My 2025 Reading List 29 Books Read Rated And Reviewed

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 2, 2025, 9:42 AM

my 2025 reading list 29 books read rated and reviewed

So here's the thing about my reading habits this year - they've been wonderfully all over the place. I've devoured psychological thrillers, ugly-cried over beautiful fiction, and somehow managed to squeeze in some genuinely brilliant memoirs and nonfiction too. My taste is basically "whatever sounds good right now" mixed with "ooh, everyone's talking about this one." Sometimes that means a twisty Freida McFadden thriller, sometimes it's a Pulitzer winner that makes me think... And honestly? I love that my reading list doesn't fit into any neat category. Subscribe to Emily Ley | The Landing to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

2024 was a difficult year for me to maintain a blog. Growing children, moving house, health issues and increased work responsibilities made it difficult to find adequate time to read and review. Nevertheless, I am ploughing on! Perhaps not posting as frequently as I have in the past. And 2025 promises to be as challenging if not more so. In 2024 I made through all the books on my 2024 Reading List plus much more besides.

As well as the items on my list I also read a couple of prepublications novels that were sent my way – the charming Goyhood and the ponderous Sleeping in the Sun. My wife Rebecca tackled another – Conquist by Dirk Strasser. With my daughter having read her way through Harry Potter (after much elbowing) it was time I finally read it too. At the time of writing I have just started The Half-Blood Prince and have a long post of the entire series in the works. If I had to pick a favourite book this year it would be the 2022 Booker Prize Winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. I will not be writing a review of it as Rebecca’s take on this blog is already popular.

After a very successful 2023 list (20/24, by far the closest I’ve come to completing one), I faltered a bit in 2024, finishing 16 of 24. Part of that was due to the library holds system – The Power of Moments just arrived, and I’ve been waiting weeks for Delicious! and The Measure to be delivered – but I suspect I also fell victim to a defect I noticed in 2022: placing books on the list that I wasn’t absolutely chomping at the bit... That’s the bar I’m using this year (absolutely chomping at the bit to read), and I’m also making one other change: I’m putting some of the books I’m most eager to tear into in... If I get to them sooner? That’s quite alright.

I’m guessing I’ll just be grateful to have read them at all :) (If you’re new, this is the very lowest-key of book clubs: I consider it a delightful exercise in thoughtfully planning my reading a year at a time (12 fiction, 12 non-fiction), and though I’m... January:The Unmaking of June Farrow | I love a well-done time travel escapade and this 2024 NYT bestseller, set in North Carolina and recommended by Janssen, has all the makings of a hit: “a... February:Gilead | This Pulitzer Prize winner has come recommended from many different sources over the years, and not always ones that I’d guess would appreciate a book about a pastor in the 1950’s.Adorning the... I’m looking forward to reading my first offering from Andrew Peterson. Read by Saskia Maarleveld and Ashley Flowers

Sign up for news about books, authors, and more from Penguin Random House Sign up for news about books, authors, and more from Penguin Random House Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network Shirts, totes, socks, and more for book lovers Each week, our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads. Check back every Wednesday for new fiction and nonfiction recommendations.

This engaging new introduction to the philosopher Immanuel Kant argues that what made Kant revolutionary was his contention that to understand anything—science, justice, freedom, God—we first have to understand ourselves. Willaschek, one of the world’s leading authorities on Kant and the editor of the standard German edition of the philosopher’s works, writes, “Kant placed the human at the center of his thought like no... His theory presents a serious problem for any kind of religion or philosophy that claims to tell us about ultimate truths and eternal essences, such as God. Is it possible to live a meaningful existence in the absence of God and other absolute truths? This would become the central question for modern Western thought, and it was Kant who first posed it in all its complexity. When you make a purchase using a link on this page, we may receive a commission.

