Moment Staff’s Favorite Books of the Year (Old and New)

It’s a literary crowd here at Moment. When I sent the call out to participate in a list about the singular best book we read this past year, many supplied two or three. “I ignored all your rules,” Amy E. Schwartz, our Books Editor, emailed me, along with her blurbs.

I’m not a doctrinaire, so here in all of its (indecisive) glory is the list of the editorial staff’s favorite reads in 2025, ranging from world histories to absorbing novels to mathematical wars. Let us know if you agree with any of our picks or if any of them make it onto your bookshelf.

— Sam Franzini, Eugene S. Grant Journalism Fellow

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Choosing one great read is beyond me. Numero uno is Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. I loved this wild salty swim through ancient, medieval and modern times from China to Europe to Africa and, yes, the Middle East, where I learned the ecological backstory of the Dead Sea and the biblical account of Lot. The book’s well-argued premise is that the many methods of obtaining, processing and distributing salt spurred the development of human government, technology (food, preservation, discovery of natural gas, refrigeration and so on) and endless culinary ingenuity. I wished this delightful book, published by Kurlansky in 2002, would have gone on forever, and to fill the hole it left in my reading life, I hungrily consumed his 2006 The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. I was equally transfixed by this chronicle of New York City seen through the lens of this treif bivalve; it transformed how I see the city’s streets, piers, harbor and rivers. 

My second choice is Daniel Deronda, published in 1876 by George Eliot, the pseudonym for the daring and brilliant Victorian-era writer Mary Ann Evans. She dives headfirst into Zionism a full twenty years before Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstadt while exploring her era’s antisemitism and the difficulties of Jewish life in the diaspora. Like the other Eliot novel I devoured this year, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda exposes the failings of class rigidity, primogeniture and women locked into second-class citizenship, reminding me of how far we’ve come and helping keep current societal challenges in perspective. 

While perusing my late parents’ bookshelves, I also stumbled on another gem: Lovesong: Becoming a Jew, Julius Lester’s gripping 1971 memoir of a Black man’s religious, intellectual and political journey. This son of a Methodist minister became a prominent radical writer in the Black power movement in the 1960s. After grappling with the antisemitism he encountered there, he found himself drawn to Judaism, only to discover his maternal grandfather had been a German Jew. A disparate and random selection of books, but that’s how I like it!

— Nadine Epstein, Editor-in-Chief

 

Maybe it was a futile attempt to escape the current moment, but this year I was drawn to novels focusing on time travel. Two of these books stood out. One, The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley, is part romantic comedy, part spy thriller, part ode to bureaucratic folly. The novel takes place in near future London where one civil servant is tasked with being a minder of a newly arrived expat. However, the expat in question is not from a different country but rather a different time, and is part of a government experiment to see how time travel affects the human body. The book touches on some heavy topics—immigration! Colonialism! Climate change!—but shines when it is exploring how intimacy develops between strangers. Despite its slim size, Emily St. Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility asks a larger question—what does it mean to be real? The book moves between 1912 Canada to a moon colony in the 23rd century with other stops along the way. Not to give too much away, but there is an ominous Time Institute, a metaphysical mystery and a global pandemic. Similarly to The Ministry of Time, the book’s beauty lies in its insistence that even in the face of inevitability, individual acts of bravery or kindness can have the power to change the world. As one character in The Ministry of Time says: “Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”

— Sarah Breger, Editor

 

My favorite? I’m struggling to choose between two beautiful, valedictory works that appeared in 2025 from my two favorite living authors, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie. Both writers are towering figures whose lives and art have been entwined with the powerful forces unleashed in their lifetimes—for Atwood, the liberation of women and the great changes in their lives; for Rushdie, the descent into violent censorship and religious fundamentalism. 

Atwood has been quoted as saying she finally yielded to her publisher’s pleas for a memoir (after some 50 books of fiction, poetry, short stories and essays) only because most of the major figures in it are now dead. Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts dispenses with the clever structures and rapier wordplay of her earlier works; it’s relaxed, witty and discursive, dishing 600 pages of salty gossip. Reading it is like sitting in a room with your revered mentor while she reclines on the chesterfield and riffs on everything imaginable. Completist/obsessives like me can enjoy fitting the autobiographical details to the novels, a game she plays with enthusiasm, throwing clues and disclaimers.

