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 Eye of the Heart

Monika Kostera ❤️ loved this book because...

A profundly inspiring book - yet written in a highly readable way, lovely to read.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Thoughts 🥈 Teach
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Cynthia Bourgeault ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Eye of the Heart as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This groundbreaking book shares the evolution of Cynthia Bourgeault's spiritual journey and offers a new map to understanding energy and our collective reality.

In Eye of the Heart, Cynthia Bourgeault investigates the imaginal realm--an energetic realm well known to the mystical traditions but often forgotten in our own times. It is invisible to the physical eye, but clearly perceptible through the eye of the heart. The imaginal realm has long been associated with the personal world of dreams, prophecy, and oracles, and it also points toward a higher vision of our human purpose that is both evolutionary and collective. Bourgeault…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2025

Book cover of The Spirit of Hope

Monika Kostera ❤️ loved this book because...

Powerful and evocative - shows how to resist nihilism and how to remain human in dark times

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Thoughts 🥈 Teach
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Byung-Chul Han , Daniel Steuer (translator) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Spirit of Hope as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A spectre is haunting us: fear. We are constantly confronted with apocalyptic scenarios: pandemics, world war, the climate catastrophe. Images of the end of the world and the end of human civilization are conjured up with ever greater urgency. Anxiously, we face a bleak future. Preoccupied with crisis management, life becomes a matter of survival.

But it is precisely at such moments of fear and despair that hope arises like a phoenix from the ashes. Only hope can give us back a life that is more than mere survival. Fear isolates people and closes them off from one another; hope,…


My 3rd favorite read in 2025

Book cover of The Uncontrollability of the World

Monika Kostera ❤️ loved this book because...

Brilliant and eye-opening. This book shows how consciousness works imaginatively in a larger context, as an encounter with world.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Outlook 🥈 Originality
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Hartmut Rosa , James C. Wagner (translator) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Uncontrollability of the World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The driving cultural force of that form of life we call 'modern' is the desire to make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world - only then do we feel touched, moved and alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.

Our lives are played out on the border between what we can control and that which lies outside our control. But because we late-modern human beings seek to make the world controllable, we tend to encounter the…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

The University of Hope

By Monika Kostera ,

Book cover of The University of Hope

What is my book about?

Is the University as we know it dead? Monika Kostera thinks not, but across the globe universities are under attack, be it by external forces or from within. Will they survive? Our civilisation requires that they must: planetary survival and sustainability depend on them. This book provides vital resources to give us all - professional academics, students, and university administrators - hope that universities will emerge renewed out of the current crisis. As this inspiring work shows, the practice of academic virtues can enable us to cultivate the awareness of the common good that academia serves: the preservation and development of humanity's potential of knowledge.

Drawing on a rich variety of ideas, theories, empirical cases, real and fictitious stories, as well as examples and images from art and literature, Monika Kostera demonstrates the splendid complexity of academic ecosystems. It is through looking for hope for the university that we find hope for society and the planet. In suggesting tangible steps for restoring a sense of meaning to academic work and the collegial community worldwide, The University of Hope shows us a path out of the darkness.

Book cover of Eye of the Heart
Book cover of The Spirit of Hope
Book cover of The Uncontrollability of the World

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