry ends, and she moves on, as breezy as though she had never made such a deeply sad revelation, to the next day\u2019s lunch meeting with Hornby and plumbing travails with Moggach. <\/p>\n

Read accompanied by: good crunchy salt-and-vinegar potato chips, for an easy, addictive pleasure.<\/p>\n

Lolly Willowes<\/a> by Sylvia Townsend Warner<\/p>\n

For a certain type of reader, among whom I count myself, Lolly Willowes will be a nearly perfect novel. First published in 1926 amid an England unsure of what to do with its newly-liberated women, and reissued this year by Modern Library, it tells the story of Laura \u201cAunt Lolly\u201d Willowes and her decision to become a witch. <\/p>\n

Selling her soul to Satan, Laura concludes, feels like a much better move than spending her whole life making herself useful to an unending stream of children.<\/p>\n

Laura is a decorous spinster who, in middle age, decides she is fed up with taking care of her family and moves away to a village by the woods. There, Laura makes the acquaintance of a supernatural cat and witnesses a macabre black Sabbath with a coven of witches. Selling her soul to Satan, Laura concludes, feels like a much better move than spending her whole life making herself useful to an unending stream of children.<\/p>\n

Lolly Willowes presents itself to the reader with all the placid charm of a comic English country novel, a Cold Comfort Farm<\/a> or a Love In a Cold Climate<\/a>. Yet its pleasantly arch, witty voice is hiding a deep well of fury. \u201cThe one thing all women hate,\u201d Laura tells Satan, \u201cis to be thought dull\u201d \u2014 yet Laura\u2019s whole life is a series of dull, mean contrivances, built for her by other people. A little bit of witchcraft of her own volition does her good.<\/p>\n

Read if you: wish the Mitford sisters had written something a little more queer; have been known to mess with Tarot cards; go wild for a walk in an autumnal forest.<\/p>\n

Books in which the journey is harrowing <\/p>\n

Dream Count<\/a> by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie<\/p>\n

To say that Dream Count is probably the weakest of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie\u2019s novels is less an indictment of Dream Count than it is a recognition of how high she\u2019s set the bar. From Adichie, even a minor effort is worth a read. <\/p>\n

Dream Count tells the story of four women, all from Nigeria, all either currently living in the US or having recently returned to Nigeria from the US. Stranded in the early desultory days of the pandemic, they begin going back over their relationships with the (mostly terrible) men they have known \u2014 their \u201cdream count,\u201d says one.<\/p>\n

Much of Dream Count is satirical, and Adichie is at her sharpest and most biting when dealing with the flummoxed reactions of white liberal Americans to wealthy, cosmopolitan Africans. \u201cThey can\u2019t stand rich people from poor countries because it means they can\u2019t feel sorry for you,\u201d remarks Omelogor, who hates America and moves straight back to Lagos. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a jarring tonal shift, however, when Adichie delves into the mind of Kadiatou, the only poor woman among her four protagonists. Kadiatou\u2019s story is based on the account of Nafissatou Diallo<\/a>, a hotel housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted assault in 2011. Adichie writes Kadiatou with a touching, at times reductive naivete \u2014 but what becomes deeply moving is the relationship Kadiatou develops with the other three women of this novel. America may not know what to do with African women of such disparate yet overlapping backgrounds, but they understand one another. <\/p>\n

Read if you: want to remind yourself that before that viral TED Talk and Beyonc\u00e9 sample, Adichie was also a very good novelist. <\/p>\n

A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck<\/a> by Sophie Elmhirst<\/p>\n

In 1972, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a real-life British couple, set sail in the little yacht into which they had sunk all their life savings. Obsessed with the idea of escaping the suburbs and exploring the wilderness, they planned to make their way from England to New Zealand. Instead, nearly a year into their voyage, their boat sank. <\/p>\n

The Baileys found themselves stranded on their tiny inflatable rubber raft, along with the few supplies they\u2019d managed to salvage: fresh water, canned food, a biography of Richard III. There they would remain, surviving against all odds, for the next four months. <\/p>\n

