The new drinking game at PL’s virtual HQ is that every time we spot another prominent “Best Books of 2025” list, at least one of us posts on Slack, “weird list”. With no dominant titles — last year Percival Everett’s JAMES was always the clear book of the year, and Hanif Abdurraqib’s THERE’S ALWAYS NEXT YEAR was the leading work of nonfiction — each individual list this year seems quirkier than ever. But when we apply our tried-and-true methodology of combining selective lists from all over — critics, retailers, booksellers, librarians, book clubs and more — suddenly a perfectly reasonable […]
