Our Favorite Books of 2025Like this list

100 items

• Actress of a Certain Age

  My Twenty Year Trail to Overnight Success

  Hiller, Jeff,

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  In his breakout role as Joel, actor Jeff Hiller delighted fans of TV's Somebody Somewhere, the sensitive HBO drama about life in a Midwestern small town. In this sweet and snarky debut of humorous autobiographical essays, the late-blooming actor…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Archive of Unknown Universes

  a Novel

  Reyes, Ruben, Jr.,

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  1978 Cuba, two underground revolutionaries, Neto and Rafael, meet at a gathering of activists and fall in love. Now not only are they hiding from the authoritarian right-wing government in El Salvador, but also hiding their forbidden love from their…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Atmosphere

  a Love Story

  Reid, Taylor Jenkins,

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  In Reid's latest novel, set in Houston in the 1980s, Joan Goodwin has lived a relatively banal life. She's a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and spends most of her time with her niece Francis, but her easygoing days are no more…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Audition

  Kitamura, Katie M.,

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  In the opening scenes of Kitamura's enigmatic novel, a prominent, middle-aged actress meets with a young man at a restaurant. There is a clandestine mood to the scene. The actress is tense, seemingly reluctant to be there. When she notices her…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Automatic Noodle

  Newitz, Annalee, 1969-

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  In this short but robust science fiction novel, set in a future post-war San Francisco, a group of human-equivalent intelligent (HEI) robots wake up in the small restaurant where they were abandoned. California has granted robots limited civil…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Bad Bad Girl

  a Novel

  Jen, Gish,

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  Jen's wonderful sixth novel is autobiographical, capturing a fraught mother-daughter relationship. The novel has a beautiful symmetry, starting as a portrait of Loo Shu-Hsin (American name Agnes), born in Shanghai, then shifting focus in the second…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Bad Company

  Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream /

  Greenwell, Megan,

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  Reporter Greenwell became interested in private equity after such a firm bought the failing online sports magazine she wrote for and quickly mismanaged it into the ground. A fundamental difference between private equity and publicly traded companies…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Baldwin

  a Love Story

  Boggs, Nicholas, 1973-

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  Don't let the page count of this, the first biography of James Baldwin in three decades, scare you off. Using original research, archival material, and interviews, Nicholas Boggs, who co-edited the 2018 edition of Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man: A…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Black in Blues

  How a Color Tells the Story of My People

  Perry, Imani, 1972-

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  Perry's Black in Blues is a collection of interconnected essays that delves into the complex relationship between the color blue and the Black experience. Perry traces the history and origins of blue, weaving it through significant events like the…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Black Moses

  a Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State /

  Gayle, Caleb

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  Gayle's work of history and biography, one of the more acclaimed books of the year, focuses on Edward Preston McCabe, a leading Black figure in the late 1800s U.S. After working for a time on Wall Street, he spent a stint of time in Chicago, working…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Book of Lost Hours

  a Novel

  Gelfuso, Hayley,

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  Welcome to time space. This is a place where the memories of those who have passed are stored in books. It is accessible only with special watches, handed down from father to son. In 1938, eleven-year-old Lisavet Levy is hidden in time space by her…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Buckeye

  a Novel

  Ryan, Patrick, 1965-

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  Ryan's Buckeye is a warmhearted, old-fashioned novel featuring the entwined lives of two married couples in the fictional small town of Bonhomie, Ohio over a period of decades. Cal Jenkins can't serve in WWII because one of his legs is two inches…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

  Jones, Stephen Graham, 1972-

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  A manuscript from 1912 uncovered by construction workers ends up in the hands of Professor Etsy Beaucarne, who thinks the history within it may finally earn her tenure. The manuscript is a diary written by her great-great-great grandfather, a…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Careless People

  a Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

  Wynn-Williams, Sarah,

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  Wynn-Williams dishes the dirt accumulated in the six years she worked as director of global public policy at Facebook from 2011 to 2017, exposing a corporate culture in which growing the company trumps basic humanity. A lawyer from New Zealand who…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Catch

  a Novel

  Daley-Ward, Yrsa,

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  Daley-Ward's reality-bending story within a story straddles the line between darkness and playfulness, exploring modern motherhood in the process. Clara and Dempsey, 30-year-old fraternal twins living in London, were adopted by different families as…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Colony

  Norlin, Annika, 1977-

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  Swedish author Norlin's literary debut features a small group of individuals in a communal living situation in the woods. Emelie, a journalist suffering from burnout, has retreated to her grandmother's cabin, where she observes the group residing…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Compound

  a Novel

  Rawle, Aisling, 1998-

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  Every season of the dating show filmed on the compound starts the same: 10 beautiful women wake up from a drug-induced sleep and find themselves scattered around the compound itself. The last inhabitants must have just left because the place is…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Dark Renaissance

  the Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival

  Greenblatt, Stephen, 1943-

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  Greenblatt, author of the Pulitzer-winning Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare among other books, returns with a consistently interesting mix of history and biography. This book's focus is on Christopher Marlowe, the rebellious…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Detective Aunty

  a Novel

  Jalaluddin, Uzma,

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  When Kausar's adult daughter is accused of murder, she rushes to her side, reluctantly returning to a Toronto fraught with painful memories. Ostensibly in Toronto to help her daughter manage her home and take care of her granddaughters, Kausar can't…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Devils

  Abercrombie, Joe,

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  Alex is a street urchin, thief, pickpocket and liar, an all-around fraudster doing whatever it takes to survive life in the Holy City. So when a duke whisks her off the streets and tells her she is the long-lost heir to the Serpent Throne of Troy,…Read moreRead more of this annotation