Jasmine P. Antwoine's 3 favorite reads in 2025

Reading The Mountain in the Sea felt like sitting beside a wiser writer and watching him peel apart the idea of consciousness with his bare hands. I kept pausing not because I was confused, but because Nayler’s restraint made me rethink my own approach to storytelling—how much I explain, how much I trust a reader to reach back.
The way he writes about communication made me realize how clumsy I can be on the page when I’m trying too hard to make a point. Nayler lets two minds brush against each other and trusts the friction to illuminate everything. That quiet bravery, that willingness to leave space, is something I’m still trying to learn.
The book left me with this lingering pressure in my chest, the kind that comes from encountering a writer who’s several steps ahead of you, yet generous enough to make you feel like you can follow. It unsettled me, inspired me, and nudged me to write with more patience and curiosity.

Ursula K. Le Guin takes systems, ideologies, whole societies, and handles them with such clarity that I’m reminded how fiction can carry enormous ideas if you anchor them to a single beating heart.
Shevek’s journey hit me hard. His stubborn hope, his loneliness, the way he tries to stay intact while navigating worlds that keep pulling at him—it mirrors my own battles. Writing can feel like that, too: a long negotiation between what you want to say and what the world expects from you.
What I admire most is how Le Guin refuses to flatten anything. She lets contradictions coexist, and in doing so gives the story a kind of moral oxygen I strive for in my own work. This book leaves me wanting to be braver with my characters, with my stories and, ultimately, with myself.

Miéville builds a world where language is so embedded in identity that breaking it becomes an apocalyptic act, and reading that as a writer is absolutely humbling. It made me question every lazy metaphor, every line where I leaned on habit instead of intention.
There’s a wildness to his imagination that feels almost physical on the page. The way he pushes language until it mutates reminded me that prose can be strange and sharp and emotional all at once, and that I often play it safer than I need to.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the conceptual brilliance, but the raw feeling of people clinging to meaning while it falls apart around them. That sense of vulnerability made me look at my own work differently. I walked away wanting to take more risks, to let language cut deeper, to stop writing like someone afraid of breaking something.