ATVBT Year-End Book-Recs
Thanks to everyone who participated in our Book Rec Survey, where I tried to gauge which books you were planning to read so I could rank my recommendations according to likeliness of being useful or relevant.
I found the survey results surprising and interesting: specifically, most of the books got ~80-90% responses of "never heard of it", which feels obvious in retrospect, but was not what I expected. There are so many books in the world that it's impossible for any of us to keep up; sometimes I walk into bookstores and have a nameless feeling of futile inadequacy, staring at the rows of shelves and knowing there are already more books than anyone could read in multiple lifetimes. (I believe some people feel this while gazing at the stars). So even with an audience of people who are (presumably) self-selected to share my interests and proclivities, most of our favourite books are just completely unknown to each other, which is (depending on your positivity) either tragic or an incredible opportunity.
I included two dummy recs in the survey to tease out how likely it was that people were actually reading the questions – I think all surveys should do this, despite the fact that there is 0 incentive or motivation to fake your answers on an unpaid book-thoughts survey. The results:
- I have not actually read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, but it was strongly recommended by friend-of-the-blog CM, and I was happy to see that only 1 person claimed not to have heard of it (plausibly accurately).
- On the flipside, only 1 of you claimed familiarity with Short Climbs by Sam Morgenstern, a book I made up. (Alas you didn't claim to have read it, or even be planning to read it).
So, well done ATVBT readers for your honesty and accuracy in survey-responding.
Onwards! Here are the books I most-recommend for ATVBT readers, given my existing tastes and yours. You'll note that these books were published various numbers of years in the past; my general feeling is that I read too many new books because they're new, and I should spend more of my tragically limited reading-slots on books that are someone's all-time favourite already, regardless of when they were published.
Books I Most Recommend You
The Flatshare, by Beth O'Leary
A romance novel with surprisingly good psychological insights, 97% not-heard-of.
Many years ago I was working on a short story about two strangers who can't afford to live in New York, and so alternate space in a studio – he works nights and she works days, so they never meet, but soon they start leaving each other notes on the bedside table, until (of course! of course!) they fall in love. I wrote the beginning of this and showed it to a friend, and he didn't like it, so I quit, as I too-often do. I have thought occasionally about that story, and how nice it would be to finish it, because gosh-darn I love the premise and the book would be super cute. But, alas, I never got back to it.
To my surprise, many years later, Audible recommended me Beth O'Leary's Flatshare, a novel that tackles this exact premise, and does it infinitely better than I ever would have.
I mainly recommend this if you're 1) a nerdy, literary person, who 2) has never read a modern romance novel. I'm not sure you'll enjoy it; presumably there's a reason you've never read a romance novel, and perhaps that reason is that you know they're not for you. But I think this one manages to be a "true" representative of the genre (not a deconstructed upmarket reimagining) while also being an intelligent, well-constructed novel with good psychological depth.
The Just City, by Jo Walton
A weird philosophical thought experiment novel, 87% not-heard-of.
The goddess Athene collects Plato-enthusiasts from throughout time and space and sends them back to Atlantis to try to build Plato's Republic.
If you want to be persuaded about this book it's more efficient for you to read this Ada Palmer review (some spoilers). Some people I've recommended it to didn't love it because they found it too thought-experimenty – I'm maybe ill-qualified to assess this because I tend to like philosofiction, but I thought the plot was pretty good as well.
Overall this is one of the novels I think of most often, and I simultaneously enjoyed it and felt like it changed how I thought: it has a genuinely new-to-me lens on how you might think about the human experience, and I think that's hard to convey and worth a lot.
Motherhood, by Sheila Heti
76% heard-of, but only 1% planning-to-read.
This book is so good as a description of the decision whether to have kids or not. Perhaps it feels more like a series of meditations or aphorisms than a traditional novel, and I can imagine that it will be high variance and some of you would hate it, but surely it's better to read a high-variance book than a low-variance one? There were so many thoughts in this book that I've had and never discussed with anyone, and I do think one of the greatest things about novels is the James Baldwin quote:
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.
(The other great thing, of course, is when you read things that have never happened to you, things that happened to people in-some-way opposite to you, and come a little closer to understanding them).
Sally Rooney reviewed Motherhood in the LRB and wrote that she was reminded of the great Camus quote that
‘To decide whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy.’ Camus meant that the only serious philosophical problem was that of suicide; it seems to me that the most serious philosophical problem could equally be that of parenthood: to decide whether or not life is worth bringing into existence.
I am not making this book sound fun, exactly, but it was fun and profound, both.
The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis
Many of you had heard of this, but were not planning to read it, so let me pitch you: this book gave me the most succinct understanding of pride (in the sinful sense) I have ever gotten, and came as close as any novel has (though not quite managing) to make me fundamentally change my life. It felt more like an artwork or a theater performance, it stabbed me right between ribs, because 1) the people in it are their own worst enemies and making their own lives worse entirely unnecessarily, and 2) I could see so clearly how I was doing the same thing.
Bonus Books I forgot to survey about but now want to recommend you anyway:
- Bambi, by Felix Salten. Yes the one from the film but also completely different, I think this is one of the most poignant books I've ever read and incredibly insightful as organizational psychological theory.
- The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk. A book about courage and cowardice and some surprising insights/challenges about moral values. I am very unsure who will like this, but I loved it.
- The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil. Look: I think this is one of the best books ever written, but also I found it very slow going, every page is full of insights but also the writing is just not compelling, if you put it down for a moment you will leave it for days and not have any urge to come back to it, until you do and then suddenly think my gosh this is the best thing ever written again.
Other Books That Were Originally on the List:
First and Last Men, by Olaf Stapledon – many of you were planning to read already. The only novel I know where the main characters are civilizations rather than individuals, very mind-expanding.
Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford – many of you planning to read already. Incredibly immersive explorations of 1700s New York. I have one big critique of this book which makes me reluctant to recommend it, despite otherwise thinking it's 110% excellent, but I can't tell you what it is without spoilering, a tricky one.
Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis and Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Great great novels but already wide name-rec, you don't need me to tell you whether to read or not.
Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovitch. Magical detective series. TV show coming out soon and I would mildly bet that this will become a true global phenomenon (it has already sold 8 million copies, but 87% of you haven't heard of it, so).
Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi. A novel about Ghana and Nigeria but also about the American elite. Breathtaking. For a long time this was one of my unambiguously favourite novels and I have some deep personal lore with it, but I realised it's now been long enough since I read it that I don't feel like I2025 can recommend it. Have queued it for re-reading so I can fully recommend it again next year.