I’ve been thinking this year about the role of literature in a time of AI slop: its power to unnerve and surprise. A writer’s original voice, their mastery of tone and language to create indelible characters and worlds, is the antithesis of AI pap. As tech titans plunder the written word to train AI models, we need the wild, untethered visions of novelists and poets more than ever.

I loved Kevin Brophy’s essay on rereading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment because he captures the feeling of being immersed in a unique and powerful story, which might speak to something dark within ourselves. And Jen Webb’s essay on a contemporary classic, English author Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers, shows how this inventive, genre-defying work movingly articulates the pain of loss.

Mythical, slippery, shapeshifting: Grief is the Thing With Feathers transforms tragedy into literature

Passion, integrity and self-reliance: why Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a heroine for our times

Tony Abbott’s history of Australia wants us to be proud of men like him

Why you should revisit the classics, even if you were turned off them at school

This year, I recognise the world less: it’s moving too fast, and sometimes I want to get off. My 2025 mood veered between a compulsion to look at the world’s horrors head-on (and have uncomfortable conversations about how to meet its many challenges), and a longing for a comforting bolthole.

In the first mood, I treasured Juliet Rogers’ wise, compassionate consideration of testimonies of Gaza and October 7, and her ability to sit with devastating complexity. In the second mood, I was soothed by Carol Lefevre’s prescription for respite and healing through beauty.

And all year long, I enjoyed the welcome relief of immersing myself in music, literature and film – and writing that reminds us why we love them. Art can gift us both engagement and escape.

Friday essay: in an uncertain world, ‘green relief’ offers respite, healing and beauty

Friday essay: I loved being a ‘90s rock journalist, but sometimes it was a boys’ club nightmare

Friday essay: foggy, flirty and too much – Jane Austen’s menopausal women solicit compassion while making us laugh

Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, set in 1984, is translated for the Trump era in One Battle After Another

Literature, history and philosophy compel us to think in two essential ways. One is to invite reflection on the broad conditions of existence, whether social, conceptual or political. The other is more immediate and personal.

The best essays often draw attention to the connections and disconnections between these two levels. As Chris Fleming suggests in his witty essay on Max Weber, many assumptions about our everyday lives remain unexamined because they become so pervasive they seem invisible. Shame, as Dan Dixon writes, is an emotion that bears thinking about precisely because of its social nature. One of the things I particularly liked about Matthew Taft’s reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was the way he showed how the novel plays with our sympathies in the service of a deeper realisation.

Shame can silence, subjugate and damage us – a philosopher considers its implications

Kazuo Ishiguro said he won the Nobel Prize for making people cry – 20 years later, Never Let Me Go should make us angry

Punishment in search of a crime – Franz Kafka’s The Trial at 100

‘There’s no such thing as someone else’s children’ – Omar El Akkad bears witness to the destruction of Gaza and the West’s quiet assent

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