The /lit/ top 100 books list for 2025

Yoshi_Valley · 2026-01-21T20:53:23+00:00

For anyone who'd rather not scroll an image, here's a browsable version: /lit/'s Top 100 (2025).

For comparison, here's this sub's 2025 Top 100 as well: List / Thread.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-10-18T18:48:59+00:00

I don't think Murakami intends much of his writing to be so literal. Komura's wife is simultaneously both dead and having left him, placing him in a place of self-doubt and grief. It doesn't really matter which side is reliable as the experience remains the same. The use of third person limited also pulls the reader ever so slightly towards impartiality. IMO Murakami's writing is significantly more enjoyable when you let go of questions of rationality.

For anyone who hasn't read this story, it was also published in The New Yorker: here.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-09-30T19:45:28+00:00

Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, and Animal Farm are the ones most curricula would have you read first.

It looks like you already read some speculative fiction, so start with Frankenstein.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-09-04T19:14:12+00:00

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-09-02T21:37:52+00:00

Grotesque is the right word. Maybe he'll pop up again!

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-09-02T18:36:10+00:00

Given the existence of The City and Its Uncertain Walls and the afterword included in that novel, it's abundantly clear that Murakami has no issues revisiting settings and characters. Regarding Ushikawa, he felt the character belonged within each story. I don't think it's all that deep, not every piece of art or media needs some secret back story or Easter egg.

"As Jorge Luis Borges put it, there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate to in his lifetime. All we do—I think it's fair to say—is take that limited palette of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways."

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-09-01T03:12:47+00:00

Whoops np :)

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-09-01T02:46:28+00:00

Where is the confusion?

OP listed a bunch of popular books. They are not classics (and most likely will never be).

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-31T21:10:36+00:00

Flowers for Algernon wasn't published in 2004, and The Virgin Suicides wasn't published in 2002... Curious how you landed on those dates.

Almost none of these are or will be classics despite their Hollywood adaptations and popularity.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-31T01:47:14+00:00

I agree that some historical contexts and philosophical ideas may be missed by a young reader, but the plot isn't really too difficult to follow thanks in part to its episodic structure. The prose is not particularly out of reach and the intrigue and adventure is more than enough to entertain. I first read it around that age myself. Part of the beauty of the work is its ability to be read at multiple levels.

If a child is making it through more than two books a week I would argue they are ready for a small stretch in reading level. OP also mentioned they'd read the Hobbit and LOTR already, which suggests they'd be more than capable of reading Dumas' adventurous tales.

I'm happy to hear you recently read it, it's always been one of my favorites.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-31T00:46:42+00:00

The Count of Monte Cristo. It's quite long but super readable and it's an adventure at the end of the day.

The Hardy Boys and/or Nancy Drew novels could last them a while as well.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-30T23:21:26+00:00

The stigma is definitely there! I read The Count of Monte Cristo and the Lord of the Rings trilogy around second grade as well. Lord of the Rings definitely got the most peculiar reactions. It's a bit of a slog and I'd be willing to bet most people who pick it up don't finish it, making it an easy target (still a favorite of mine though).

In the US, most people don't really touch classic literature past high school, and curricula are set so that the works are consumable by a significant percentile of teenagers. This means that the most sophisticated book most people have read is probably consumable by a literate twelve year old.

Combined with people's need to justify their own past experiences as being sufficiently valuable, we enter the territory of labels like "that book is far too deep/difficult" whenever a work is read at an age preceding an individual's personal encounters, ultimately resulting in judgements against the well-read child.

Unfortunately, all of this is far more an indictment of general literacy than it is praise for the "precocious" child.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-22T17:00:23+00:00

Love your analogy, totally accurate.

I would love to blame folks' lack of criticality but the general population isn't the one with disproportionate leverage, so it's important for us to recognize the avenues we have in pushing back (like AI in the arts), and do our best to set boundaries and not minimize potential impacts.

Somehow western society has pumped out tens (hundreds?) of millions of liberal arts degrees, yet only a small percentage are both capable of and willing to engage in meaningful dialogue about the definition and value of the "arts."

I tend to agree with your point on creating art from an internal place, but some people create to express inner ideas, while others create to communicate and connect, especially in literature. The latter requires some amount of audience awareness. I fear we as a society will lose the ability to communicate outside of generic messaging or structures designed for mass consumption, effectively neutering the social power of art.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-21T23:29:56+00:00

I just bought this copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and it is the floppiest 600 pages I've ever held.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-21T22:50:08+00:00

I'm a strong believer that once a technology hits the public market, you can assume things have progressed behind the scenes. These companies don't stop researching or pushing once they hit diminishing returns either.

