The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2025

The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2025 “Historians will study how bad this book is.” Pans, glorious pans. No end-of-year roundup would be complete without them. Among the books being driven into the woods by pitchfork-wielding villagers this year: Louis C.K.’s masturbatory debut novel, Olivia Nuzzi’s delusional fortune cookie, Woody Allen’s autofictional kvetch-fest, and Kamala Harris’s 304-page excuse for ineptitude. So here they are, this year’s dirty dozen, in all their grimy glory: the most scathing book reviews of 2025. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * “In truth, C.K. really isn’t interested in Ingram’s childhood and how it might have shaped the boy, what would naturally be the concerns of a ‘literally literary’ novelist. That’s because Ingram is driven by concept rather than character, and C.K. aspires only to concoct a narrator as naive and transparent as possible without worrying too much about how he got that way ... It doesn’t help that C.K.’s rendering of rural poverty feels inauthentic. Children on struggling farms don’t spend their days sitting in the dirt, staring at animals ... A writer with a particularly fierce vision and style can command a reader’s belief in a fictional world despite some ramshackle world-building, as Cormac McCarthy did in The Road , a work that seems to have influenced Ingram . But C.K. is not that novelist. Which is not to say he couldn’t be. Ingram seems most of all like the kind of first novel that ends up in a drawer and stays there until its author dies , whereupon, if the writer’s fully realized works have won over enough readers, it might get dragged out and published by the artist’s heirs. But C.K. is famous and still has many fans despite his scandals, and what ought to have been cashiered as mere juvenilia winds up printed between hardcovers, with a slipcover photo of its author sitting at a manual typewriter, and listed for $27.95. This choice does no one any favors, most especially C.K., who might have a genuinely worthwhile novel in him if he had the incentive to work harder and longer at the craft. Instead, he’s just sitting in the dirt.” -Laura Miller on Louis C.K.’s Ingram ( ) Slate “ American Canto was the last real opportunity for Nuzzi to talk about what happened: tangibly, what she did to torpedo her career and personal life. It could have been a pulpy tell-all that explains how she fell in love with the worst Kennedy or a political book opening up her reporter’s notebook to share from a vantage point few people ever reach. After these brief weeks around Christmas, already a chaotic time to publish a book, the interest around her will ebb. American Canto could have helped redeem her if only it were interesting. Instead, it is illegible in ways you can’t imagine. Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them...

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