The best books of 2025

This list is part of the best books of 2025.

Join 1,210 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2025

Book cover of Middlemarch

John Lawson III ❤️ loved this book because...

I love this novel's timelessness. Seemingly every page has a memorable line such as this: "Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything..."

Reading what Eliot wrote more than 150 years ago endlessly amused me as I matched the follies of her world to the pettiness, mindlessness, and garishness of today's world.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Writing 🥈 Thoughts
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐕 Good, steady pace

By George Eliot ,

Why should I read it?

15 authors picked Middlemarch as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.

Henry James described Middlemarch as a 'treasurehouse of detail' while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's masterpiece as 'one…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2025

Book cover of With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

John Lawson III ❤️ loved this book because...

I loved Sledge's humility. Precious few human beings have endured extraordinary experiences like his as a Marine in the Pacific during World War II. Yet he channels the reader's admiration away from himself and toward the Marines he served alongside. It's impossible not to admire Sledge even though he tells his story in a way that never seeks our praise.

Too many people take too much pleasure in talking about themselves, but Sledge—a model Marine, a model American, and a model human being—is a welcome contrast to such people.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Immersion 🥈 Emotions
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By E.B. Sledge ,

Why should I read it?

10 authors picked With the Old Breed as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The inspiration behind the HBO series THE PACIFIC

This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands...

Landing on the beach at Peleliu in 1944 as a twenty-year-old new recruit to the US Marines, Eugene Sledge can only try desperately to survive. At Peleliu and Okinawa - two of the fiercest and filthiest Pacific battles of WWII - he witnesses the dehumanising brutality displayed by both sides and the animal hatred that each soldier has for his enemy.

During temporary lapses in the fighting, conditions on…


My 3rd favorite read in 2025

Book cover of The Fault in Our Stars

John Lawson III ❤️ loved this book because...

This is a moving, beautiful contemplation of what it means to make the most of the time we have in this world.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Emotions 🥈 Character(s)
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By John Green ,

Why should I read it?

15 authors picked The Fault in Our Stars as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 14, 15, 16, and 17.

What is this book about?

The beloved, #1 global bestseller by John Green, author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and Turtles All the Way Down

"John Green is one of the best writers alive." -E. Lockhart, #1 bestselling author of We Were Liars

"The greatest romance story of this decade." -Entertainment Weekly

#1 New York Times Bestseller * #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller * #1 USA Today Bestseller * #1 International Bestseller

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Kurtz

By John Lawson III ,

Book cover of Kurtz

What is my book about?

Annie Kurtz joins the Marines, deploys to Afghanistan, and has to make a split-second decision. She can follow her orders. Or she can follow her conscience. Nick Willard is a journalist who has pined for Annie since they were in prep school together. While doing his job, he discovers what Annie did.

Together, Nick and Annie battle the half-witted strategies that made the wars on terror so frustrating, wrestle with conflicts between law and morality, and explore the tensions between love and friendship.

Book cover of Middlemarch
Book cover of With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
Book cover of The Fault in Our Stars

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