Last year, I read a total of 65 books. Most of them were good, some were horrible, and very few were remarkable, so I’ve narrowed down all the books I read into a snapshot of the best and the worst.
Best of 2025
First, a few honorable mentions:
- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
- The Women by Kristin Hannah
- My Friends by Frederick Backman
- Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
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This book changed how I read fiction. I’m not even kidding.
When I read the back of this book, the synopsis sounded boring and uninspired, but I bought it anyway. Cloud Cuckoo Land weaves together five different storylines, going from 15th-century Constantinople, 2019 in America, and a 22nd-century spaceship. All of these storylines are strategically and methodically connected by one ancient Greek text.
That seemed complicated and easy to mess up, giving way to many opportunities for lazy writing to connect them all. Only, Anthony Doerr does it and does it well.
When it all came together, I thought my head was going to explode. I remember putting the book down and thinking, How did Doerr come up with that?
I now gravitate to boring book descriptions. I look at the fiction section and find the seemingly uninspired and dare them to be as good as Cloud Cuckoo Land, and, honestly? It’s working out better than you’d think.
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
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Bel Canto is by far one of the most creative and remarkable stories I’ve ever encountered. It’s a story about a terrorist group in an unnamed South American country holding a group of elitist society members and one opera singer hostage for five months. For those five months, the hostages and terrorists live together in a wonderfully strange and heartbreaking harmony. Bel Canto is a testament to humanity, proving how little we know of each other and the world around us.
- Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
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This book was absolutely incredible. Martyr! follows Cyrus, a queer Iranian-American poet and recovering alcoholic grappling with depression after the death of his mother. Through his obsession with martyrs, Cyrus begins to unravel what it means to live and die.
To put it simply, it’s beautiful, poetic, hilarious, and heartbreaking. I cried when it was over, not necessarily because it was sad, but because I was going to miss Cyrus and I wanted to give him a hug. I loved it.
- Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid
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Listen, I hate to be that person, I really do, but this book was incredible.
If you look at the rest of my Best list, you’ll see no other smutty books. The smutty books I read are few and far between and always exist right in the middle, not horrible, but not great either. They’re what I like to call “palette cleansers”; my method to get my brain ready for my next big read.
Heated Rivalry was the furthest thing from a palette cleanser. Sure, it has a lot of smut, but it’s also so much deeper than that. The book seeps with longing and brings the trope of forbidden love into its rawest and most devastating form: reality. The story follows two major league hockey players who fall in love while the world watches them as rivals on the screen; it’s beautiful, cheesy, and I unironically ate it up.
Worst of 2025
- The Inmate by Freida McFadden
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I read this one for my book club, so it was entirely against my will. The Inmate follows a woman who takes a nursing position in the maximum-security prison where her high school sweetheart is living out his sentence. The twist being, it was her testimony that put the man behind bars for murder when they were 18 years old.
The main character’s inner monologue was as infuriating as the plot was predictable. The dialogue and annoying characters felt like reading a story written by a 15-year-old. (Sorry McFadden fans.) I have nothing against thrillers, but they have to be done well, and McFadden really fell short here.
- Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston
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Ashley Poston is the author of The Seven Year Slip, a romance novel that’s become increasingly popular in the BookTok community recently. I thought that book was pretty good, so I wanted to try out Dead Romantics, her latest.
And okay, yes, I read the back of the book. I knew what I was getting myself into, but it sure was weird.
Ever since she was a kid, the main character could see dead people. One day, her “hot” new boss shows up as a ghost, and as they spend more time together (her alive and him dead), she falls in love. The woman falls in love with a ghost! A dead person! Someone who she’s supposed to help get to the Great Beyond or whatever! To make it worse, she was totally woe-is-me about it.
I was not a fan, but I blame myself for reading it while knowing that it was a ghost story and Poston writes romance. What else did I expect?
- The Ministry of Time by Kaliane BradleyÂ
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I wish I had never read this book. Genuinely.
The Ministry of Time follows a woman who works for a futuristic UK ministry that monitors “expats,” or people they have stolen from the past via time travel. In it, the protagonist inevitably falls in love with her assigned time traveler, which in itself feels like a cop-out for a more interesting storyline. And it’s only made worse by her self-absorption as she belittles the time traveler’s distaste for her futuristic world and desire to return to his own.
Bradley does what thousands of authors have done for decades: she provides us with yet another shallow female main character who only thinks of herself and her maddening love while pretending it’s profound. This main character is in a position of power and squanders it because she can’t be in the same room with someone without thinking she’s in love with them. And what’s worse? The time traveler, Graham, is afraid because the woman is all he has. Graham has no other option in this strange world he’s been forced into but to follow her lead. It was gross, distasteful, and a step back for women characters in literature.