Favorite books in 2025
My favorite reads this year, ordered within each section by the date I read them:
Nonfiction
- The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, by Erik Larson, 2020
- The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World, by A. J. Baime, 2017
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass, 1845
- A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900–1960, by Nikhil Krishnan, 2023
- The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession, by Michael Finkel, 2023
- Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, by Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon, 1996
- Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius (translated by Gregory Hays), 167 (translated 2003)
- Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky, 1997
- Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa, by Marilyn Chase, 2020
- The Common Reader, by Virginia Woolf, 1925
- The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin, 1839
- How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World, by Deb Chachra, 2023
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion, 1968
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962
- The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, by Virginia Postrel, 2020
- Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2003
- Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by Ada Palmer, 2025
- The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans, 2003
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, 2012
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson volume 1: The Path to Power, by Robert A. Caro, 1982
- The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives, by Adam Smyth, 2024
Fiction
- The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman, 2024
- The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, 1920
- The Grief of Stones, by Katherine Addison, 2022
- Medea, by Euripides (translated by Gilbert Murray), 431 B.C. (translated 1912)
- Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon, 2024
- Lent: A Novel of Many Returns, by Jo Walton, 2019
- Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter, 2015
- Tuyo, by Rachel Neumeier, 2020
- Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, 2004
- Middlemarch, by George Eliot, 1872
- Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2024
- Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, 1599
- Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, by Chrétien de Troyes, 1180
- Ajax, by Sophocles (translated by Francis Storr), 442 B.C. (translated 1919)
- Dogs of War, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2017
- Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, 1925
- Children of Memory, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2022
- Penric’s Mission, by Lois McMaster Bujold, 2016
- Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, 1851
- The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton, 1900
- The Dagger in Vichy, by Alastair Reynolds, 2025
- House of Open Wounds, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2023
- The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, 1959
- Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, 2009
- The Orb of Cairado, by Katherine Addison, 2025
- Sanctuary, by Edith Wharton, 1903
- Saturation Point, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2024
- Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel, 2012
- Half a King, by Joe Abercrombie, 2014
- Making History, by K. J. Parker, 2025
- Moonbound, by Robin Sloan, 2024