🗝️ 2025 Best Books Part Two: Nonfiction and Hybrids
On memoirs, essays, science writing, travel writing, speculative nonfiction, graphic memoirs, and more.
Two weeks ago, I made an annotated list of my favorite 9 novels I read this year.
Today, I’m publishing a list of my 12 favorite nonfiction reads and a few hybrids.
2025 Best Books Part Two: Nonfiction and Hybrids
The Lunatics’ Ball by Jacqueline Doyle
Let’s begin with a book that’s… not yet published. If you’re lucky enough to have talented author friends who trust you with their work in progress, you may get to read amazing books long before they’re available to the public. This was the case for me when I was given Doyle’s masterful book The Lunatics’ Ball. It’s a riveting memoir on her bipolar disorder—the discovery, the struggle, the acceptance—and a lyrical, sometimes speculative exploration of how women throughout history have dealt with their mental illness and how men and the medical establishment have mistreated them horribly. The book is also much more than that. I have every reason to believe that The Lunatics’ Ball will be published in 2026 or 2027, and when it does, you’ll hear about it from me again!Wedding of the Foxes by Katherine Larson (Milkweed Editions, 2025)
“How are we supposed to live alongside the backdrop of all that’s awash in flame?” asks poet and ecologist Katherine Larson in Wedding of the Foxes. She imagines non-binary alternatives to despair in nineteen gorgeous lyrical essays that are powerfully intimate and tenderly universal. We can observe leafy sea dragons, invite ghosts, converse with Japanese authors, apologize to foxes, open doors to monster dreams, crush blossoms into perfume, play collaborative surrealist games, and bleed into one another. Read this book in dappled light to drift, dissolve, and reconnect with the natural world.
* This mini review of mine was part of the 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 List published at Lit Hub a few days ago.Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch (Riverhead Books, 2025)
In this excellent lyrical memoir, the author dips into the speculative to reframe her memories. “I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from literature: how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions.” Just as in her stunning debut, The Chronology of Water, Yuknavitch uses water as a leitmotif here, dipping us into pools of grief and carrying us along currents of rehabilitation and love.Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer (Riverhead Books, 2025)
I have yet to read a book by Pico Iyer I don’t like. I love the world more when seen through his eyes and annotated by his mind. He’s always a considerate traveler, not only paying attention to fellow humans but paying them homage. In his latest book on a Benedictine hermitage perched high above the sea in Big Sur, California, where he has made more than a hundred retreats, he shows us his most vulnerable side. What has silence taught him about living with loss?“The only point of being here, I realize: surrender.” Pico Iyer in Aflame.
Forget the Camel: The madcap world of animal festivals and what they say about being human by Elizabeth MeLampy (Apollo Publishers, 2025)
“Have humans no shame?” asks lawyer and animal advocate Elizabeth MeLampy in Forget the Camel. Together with her wife and in the footsteps of her anthropologist grandmother, MeLampy attends a gory rattlesnake roundup, a ludicrous camel race, a supposedly harmless jumping frog jubilee, and other bizarre events. In lucid and haunted prose, she sharply questions our animal narratives, making us feel what we’re too embarrassed to admit. Read when you want to meet your fellow creatures and your own animal self.* This mini review of mine was also part of the 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 List published at Lit Hub a few days ago.
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (Pantheon, 2025)
I read this gorgeous memoir while traveling through Peru and sometimes felt that the Inca ruins were getting in the way of my reading. “I need to get back to my leveret!” I would tell my husband. “What’s a leveret?” he first asked. Yet soon that turned into: “How is our leveret doing today?” I was so invested in Dalton’s story of saving a vulnerable baby hare during the pandemic that I got him invested, too. I’m not sure why this book touched me so. Let’s call it the magic of excellent writing and it being a unique tale of exceptional care.Fit into Me: A Novel: A Memoir by Molly Gaudry (Rose Metal Press, 2025)
Why write (fiction)? ponders Molly Gaudry in Fit into Me: a Novel: a Memoir. As a Korean adoptee in the U.S., Gaudry lacks a clear origin story and continuously revises her life’s narrative in poignant fiction and nonfiction fragments. She is unapologetically vulnerable as she grapples with the post-concussion “garbage of her mind” and explores the gaps between desire and attachment. Her chiseled prose drips with quotations and footnotes, yet remains open, breathable. Read if you miss human touch and like to receive it in words.The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger (Harper Perennial, 2025)
Can plants feel? Think? See? Hear? Communicate? Socialize? You might be tempted to say “no” to (most of) these questions, but after reading Schlanger’s The Light Eaters you will no longer be so sure. The author writes from a deep personal interest in plant life and infuses her chapters with the wisdom of hundreds of experts in the field. She visits labs and joins expeditions to make her own discoveries. Great writing, paired with mind-blowing revelations, will forever change how you see plants.“A single plant is a marvel. A community of plants is life itself. It is the evolutionary past and future entangled into a riotous present in which we are ourselves also entangled. This stretches the mind. Plants give us the chance to see the system in which we live.” Zoë Schlanger in The Light Eaters.
