And that is a wrap! 2025 is in the books. Thank you, 2025, for all the memories and the lessons you’ve taught me. We’ve successfully completed a 365-day revolution around the sun. But as the old adage goes, with every end comes a new beginning. 2025’s conclusion comes with the opening of a new door. We are provided with 12 new chapters, each accompanied by 365 blank canvases, upon which to paint new memories. I hope that we will paint these pages with memories that we will cherish for a lifetime, may it be with the people we love or all by ourselves.
As has been the tradition in the past few years, I will be kicking off the new year by looking back to the previous year, its hits, and of course, its mishits. It is also an opportunity to take a glimpse of how the coming year is going to shape up. This book wrap-up is a part of a mini-series that will feature the following:
- 2025 Top 20 Favorite Books
- 2025 Book Wrap Up
- 2025 Reading Journey by the Numbers
- 2025 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part I)
- 2025 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part II)
- 2025 New Favorite Authors
- 2025 Beat the Backlist Challenge Wrap-up
- 2026 Books I Look Forward To List
- 2026 Top 26 Reading List
- 2026 Beat the Backlist Challenge
As has been customary over the previous years, I will be sharing a list of books that I am looking forward to. This yearly reading list started with 20 books before I decided to increase it based on the last two digits of the year; I think I will be stopping at 30. Regardless, my Top 20 reading lists have opened several doors of opportunity to explore some of the best works of literature. Often an eclectic mix of literary classics and contemporary books from various genres, these lists have provided me with some of the most memorable literary journeys I have had in years. Ironically, they are the reasons why I usually would scramble toward the end of the year. In 2025, it was a buzzer-beater as I was only able to complete my 25th book by mid-December. It was a close call. Still, I am filled with hope that my 2026 reading journey will be as stellar as the previous years. Without further ado, here are the 26 books I am looking forward to reading in 2026.
Title: Herscht 07769
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Translator (from Hungarian): George Szirtes
Publisher: Tuskar Rock Press
Publishing Date: 2016 (1999)
No. of Pages: 279
Synopsis: In the archives of a small Hungarian town, the suicidal clerk Korin has discovered an antique manuscript of startling beauty narrating the epic tale of brothers-in-arms returning home from a disastrous war. Korin is determined to kill himself, but first he must commit the precious manuscript to eternity by typing it all out onto the internet. And to do so he must travel to the nexus of the known world: New York. There on the city’s streets, Korin encounters a raft of eccentrics, and as his desperate mind swings from lucidity to lunacy he finds himself lost in a world torn between viciousness and mysterious beauty.
Title: The Great Swindle
Author: Pierre Lemaitre
Translator (from French): Frank Wynne
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 439
Synopsis: October 1918: the war on the Western Front is all but over. Desperate for one last chance of promotion, an ambitious lieutenant, Henri d’Aulnay Pradelle, sends two scouts over the top of the trenches, and contrives to shoot them in the back to incite his men to heroic action once more.
And so is set in motion a series of shocking events that will bind together the fates and fortunes of Pradelle and the two soldiers who discover his crime: Albert Maillard and Edouard Péricourt.
Back in civilian life, Albert and Edouard find themselves in a society whose reverence for its dead cannot quite match its resentment for those who survived. Penniless, morphine-dependent, cut-off from their families, psychologically and physically destroyed by their wartime experience, the two soldiers conspire to enact an audacious form of revenge against the country that abandoned them to penury and despair, with a scheme to swindle the whole of France on an epic scale.
Meanwhile, believing her brother killed in action, Edouard’s sister, the heiress Madeleine Péricourt, has married Pradelle, who is running a certain scam of his own.
Set amid the ruins of one of the most brutal conflicts of the modern era, this is a devastating portrait of the darker side of post-war France with all her villains, cowards, and clowns, revealing the unbearable tragedy of the lost generation.
Title: The Ogre
Author: Michel Tournier
Translator (from French): Barbara Bray
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Publishing Date: 1972
No. of Pages: 370
Synopsis: An international bestseller, The Ogre is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. Following strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges’s passage from submissive schoolboy to “ogre” of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, it takes us deeper into the dark heart of fascism that any novel since The Tin Drum. Until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich, it shocks us, dazzles us, and above all, holds us spellbound.
Title: Z
Author: Vassilis Vassilikos
Translator (From Greek): Marilyn Calmann
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publishing Date: January 2017 (1966)
No. of Pages: 406
Synopsis: A progressive parliamentary deputy is scheduled to appear at a political rally. Meanwhile, local political bosses plot his assassination. Thugs are recruited to disrupt the rally. Rumors begin to spread. But the forces already set in motion are irresistible. Z is the story of a crime, a time, a place, and people transformed by events.