Rushdie’s life story, darkness to her light, is of course nowhere near over, and Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories is not a memoir, nor, probably, his final work. But Rushdie’s body of work represents the triumph of life and art over repeated tragedy—first the decades he lost to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa sending him into hiding, then the 2022 knife attack by a crazed assailant that cost him an eye. So although these tales smack of melancholy, the subtext is jubilant: that no one and nothing has stopped up the tale-teller’s voice or blunted his art. These five stories elegantly address the boundary between life and death, the beauty of free language and free debate and the chances of an artist’s affecting the shape of an era. In some stories, reconciliation comes late but is achingly beautiful; in others, revenge is a dish eaten cold—and sweet.

— Amy E. Schwartz, Books/Opinion Editor

 

My pick is The Great Math War (Basic Books, 2025). It’s about a fight over the foundations of mathematics waged in the early 20th century, primarily by Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert and L.E.J. Brouwer. Yes, it’s a book about math—about infinity and set theory and myriad formulas and paradoxes. It’s also about history, about war, about love and the messiness of it all (Russell’s love life in particular). Full disclosure: I don’t normally read math books, but I’ve been married to the author, Jason Socrates Bardi, for 21 years; this surely makes me his toughest critic, so I do hope you’ll believe me when I say the book will illuminate, challenge, confound and, quite often, make you laugh out loud. “Think of all the things you can’t imagine,” one of the book’s thought exercises begins. “The very act of imagining this group of things implies it’s not included. Almost any set you can think of is like this. Most sets simply don’t belong to themselves…Even if you consider collections of purely imaginary objects, like the set of all things that exist only in fantasy—dragons, unicorns, talking gerbils, employee-friendly HR policies—any conceived collection of such made-up things is a defined, real thing in your mind and is therefore not a member of itself.” My short take can’t really even scratch the surface of The Great Math War, but I’ll add that if you do read it, don’t skip the preface—where all is revealed concerning the author’s middle name.

— Jennifer Bardi, Deputy Editor

My wife Miriam Daniel and I highly recommend The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. This book offers a sweeping view of the factors impacting the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe. A poem by the Roman poet Lucretius is lost for 1,000 years and found by a curious book hunter in the 14th century. Lucretius comes up with the striking concept that the world is made of atoms and that fear of death is foolish. The discovery of this poem helps to bring in the Renaissance. Beautifully written, informative and provocative.

— Laurence Wolff, Senior Editor

 

The most intriguing aspect of Percival Everett’s reimagining of Huckleberry Finn is slaves like James using minstrel-show Black dialect when white people are present, but normal English among themselves. Is this historically accurate? Apparently not, but James (which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction) is using it as a shorthand for an important perception about African-American life under slavery: Dual language is a survival mechanism, a part of what W.E.B. DuBois called “double consciousness,” which he famously defined as a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

— Dan Freedman, Senior Editor 

 

One book I devoured over this summer was Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds, a debut novel about female friendship, competition and art. When Ruth notices Maria—one of the only other Black children in their Rhode Island town—shopping for clothes days before elementary school, she latches onto her with a grip that lasts until their late twenties. As they move to New York, date, and pursue their ambitions, and as each eyes the other’s beauty, art and relationships, Ruth’s resentment—and desire—grows into something unmanageable yet vague. Can Ruth even exist without Maria? Lonely Crowds felt classic in a really beautiful way. If you’re looking for something to fall into and read in a single sitting, it’s the book for you.

— Sam Franzini, Eugene S. Grant Journalism Fellow

 

One of my favorite books from my year’s reading was Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo. The book goes into the lives of the people living in Annawadi, a slum town outside Mumbai, India. The story focuses on three main families and their intertwining stories: Abdul, a teenaged boy working to support his family, who face discrimination as Muslims; Abdul’s neighbor, Fatima, who clashes with the boy’s family; and Asha, a woman slumlord and leader in the community, doing what it takes to get ahead and provide for her family. Boo spent three years in Annawadi researching, and her writing shows that she truly got to know this community. The book is beautifully written—it’s nonfiction but reads like a novel. The story shows the complexities and injustices of slum life in India and also lets the reader get to know the characters and feel for them.

 

— Ella Gorodetzky, Richard Solloway Fellow