Herald Favorites: our top reads of 2025

With everything that happened last year, it’s a miracle that the Herald staff had time to step away from the crazy news cycle and do some reading. But we did, and the genres and styles of our favorites ranged from personal essays and Argentine fiction to Hollywood lore and the uneasy rise of artificial intelligence.  The five books below (in both Spanish and English) explore memory and identity, power and technology. Varied in style and scope, our recommended reads offer a snapshot of what kept us turning the pages last year. Enjoy! Un destino común Lucrecia Martel (Caja Negra, 2025, 224 pages) Caja Negra’s latest book brings together articles and public speeches by internationally-renowned Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, offering comprehensive access to her thoughts about film and beyond. The volume compiles basically every lecture, talk and essay the Salta-born artist delivered over more than a decade at film festivals, universities and cultural institutions in Argentina, Spain and Uruguay.  Organized into three sections, the book also includes exchanges on artistic creation with Argentine filmmaker and writer César González, Spanish director Carla Simón and journalist Leila Guerriero. Martel, as always, goes beyond film analysis, questioning our sensitive approach to local issues, the ways we can establish a connection with people whose minds work differently, and how to narrate ourselves and our history in the age of algorithm standardization. Rather than focusing on her filmography, Martel reflects on sound, perception, storytelling and politics, examining how cinema shapes — and is shaped by — collective experience. A thorough compilation work by experimental filmmaker Pablo Marín and publisher Malena Ray, the book highlights with clarity and rigor Martel’s role as both a major director, and a sharp cultural observer engaged with contemporary debates on how we perceive ourselves and others.  What is Mine  O que é meu. José Henrique Bortoluci (Fósforo Ed., 2024)Published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions with translation by Rahul Bery, 160 pages. In What Is Mine, sociologist José Henrique Bortoluci delivers a beautiful and moving mix of lyrical biography, social essay, and poetic testimony as he interviews his father Didi to retrace the recent history of Brazil and of his own family. From the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s, Didi’s work as a truck driver took him away from home for long stretches at a time, as he crisscrossed the country and participated in huge infrastructure projects including the Trans-Amazonian Highway and the construction of the country’s new capital, Brasilia.  Originally released in 2023 by Brazilian publishing house Fósforo and translated into a dozen languages, What is Mine successfully combines the author’s academic insight with the natural voice of Didi and his damaged health, from a heart attack in middle age to the cancer that forced him to retire. In a similar tone to Nobel winners Annie Ernaux and Svetlana Alexievich, Bortoluci connects Didi’s life and adventures on the road with the history of an expanding nation, driving us through jungle roads, military dictatorship, deforestation, viral capitalism, and an ailing society during the 2019-2023 presidency of subsequently imprisoned far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro. Cometierra  Dolores Reyes (Sigilo, 176 pages, 2019) EartheaterDolores Reyes, translated by Julia Sanches (HarperVia, 224 pages, 2020) Cometierra, by Dolores Reyes, on display at Céspedes Libros. Photo: Céspedes Libros This gritty but magical short novel tells the tale of a girl in the impoverished outskirts of Buenos Aires who gets visions of the dead and disappeared when she eats the earth where they have walked. Darkly compelling, it explores themes of femicide, the absent state, and the dynamics of disappearances since Argentina’s return to democracy: which people are not looked for by the authorities when they go missing? First published in 2019, the book shot to fame in late 2024 after members of La Libertad Avanza criticized schools for teaching the text because of one or two sexually explicit scenes, sparking a debate about book bans. An Amazon-produced series based on Reyes’ book premiered on Prime Video in 2025, led by showrunner Daniel Burman and set in Mexico. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Quentin Tarantino (HarperCollins/Harper Perennial, 400 pages, 2021) If you’re a fan of Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, chances are the director’s 2021 novel that bears the same name and expands the movie’s fictional universe is right up your alley.  The book is built upon the film’s main premise, following fading television actor Rick Dalton (played in the movie by Leonardo Di Caprio) and his loyal stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), as they navigate an industry in transition in late-1960s Los Angeles.  Its main attraction for those who loved the movie is how much more depth it provides on the characters’ backstories, a pulpy tour-de-force exploring Hollywood history, B-movies, and violence with knowledgeable detail.  The literary version is not a straightforward adaptation of the story, but rather a trip into an alternate world of the same universe. And while the prose takes on a tone of its own, shifting the timeline and emphasizing different elements, it maintains the movie’s core drive of being a love letter to a lost era of American cinema, filtered through Tarantino’s obsessions with genre and storytelling. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI Karen Hao (Penguin Press, 496 pages, 2025) Journalist Karen Hao’s thorough reporting became one of last year’s best selling books. And for a good reason: her investigation demystifies the all-encompassing narrative that supports the current iteration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and recounts in detail the very earthly discussions, decisions, and operations that enable ChatGPT to exist. In Hao’s hypothesis, OpenAI (the company behind the chatbot) hides a new form of imperialism, seizing resources (artists’ works, personal data, but also land, energy, water, and lithium) and exploiting third-world workers to process all that plundered information. And on top of that, this operation is sustained by a quasi-religious vision imposed by Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI. An essential book to understand AI and its growing dominion over everyday life, Hao’s book draws on rare early access to OpenAI’s San Francisco offices to chronicle internal leadership struggles, revealing that today’s AI is not inevitably monolithic but shaped by many human choices. She also examines the hidden labor conditions and resources behind Altman’s vision, from lithium mining in Chile and water-sucking data centers in Uruguay and the U.S. to low-paid data workers in Venezuela and Kenya, while highlighting community-driven AI uses like preserving the Maori language.