Now that 2025 is ending what has been your favorite book you’ve read in the last year?
Mine is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (audiobook is the way to go!)
Lesser known: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle. Satire Horror. It was a fun ride.
All Sinners Bleed (mystery noir) by S.A. Cosby and My Friends by Frederik Backman are also my notable mentions
I always have trouble picking favorites, so here are the three I most enjoyed:
- The Crows by C.M. Rosens - 90s chick lit crossed with eldritch horror: a young woman buys a house in a seaside town, unaware that some of the townsfolk are secretly eldritch monstrosities, or that the house is more than it seems. Suffers a little bit from self-published editing in places, but the awfulness + fluff combo works surprisingly well; I devoured this.
- Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko - dark academia fantasy with cosmic horror elements: a teenager is coerced into attending a mysterious institute, where the main coursework is incomprehensible, and nobody will explain what the students are learning. Despite this being much too slowly paced for me and not my typical subgenre, the magic system was fascinating.
- Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm - short story collection focusing on scifi technology. I’m not a huge short story fan, but I read a few collections for bingo, and this is the only one I liked as a whole.
For me I think it was Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. So many emotions lol.
Project Hail Mary was another one of the highlights!
deleted by creator
I read (listened to) the first 6 books of Dungeon Crawler Carl. The whole series is fantastic. Best enjoyed via audio book because the narrator does a great job with the voices.
I also got around to reading The Shining by Stephen King. Definitely worth the read!
Happy New Year!
I’m reading Dungeon Crawler Carl at the moment and it’s great and completely bonkers! Just started book 4 today.
Damnit Donut!
A good narrator is priceless!
I can definitely recommend the recent sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep. The movie adaptation is not bad, but as in most cases the book is better. What’s interesting is that the book version of Doctor Sleep is a sequel to the book version of The Shining, while the movie follows up the 1980 Kubrick film.
Just added to my tbr!
Definitely the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. Currently listening to the Bobiverse series and it is a close second.
same… i read Project Hail Mary and it was awesome…
arl read The Gone World and it was also amazing
I haven’t done a full recap yet, but this is year I read all of the Murderbot books (recommended if that’s your sort of humor, steer clear otherwise) and the Black Sun trilogy. Honestly the latter has stayed with me the longest, even if it’s a light read.
Project Hail Mary is a sound hard scifi book that finally doesn’t mix romance into everything (as or rarely happens since a couple of decades).
I read all the Murderbot books in a row a couple of times a year and they never get worse, they are fantastic.
And Project Hail Mary is so good, I love the relationship with Rocky, I really did feel horror and dread when he was in danger and that is very rare for me.
The Devils. Fantastic mix of grim dark and fantasy.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
I read that in 2024. It really stuck with me and honestly in a way felt timeless. As their “present” was just the apartment really with no notable descriptors but def felt the shift into the past. Amazing writing.
One of my favorites I read was the trilogy which starts with The Three-body Problem. Mind boggling stuff, and page turners, but not perfect.
I also read a lot of Stephen King, and the award for the best book I read in 2025 has to go to The Green Mile. It’s one of King’s best, and one I have great memories of reading when it came out.
I’m going to go with Dungeon Crawler Carl book 7: This Inevitable Ruin. The whole series is great, but TIR reaches new heights. Just the scope and how everything meshes together is amazing. I’m looking forward to more.
I am so excited to listen to Book 7! I’m waiting for my husband to catch up!
I read a lot of great books this year. But, my shortlist goes to one author: Omar El Akkad.
One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This (2025) and American War (2017) were both revelations.
P.S.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) by Rashid Khalidi. An absolutely vital history in its address of Occupied Palestine, the State of Israel, and the world’s interactions with them. In much the same way Tony Judt deepened my perspective of Europe with Postwar, and Davids Wengrow and Graeber pushed my understandings with The Dawn of Everything, Khalidi weaves family history with world events to lend a sorely lost dimension to a vilified people.
The Lies of Locke Lamora and its sequels are wonderful reads. Loved the world and characters and has a fun gripping plot.
Those books are fantastic
This year my highlight was “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang.
It is a collection of (not so) short stories. I didn’t like every one, but those I liked were absolutely brilliant. The title story, “Exhalation”, was one of those. I wanted to read something by Ted Chiang specifically because I adore the movie “Arrival” (2016), and found out it was based on one of his stories (not in “Exhalation”).
Btw. I liked “Project Hail Mary” too, read it last year.
I read my first Ted Chiang this year! I think my favorite was his short story “Tower of Babylon”. It dragged a bit for me but “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” gave me a lot of food for thought with the current LLM mania. I’m looking forward to more.
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. The former is an incredibly important read for understanding nationalist anticolonial wars of liberation and the latter is a deeply affecting account of slavery. Harriet Jacobs’ experience is genuinely horrifying and disturbingly common.
Upvote for Fanon. I read Wretched of the Earth as my first book of '25, and A Dying Colonialism late in '24. If you haven’t already, I’d definitely recommend The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s only novel and his 2024 pseudomemoir The Message.
Thanks for the recommendations. My list grows ever longer