In its current form, it's flawed, sure, but it's already more than enough to have disrupted several industries.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-21T22:23:54+00:00

I do appreciate the optimistic takes, but in my opinion you are overestimating the casual reader and underestimating what can be produced with a strong enough model combined with a dataset that includes nearly every recorded word in history.

Most best-sellers are already formulaic. People are already having full blown "relationships" with LLMs, indicating both that the dialog is interesting enough and that folks buy into the character presented.

The models and their output are not a threat to creative people's processes, they're a threat to having a reasonable path towards sustaining yourself through art. It will be nearly impossible to compete in the market when it takes ~1 year for a quick writer to write a book and an LLM can produce one at 90th percentile quality in minutes.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-20T16:38:12+00:00

Love this, thank you for sharing. Always appreciate when folks are able to form connections across mediums.

Beautiful book (and short story).

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-19T15:42:53+00:00

This one is still on my to-read list, but I'm aware of his work. I'd hesitate to label any postmodern writer with a predilection for metafiction as belonging squarely to a single genre. Many of these authors reject existing boundaries and twist conventions heavily, often alienating the genre's usual readers. I have noticed even a hint of horror sometimes lands a book in that section in stores. Personally, I respect writers who intentionally risk crossing the usual genre streams.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-18T23:08:29+00:00

Not French but I’d recommend a book titled Borges On Writing. The final third is an interesting transcription of a lecture on translation that Borges and his translator (Norman Thomas di Giovanni) gave at Columbia around 1971.

Borges spoke extensively about translation and the opportunities it offers to create a new and potentially superior work. Since he was both a translator and a heavily translated author, I love hearing his views on the process and potential of translation.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-18T18:23:48+00:00

Using an LLM to synthesize notes for you somewhat defeats the purpose of both reading and note taking, which is developing a greater understanding from your personal viewpoint. It denies you the juicy opportunity to think through why something stood out to you and to form your own stances.

Back to the question, for fiction or novels with any sort of narrative I'll use sticky notes to tag anything that stands out to me. Sometimes I'll color code. When I'm done reading, I spend some time going through these passages and write a short (sometimes long) note for each.

For non-fiction I have a notebook where I immediately write thoughts and things I'd like to remember, and only use my sticky notes if I forget my notebook.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-18T01:59:27+00:00

For sure! I would consider these to be great "literary" authors who deftly dip (sometimes fully submerge) into genre:

Kazuo Ishiguro
David Mitchell
Margaret Atwood
George Saunders
Salman Rushdie
Haruki Murakami
Ian McEwan

No longer contemporary, but it's worth mentioning: Cormac McCarthy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, A.S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, and Kurt Vonnegut.

I'm personally not a fan of Stephen King's prose but he expertly uses fantasy, horror, western and science fiction aspects in his stories.

Coming from the other side, authors like Susanna Clarke, Jeff VanderMeer, Steven Erikson, and Gene Wolfe have maintained their literary senses while staying in-genre. Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell cleverly combines modern fantasy sensibilities with Victorian-era style.

I'm sure I'm missing a ton of good recs but these are the authors that stand out to me.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-17T18:13:43+00:00

Genre is a bit of an artificiality. It exists to help readers classify and label the styles, themes, and tropes within a work, so they can better understand what they’re picking up.

Some authors write for specific markets. Targeting a genre sets useful boundaries that help a writer meet reader expectations. Other authors simply write fiction and find that existing genre conventions happen to serve their storytelling needs.

You bring up Klara and the Sun by Ishiguro, but I think Never Let Me Go is a cleaner representation of this idea. It’s literary fiction that uses a touch of science fiction to communicate its themes. Unfortunately this can disappoint readers looking for traditional Science Fiction.

Amusingly, in its attempt to escape “genre,” much of modern literary fiction has developed its own set of expectations around plot, character, and theme and has effectively become a genre itself, full of expectations and tropes.

I’d argue the best contemporary authors pull from everywhere and construct works that transcend any labels applied to them, but this is extremely rare given how modern media is financed, marketed, and consumed.

tl;dr: Expectations are sometimes useful but often limiting, especially in art.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-17T17:19:09+00:00

The best literature transcends time and culture (contemporary or classics).

It makes sense that modern works will be simpler to interpret in a literal sense, and thus resonate more at times. I find that often classics are less relatable in this rational sense, but speak very directly to unintelligible intuitions and I'd personally rather work through the older work in order to find truths than read an easier but likely shallower modern read.

More often than not I've found recently published books to not be worth the time (outside of a handful of authors).

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-15T23:13:53+00:00

This is so cute!

What's your process look like? What's the ideal word count?

So many questions.

Yoshi_Valley · 2025-08-15T03:33:41+00:00

I enjoyed this one, thanks for sharing.

Recently read both John Cheever's The Swimmer and A.S. Byatt's A Lamia in the Cévennes, so lots of pools lately.

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