My 2025 Reading Year + Top 10 Favorite Books

It was hard to pick a rom-com I loved the most this year (because I also really loved reading Annabel Monaghan’s Summer Romance) but this is the one I landed on for this list. Ask me a different day and I could have a different answer.

But this one was so much fun to read. Set in Bath, England, this book is about Anna Appleby and Will Havers, who both work at a magazine and both start rival dating columns each hoping to prove themselves worthy of keeping their jobs.

For Anna’s column, her children choose her dates, which results in all kinds of misadventures. But since this is a romance, you know who she’s going to end up with. I thought this was so much, and I really loved how there was more to Anna’s story beyond the romance. Newly divorced and trying to re-establish her life, she learned different things about herself from different dates and even made some new friends.

Annie B. Jones, who owns the adorable The Bookshelf in Thomasville, Georgia, is someone I’ve followed online since before her Bookshelf days. And I first found her because she had a blog and I fell in love with her writing.

So I was so excited for her debut essay collection and I loved it just as much as I hoped I would. Here she writes about family and faith and what it’s like to live in a small town when she always thought she would have a bigger city in her future.

Her writing is beautiful and comforting and it’s perfect if you just need a book that feels like a hug from a friend.

My favorite poetry collection of the year! You may know Lindsay Rush as MaryOliversDrunkCousin on Instagram.

Her poems are so clever and relatable, some of them filled with rage for the world and some of them filled with unabashed joy.

The ones about joy, about really getting everything you can out of life and not being ashamed of delight, were really what struck me the most. This was the first book I read in 2025, and now, at the year’s end, I already want to read it again.

Quiet family dramas are really my favorite genre (you’ll see a theme in the rest of this list tbh). This was actually my very first Anne Tyler book, and I want to read more.

This is a book about Garrett family, two parents, one brother, two sisters. And each chapter is from the perspective of a different family member, all years apart in their telling.

And it’s about how this family is connected, but also not. Mercy, the matriarch, is intent on carving out some independence. Lily and Alice, the two daughters, are polar opposites. And David, the son, seems to only want to get away from his family.

I loved this one, and am definitely adding more Anne Tyler to my TBR list.

Again, see quiet family dramas. This is Newman’s follow-up to Sandwich, which was one of my favorites from last year, and this one lands on my favorites list too.

Here, we’re back with Rocky and her family. Her elderly father has moved into their garage apartment, her adult daughter is living with them, and her son is off in the city working. And her husband is being supportive (but not always getting it right) in the most endearing ways.

Then two things happen at once: There is a tragic accident in their community that Rocky can’t stop obsessing over, and her body starts having a weird skin condition that no one has an answer to.

I loved all the thoughts about anxiety in this one and how you want to hold on tight to your family. And while all that sounds a little depressing, this book is also so funny and relatable. The fact that so many of us see parts of ourselves in Rocky and her family is, I’m sure, why these books have become so beloved.

Oh man! This book snuck in just under the radar as a December read landing in my top 5! And I can’t believe I’ve been sleeping on Dolly Alderton.

This book is about Andy, who is heartbroken that his girlfriend of 4 years has broken up with him. He’s struggling in pretty much every aspect of his life….his comedy, finding a place to live, having meaningful friendships.

And most of this book is about that struggle. Which sounds bleak, but it’s really not. This book is SO funny and also tender. The writing her is so good, it’s one of those books that just propels you along.

And when you get to the end? Oh man! It pulls everything together in such a great way I thought.

The oldest book on my favorites list! I read this book before we went to Prague this summer, and I loved it so much.

It’s a memoir about communism in the Czech Republic. Kovály’s husband was a notable figure in the government, and she talks about how WWII left a hole easily filled by communism and how her husband and many of his friends were so optimistic for what it could mean for their country.

Eventually though, her husband was arrested and put on the stand in a puppet trial and eventually executed.

It’s a hard book. There is a lot of bleak stuff that happens. But Kovály’s writing is still somehow so hopeful and so beautiful. And it’s one of those books that made me feel better about the time we are living in, because people have faced bad things before with beautiful hope.

I debated about whether this should be 3 or 4 on my list to be honest, but it lands at 3 simply because of how quickly I DEVOURED it.

I didn’t grow up in the evangelical Christian circles where Hatmaker made a name for herself, but of course when her career was “canceled” because of her support for LGBTQ+ people, I paid attention. And then, a couple years later, her marriage fell apart and I, like so many other people, wondered what happened.

Well…here’s what happened. She woke up in the middle of the night to her husband talking to his mistress on the phone.

And this book could easily be a scathing tell-all about that situation. But really it’s about her journey of finding herself as an independent person and connecting the dots of how her and her ex-husband’s upbringings put them in the position of a failing marriage. It’s about learning how to handle her finances on her own and about healing by taking care of herself and about leaning on her family and friends to get through the toughest time in her life.

The writing here is SO good. This wins for the fastest book I read this year. I truly could not put it down.

I can’t believe I didn’t pick this book up until now! What a beautifully quiet book full of interpersonal dramas and cozy family feelings.

This is narrated by Lara, a middle-aged mother whose three young adult daughters are home because of the pandemic and are helping pick cherries on the family farm.

And as they are picking cherries, the girls want to know about one thing: the story of how Lara dated a famous movie star (before he was famous) when they were at a summer theater program together.

This is a book about finding contentment in the choices we make (Lara could have been a famous actress, but chose not to) and about how we think about our past and about family. And the ending is so beautifully heart-wrenching.

Here’s what I mainly want to tell you about this book: I could hardly see the last 30 pages to read them because I was crying so hard. And I loved every second of it.

This book is connected to Writers & Lovers (a favorite of mine in 2020) in that we have the same main character. But it doesn’t really matter if you’ve read the other book or not. This is its own stand alone story.

Here we get Casey, who is only referenced to as Jordan in the book because of a college nickname, recalling her time in college as she dated one boy but really was falling in love with his roommate.

Then, years later, her past comes back to visit and oh it is so sad but so so beautiful. Definitely a content warning for cancer and death in this one, and also heartbreak on all kinds of levels. But I truly cannot recommend it enough. This was by far my favorite book I read this year.