Books Evergreen Loves: 2025
Or at least the ones I recommend
Since this blog’s now in its second year I have the extreme thrill of publishing a second installment of Books Evergreen Loves. I won’t bother giving these books a numerical rating, though I sometimes do that in the privacy of my home. I also won’t bother putting them in any order because they’re all very different. They didn’t all come out in 2025, but I recommend you read them all in 2026. Here it comes:
NONFICTION
Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal - Mohammad El-Kurd
“Palestine is a microcosm of the world: wretched, raging, fraught, and fragmented. The lens we lend the Palestinian reveals how we see each other, how we see everything else.” Nothing can make a genocide comprehensible, but El-Kurd’s book is a relief in how it clarifies the discourse that permeates, surrounds, and enables atrocity. I pushed it way up in my list after seeing Robin D. G. Kelley call it “a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century” and found that it really did have a similar effect on me as that text. Both a material analysis and a work of poetry, it’s easy to place Perfect Victims in line with landmark works by authors like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. This is a phenomenal book that I’ll be returning to for a long time.
The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America - Matthew Bowman
Made a blog post about this one. Historical account of a famous couple from my hometown who had a traumatic experience on a remote New Hampshire highway and claimed until death that they were abducted by aliens. This book affected me in a deeply emotional way and made me think about the nature of memory.
Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England - Jean M. O’Brien
Firsting and Lasting is an incisive look into how local history produces national mythology on a town-by-town level. While it’s specific to New England, O’Brien’s study provides a framework for understanding settler colonial nationalism across the US and might just as easily provide insight on settler colonial settings outside Turtle Island. I finally finished reading this book after citing bits and pieces in Tears of Other People and I’m so glad I took the time to read the full text. Made a blog post on this one too.
The Tears of Other People: A History and Memoir of Displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire - E. M. Ippolito
FICTION
Black Flame - Gretchen Felker-Martin
Treasure of filth. Violently closeted film preservationist restores a Holocaust-era smut film and becomes haunted by ghosts, both from the film and her own New York Jewish family. This one is easily the best of Martin’s three books so far but it won’t get anything close to the acclaim of her 2022 debut Manhunt. More than any other author on this list, Martin isn’t for everybody. Don’t bother if you’re tepid on horror or unwilling to engage with extreme violence. That being said, her violence—utterly depraved, can’t stress that enough—is written with purpose. It serves sincere and clever ends. Black Flame isn’t just a scary fucking book, it’s a deeply rooted queer text with urgent insight into cultural repression and white assimilation. Plus, as a personal preference, I love protagonists mired in grief and self-denial <3
Tell Me I’m Worthless - Alison Rumfitt
Antifascist English haunted house story about transsexual relationship trauma. This book’s been out since 2021 and admittedly there were parts of it that felt a little too didactic for a horror novel, but give it a try if you’re a fan of Shirley Jackson, Carmen Maria Machado, or Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Scariest reading experience of the year award goes to the “latex babe TV show” sequence around the middle of the book, a brainrot fantasy that made me wanna die. Voice actress Nicky Endres set a new bar in my head for what an audiobook is capable of.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Stephen Graham Jones
Indigenous Blackfeet vampire getting even on the US colonial frontier. Brutal and severely immersive. This was my fifth read by Jones and I’m happy to say that it edged out his 2016 werewolf drama Mongrels for the number one rank. Liked it so much that I went to see him speak at Brooklyn Book Festival this year and all I can say is that I’m totally onboard with his phenomenon. Stuck in my imagination and made me wanna write more.
LIGHTNING ROUND!
+ Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love - Zefyr Lisowski: Gorgeous essays that helped me put words to the complicated relationship between horror fandom and trauma
+ Fawn’s Blood - Hal Schrieve: Vampire book (another one!) with excellent worldbuilding — buy this for the queer teen in your life right now
+ Times Square Red, Times Square Blue - Samuel R. Delany: A complicated and very important text I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now. One of my favorite histories of NYC I’ve read—memoir section's fabulous, insights on contact-based socialization are fabulous, insights about safety and security in queer sex spaces are certainly provocative but should be read critically
+ The City & the City - China Miéville: Listen, I love the narrative form of the police procedural but I do NOT love police so if you know any book like this one (or alternatively like Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff Vandermeer) that depict cops or PIs but are critical of the institution and idea of criminality you gotta shoot me an email and lmk
BONUS: SHITTIEST BOOK I READ THIS YEAR
+ The Mothman Prophecy - John Keel: I am shocked at just how influential this book clearly is on the weird canon, particularly on David Lynch's work, because I can't picture somebody choosing to read it willingly without a research motive. A square look into the messy abyss of UFOlogy: sometimes compelling, often incoherent, usually racist.
2025 was a fantastic reading year for me! i won't say how many books i read (because it occurs to me some people get weird about that shit) but just as i was able to write a lot more this year, making 2025 by far my best year as a writer, i was also able to read more. this improved my life a lot. i still don't get to read as much as i'd like to, but we do what we can.
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your Good Reads alternative (sometimes),
evergreen<3