Alexandra Jacobs

Well, BIG novels really bonked me on the head this year, in the best possible way. I am always fretting that the internet has permanently destroyed authors’ (and readers’) attention spans. And we were all sobered by the news that over the last two decades, 40 percent fewer people are reading for fun.

But surely what they used to so portentously call the World Wide Web is also stoking our urge to escape into different worlds, and helping to furnish them more richly, with so much research at the fingertips rather than after a long walk to the card catalogs. Maybe?

Adam Ross’s “Playworld” (506 pages) and Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”(688 pages) are both captivating and superb. They’re both about (among other things) how certain messed-up, powerful relationships that look like love can stay with you for a long time, perhaps your entire life. Both are splendidly written, in entirely different ways. How great, too, that in this era when text is very cheap they both took a long time to finish — a decade and 20 years, respectively. Bring back long hours in a garret!

Then there was Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s “The Sisters” (638 pages) — conceptual and daring and a back handspring of language: written in English, translated into Swedish and back into English again, like an IKEA sofa bed. It goes from chronicling a year to a day to a minute, which mimics how growing older feels. Excellent company, at least for my left brain.

The best memoirs this year seemed to be mourn-moirs of a kind, raw first drafts that are also final words. Geraldine Brooks on the sudden death of her husband, the fellow reporter Tony Horwitz; Arundhati Roy on her abusive but inspiring mother; Sally Mann writing about everything but the unspeakable demise of her son and photo subject, Emmett, to whom the book is dedicated; and Susan Cheever combining literary analysis and a family-therapy session on her famous father, John.

Then there was the lord of multimedia synergy, Barry Diller, going old-fashioned between covers on the end of Hollywood; the food writer Olia Hercules on her native Ukraine; Edmund White on his prodigious sex life — a lewd but lucid last gift to us, published a few months before he died. And Joan Didion honked down from the great Corvette Stingray in the sky with “Notes to John,” underscoring the importance of burning the diaries if you don’t want them read, or published.

But some diaries are evidentiary, crucial. I won’t soon forget the devastating testimony of either the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, whose posthumous account of her tragic life, written with Amy Wallace, is now an indelible part of the public record and a best seller; or E. Jean Carroll, who cast her wry and rolling eye, refined after decades in magazines, on the actual trials and related tribulations in her cases against Donald J. Trump.

From E. Jean to Miss Jean (Brodie): I didn’t think there was anything new to say about the latter’s creator, Muriel Spark, who died in 2006 — but how wrong I was. In “Electric Spark,” Frances Wilson did the absolute best thing you can do with biography, which is convince the reader that a sort of haunting and exorcism has taken place in the course of its creation. Next time I go on vacation, it will be with a tall stack of Sparks.

As the American left showed a pulse in the most recent elections, Carla Kaplan’s “Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford” reintroduced us to a Mitford for this moment: muckraking, progressive, YouTubeable. And who could have been more of a troublemaker than Yoko Ono, given a reputational refurbishing by David Sheff?

This may not be possible for Woody Allen, but his first novel, at age 89, was not half bad. Though relatively teensy.

Jennifer Szalai

Remembering the beginning of 2025 can be like trying to recall a distant era. The news cycle has been so eventful that last month feels like it took place a decade ago. Then again, the surprise return of some old concerns (tariffs, measles) can make it seem as if the clock has been turned back 100 years.

But great books keep getting published. I still think about one of the books I reviewed in January: “Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life,” by the philosopher Agnes Callard. Callard’s approach to self-improvement is, in her words, “hard-line intellectualist” — not exactly an easy sell, but she is so obviously thrilled by her mission that it’s hard not to be charmed by her singular combination of exacting intelligence and indefatigable enthusiasm. I was especially moved by her emphasis on thinking as a communal pursuit: “In the presence of others, something becomes possible that isn’t possible when you are alone.”

Brian Goldstone’s “There Is No Place for Us” is another book I continue to think about, but for very different reasons. The families in Goldstone’s book are part of the working homeless in Atlanta, a city where rents have shot up so extravagantly that someone with a full-time job can’t necessarily afford a place to live. He follows five families, chronicling their ups and downs as the parents try their best to find a home for themselves and their children. If they end up crashing with friends or living in extended-stay hotels, they aren’t even included in homelessness statistics: “They literally did not count.” He writes about a ruthless housing system that profits from people’s desperation and penalizes them for being poor. I was moved by this book. I also felt enraged.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first picked up Sue Prideaux’s biography of the French painter Paul Gauguin, “Wild Thing.” After all, Gauguin has developed a reputation as something of a monster: a colonialist who spread syphilis to teenage girls in Polynesia. Prideaux finds considerable evidence to the contrary. This rigorous and stylish biography isn’t a whitewash; it’s a lush and surprising portrait of a stockbroker turned artist who led an incomparable life.

I’ve been telling everyone to read “A Flower Traveled in My Blood,” by Haley Cohen Gilliland, which traces the riveting story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo — Argentine women who have spent the last five decades searching for grandchildren born in captivity during the country’s military dictatorship. These grandchildren are now middle-aged; some were given to military families, and had no idea that their actual parents had been murdered by a dictatorship they had been taught to revere.

