Best of 2025, or, Your Holiday Shopping List

We’ll begin with a list that you’ll find nowhere else: My Best Reads of 2025. It’s possible that not a single book on this list was published in 2025, just that I read it in 2025. (Turns out a few of them were published this year. See asterisks.) Some of them were published hundreds of years ago. If I read (or re-read) it this year, it qualified for this list. They are in no particular order. (It turns out I read a lot of good books (rated 4), but these I rated 4.5-5 stars, just to really narrow it down.)

Scythe (Arc of a Scythe trilogy #1), Neal Shusterman
Miss Iceland, Audur Ava Olafsdottir
The Eyes & the Impossible, Dave Eggers
A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes #1), Brittany Cavarallo
House of Fury, Evelio Rosero *
In the Woods, Tana French
Lovebirds, Hananah Zaheer
The Slightly Spooky Tale of Fox and Mole, Cecelia Heikkila *
Hot Dog, Dough Salati *
Senlin Ascends (Books of Babel #1), Josiah Bancroft
The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love (Love’s Academic #1), India Holton
The Geographer’s Map to Romance (Love’s Academic #2), India Holton *
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu
Emily of New Moon (Emily of New Moon #1), L. M. Montgomery
Emily Climbs (Emily of New Moon #2), L. M. Montgomery
Emily’s Quest (Emily of New Moon #3), L. M. Montgomery
A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk and Robot #1), Becky Chambers
The Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats
Kindred Dragons, Sarah Mensinga *
Funny Story, Emily Henry
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Colony, Annika Norlin *
The Dutch House, Anne Patchett
Children of Solitude, Michael G. Williams *
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone interactive edition, J. K. Rowling
North Sun, Ethan Rutherford *
Good Spirits, B. K. Borison *
A Family Matter, Claire Lynch *
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, Ally Carter *

Next, we’re going to list the books that experts are calling the best books of the year. Which means they have been published in 2025. The buzz here is that there is no book (singular) of the year, nothing that stood head-and-shoulders over everything else. Last year that was James by Percival Everett. I have some thoughts about this year’s book of the year and how that probably doesn’t even happen that often, but here are the books of the year according to the experts:

The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny, Kiran Desai
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood
The Correspondent, Virginia Evans
Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck, Sophie Elmhirst
Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy
A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar
A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, Sango Mandanna
Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid
Audition, Katie Kitamura
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, V. E. Schwab
Flashlight, Susan Choi
Katabasis, R. F. Kuang
King of Ashes, S. A. Cosby
Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones
Buckeye, Patrick Ryan
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, Emma Knight
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, Ranu Mushtaq
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, Run Currie
Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
The Compound, Aisling Rawle
Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, Sophie Gilbert
Tilt, Emma Pattee
Flesh, David Szalay
Julie Chan Is Dead, Liann Zhang
Abundance, Ezra Klein
Sounds Like Love, Ashley Poston
Victorian Psycho, VIrginia Feito
Heart the Lover, Lily King
Everything Is Tuberculosis, John Green
The Pretender, Jo Harkin
Ginseng Roots, Craig Thompson
Angel Down, Daniel Kraus
The Director, Danial Kehlmann
The Sisters, Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Mother Emanuel, Kevin Sack
There Is No Place for Us, Brian Goldstone
Wild Thing, Sue Prideaux
A Sharp Endless Need, Mac Crane
Along Came Amor, Alexis Daria
August Lane, Regina Black
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, Kylie Lee Baker
Blob: A Love Story, Maggie Su
Cannon, Lee Lai
Deep Cuts, Holly Brickley
Don’t Trust Fish, Neil Sharpson
Down in the Sea of Angels, Khan Wong
Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology, Angela Hsieh
Capitalism and Its Critics, John Cassidy
On the Calculation of Volume, Book 3, Solveg Balle
Water Mirror Echo, Jeff Chang
When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, Jordan Thomas
Back in Blues: How a Color Tells the History of My People, Imani Perry
The Ten Year Affair, Erin Somers
Stag Dance, Torrey Peters
Heartwood, Amity Gaige
The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien
Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor
The Names, Florence Knapp

Whatever the experts are saying, these are the books (missing many that I forgot about, I’m sure) that flew off the shelf this year, the books that were on every store-front display (which doesn’t necessarily mean they were new). I’m sure I’m forgetting many:

Not Quite Dead Yet, Holly Jackson
Onyx Storm, Rebecca Yarros
Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami
The Wayfinder, Adam Johnson
What We Can Know, Ian McEwan
Good Dirt, Charmaine Wilkerson
The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong
Memorial Days, Geraldine Brooks
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, Neko Case
My Name Is Amelia del Valle, Isabel Allende
The Antidote, Karen Russell
The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow
The Road to Tender Hearts, Annie Hartnett
My Friends, Fredrik Backman
Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins
Isola, Allegra Goodman
Wreck, Catherine Newman
We the People, Jill Lepore
The Sad Sad Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), Rabih Allemedine
Alchemised, SenLin Yu
First Time Caller, Ally Carter
Dungeon Crawler Carl (and the new one), Matt Dinniman
The Impossible Fortune, Richard Osman
The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, Grady Hendrix
Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs
The Devils, Joe Abercrombie
How We Learn to Be Brave, Mariann Edgar Budde
Good Things, Samin Nosrat
Kapusta, Alissa Timoshkina
Secret of Secrets, Dan Brown
Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Roberts Guiffre
The Look, Michelle Obama
The Housemaid, Frieda McFadden
Hail Mary, Andy Weir
The God of the Woods, Liz Moore
Always Remember, Charlie Mackasey
The Let Them Theory, Mel Robbins
Fake Skating, Lynn Painter
Heart the Love, Lily King
The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny, Kiran Desai
Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid
On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder
The Constitution of the United States of America
Audition, Katie Kitamura
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, V. E. Schwab
Flashlight, Susan Choi
Katabasis, R. F. Kuang
King of Ashes, S. A. Cosby
Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders
Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones
Buckeye, Patrick Ryan
Flesh, David Szalay
Everything Is Tuberculosis, John Green
The Backyard Bird Chronicles, Amy Tan
The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer
James, Percival Everett
Great Big Beautiful Life, Emily Henry
Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins
Deep End, Ali Hazelwood
Fearless, Lauren Roberts
The Knight and the Moth, Rachel Gillig
A Philosophy of Walking, Frederic Gros
Don’t Let Him In, Lisa Jewell
Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar
North Woods, Daniel Mason
I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman
Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt
Abundance, Ezra Klein
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
Orbital, Samantha Harvey
Small Things Like These and Foster, Claire Keegan
Murdle Vol. 1, G. T. Karber
The Wedding People, Allison Espach
Intermezzo, Sally Rooney
Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
All Fours, Miranda July
Good Material, Dolly Alderton
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi (and other books with cats on the cover)
The Wager, David Grann
Goodnight Tokyo, Atsuhiro Yoshida
Never Flinch, Stephen King
Accomplice to the Villian, Hannah Nicole Maehrer
The Black Wolf, Louise Penny
Little Alleluias and Devotions, Mary Oliver
A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker
The Empusium, Olga Tokarczyk