Best nonfiction I read in 2025

Where beauty, eros, tech, and middle-aged women meet

My themes are beginning to emerge. I read stacks of great nonfiction this year and took so many notes. Here are my 10 favorites—and a long list of honorable mentions.

1. On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry

“Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver. As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life. Each ‘welcomes’ the other: each—to return to the word’s original meaning—‘comes in accordance with [the] other’s will.’”

Obsessed with this beautiful (!) little book: A professor of aesthetics makes the case for the alignment between beauty and justice, beauty and truth, beauty and a radically de-centering way of living and encountering the world. I love Scarry’s direct way of writing: She jumps into the flow and takes you along for the ride: no preamble, no subtext, no boring introductions. It is a delight, from start to finish, and one that has reordered my way of thinking about aesthetics, desire, art, and action.

2. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun

“The passion to break away explains also why many feel that the West has to be denounced. But we are not told what should or could replace it as a whole. Anyhow, the notion of western culture as a solid block having but one meaning is contrary to fact. The West has been an endless series of opposites—in religion, politics, art, morals, and manners, most of them persistent beyond their time of first conflict. To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.”

Insanely ambitious and sweeping. I just love the CHUTZPAH to even attempt to write a book like this—and the intellectual power to hold all of this information (and all of these firm opinions!) in your brain (and an 80-year-old brain, at that). Barzun’s prose is charming and eloquent, and he goes wherever he likes, not necessarily in straight chronological order. The people and events he leaves out are as fascinating to me as the ones he leaves in. And while a lot of it is “you-may-think-you-know-Rousseau-but-everything-you-think-is-wrong,” I am glad I rode along with him for 800 pages. A scintillating cultural survey; haven’t read anything like it!

3. The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han

“‘Something universal’ inhabits eros. When I contemplate a beautiful body, I am already on the way to beauty-in-itself. Eros rouses and spurs the soul, ‘engendering and bringing to birth in the beautiful.’ It emanates spiritual buoyancy. The eros-driven soul produces beautiful things and, above all, beautiful actions, which have a universal value. That is Plato’s doctrine of eros. It is not simply, as commonly assumed, hostile to the senses or to pleasure. But if love is profaned into sexuality, as is happening today, the universal quality of eros vanishes.”

The mental image of Byung-Chul Han reading Fifty Shades of Grey is exquisite.

4. Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, Nicholas Carr

There are a hundred books on this subject now, and while none of Nicholas Carr’s observations about the destructive nature of social media are new, I find his line of argument salient, profound, and memorable. Superbloom is the best I’ve encountered in this urgent genre. I transcribed veritable pages of quotes from this book, and I’m still processing its implications. If you needed yet another reason to log off, here’s the most compelling case I’ve encountered by a thoughtful researcher and cultural philosopher.

5. Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing, Deborah Levy

I went hard on Deborah Levy in 2025, as you can see, and her memoir trilogy is delightful. In this, the first installment: A case of writer’s block in Majorca is interrupted by memories from a difficult childhood in South Africa. I could read Deborah Levy all day. She’s brilliant, spare, sharp; just the kind of thing I like.

6. The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy

Part 2: Even if Levy wanders all over the place, even if I am not entirely sure what she wants me to know, even if I can’t think about reading anything else because I just want to read this, I’ll always want more.

7. Real Estate, Deborah Levy

“All writing is about seeing new things and investigating them. Sometimes it’s about seeing new things in old things.”

Part 3: Deborah Levy, after a divorce, thinks about a buying a house, and I want to listen to her thinking forever.

8. How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, Helen Garner

“At dinner the surgeon asked me why I write with a pen rather than using a dictaphone or a word processor. ‘Why would I?’ ‘Because it’s faster and more efficient.’ ‘But it’s my life’s work. I’m not in a hurry.’ I was surprised to hear myself make that answer.”

A writer’s diary, written to be read, and with beautiful insight and sharp wit and emotion. Helen Garner seems to possess that rare quality in an artist: the ability to see oneself very clearly. It is long and elegantly accomplished: a personal history of the writing life.

9. Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O’Donohue

A very Irish and very lovely account of the divine call of beauty in our lives. Lots to chew on here. (Thanks, Mom, for the book!)

10. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, Marilynne Robinson

A full-throated defense of the humanities and a spiritual worldview against the “parascientific” philosophy that so pervades academia. This collection (a version of a series of lectures Robinson delivered) is only from 2010, and yet no one writes like this anymore. The language almost feels antique. I fear that her deeply thoughtful and intellectual stance is fast disappearing in elite intellectual circles.

Honorable mentions

1. Touch Me: The Mystery on the Surface, Gregor Eichinger

2. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, Peter Attia

3. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Carl E. Schorske

4. The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022, Peter Schjeldahl

5. The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies, Deborah Levy

6. Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, Will Guidara

7. The Last Supper, Rachel Cusk

8. The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World, David Zahl

9. Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness, Emanuele Coccia

10. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung

11. Art Work: On the Creative Life, Sally Mann

12. The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, Christine Rosen

13. Seduction and Betrayal, Elizabeth Hardwick

14. Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art, Susan Aberth

15. Ways of Seeing, John Berger

16. Raising Emotionally Strong Boys: Tools Your Son Can Build on for Life, David Thomas

17. The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Robin Wall Kimmerer

18. Undaunted Courage: The Pioneering First Mission to Explore America’s Wild Frontier, Stephen E. Ambrose

19. Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir, Craig Mod

20. Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane

21. Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, Charles Eisenstein

22. Raising a Kid Who Can, Catherine McCarthy

23. Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, Jane Alison

24. Writing, Marguerite Duras

25. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker

Up next: Best fiction I read in 2025.

A few past lists

Best nonfiction I read in 2024

Best nonfiction I read in 2023