Z was published in Greece in 1966, and banned there one year later. It is based on an actual political assassination in 1963 in Salonika. The victim was Gregory Lambrakis, a socialist legislator and outspoken critic of the government. But Lamrakis’s killers could not have anticipated the public response. His funeral became a political event; by the time the cortege reaches Athens, 400,000 people were following the coffin in silence. In the nation’s capital, the letter Z suddenly appeared on walls, sidewalks, posters – everywhere. Z stands for the Greek verb zei, “he lives.”
Title: Home is the Sailor
Author: Jorge Amado
Translator (from Portuguese): Harriet De Onis
Publisher: Collins Harvill
Publishing Date: 1990 (1961)
No. of Pages: 298
Synopsis: The sleepy Brazilian beach resort of Periperi needs a hero. As if in answer to their call, Captain Vasco Moscosco de Aragão (newly retired) arrives and soon has the townspeople enthralled with his tales of ocean-going daring and romance. Only his rival, Chico Pacheco, delves into the captain’s past and discovers that he has never in his life sailed beyond the harbour bar. But just as Vasco is about to be unmasked, the Ita limps into port with her flag at half mast and her captain dead at the wheel. Pressed into service, Vasco goes to meet his destiny and so begins an adventure in love and seamanship that surpasses even his wildest fantasies.
Title: Where the Air is Clear
Author: Carlos Fuentes
Translator (from Spanish): Sam Hileman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Publishing Date: 1985
No. of Pages: 376
Synopsis: My name is Ixca Cienfuegos. I was born and I live in Mexico City. Which is not so grave: in Mexico City there is never tragedy but only outrage. Thus begins Carlos Fuentes’s first novel, unfolding a panorama in which many people’s lives depend on the fact that they live in today’s Mexico City, where the air is clear and yet filled with the old gods and devils still struggling to overcome the new, where a long and bloody revolution is still being fought and paid for in flesh. The vividness of Fuentes’s characters and the country that is theirs has made critics claim this as his best novel. It is unquestionably among the finest works of literature to be produced in the Western Hemisphere.
Title: The Skating Rink
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Translator (from Spanish): Chris Andrews
Publisher: New Directions
Publishing Date: 2009 (1993)
No. of Pages: 182
Synopsis: Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona.
The story revolves around the beautiful figure-skating champion Nuria Marti. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion outside of town. What he doesn’t tell her is that he paid for it using embezzled public funds, but such a betrayal is only the beginning, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene.
Told in short, suspenseful chapters by three alternating male narrators – a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered yet still romantic itinerant poet, and a duplicitous local entrepreneur – The Skating Rink is a wholly engrossing tale of murder and its motives.
Title: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Author: Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher: Perennial Classics
Publishing Date: 2000
No. of Pages: 448
Synopsis: It’s 1949. It’s the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the grand stage of New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become by night stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is their moment of young – a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and deep affection. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos has created a rich and enthralling novel about passion and loss, memory and desire.
Title: The Kingdom of this World
Author: Alejo Carpenter
Translator (from Spanish): Harriet de Onis
Publisher: The Noonday Press
Publishing Date: 1989
No. of Pages: 186
Synopsis: A few after its liberation from French colonialist rule, Haiti experienced a period of unsurpassed brutality, horror, and superstition under the reign of the black King Henri-Christophe. Through the eyes of the ancient slave Ti-Noel, The Kingdom of This World records the destruction of the black regime – built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French – in an orgy of voodoo, race, hatred, erotomania, and fantastic grandeurs of false elegance.
‘Carpentier’s writing has the power and range of a cathedral organ on the eve of the Resurrection.’ ~ The New Yorker
Title: Lovesick
Author: Ángeles Mastretta
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Sayers Peden
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Publishing Date: 1998
No. of Pages: 292
Synopsis: A bestseller throughout Latin America, Lovesick is the story of a passion interwoven with the history of a nation, a war, and a family. Emilia Sauri is torn between her love for her childhood playmate, Daniel Cuenca, who runs off to join the Mexican Revolution, and her desire to become a doctor. Her professional calling leads her to Antonio Zavalza, a physician whose only audacity is to desire peace in the midst of a civil war.
With an assured hand and a crystalline touch, reminiscent of the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Isabel Allende, Ángeles Mastretta presents the vivid portrait of a woman both fragile and bold, who enters the new century shedding the bonds and the prejudices of previous generations. As Emilia must sort through the affairs of her heart, so too must she confront the fate history presents – a nation wracked by years of war and society awakening to the tumult of the twentieth century, and the place for a woman of many passions.
