Best Books of 2025

My Favorite Books I Read in 2025

I get a free eBook every month with Amazon Prime.

I love love love renting eBooks for Kindle or Libby from my local library.

I set a reading goal to read 100 books this year, and I barely completed that.

I’ve read a lot of series and systematically read through entire collections of authors such as Octavia Butler and Joe Haldeman and John Scalzi and Simon Tolkein and Emily St. John Mandel.

The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen

Technically speaking, Hendrik Groen is elderly. But at age 83 and one quarter, this feisty curmudgeon has no plans to go out quietly. Bored of weak tea and potted geraniums, exasperated by the indignities of aging, Hendrik has decided to rebel.

He begins writing an exposé: secretly recording the antics of day-to-day life in his retirement home, where he refuses to take himself, or his fellow “”inmates,”” too seriously. With an eccentric group of friends, he founds the Old-But-Not-Dead Club, and he and his best friend, Evert, gleefully stir up trouble, enraging the home’s humorless director and turning themselves into unlikely heroes.

This was a poignant book for me since I place my parents in assisted living and then my father passed in July. I have so many what-ifs. We really just don’t care about our elders enough.

Artificial Truth: A Novel by J.M. Lee

In the virtual city of Alegria, fantasies are made real, innumerable lifetimes are lived, and even death itself is a survivable experience. An escape from reality that changed the landscape of artificial intelligence, it is home to more than one hundred million people. Though it’s been six years since Alegria’s creator—revolutionary tech genius KC Kim—died of cancer, his legacy is alive in the pinnacle of KC’s genius: an AI named Allen who surges with KC’s memories.

As hard as KC’s widow, Minju, and her new husband, Junmo, try to move on, Minju can’t shake the unnerving feeling that somehow, from somewhere, KC is watching. She sees a stranger who bears an uncanny resemblance to him. A pair of KC’s custom-made shoes arrive at her doorstep. And someone has booked a Tokyo hotel room where she and KC shared happier times. Certain of nothing except KC’s mad innovation, Minju can only imagine what he is accomplishing without even existing.

I hate AI and this book touched on many horrors that I see potentially happening. It turned into a mystery and happy ending and I enjoy Asian novels so much for their different values and style.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl – the fortieth prisoner – sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others’ escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

At no point was I prepared for how anything would turn out and this book has stayed with me and I think about it so often. So many questions unanswered. It’s a great book club item.

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.

Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere.

One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . . .

I love all of Chuck Wendig’s books and this one was really interesting with the psychological and supernatural thrills. I hope we revisit this story in a sequel!

Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune

A magical house. A secret past. A summons that could change everything.

Arthur Parnassus lives a good life, built on the ashes of a bad one. He’s the headmaster of a strange orphanage on a distant and peculiar island, and he hopes to soon be the adoptive father to the six magical and so-called dangerous children who live there.

Arthur works hard and loves with his whole heart so none of the children ever feel the neglect and pain that he once felt as an orphan on that very same island so long ago. And he is not alone: joining him is the love of his life, Linus Baker, a former caseworker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth; Zoe Chapelwhite, the island’s sprite; and her girlfriend, Mayor Helen Webb. Together, they will do anything to protect the children.

But when Arthur is summoned to make a public statement about his dark past, he finds himself at the helm of a fight for the future that his family, and all magical people, deserve.

And when a new magical child hopes to join them on their island home―one who finds power in calling himself monster, a name Arthur worked so hard to protect his children from―Arthur knows they’re at a breaking point: their family will either grow stronger than ever or fall apart.

Welcome back to Marsyas Island. This is Arthur’s story.

TJ Klune’s characters are all so adorable and I loved this sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea. It was just a lovely read and satisfying happy endings.

What was your favorite book this year?

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