The Books We Enjoyed Reading in 2025
Books are still one of the best tools we have for making sense of life. They train attention in a distracted age. They expand your inner world, sharpen your judgment, and give you better language for what you already sense but can’t yet explain. Fiction builds empathy without preaching. Nonfiction, when it’s honest and well-made, teaches you how to think, not just what to think.
At The Kigalian, we care about clarity, depth, and a bias toward what lasts. Sharing what we read is part of that mission. It’s a way to point readers toward work that rewards patience and improves how we see the world.
These are the best books we read this past year:
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie — A memoir written after violence, but not owned by it. Rushdie defends literature, reason, and the stubborn act of staying intellectually alive.
The Places in Between by Rory Stewart — Travel writing at its best. A walk across Afghanistan in 2002, told with restraint and sharp attention. He makes strangers feel real, not exotic.
Titre de voyage: Ponts interdits de l'exile (French Edition) by Ezéchias Rwabuhihi — A slim, personal book with a traveler’s eye. It reads like movement: scenes, shifts in mood, and the quiet logic of leaving and returning.
Blank Space: Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx — A sharp account of how taste, status, and cultural authority shifted in the 2000s and 2010s, and why “cool” became both more democratic and more engineered.
Where Women Meet Boys: Stories by Patrick Shyaka — A bold Rwandan debut. Eleven stories that are funny, unsettling, and direct. The book is a signal that local fiction can aim for craft, not just confession.
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