What we want to read in 2025

The Lounge team’s list of unread books has only grown longer, while we also revisit and re-read old favourites

A GLIMMERING SPELL

One of my favourite reading experiences in 2023 was picking up Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease To Understand the World, on a friend's recommendation, soon after watching Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer. Labatut's 2021 book, a fictionalised look at a handful of legendary scientists in the early 20th century, featured characters from Nolan's film, The MANIAC but it was the tonal similarity between the two works that struck me: science as a glorious vision, a fever dream, and as sickness. Labatut's next book, The MANIAC (2023), is along similar lines, a fictionalised biography of John von Neumann, the Hungarian who did pioneering work in mathematics, physics, computing and other fields. This is Labatut's first book in English (the previous ones were in Spanish). I'm hoping for a repeat of the dark, glimmering spell When We Cease To Understand The World cast on me.
- Uday Bhatia

MY MCEWAN YEAR

I discovered Ian McEwan-yes, rather late in life on a holiday in October. At an Airbnb in Marseille, someone had left behind their copy of Amsterdam. I chuckled at newspaper editor Vernon Halliday's observations on grammar, meetings and story pitches haven't things changed that much in the newsroom since the Booker-winning novel that deals with moral Lessons Ian McEwan hypocrisy was published in 1998, I thought to myself. I next read his Black Dogs, purely judging it by the cover.

In December, I amazoned Lessons and Atonement, with the good intention of finishing at least one of them before the end of the year. But the whirlwind that was the last month of the year, I have managed only 80 pages of Lessons, which opens in 1986 right after the Chernobyl disaster-400 pages and a book await me in the new year. It's probably going to be my McEwan year.
-Nipa Charagi

CULINARY PHANTASM