Title: The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Translator (from Spanish): Edith Grossman
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Publishing Date: 1999 (1997)
No. of Pages: 304
Synopsis: Don Rigoberto – by day a grey insurance executive, by night a pornographer and sexual enthusiast – misses Lucrecia, his estranged second wife. The pair separated following a sexual encounter between Lucrecia and Alfonso, Rigoberto’s son. To compensate for her absence, Rigoberto fills his notebooks with memories, fantasies and unsent letters. Meanwhile, Alfonso visits Lucrecia, determined to win her love.
In The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Mario Vargas Llosa keeps the reader guessing which episodes are real and which issue from Rigoberto’s imagination. The novel, a wonderful mix of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling. (Source: Goodreads)
Title: Portnoy’s Complaint
Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: 1969
No. of Pages: 274
Synopsis: Portnoy’s Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: ‘Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient’s “morality,” however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.’ (Spielvogel, O. ‘The Puzzled Penis’, Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.
Title: Underworld
Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Scribner
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 827
Synopsis: Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life; she is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times – Don DeLillo’s greatest and most powerful work of fiction.
Title: America is Not the Heart
Author: Elaine Castillo
Publisher: Atlantic Fiction
Publishing Date: 2018
No. of Pages: 406
Synopsis: How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she’s already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay, knows not to ask about the first and second, and his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their seven-year-old daughter, Roni, asks Hero why her hands seem to scream with hurt at the steering wheel of the car she drives to collect her from school, and only Rosalyn, the fierce but open-hearted beautician, has any hope of bringing Hero back from the dead.
Title: Neuromancer
Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Gollancz
Publishing Date: 2016
No. of Pages: 297
Synopsis: William Gibson revolutionised science fiction in his 1984 debut Neuromancer. The writer who gave us the matrix and coined the term ‘cyberspace’ produced a first novel that won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards, and lit the fuse on the Cyberpunk movement.
More than three decades later, Gibson’s text is as stylish as ever, his noir narrative still glitters like chrome in the shadows and his depictions of the rise and abuse of corporate power look more prescient every day. Part thriller, part warning, Neuromancer is a timeless classic of modern SF and one of the 20th century’s most potent and compelling visions of the future.
Title: Less Than Zero
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1986
No. of Pages: 208
Synopsis: The rich and spoiled children of Los Angeles have it all – sex, drugs, fast cars, air-conditioned mansions. Theirs is a world shaped by television, rock music, and too much money; it is a world devoid of feeling and of hope.
In a startling, staccato style reminiscent of music videos, Bret Easton Ellis re-creates this world in a dizzying journey through endless parties, seedy rock clubs, and the seamy underworld of drug dealing and prostitution. Haunting, unnerving, Less Than Zero is the inside story of a generation on a desperate search for the ultimate sensation.
Title: The Mists of Avalon
Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Publisher: DelRey Books
Publishing Date: November 2000
No. of Pages: 876
Synopsis: In Marion Zimmer Bradley’s brilliant reworking of the powerful Arthurian epic, we see the tumult and adventures of Camelot’s court through the eyes of the women who bolstered the king’s rise and schemed for his fall. There is Morgaine, an intense woman gifted with the Sight, who has sworn to keep the old religion alive against the growing tide of Christianity that threatens her way of life – even if it means fighting a deadly battle against her beloved brother. And the devout Gwenhwyfar, married to Arthur out of a sense of duty, determined to bring Britain into the light of her God.
From their childhoods through the ultimate fulfillment of their destinies, we follow these women and the diverse cast of characters that surrounds them as the great Arthurian epic unfolds stunningly before us. As Morgaine and Gwenhwyfar struggle for control over the fate of Arthur’s kingdom, as the Knights of the Round Table take on their infamous quest, as Merlin and Viviane wield their magics for the future of Old Britain, the Isle of Avalon sips further into the impenetrable mists of memory, until the fissure between old and new worlds – and old and new religions – claims its most famous victim.
Title: Persuasion
Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Publishing Date: 2008 (1818)
No. of Pages: 249
Synopsis: Eight years ago Anne Elliot bowed to pressure from her family and made the decision not to marry the man she loved, Captain Wentworth. Now circumstances have conspired to bring him back into her social circle and Anne finds her old feelings for him reignited. However, when they meet again Wentworth behaves as if they are strangers and seems more interested in her friend Louisa. With humour, insight and tenderness, Jane Austen tells the story of a love that endures the tests of time and society.