Thank you for supporting The New Yorker. The title of this brilliantly strange, funny, and moving novel refers to many things, among them a journey across the Atlantic, the quasi-psychedelic quality of dying, and a boy by that name. At the novel’s outset, Trip’s mother travels to Nepal to attend a conference “for people who study death.” While there, she dies in a freak accident; at the same time, Trip, who has autism,... As the mother lingers in spirit form, trying to communicate with the living in order to save Trip from calamity—by possessing the body of another conference-goer, for instance—she faces the prospect of losing the... “You’ll forget everything,” she’s told, after lovingly relating a list of details about her son. In the late nineteen-forties, Hollywood was in transition: the blacklist was demolishing careers, the studio system was imploding, and television was emptying movie theatres.

The noir film “Sunset Boulevard,” which came out in 1950, reflected this destabilization. The film focusses on two Hollywood castoffs: an aging former star and a floundering screenwriter who becomes her kept man. This scrupulous account of the making of the film—initially conceived as a comedy starring Mae West—traces how it became “a history of Hollywood” that mocked “an entire industry on the edge of collapse or... It’s been a while since I’ve made a reading list for myself (the last one was in 2017!), so I thought I’d make one for 2025. For this reading list, I tried to pick a mix of books I haven’t read before, as well as some I’ve been interested in re-reading; fiction and nonfiction. There’s also a mix of all sorts of genres; prose and graphic novels; and new and old books.

Energy levels permitting, I plan to post reviews throughout the year for each book I read from this list, too. So, without further ado, here’s my (alphabetized) list of books I plan to read in 2025! Anyone who knows me knows that I read way more than 25 books in a year, so you may be wondering why this list is so short. The answer? I want to leave room for impulsivity and flexibility for when my brain needs a break from an assigned list, so I can pick up whatever books I want at the library or in... Also… I have a much longer list of books that I own but haven’t read yet, and I *also* plan to read many of them this year:

I usually own somewhere between 25 and 40 books that I haven’t read at any given time. I tend to go through approximately 30-50 books from this category in a calendar year. If you end up reading any of these books, too, please share what you think! Check back as I update this reading list often! Just about every week, I add new books I’ve accepted for review or titles I can’t resist, as well as a few backlist titles squeezed in where I can. I also update the list to include links to my reviews as they go live.

This list includes some backlist titles that I’ve read recently and plan to post reviews for this year. For the last few years, I’ve been breaking my reading list down into categories. Click one of the headings below to go directly to my reading list in that category. Note: This list contains affiliate links which do not cost anything for you to use. They help support the work I do here. Thanks for using them to do your shopping!

Published January 7, 2025 | My Review to Come If you'd like to support Words Like Silver financially (which allows me to devote more time to its development), you can shop my picks directly on Bookshop, a platform that supports independent booksellers. Not all books I reference are available there—most are—so alternatively, you can shop at a local favorite, Barnes & Noble, or support your local library. I just ask that you don't buy these from Amazon. (Thank you.) To start out strong, I'm immediately sharing my book list for the year, including books I'm partway through (noted accordingly.)

Nowadays, I use The Storygraph as my preferred reading tracker, but I still love having the full list on the blog too for reference. Check the review archive and books category page to explore each read more in-depth; I'm still in the process of building out more reviews and transferring hundreds over from my old site. And, of course, book club with me about my 2024 reads. You can find each of my 2025 mid-year favorites here for purchase in a Bookshop storefront. It’s finally starting to feel like summer on the East Coast. To wit: the forearms are out, and so are the reading lists.

To find out which books everyone is reading and recommending this season (as is my wont), I read 35 summer reading lists from 31 publications, counted up all the books, and tallied them together... This year, those 35 lists (which are themselves listed at the bottom of this post), recommended a total of 540 individual books. 85 of those appeared on at least 3 lists; those 85 are now presented to you in descending order of popularity. Well, it really speaks for itself, starting with the winner-by-a-mile: Melissa Febos, The Dry Season R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

Susan Choi, Flashlight V.E. Schwab, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea Caroline Fraser, Murderland Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother Catherine Lacey, The Möbius Book Jess Walter, So Far Gone

My 2025 Reading List 29 Books Read Rated And Reviewed

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