A Year in Review, Literarily
By Pam Parker
Director of Library Operations
Our “Best of 2025” is a smorgasbord of reads, with 50 fiction and 50 nonfiction titles, selected from books published during the year. Using literary awards, other ‘best of’ lists, starred reviews, staff picks, and patron suggestions, we handcraft our list with an eye for stand-out reads that we suggest will endure well beyond the calendar year.
Ultimately, we hope these end-of-the-year recommendations have the flavor of a good home-cooked meal. The aim being to inspire you to read your fill of the year’s most delectable literary offerings.
‘Blue Ribbon’ Reading
We generally start by tracking major book awards. Some of the best minds in the publishing world are engaged in informing our major literary awards, of which there are many. No small amount of work is involved, from nominations to short- and long-lists, and, finally, the winners emerge throughout late 2025 and into 2026.
Two big winners in fiction have been announced for 2025, both of which we highly recommend:
National Book Award Winner
- The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (& His Mother) | Rabih Alameddine | Tragic/Comic | FICTION Alameddine
Booker Prize Winner
- Flesh | David Szalay | Urban Morality/Class | FICTION Szalay
To be frank, award-winning reads can feel like hard nuts to some readers. These more literary reads are not for everyone, clearly. So, we also try to include plenty of reads for the year that have been popular with readers themselves, like:
Popular Reads in 2025
- Broken Country | Clare Leslie Hall | Suspense/Rural Noir | FICTION Hall
- Wild Dark Shore | Charlotte McConaghy | Suspense/Climate/Antarctica | FICTION McConaghy
- A Marriage at Sea: Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck | Sophie Elmhirst | Survival Tale/Marriage | 910.91 ELM
- Careless People: A Cautionary Tale | Sarah Wynn-Williams | Memoir/Social Media | 302.32 WYN
What’s Trending This Year?
Some 2025 trends in publishing include:
- Hybrid genres (aka ‘mash up’ reads like historical mystery, author memoir, scifi Western)
- Escapism (‘feel good’ reads, stories of overcoming/survival, ‘Tragicomic’, ‘Romantasy’)
- Stories reflecting contemporary social issue (AI, climate disaster, social realities)
One way to spice up the year is to explore these trends. In our ‘Best of 2025’ lists, we’ve included a short bit of info about each title to guide you in finding your interests. This works for some people but if you need more info, just click the link to find a summary of title or place a hold.
Keep in mind that Readers’ Advisory is a service we love to provide at The Community Library. Ask us to help find a spinoff of your favorite genres or titles from an author you’ve just heard about. Chances are good that we hold it, can add it to our collection or bring it from another library.
Librarians are keenly aware that plenty of outstanding reads never win awards or make bestseller lists. They are waiting on the shelf to be discovered by you, the reader who is curious enough to seek out something new.
Exploring Other Worlds | Facing Darker Realities
This year, we’ve tried to reach beyond borders, including award-winning stories about places few of us are likely to go. This includes some international reads published this year in English translation. We’ve also embraced some darker realities we face as human beings, from grief to ongoing conflicts to turning points in technology and science.
Here’s a couple of titles that will take you elsewhere, be it a plateful of pre-revolutionary Iran or a sampling of Japan’s noir mysteries:
- King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution | Scott Anderson | Biography/ Iranian History | 955.05 AND
- Moderation | Elaine Castillo | Virtual Reality/Relationships | FICTION Castillo
- Strange Pictures | Uketsu | Mystery/Japanese | MYSTERY Uketsu
Yes, a stew of big issues has emerged in literary form like the numerous reads about technologies and social justice. Several meaty reads from the tough end of the roast that you might sample are:
- If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies | Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares | Technology/AI | 006.3 YUD
- We Survived the Night | Julian Brave NoiseCat | Memoir/Indigenous History | 970 NOI
- Katabasis | R.F. Kuang | Underworld/Mythical | SciFic – SCIFIC KUA
While literary tastes can vary dramatically, stories pull us together by serving up new ways of experiencing the world through distant places and varied voices. A book can lend us new ways of perceiving our increasingly complex world, in short.
“How do you choose your recommendations?”
This is a question that I always get when our ‘Best of’ lists come out – I hope this essay better explains the process. That said, our recipe also includes a dash of librarian love for great achievements in writing. Our special sauce to find these includes numerous professional resources offered by the American Library Association and other librarian entities like the Library Journal—a library magazine dating to 1876 and founded by Melvil Dewey.
And, I personally add a bit of sugar-and-spice garnered from readers who frequent our library. You are invited to keep sharing your good reads with us—as well as those yummy plates of treats! Yes, you know who you are.
As another year ends, we take time to reflect on outstanding achievements in literature and to revisit the reviews of books bubbling up to the top. We hope our ‘Best of 2025’ is a feast you feel is worth attending.
