As we close out 2025, we wanted to share a few of our favorite books of the year, what we’re reading, and what we’re looking forward to reading in 2026. Across our readers and editors, you’ll find that our reading tastes are eclectic—which feels pretty on-brand for Glossy Planet’s editorial team!
Ashley Huyge
Just finished reading: People Collide by Isle McElroy.
While living overseas in Bulgaria, Eli is on his way to meet his successful and ambitious wife at the school where she teaches when he discovers that he is no longer in his own body. Somehow, he is living inside her body as an unintentional tenant, learning how to move through the world as Elizabeth. Wherever his body is, Elizabeth must be its new owner, prompting Eli to search for his missing wife and body.
What really struck me about this book is how Eli experiences life from his wife’s perspective. How slowly he has to walk with her shortened gait, how much is too much to drink on a night out with friends, how to apply makeup, and just exist in the world as a woman. Reading this book is an exercise in gender, identity, empathy, and belonging.
Jamie Dean Nicholl
Currently reading: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Reading next: Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and House of Psychotic Women by Kier-la Janisse
Best read of the year: Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li. This memoir finds the author dealing with an unimaginable loss. Her analysis of the grieving process and the aftermath is groundbreaking and touching, and it made me look at death very differently.
Jacob Engelsman
Currently reading: I’ve currently got two things going in my personal reading time. First, a collection of short stories called Tevye the Dairyman, selections from which were turned into the play Fiddler on the Roof. The book, which has become somewhat obscure, was written under the pen name Sholem Aleichem, which you might recognize as a Hebrew or Yiddish pun. He was often referred to as the Jewish Mark Twain (whose name is also a pun but it only makes sense if you know about riverboats), although he only lived in the U.S. for the last 10 years of his life.
The other is an anthology called Spacefunk!, a collection of Afrofuturist science fiction and poetry edited by Milton J. Davis. I just started this, but I picked it up at the Atlanta Writers Conference, where I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Davis. I’m going to pick up his Atlanta-themed anthologies the next chance I get.
Rebecca Paredes
Currently reading: Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. If I have any reading resolutions for 2026, it’s to read more translated works, and I’m already loving this one.
Best read of the year: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. It’s an intricately layered epistolary novel with one of the most original takes on vampirism I’ve seen, nested in a broader investigation of colonialism, indigeneity, and the crimes that haunt us. I was fully invested from the first page with this one, and I recommended it to everyone after reading it.
