Best books to read in December 2025, from a Roosevelt biography to poetry

I apologize to T.S. Eliot, but December may be the cruelest month—at least for publications. With weekends focused on awards season and holiday sales, some of this month's best titles are out in paperback. Fear not, readers; These paperbacks create great stories and will also leave room in your budget for the best gifts: more books! Happy holiday reading.

FICTION

Casanova 20: Or Hot World: A Novel
Davey Davis
Catapult: 304 pp., $18.00.
(December 2)

What if you were so beautiful that you could seduce anyone, but you lost that charm? Would you become depressed or would you look for a new way in this world? Adrian, who is in his mid-20s and has countless “friends” of all genders, is emerging from a global pandemic having lost his mojo. The only person who loves him platonically, Mark, is older, sick and lives on the other side of the country. Together they try to figure out how to appear in a society that ignores so many of us.

Definitions: Novel
Matt Green
Henry Holt: 176 pp., $18.00.
(December 2)

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” said Joan Didion is known to and in Greene's new dystopian novel, survivors of a neurological virus have lost the ability to identify words, let alone tell stories—they are in a place known as “The Center” but have no memories. The tension arises not from further illness or rebellion, but from the sheer unrecognizability of a world where meaning exists only in fleeting moments and can rarely be shared.

Television: Roman
Lauren Rothery
Here it is: 256 pp., $28.
(December 2)

Rothery, a filmmaker, began writing short stories during the pandemic, and now her stylish debut novel focuses on the city she knows best, Los Angeles (the cover photo is a still from one of her films). Verity, a hot-tempered but hugely successful aging Hollywood star, alternates the narrative with her younger best friend Helen in a story involving an aspiring screenwriter named Phoebe. Pay close attention to what the name inspires.

House of the Day, House of the Night: A Novel
Olga Tokarczuk.
Riverhead: 336 pp., $28.00.
(December 2)

First published in 1998, this early gem from Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk The story takes place in Silesia, a region of Poland close to the Czech Republic and influenced by its bohemian culture. Like the author's more recently acclaimed Constellation or the author's long-form novels, House of the Day includes episodes featuring her obsessions—mushrooms, dreams, death—and a cast of colorful characters living in the same village.

Galapagos Islands: A Novel
Fatima Velez
Astra House: 208 pp., $22.00.
(December 2)

Colombian writer Velez makes his debut with a story that features a ship full of dying artists. The nameless disease (evidently HIV/AIDS) retains the vocabulary and symbolism of the plague narrative. Gay friends on board in 1992, including artist Lorenzo and his partner Juan B., know they will never make it ashore. Instead, in the style of The Decameron, they tell stories of their past lives and impending deaths, with grotesque details adding to the urgency.

NUNFICTION

In the Arena: Theodore Roosevelt in War, Peace and Revolution
David S. Brown
Scribner: 496 pp., $31.
(December 2)

Theodore Roosevelt believed that life should take place “in the arena” where creations and conflicts took place, which, as historian Brown (Hellstorm) shows, was Roosevelt's own environment, whether on foot, in the saddle, or in the Oval Office. Fortunately, the author is not writing hagiography. It fully portrays our 26th President, showing his individualistic spirit as a soldier and statesman, as well as the racism that influenced some of his policies throughout his life.

This year: 365 songs with annotations: Book of Days
John Darnielle
MCD: 560 pp., $36.00.
(December 2)

Founder and sole member Mountain goatssinger-songwriter Darnielle is also a writer (“Devil's House“for example) and now definitely a poet: the lyrics, dealing with the year's sunrises and sunsets, range from the unexpectedly tender to the horrifyingly sad. The beauty of the collection is that each entry, although varying in quality, feels authentic – warped by the pleasure or pain of this extremely talented artist's commitment to life on earth.

The Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
Elizabeth McCracken
Here it is: 208 pp., $27.
(December 2)

McCracken, History Prize Laureate knows a lot about writing fiction, but sees his new edition less as a craft book and more as a guide for both novice backpackers and seasoned travelers. The author reminds us all that “no process leading to the creation of the first draft of a book is wrong.” Or, as McCracken once said about bowling, “I like the fact that it's difficult and impossible to perfect, but people are really dedicated to it.” This volume contains drums only, no spare parts.

Just sing: 152 uncollected dream songs
John Berryman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 192 pp., $28.
(December 9)

Berryman”77 dream songswon 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. To read these unpublished dream songs 60 years later is to find a treasure and admit that you like the rough gems just as much as the polished ones. Henry, the great poet's alter ego, reappears in all his ambiguity and confusion, a thoroughly American, unremarkable but observant “unheroic hero,” in the words of Shane McCrae, who wrote the foreword to this collection.

Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret K. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Struggle for Literary Modernization
Adam Morgan
Atria/One Signal: 288 pp., $29.00.
(December 9)

Anyone who pigeonholes another person should tell the story of Margaret K. Anderson, a privileged Midwesterner who was also queer and radical and without whom we might not be reading Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, and T.S. today. Eliot (among others). Anderson founded the Little Review in Chicago in 1913 and grew it into a publication that moved to New York and Paris—and played a role in the infamous Ulysses obscenity trial.