the best books i read in 2025

Best Books of the Year

10. Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin

9. Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

8. Circe by Madeline Miller

7. The Destroyers by Christopher Bollen

6. Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell

5. God of the Woods by Liz Moore

4. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin

3. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

2. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

1.Heart the Lover by Lily King

Honorable Mention

best LGBTQ book: The Pairing

book with the best love story: Heart the Lover

sexiest book: The Pairing

best romcom: Ghosts

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most WTF (in a good way) book: Havoc (I wanted to call the author and be like “are you ok?”)

most WTF (in a bad way) book: Bridget Jones’s Diary

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best poetry: The Wickedest

best memoir: When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

best short stories: Stag Dance (I’m definitely in the Torrey Peters fan club)

best novella: The Hour of the Star (I still think about this book sometimes)

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best novel that feels like nonfiction: Crush (I think she wrote it as a memoir and her agent was like… let’s change some names and say it’s a novel)

best book about kids: God of the Woods (I love love loved the summer camp setting); The Bee Sting (my only critique is all the facebooking is unrealistic); Black Swan Green (totally nails pre-teen anxieties)

best reread: The Age of Innocence (love that old-timey gossip)

book I most want to see as a movie: Creation Lake (would be Coen brothers-level hilarious)

most devastating book: Heart the Lover (I ugly cried)

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best self-help: The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control (I want to recommend this to so many people I know, but it seems kind of rude)

best relationship book: Wellness (I kept reading parts of this novel out loud to my husband)

best book about death: Briefly, Perfectly Human

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best sci-fi: I Who Have Never Known Men (can’t stop telling people about this book)

best fantasy: Babel (I love this world of magic and dark academia)

best romantasy: Fourth Wing (this book is actually terrible but I stayed up until 3am reading it)

best horror: Rejection (I literally had to talk to my therapist about this book)

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best wanderlust book: Number 9 Dream (really made me want to go to Tokyo)

best travel writing: A Cook’s Tour

best book to read on vacation: The Destroyers

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