Name: Anthony Jeselnik’s Top Ten Books of 2025
Uploaded: 2025-12-10T18:01:12.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Anthony Jeselnik’s Top Ten Books of 2025' from Anthony Jeselnik on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Anthony Jeselnik’s Top Ten Books of 2025' from Anthony Jeselnik on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-10. Transcript available.

Hey, this is Anthony Jeselnik coming to you from the last bookstore in Studio
City to announce my
top 10 novels of the year. I've done this every year on podcasts, on social
media. Now I'm doing
it live. I've got some announcements coming at the end. I've got tour dates
coming up and something
a little bigger for next year. This year I've done a thing called New Book
Tuesday on Instagram where
each Tuesday I pick a new book release. I read it in the week and I review it
for Monday. It's been
fun. I will not be doing that again. I will be doing something else that I will
announce at the
end. Without further ado, let's get into my top 10 novels of the year. My
number 10 novel of the year
is Unworld by Jason Green. This is the biggest downer. It is a bummer of a book,
but it is beautifully
written. I can handle sad if it is beautifully written. This is a book about
suicide. It's a book
about artificial intelligence. Mostly it's a book about parenting. The
terrifying ways that you can
fuck that up. That's Unworld from Jason Green. Number nine, you will never read
a book where you
hate a main character more than The Stalker by Paula Bomer. This guy is just a
complete and total
irredeemable asshole. You get his inner monologue from start to finish and you
cannot wait for horrible
things to happen to him. I loved it. Number eight is Among Friends by Hal Ebbett.
A couple guys who are
best friends. They're about my age, about 46. They have daughters who are
friends with each other. It takes
place, I believe, a 50th birthday party or a big birthday party for one of the
friends who is a
little more successful, has a little more money, and something happens at the
party. One of the
friends has a run-in with the other guy's daughter. It's the fallout from that.
It's about male friendship
and the limitations of it. I recommend this book for the exquisite pleasure
from recommending it to your
best friend when you were godfather to his daughter and then waiting to see his
reaction. Number seven is
The Savage Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Curry. It's a French-Canadian noir,
you might call it, and it's
about a matriarch of a crime family. Think of like a female Tony Soprano,
grandmotherly Tony Soprano whose
daughter is killed in the beginning of the book, and she goes hard as hell to
get revenge. I just think it
was a singular work. I've never read anything like it. If I was recommending
one of these to someone who hates
reading, who does not like to read, I would recommend The Savage Noble Death of
Babs Dionne by Ron Curry.
Just a true pleasure. Number six is A Stag Dance by Tory Peters. I don't
normally like short story
collections, but this one was incredible. People will say it's about trans
identity. I don't think so. I think
it's about identity. It's three, maybe four short stories. Stag Dance is the
headliner about the
lumberjacks having a dance where one of the guys, a couple of the guys, have to
be the girls and how
they figure that out. It was an incredible story, heartbreaking story, and it
contains a story called
The Masker, which is the most terrifying short story I've read all year. Number
five is a fucking banger.
King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby. I read every one of S.A. Cosby's novels. This is
his best work. If you put on
the audio book of King of Ashes at a party, your party will be lit. It is a
crime novel about a finance
bro in Atlanta, very successful, who comes home to try to help out his family.
His father's in a coma.
Was it an accident? Probably not. He's got a brother who's in debt to a gang,
and the gang is the most
terrifying group of villains I have ever come across in literature. Period.
Number four is Minor Black
Figures by Brandon Taylor. I would call this more of a hangout novel. There's
very little plot.
It is a true hangout novel about what it means to be an artist and whether it's
worth being an artist.
Number three. This was an award winner, but I forget which award, and I don't
really care. Flesh by David
Zillet. Incredible book. The prose is sparse. It's been called a rags to riches
story about a guy who's
just trying to do his best. It reminded me a lot of the novel Stoner by John
Williams,
the novel I think is the great American novel. The writing is so sparse. It
carries you through.
It's a pleasant read, and again, the main character is just so jaded that I
enjoyed spending time in
his world. It was kind of like following James Bond, kind of through a mission,
and the mission is just
life. Number two is What We Can Know by Ian McEwen. I will admit I've heard of
Ian McEwen. I know he's a famous
author. I have never read Ian McEwen. I think of Atonement. When I think of Atonement,
I think of
that movie with Keira Knightley, which I've never seen, never want to see. But
I picked this one up.
It is a masterpiece. Critics keep saying about this book that it's just shy of
a masterpiece. It's a
masterpiece. It takes place in 2014 and in the future. It's about a poet, a
famous poet, who writes a
long, complicated poem to his wife on her birthday, reads it once, gives her
the only copy. Then you
jump to 150 years in the future, climate change, nuclear war, everything bad
that's going to happen
has happened. And these are the last two historians on earth trying to track
down this masterpiece.
It's hard to talk about the ending without choking up even now. The most
beautiful book I've read all
year. It is an absolute masterpiece. My number one, my number one novel of the
year. And when I read this,
I knew it was going to be my number one novel of the year. It is called Perfection
by Vincenzo
Latranico, translated by Sophie Hughes. The translator is important because
this book is just like
drinking a glass of room temperature water when you did not know you were
thirsty. The only book I've read
twice this year. It is almost a fantasy that everyone has after college of what
if I just did
something different. The prose is incredible. The best written novel I read all
year. If you're
looking for a book that you can read in one sitting, Pick Perfection by Vincenzo
Latranico,
translated by Sophie Hughes. And those are my top 10 novels of the year. There
are other ones that could
have easily been in the mix here, but I don't remember them now. Just go back
to my Instagram
on the stories. You can go back and see all the books I read. So I would like
to make a couple
announcements now. One is I'm going to, I've got tour dates starting in
February. Go to anthonyjelselnick.com
to get tickets. This is my club year. The other thing I would like to announce
is I'm going to do
a book club. I'm going to do a book club pretty much on YouTube. Smash that
subscribe button. The
Jeselnick book club will start in January. I'm going to be doing books that I
would want to read. Books
I've already read a long time ago and I would like to share with people. I don't
think I'm going to make
any money. I just think that people should read more novels. If you don't like
reading novels,
you don't like reading books at all, I'm going to give you your best chance. I'm
going to give you
a fastball down the middle and just let you hit it out of the park. So look for
that in January. I'll
announce the first book. I'll have an email address. You can email and ask
questions. And at the end of
the month, I will answer your questions with another video. That'll be pretty
much what the Jeselnick book
club is. I will give you a book at the beginning of the month. You got 30 days
to read it. I will pick
books that are easy for you to read in 30 days or less, and then we'll discuss
it. And the only way I
want to discuss things with my fans by you sending an email and then me picking
the ones I want to
answer and then talking to the camera by myself. There's a male loneliness
epidemic going on. And while
that's going on, I'm having a good time reading a book by myself with my dog.