Title: The Censor’s Notebook
Author: Liliana Corobca
Translator (from Romanian): Monica Cure
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publishing Date: 2022 (2017)
No. of Pages: 476
Synopsis: A window into the intimate workings of censorship under communism, this novel begins with a seemingly non-fiction frame story – an exchange of letters between the author and Emilia Codrescu, the former chief of the Secret Documents Office in Romania’s feared State Directorate of Media and Printing, the government branch responsible for censorship. Codrescu was once responsible for the burning and shredding of censors’ notebooks and the state secrets in them, but prior to fleeing the country in 1974 she stole one of these notebooks. Now, forty years later, she makes the notebook available to Liliana for the newly instituted Museum of Communism.
The work of censor – a job about which it is forbidden to talk – is revealed in this notebook, which discloses the structures of this mysterious institution and describes how these professional readers and ideological error hunters are burdened with hundreds of manuscripts, strict deadlines, and threatening penalties. The Censor’s Notebook asks whether literature has the power to keep alive personal and political truths in an age when censorship is pervasive.
Title: The Peasants
Author: Władysław Reymont
Translator (from Polish): Anna Zaranko
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publishing Date: 2024 (1904-1909)
No. of Pages: 893
Synopsis: In the Polish village of Lipce, scandal, romance and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village’s wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride – but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over the course of four seasons – Autumn to Summer – the tangled skein of their story unravels, watched eagerly by the other peasants: the gossip Jagustynka, pious Roch, hot-blooded Mateusz, gentle Witek. At once richly lyrical and realistic, comic, tragic and reflective, Władysław Reymont’s epic novel is a love song to the land, and to the eternal, timeless matters of the heart.
Title: Season of Migration to the North
Author: Tayeb Salih
Translator (from Arabic): Denys Johnson-Davies
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2009 (1969)
No. of Pages: 139
Synopsis: After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood – the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.
But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man – whom he has asked to look after his wife – in an unsettled and violent no-man’s land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.
Season of Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important novel of the twentieth century.
Title: The Sirens of Baghdad
Author: Yasmina Khadra
Translator (from French): John Cullen
Publisher: Anchor Books
Publishing Date: 2008
No. of Pages: 307
Synopsis: The third novel in Yasmina Khadra’s bestselling trilogy about Islamic fundamentalism has the most compelling backdrop of any of his novels: Iraq in the wake of the American invasion. A young Iraqi student, unable to attend college because of the war, sees American soldiers leave a trail of humiliation and grief in his small village. Bent on revenge, he flees to the chaotic streets of Baghdad where insurgents soon realize they can make use of his anger. Eventually he is groomed for a secret terrorist mission meant to dwarf the attacks of September 11, only to find himself struggling with moral qualms. The Sirens of Baghdad is a powerful look at the effects of violence on ordinary people, showing what can turn a decent human being into a weapon, and how the good in human nature can resist.
Title: Homeland Elegies
Author: Ayad Akhtar
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Publishing Date: May 2021
No. of Pages: 343
Synopsis: A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at tis heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation’s unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one – least of all himself – in the process.
Title: The Last Days
Author: Raymond Queneau
Translator (from French): Barbara Wright
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Publishing Date: 1996
No. of Pages: 231
Synopsis: The Last Days is Raymond Queneau’s autobiographical novel of Parisian student life in the 1920s: Vincent Tuquedenne tries to reconcile his love for reading with the sterility of studying as he hopes to study his way out of the bourgeoisie to which he belongs. Vincent and his generation are contrasted with an older generation of retired teachers and petty crooks, and both generations come under the bemused gaze of the waiter Alfred, whose infallible method of predicting the future mocks prevailing scientific models. Similarly, Queneau’s literary universe operates under its own laws, joining rigorous artistry with a warm evocation of the last days of a bygone world.
Title: The Inheritance of Loss
Author: Kiran Desai
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 358
Synopsis: In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai’s brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair. Her characters face numerous choices that majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.
Title: Martin Rivas
Author: Alberto Blest Gana
Translator (from Spanish): Tess O’Dwyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publishing Date: 2000
No. of Pages: 389
Synopsis: Martin Rivas, an impoverished but ambitious young man from the northern mining region of Chile, is entrusted by his late father to the household of a wealthy and influential member of the Santiago elite. While living there, he falls in love with his guardian’s daughter. A poor provincial, Martin perceives his situation to be hopeless, so he immediately sets about improving his financial and social station. Along the way, he bears witness to the wide range of social and moral strata within Chilean society.
Widely acknowledged as the first Chilean novel, Martin Rivas is at once a passionate love story and a keenly observed portrait of the manners and customs of nineteenth-century Chile. Rich with unerring social portraits, animated dialogue, and sharply drawn characters, Martin Rivas is an engagingly spontaneous and charmingly romantic novel.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 