TTT: Best Books I Read in 2025

Best Books of 2025

I often create separate fiction and nonfiction favorite books lists each year. This year, for some reason, I found it really easy to identify my top five for each category and trouble picking 6-10. So this year, you get to see my top ten books of 2025: five fiction, five nonfiction.

FICTION:

1. The Antidote by Karen Russell -- I guessing this is a cilantro book, either you love it or hate it, but I loved it! It is set during the Dust Bowl in the midwest during the 1930s. It is so full of themes, but one important one is how we deal with history and have selective memories. I knew when I listened to this book in early June it would be my favorite book of the year and it is!

2. Heart the Lover by Lily King -- This story about a long-term friendship/love between two people who broke each other's hearts, yet remained in touch with each other, is clutch-your-hand-to-your-heart good. And the writing is transformative. I didn't even know this was a sequel of sorts to another book I loved by the same author, Writers and Lovers. Now I want to reread both, to catch the hints I missed first time around.

3. Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones -- It is shocking to even me that this book, a vampire story, is near the top of my yearly list of bests. It may have a vampire in it, but it is also an anti-colonialism story and a history of the Black Foot nation and what happened to its people when white men arrived and killed all their buffalo. Super powerful.

4. Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon -- Martha Ballard lived in Colonial Massachusetts and was a midwife. She kept a diary of what her life was like and the medical practices she used. Lawhon took her diaries and focused on one event she mentioned and made it into a compelling mystery. Very well-done and interesting, made even more so by the details being based on facts.

5. The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich -- Erdrich does it again. She writes in such a way to make us aware of many issues at one time. This time it is the overuse of pesticides in farming, and how Native Americans live, even today, in the 'land of plenty.'

NONFICTION:

1. There's Always This Year: On Baseketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib -- A memoir, of sorts. Also,  partly a sports story, as you would guess from the subtitle, the book explores the popularity of basketball in the region of Ohio where the author grew up. There's Always This Year is also part essay, part memoir, part social commentary, part cultural/racial observation, and part poetry, all moving far beyond basketball. 

2. All My Knotted-Up Life: a Memoir by Beth Moore -- Beth Moore is a Christian educator who has created  many Bible-series used for women's ministry in churches, including my own. In 2016, she made the news because she is one of the few Christians who spoke out against Trump for his Access Hollywood tape comments. This is her remarkable story.

3. Say Nothing: A True Tale of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe -- I'd long heard about the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s through the early 1990s but knew little about it. This book, so well researched and written, cured my ignorance. I found the whole account fascinating.

 

4. Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green  -- One of my must-read authors, John Green is on a mission to wake-up the world as to a deadly infection which is completely curable but the people who need the cure, the poorest of the poor in the world, can't afford the treatments. And the people who can afford the treatment, don't get TB. I told everyone I know to read this book, which doesn't read like a medical book, but it stuffed full of stories of real people, mkaing it personal and relatable.

5. Stay True: a Memoir by Hua Hsu -- An unlikely college friendship — Ken loves preppy polo shirts and Pearl Jam, Hua prefers Xeroxed zines and Pavement — blossoms in 1990s Berkeley, then is abruptly fissured by Ken’s murder in a random carjacking. Around those bare facts, Hsu’s understated memoir builds a glimmering fortress of memory in which youth and identity live alongside terrible, senseless loss. (NYT)

What were your favorite reads of 2025?

-Anne