The Best-Selling Backlist Books of 2025

Red Rising and The Song of Achilles are the newcomers and might surprise some people.

The Millions’ The Year in Reading

Terrific browse-reading that is really just internet but feels like proper reading, where you can discover some new books that you say you want to read but will just end up in memory purgatory. What else is this week for?

Here is an excerpt from it of Erin Somers (The Ten Year Affair) on Howard’s End. Her description of reading a classic very much lines up with my re-engagement this year on Zero to Well-Read:

I have been doing this long enough that I should know that whatever my notions are about a classic are likely wrong. But no, I never learn. Every time I’m like, what is this turgid artifact? From what dusty tomb was it unearthed?

Howards End looks so, so dusty. It’s like they tried to make it look as dusty as possible. They should refresh the design. They must. But then when you crack it, it is funny and alive, a class novel inspired by the lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell concerning the fate of a country house.

What Every Non-Fiction Books is Called Now

There isn’t enough funny literary writing, but Daniel Lavery keeps the torch burning over at The Chatner. As someone who reads a bunch of books like this, the shock of recognition here was especially zingy: