On My Top Books of 2025

As I’ve done the last five years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), I’m ending the year by selecting the top ten books that I, personally, read in the past year—regardless of when they were released. I don’t usually review books because for the most part, if I don’t like a book, I think that says more about the reader–book fit than the value of the book itself; but I do like to specifically recommend books that I think will appeal to a lot of people (or improve a lot of people’s lives), and this is my once-yearly way of doing that. And as always, an entire series might qualify as “one” of the ten books if I don’t think it’s possible to separate the appeal of any single book from the series as a whole.

An interesting note on my “methodology”: the way I make these lists is to go back through my Goodreads list for the year and look for books I assigned 5 stars (for context: I almost never give a rating other than 5 stars; 5 stars mark my favorite books, 1 stars mark the extremely rare books I think are objectively bad, and every other book doesn’t get a rating). I copy them down here, pre-assigning them to either my Top Ten or to the honorable mentions. Then, depending how the numbers work out, I either drop a couple down to Honorable Mention or select my favorites from the honorable mentions to move into the top section to get to ten.

This year there was no moving up and down; there were ten books I identified as my ten favorites from the get-go. Neat.

So, here are my top “ten” books that I read in 2025, in no particular order. Well, technically, in a very particular order: the order in the year in which I read them.

  • Lifeform by Jenny Slate. I love the way Jenny Slate writes right at that line between prose and poetry, and how the individual short stories leave you wondering how autobiographical each one might actually be. She’s one of the only authors I’ve found that can make you laugh, cry, and think in the same sentence, let alone in the same book.
  • The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Barry. I’m three-for-three with Max Barry, Providence and Jennifer Government were already two of my all-time favorites. In this one, I love the light-touch sci-fi angle that stays in the background except where necessary, and I love the twist. My favorite kinds of twists are those that connect to something outside the story itself, whether that’s the book’s name, the book’s structure, or the book’s literal printing style.
  • The Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik. I thoroughly enjoyed this sort of alternate take on the school-of-magic trope. I appreciated how it confronted the necessary realities of the setup head-on and incorporated them into the world-building rather than hand-waving it away as “well, I guess everyone’s just okay with sending their kids to such a dangerous place.” I also loved how it reflected real-world questions of society and equality without getting too heavy-handed: it was easy to read as a story on its own without constantly figuring out the source of an allegory, but it was also easy to pick up that the darker implications of the book’s world are mirrored in the real world.
  • Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. I’ve thought about picking a single book of the year in addition to my top ten, but some years there’s not a clear favorite. This year, though, there was, and it was this. It’s a science-backed account of the evidence of humanity’s inherent goodness, along with a compelling explanation of how that goodness gets co-opted for evil—and what we can do about it. My latest entry into my eventual list of “books I wish everyone would read”.
  • The Martian by Andy Weir. I said this a couple years ago when Project Hail Mary was one of my favorites, but it almost seems silly to add my two cents to something written by an author as popular as Andy Weir, except to say again—my expectations for this book were sky-high, and yet it still exceeded my expectations.
  • The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. I really appreciated this attempt to bring science to some intercultural differences that we feel intuitively, but struggle to describe without getting into overgeneralized stereotypes. I’ve found myself putting it into use on multiple occasions already (and, worse, revisited conversations I’ve had over the years with a new realization about the context and finally figured out what I should have said differently—oh well).
  • The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian. I loved this book even though, interestingly, it doesn’t actually talk about the alignment problem itself that much. What I loved is that it talks about how deeply entwined machine and human learning have been, and it gives several anecdotes about how each have informed the other over the years. It’s amazing how many times something was discovered in one field—either cognitive science/neuroscience or machine learning—that made the other field say, “Huh… we should try that, too” only to find out it’s true for both artificial neural nets and real brains. I find it particularly fascinating that while psychology has evolved from behaviorism to cognitivism, early AI efforts were more more cognitive while more recent improvements are more behaviorist in many ways.
  • Playground by Richard Powers. I read this at the same time as The Alignment Problem, and they’re bizarrely good companions: not only does Playground tell the lightly-fictionalized origin story of a ChatGPT-like AI assistant, but while The Alignment Problem focuses on how AI learning is similar to human learning, Playground focuses on how human relationships have a massive impact on technological development, which then impacts human society. It also has one of those phenomenal structural twists like The 22 Murders of Madison May, although to experience it fully I’d highly recommend reading it rather than listening to the audiobook.
  • I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin. I always feel a little weird putting Jason Pargin’s books among my top books of the year (this is the third time in four years) because the humor is pretty vulgar and errs on the juvenile side, but he has this remarkable ability to write stories that seem absolutely absurd and immediately realistic at the same time—in a way that makes you reflect on how something so ridiculous can also be so believable. And in this book, what really shined through was how he created characters that would usually be extremely unsympathetic, but revealed their backstories in a way that made them believable and understandable. You constantly find yourself saying, “I think this character’ is absurd’s beliefs are despicable, but I can understand where they came form”, which I think is a truly rare form of character writing.
  • Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor. This was going to be an honorable mention for me until right at the end—it’s a really entertaining and novel story featuring a fascinating look at a different culture (different to me, anyway), some questions from the near-future about augmented humanity, and a story that sort of meandered but was fun to follow nonetheless… until the twist at the end. it’s similar to Playground and The 22 Murders of Madison May in that the twist is less within the plot and more structural to the book as a whole, and it completely changes the entire story.

And while I’m pondering: my single top books for previous years would have been The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson for 2024, Providence by Max Barry for 2023, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman for 2022, The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear for 2021, and The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern for 2020. Huh. I guess I usually do have a clear favorite.

And that aside, my (long, long) list of honorable mentions for 2025. Some of these have comments, some of these are just me saying, “Hey, I liked this one too!”

Honorable Mentions:

This year as well, Goodreads added some cool little visuals for the “My Year in Books” recap:

Sort of a random set of books to highlight, but hey. I found this interesting, too:

I’ve got an annual goal of 100 books, and it’s true that early in the year I tend to focus on shorter books early in the year just so I won’t need to rush at the end of the year. I hit 100 books in September, so my books in October, November, and December were just way, way longer.

Of those 111 books, 91 were audiobooks, 12 were physical books, and 8 were on Kindle. I’ve been working on the same physical book since August, but my time to sit down and read an actual book that I have handy has frustratingly evaporated. That sentence was originally written last year and is exactly true again this year.

My full year in books is available on GoodReads.