This is Gilliland’s first book, and in addition to being impressed by her crisp writing and her prodigious reporting, I was also taken by the book’s pacing and structure — no small feat when trying to recount a tangled history, full of political upheaval, while also weaving in some of the more fraught and intimate details of people’s lives.

I kept thinking about Gilliland’s book when I reviewed Philippe Sands’s “38 Londres Street,” which is about another Cold War-era dictatorship in the Southern Cone: Chile. Sands, a human rights lawyer, begins with the attempt to indict Pinochet with crimes against humanity. But soon Sands brings in the story of Walther Rauff, a former Nazi SS commander who fled a liberated Europe and ended up working in a crab-canning factory in Patagonia. In Germany, Rauff oversaw the development of mobile gas vans, where one of his mother’s cousins was murdered. She was 12.

Rauff and Pinochet knew each other. Sands braids together their stories in order to explore the larger theme of impunity. It’s because of Sands’s book that I finally read Roberto Bolaño’s haunting novella “By Night in Chile,” in which the narrator, a dying priest who worked with the Pinochet regime, remembers his encounters with Mr. Raef — a sinister manager of a “clam-tinning plant.”

This was a big year for Hungarian writers: Laszlo Krasznahorkai received the Nobel for his enigmatic body of work, and David Szalay won the Booker Prize for his marvelous novel “Flesh.” I was also mesmerized by “Eye of the Monkey,” a new novel by the Hungarian poet Krisztina Toth about love and death in an unnamed autocracy. She describes how the more baffling and absurd everything gets, the more people cling to the scraps they can control: “His habits, routes, movements were a handhold; without them, he might lose his sense of orientation completely.”

Dwight Garner

In Dan Nadel’s excellent biography of the cartoonist R. Crumb we were reminded that the first issue of Crumb’s Zap Comix arrived with this cover line: “Approved by the ghost writers in the sky.” Here are some sentences from the past year that, in this critic’s estimation, are similarly approved.

Tonight I am giving a small acid dinner party.

— Joe Brainard, “Love, Joe”

Do you know how good Bunny Wailer sounds when you are on mushrooms?

— Patricia Lockwood, “Will There Ever Be Another You”

Spend your whole day around ice cream, you can begin to grow philosophical.

— Thomas Pynchon, “Shadow Ticket”

Wondering, as she always did, why olive oil was alone in having extra virginity.

— Edward St. Aubyn, “Parallel Lines”

There are few feelings of relief comparable to the first gulp of night air after leaving a dinner party prematurely.

— Keith McNally, “I Regret Almost Everything”

There was something about air travel that made me think of Swiss euthanasia clinics.

— Mariel Franklin, “Bonding”

If I had to describe the ambience of my first date, I would say, “my mother was driving.”

— Dave Barry, “Class Clown”

Whenever I hear the word community I think of Shirley Jackson and “The Lottery.”

— Chris Kraus, “The Four Spent the Day Together”

Life is an excruciating phase in the life of everyone.

— Nell Zink, “Sister Europe”

No one was ever listening closely — even the people who especially claimed to be listening were not really listening.

— Susan Choi, “Flashlight”

Someday I’d like to get credit for not saying all the things I could have said.

— Anne Tyler, “Three Days in June”

I was so horny I felt like going out & jumping a sidewalk Santa.

— Thomas Mallon, “The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994”

Well, wouldn’t it be nice to consummate
Our friendship while we still have teeth and hair?

— Wendy Cope, “Collected Poems”

If you think your carrier doesn’t notice when you order a sex toy, you’re wrong.

— Stephen Starring Grant, “Mailman”

My mother’s heartbeat,
the first time I heard a bassline.

— Caleb Femi, “The Wickedest”

Honor your parents, when they are around.

— Mark Twain, in Ron Chernow’s biography “Twain”

It vexed him that his son-in-law replied to every question, “What do I know?”

— Chaim Grade, “Sons and Daughters”

What is better to do in hotel rooms than to write poetry?

— John Updike, “Selected Letters”

I don’t write like a man. I write. Like a man.

— Margaret Atwood, “Book of Lives”

I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: If you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.

— Ian McEwan, from the future, in “What We Can Know”

Watch this.

— Malcolm Cowley, in Gerald Howard’s biography “The Insider,” rolling Jack Kerouac’s original scroll of “On the Road” across his living room rug.

Spare me from old men’s calm assumption that anything they say, no matter how dull, slow or perfunctory, deserves and will have an audience.

— Helen Garner, “How to End a Story”

I have to say that becoming paralyzed is a great way to meet new people.

— Hanif Kureishi, “Shattered”

We thought the pain of what was happening in this country wouldn’t come to our doorstep. But it has.

— Gary Shteyngart, “Vera, or Faith”

You never know when you’re in a golden age. You only realize it was a golden age when it’s gone.

— Graydon Carter, “When the Going Was Good”