I Read 36 Books This Year & This Was My Favorite

Reading three books per month hardly makes you prolific. I aspire to read much more, and there are times in my life that I have. But every year, I dutifully keep a tally of what I’ve read, what I’ve loved and what I’d just as soon forget (titles I actually would forget if I hadn’t written them down.)

In 2025, my number wasn’t particularly impressive, but I was pleased with some of the great books I picked up. Notable mentions go to heavy-hitter novels like James, Martyr! and The Emperor of Gladness. And, as per usual, I loved my odd little selection of nonfiction titles—Frostbite (about the history of refrigeration), A Marriage at Sea (about a real-life husband and wife who survived 118 days shipwrecked on a rubber raft), The Anxious Generation (as a parent of tweens, that one hit me hard). And I even got a sneak peek at two fantastic 2026 books—The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout and the arresting A Real Animal by Emeline Atwood.

But my favorite book of 2025 wasn’t even from 2025—it was a quiet, British novel from 2023, Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt.

Set in working-class London in an unspecified era (which most certainly isn’t today), the novel follows Ruth, a hard-working, clear-thinking teacher who decides to take in and raise her granddaughter Lily in the wake of her daughter (Lily’s mother) Eleanor’s years-long struggle with drug addiction.

The addiction novel, of course, is nothing new. Yet I found the specificity of Ruth’s perspective both original and underrepresented in contemporary culture.

The book is told in vignettes, skipping ahead years in time to focus on small moments that loom large in Ruth’s life: the time she coaxes Eleanor to eat a turkey sandwich on Christmas, the time she maybe spots Lily’s father on a London bus, the time she tries to bring dignity to a truly bungled Christening with a truly in-over-his-head priest. And many of these moments—particularly as Lily grows older and begins to understand her mother’s unreliability—are gutting, but also funny, honest and sharply astute.

The addiction novel, of course, is nothing new. Yet I found the specificity of Ruth’s perspective both original and underrepresented in contemporary culture. There is an epidemic of grandparents raising their grandchildren. And there are very few books that look at that dynamic head-on. I have also dealt, in my own family, with the heartache of drug use and mental illness, and I felt Boyt’s subtle chronicle of the experience to be extremely accurate. It is possible to love, to hope, to despair all at the same time; These things are not mutually exclusive.

Loved and Missed is not a long book. At 200 pages, it’s easily read in an afternoon. And yet it’s one that stayed with me—extraordinary in its subtly, unparalleled in its charm.