Daphne by Kristen Case (Tupelo Press, 2025)
I was intrigued by the title of this hybrid book of poetry and lyrical essays. Daphne takes its name from the haunting myth of a woman who transforms herself into a tree to keep a god from raping her—a theme I explore in my own writing. I also liked the pitch: a meditation on the centrality of predation. Case writes from personal experience with violence, her own obsession with how we can get to know one another not only through beauty but through brutality. She shines a light on long-existing power structures in our literary tradition and beyond. Ovid, Heidegger, Shakespeare, Keats, and Beethoven pass by, to name a few. What must we give up to find love? Case asks. Daphne is a beautiful investigation into the complex world of human desire and how we might protect ourselves from others without closing ourselves down.Feeding Ghosts: a graphic memoir by Tessa Hulls (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)
I rarely read graphic novels or memoirs because they’re hard to appreciate on my phone screen and they’re too heavy for a nomad like me to carry around. But there I was, zooming in on Hulls’s panels one by one, letting myself be transported by her powerful artwork and poetic prose. I love memoirs in which the author does not spare herself, especially when discussing difficult family relationships. I wanted to follow Hulls and her mother to China, witness them strengthen their connections and dive deep into the troubled past. It’s a book rich with political history and (as the title suggests) gothic themes.Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference by Rutger Bregman (Little Brown and Company, 2025) translated by Erica Moore
Bregman is from the Netherlands (like me) and writes in my mother tongue, Dutch. But I read this book in its English translation. Though a tad preachy, it offers inspiring examples of what people can accomplish through collective effort. And how I, too, can do more for the world if I wish. I made a ton of notes and will likely write some newsletters in the years to come about taking concrete steps to start making a difference.Things Become Other Things: a Walking Memoir by Craig Mod (Random House, 2025)
I’ve been reading Craig Mod’s newsletters for years. I highly recommend them if you’re interested in Japan or in walking, and particularly if you’re interested in making multi-day hikes in rural, less-crowded areas of Japan. Things Become Other Things is his first book with a major publisher and is predictably about walking and Japan, but it’s also about the harsh milieu Mod grew up in back in the U.S. and the early, violent loss of his childhood friend. The stunning black-and-white photographs of the villages and landscapes he passes through are an extraordinary bonus.
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I’m Claire Polders, a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Read about my books and more on my website www.clairepolders.com.
What were your favorite nonfiction books or hybrids this year?
Author News
The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora in Christchurch New Zealand accepted my application for an artist residency—which included some of the essays I wrote for this newsletter—and I’m already looking forward to writing in their beautiful environment in February. Please subscribe to read about how that goes.
EPOCH Magazine, Cornell University’s literary journal, bought one of my longer essays and will publish it in their next issue. I’m psyched!
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Related Essays
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Time to Say Goodbye
Daniel and I arrived in Buenos Aires and will be staying in the hip Palermo neighborhood for two weeks. But I’m not yet ready to take you there. In my writing, I’m still in Brazil.
All my best,
Claire
P.S. What were your favorite nonfiction books or hybrids this year?
Currently reading and loving Motherhood by Julia Ioffe. Brilliant weaving of historical progression from the Bolshevik Revolution with her family history, primarily through the women. I'm learning a lot, for example, I had no idea that the Bolsheviks promoted gender equality in jobs. Julia's great-grandmother, grandmother and mother were all doctors!! and, as she says, it wasn't unusual for women to have professional roles - while in the U.S. women were mostly being housewives (at that time).
Thanks Claire for a diverse list. I gave my aunt Raising Hare for Christmas last year. Being an animal lover she loved it. I have read some really good non-fiction books this year including the Deborah Levy memoir trilogy, Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me and Philippe Sands 38 Londres Street.