my five favorite reads of 2025
so far, anyway. also, how is it possible that we are in the second half of the year already?
Hi, friends—
Welcome to your Saturday, and thanks for including me in your plans. Instead of my occasional Ten Things, I thought I’d share what I have been reading over the last six months. Initially I had thought I would give you my 10 favorite books, but I’ve landed on only 5 since my cold is asking me to lie back down as quickly as possible! You can see my complete list over on my bookshop page.
It seems that writing book reviews here on Substack has not become a regular occurrence for me like I had once thought it might. I wonder what that says about me, as both a writer and a reader. I fall so deeply inside of my reading experiences, maybe it is hard for me to talk about the book in any coherent, concrete ways.1 Also, what I love so much about a book is usually the craft of it—literally, the sentences (hello, John Steinbeck)—and I realize that not everyone reads for those reasons. I know, for example, that I don’t necessarily need a plot. I will read pages and pages of descriptions and observations even if there’s no real action, but I know lots of readers very much want a plot, very much don’t want the absence of plot. At any rate, here are my 10 mini reviews of what I have loved this year, and why.
Neighbors and Other Stories, by Diane Oliver. A student first brought Oliver’s work to my attention last year. Oliver was a writer in Iowa’s MFA program in the mid- 60s and died in a tragic motorcycle accident at the age of 22. She had only published four stories while she lived. Then, in 2024, Grove Press published her existing stories in this collection, along with an introduction by Tayari Jones. The stories follow the lives of mostly Black persons living in the South in the 1960s, all of whom are reckoning with the Civil Rights movement in one way or another. (The single story about a white family deals with one son who wants to attend a sit-in and experiences push-back from his family but not from his elderly, widowed neighbor.) There are a couple of things I loved about these stories—the first is that they are so hyper-focalized. They hold a specific character in a specific moment in time. They don’t suffer from overly convoluted timelines or over-weighted exposition. And while the theme of the Civil Rights movement and all it stood for—equity, integration, power, justice—are throughly present in the stories, the stories are not about ideals, or generalized history. They are characters sketches in the best sense of the word, allowing we as readers to get a little peek into their existing predicament. The stories are imperfect, as befits such a young writer with so little publishing experience, but, in my opinion, that makes them all the more enjoyable and engaging.
Concerning the Future of Souls, by Joy Williams. I was not familiar with Williams’s work before I stumbled across a recommendation to read her—now I can’t even remember where I came across that, but I’m so glad I did. These 99 entries are an exquisite cross between prose and verse, a dizzying feat of imagination, intellectual rigor, and technical competence. They all deal, at least tangentially, with the angel Azrael, as he ferries souls from the recently deceased, reckons with his role in death and dying, and navigates a surprisingly intimate friendship with the Devil. It really defies description.
At the Bottom of the River, by Jamaica Kincaid. I first read Kincaid in my early 20s, when I was living in Puerto Rico and traveling widely throughout the Caribbean. Because I was trading books with the people I was meeting, I wound up with an accidental course in Literature of the Carribean—including Edwidge Danticat, Jean Rhys, and Julia Alvarez2. But Kincaid stands out as the writer I read the most those years. Within a span of 18 months, I read at least four of her books—See Now Then, Annie John, A Small Place, and Lucy. I feel about At the Bottom of the River the same way I feel about Concerning the Future of Souls: beautifully-rendered, expertly crafted pieces of short prose that read like poetry, sound like a song, and feel like a prayer.
With My Back to the World, by Victoria Chang. Chang’s prose poetry collection bowled me over for a lot of the same reasons Williams’s work did—there’s almost an impossible level of craft that is used to craft such gorgeous—yet straightforward—reflections on what it means to be human. Chang writes in response to the artwork of Agnes Martin, a painter whose work I didn’t know, but is best known for her large, abstract canvases, composed primarily of geometric shapes in monochromatic colors. I’m now on a mission to try to see Martin’s work in person!3
East of Eden, by John Steinbeck. I reread Grapes of Wrath several years ago, and it has taken me almost that long to stop opening every conversation I have with: When did you last reread Grapes of Wrath? The prose is so flipping good, I sometimes just toss the book across my bed when I’m reading it and think to myself, that’s it, I give up, a more perfect sentence will never be written, ever again. So this year, I am rereading East of Eden at A.’s suggestion and encouragement—he read it earlier this year, and, when I finish, we’ll watch the movie, since he can’t believe that I’ve never seen it. Here’s just a hint of Steinbeck’s extraordinary command of language, from just a few pages in: “Under the live oaks, shaded and dusky, the maidenhair flourished and gave a good smell, and under the mossy banks of the water courses whole clumps of five-fingered ferns and gold-backs hung down. Then there were harebells, tiny lanterns, cream white and almost sinful looking, and these were so rare and magical that a child, finding one, felt singled out and special all day long.
Thank you for reading, friends! As a final offering, please enjoy last night’s sunset, back on my favorite beach.
love, Francesca
This is likely a cop out—maybe it’s more true to say that I am uninterested in doing the work of putting my feelings about books into words, possibly while I’m spending so much other times putting my feelings about other things into words.
In addition, I was reading stateside, feminist, anti-colonials authors like Sandra Cisneros, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. I was young, white, clueless, economically disadvantaged but privileged in almost every other sense of the word, and these authors so generously invited me into not only their worlds as women but their worlds as artists, as imaginative believers in communities that could heal what was broken, through art, authenticity, and collaboration.
Martin's work can be found in major public collections in the United States, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, among others. Her work is on "long-term view" and part of the permanent holdings of Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York. International holdings of Martin's work include the Tate, London and Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm, SwedenInternational holdings of Martin's work include the Tate, London and Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden.
Dear Francesca, you never fail to thrill.