The reading list for 2025 is officially official! After a lively nominating season and much debate (which you can hear in this episode), we have chosen nine books to discuss next year. We’re heavy on classics this year, by design—and we’re going to take our time as we read them.

If you’d like to hear how these books came to be chosen (and the books that didn’t quite make the cut), click that “play'“ button to check our “Great Winnowing” conversation. Here’s to a great year of reading together!

A few notes:

* You can click here buy these books through Goldberry Books.

* The complete schedule, with dates and number of weeks per book, will be relased later this year. We do not yet know the order in which we will read them (including which will be read first).

* The first subscriber-exclusive book for 2025 will be The Betrothed, an Italian novel by Alessandro Manzoni. We will announce the second title soon.

* The titles in our monthly series on mystery fiction will be announced in early October

Happy listening!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit closereads.substack.com/subscribe