The best of 2025!

As I did in past years, I thought I’d make my last Monday post of the year (!) a roundup of some highlights from 2025. Hope you find a new discovery or two!

The best of the blog 2025

Most viewed posts published in 2025

1. Publishing scams are rampant. How to be vigilant.
2. A literary takedown for the ages (This week in books)
3. Find and delete these phrases from your novel
4. Chapter template
5. Stamp out vague catchalls in your writing

Most viewed posts overall in 2025

1. List of character strengths and weaknesses
2. How to write a query letter
3. How to write a novel
4. Example of a good query letter
5. My query letter for JACOB WONDERBAR

My personal favorite posts of 2025

1. Stamp out vague catchalls in your writing
2. The answer is always community
3. Are we losing the nascent democratization of books?
4. Think more about whether you like a prospective agent than whether the agent will like you
5. What I learned about creativity from Bob Ross

The best books I read in 2025

I read a ton for my day job, so I don’t always have a chance to stay up with all the books published in a single year, but here are some of my recently published faves:

1. The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk – A wrenching and necessary corrective that traces the immense influence of the United States’ native peoples.
2. The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson – An incredibly vivid history of the American Revolution. I can’t wait to catch up with Ken Burns’ new documentary as well.
3. A Map for the Missing by Belinda Huijuan Tang – Elegantly written dual-timeline novel that moves between China’s Cultural Revolution and booming ’90s.
4. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner – I have some mixed feelings to be honest, but this novel never fails to be interesting.
5. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein – Heinlein as a person had some quite strange views, but it’s worth revisiting the prescience of his fictional artificial intelligence, which he wrote in the 1960s.

The best music of 2025

A few years ago I resolved to listen to an album every weekday to keep up with the great new music out there, and I kept that going:

The best albums of 2025

1. Under Tangled Silence by Djrum
2. Friend by james K
3. Revelation by The Knocks and Dragonette
4. EUSEXUA by FKA Twigs
5. Lateral by Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe

The best songs of 2025

1. A Tune for Us by Djrum
2. Dudu by Yeule
3. uncomfy by xaviersobased and OsamaSon
4. Catch These Fists by Wet Leg
5. Play by james K

The best products of 2025

Here are some random things I enjoyed in the past year:

1. Waymo – I haven’t had a “holy crap I’ve seen the future” technology moment in quite some time. But after taking my first Waymo this year, holy crap is this the future. We need to deal with the resulting displacement, but with drivers increasingly distracted by their phones, if I were king I’d ban human-driven cars immediately.
2. Trader Joe’s Cornbread Crisps – “Cornbread in chip form,” you say? “That couldn’t possibly work,” you say? And yet…
3. Hello Chinese app – If you have a hankering to learn Mandarin (and who doesn’t), this app is extremely, extremely helpful.
4. Apple AirPods Pro 3 – I’ve gotten so used to incremental Apple product improvements I’d forgotten what a genuine leap forward feels like. These new AirPods are just way better on pretty much every conceivable front.
5. How to Write a Novel by Nathan Bransford – I may be biased.

I’ll be back with a This Year In Books roundup on Friday! Thanks so much to everyone who read the blog in 2025.

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Art: Peder Mørk Mønsted – Wood in snow