The story of the Baileys became a media sensation after they were eventually recovered, but it has long since faded from the collective memory. In this elegant and electric account, journalist Sophie Elmhirst reconstructs every day of their four-month ordeal, and the blistering aftermath of their eventual rescue. <\/p>\n

Surrounded by far more wilderness than they ever counted on, the Baileys caught fish and sea turtles, tried and failed to signal to passing ships, and read every line of that damn biography over and over again. The book, optimistic Maralyn tells fatalist Maurice, will form the basis of their library once they get home. <\/p>\n

In Elmhurst\u2019s hands, the story of the Baileys\u2019 ordeal becomes a portrait of a marriage: how two people can drive each other to the edges of despair, and how they can keep each other alive in a time of almost unimaginable horror.<\/p>\n

I galloped through it in a single night. You will too.<\/p>\n

Read accompanied by: plentiful supplies to gloat over as the Baileys\u2019 condition gets worse and worse. Imagine you\u2019re a kid reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s worst winter again, and go from there.<\/p>\n

Susan Choi\u2019s last book, 2019\u2019s Trust Exercise<\/a>, was a structural triumph, so fine and precise it cut like a knife. Flashlight, her new novel, is a looser, less showy affair. It creeps up on you, so you don\u2019t quite register how deeply it\u2019s gotten its hooks in you until days later, when you\u2019re still thinking about it.<\/p>\n

Flashlight begins with a girl and her father on the Japanese beach at twilight, heading out to look at the stars. The girl, American-born Louisa, is a precocious 10-year-old. Her father, Serk, is a Japanese-born Korean man who is almost always angry. A day after they go star-watching, Louisa is found unconscious on the shore. Serk is lost and presumed dead, his body never recovered. <\/p>\n

Part of the deep pleasure of Flashlight is how finely Choi renders the mind of Louisa, who soon finds herself to be, like her father before her, always angry. Louisa is filled with rage at the adults around her: her teachers, who she considers stupid and incompetent; the school psychiatrist, who isn\u2019t smart enough to understand her; most of all her disabled mother, whom Louisa believes to be a liar and a malingerer. Louisa is angry in the way of a child: betrayed by the adults who have failed to live up to the expectations she set for them. And as Louisa grows into a fraught, uneasy adulthood, we see how her child\u2019s rage continues to shape her psyche in ways that she herself observes with surprise and confusion.<\/p>\n

Read alongside: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910\u20131945<\/a><\/p>\n

The narrator of Kate Folk\u2019s sly, clever Sky Daddy presents her problem to readers on the first page. \u201cThis was my destiny,\u201d candid Linda says, with characteristic transparency: \u201cfor a plane to recognize me as his soulmate midflight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.\u201d <\/p>\n

Linda is sexually attracted to planes. She believes the only way to marry one is to die in a plane crash. With that simple equation in mind, she devotes her paltry salary to taking as many plane trips as she can; mostly regional ones, to nearby midsize cities. Nevertheless, none of the \u201cfine gentlemen\u201d who woo her on each flight has yet taken her to be his bride. Desperate, Linda starts exploring the world of vision boarding to see if it can bring her closer to her destiny.<\/p>\n

There is a version of Sky Daddy that treats Linda as an object of malicious fun, but Folk never stoops so low. She takes Linda completely seriously: Linda, after all, has devoted her life to the pursuit of love, accepting the prospect of her own self-destruction with steely equanimity. Linda is part Ahab, part Ishmael, and her white whale is the first plane she ever fell in love with. This is a strange and tender novel, and it has lingered in my mind for months.<\/p>\n

Read if you: feel Elinor Oliphant Is Completely Fine<\/a> would have benefited from being weirder, or Moby-Dick<\/a> would have benefited from more sex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A truism about stories (courtesy, more or less, of the novelist John Gardner) is that there are only…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,690,88,11447],"class_list":{"0":"post-11473","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-culture","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-next-page"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}