My Favorite Reads of 2025
Note: If you’d rather watch the video, you can do so here.
I have friends who can read 10-11 books a month. I am not one of those people.
Generally, I average about three books a month, sometimes less if life is squeezing me like a lemon, or if I’m reading something super long (looking at you, King Sorrow). But I did read some awesome books that I really wanted to talk about this year, so here I am.
A few things before I start:
I read just about anything, but I don’t really like historical nonfiction or romance novels. I mean, I’ll read a romance novel, but I don’t tend to choose them unless I’m looking for something very light and fluffy.
I don’t always read what’s new. I just read what grabs me. So if you hear a book in here and you’re like “Arianna, that book has been out for years, where have you been?” mind ya bizness.
I count DNF’s as a book read. I tried, I just couldn’t finish it. And I deserve some credit for trying, dammit.
OK, so with that said, let’s start with the shining stars for me. These were books I rated 4 or 5 stars out of 5:
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal
See? What’d I tell you? I know damn well this book came out in 2017, but I read it this year, so here we are.
For those of you who don’t know, this is the story of Nikki, a woman who doesn’t quite fit into the orthodox Punjabi culture. She winds up agreeing to teach a writing class to her elders, only to find out that:
1. By “writing class,” the powers that be meant a literal “class to teach women to write in English,” not creative writing, as Nikki first thought,
and 2. These women do want to tell stories. But only dirty stories, about wee-wees and vaginas, which I’m sure you’d imagine won’t go over well in a patriarchal community such as theirs.
There’s tension as the women try not to get caught, and you feel it pretty heavily in every chapter. This book was funny, it was poignant, and it was creative. I loved that it would, in one fell swoop, point out our constant dismissal of elders and their humanity and then give us erotic stories where the guy’s member was referred to by the names of veggies. I know some people had a problem with the murder subplot, and I’ll agree that it didn’t add much for me, but you know what? I loved the book so much that I was willing to look past that.
I think it took me three days to read this one because I was so engrossed. One of my absolute faves of the year.
The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune
The way this book alley-ooped me needs to be studied.
I started out unsure as to whether or not I was even going to like it. In fact, I was a little worried at first that I was getting bored with it. Then, just in time, it pulled me in and kept me until the last page.
In this one, Linus, a social worker for magical kids, is tasked with reviewing a foster home for a group that’s supposedly more dangerous than any other. Linus isn’t an interesting guy; in fact, that’s why he’s chosen. He’s gray, milquetoast, and willing to just do his job as he’s asked. He takes honest, straightforward notes and doesn’t seem to feel one way or the other about anything. The perfect company man to shut down a place without guilt.
But man…the way this book made me care was impressive. I laughed out loud a few times, felt anger when I was supposed to, and almost cried at the end. Well...for me, it was almost. I didn’t have tears in my eyes, but I thought I might, which is more than any book has ever done to me before. Anyone who’s gone through racism will also feel parts of this pretty hard.
This was beautiful and a definite rec from me. Next up…
Storm Front (The Dresden Files #1) by Jim Butcher
I know. This one’s old, too. I warned you.
I initially picked this up because I was told that my book was very similar to The Dresden Files when it comes to voice and vibes. And dammit, they were right. But I still have some room before I get to Butcher’s level, I think.
This follows Harry Dresden, a wizard and a private investigator who’s tasked with hunting down a murderer in modern-day Chicago. Harry is funny, he’s intelligent, and he’s the perfect frumpy PI. I’ve told people before that murder mysteries are some of the hardest things to write, because you have to know the ending the whole time, but not give it away to your audience. Butcher does that beautifully through this whole thing. I’m also a sucker for “voicey” narrators, and this whole book is like being in Dresden’s head. I loved it.
If my book ever makes it onto shelves, just know that I didn’t read Butcher’s work until after I’d written mine, ok?
That said, I’m honored to be likened to this at all. You should definitely check it out if you haven’t already.
The Witch’s Daughter by Paula Brackston
I don’t remember who suggested this one to me, but goddamn was it brilliant.
I read this right after Erotic Stories, so it took me a sec to adjust to the different language, but soon as I got used to it, I couldn’t put it down.
The book follows Elizabeth Hawksmith as she loses her family to the plague, loses her family to a witch trial, and then becomes a witch herself. She’s then pursued through the ages by a man who’d love to claim her soul for the devil, even if it means punishing everyone surrounding her.
I honestly wasn’t sure what to think about this one at first, but by the end I was thrilled I’d picked it up. There are more books in the series, and I fully plan on picking them up. Y’know…once I’m through the rest of my TBR. Which may be never. But you get my drift.
NEXT.
The Hacienda by Isabel Canas
Oh hey, look! A book less than a decade old!
This one came out in 2022, in case you’re wondering.
Anyway.
The Hacienda follows Beatriz after she marries into a family with money and moves into a haunted home during the aftermath of the Mexican War for Independence. As is tradition in every horror movie, Beatriz continues to hallucinate and be driven to a place of madness, only for everyone to gaslight her at every turn. The only one who doesn’t is a priest named Andres, who’s got some connections of his own to The Other Side.
I remember reading afterwards that this was Canas’s debut novel, and I kind of had an existential crisis as a writer. For a debut especially, the language in this is beautiful and expertly descriptive. There’s a part in here where she describes rainclouds that are pregnant with rain (not the words she uses) that made me actually say “ooh. That’s good” out loud.
Not gory, not vulgar, but still creepy and very, very good. I’m so glad I stumbled on this one.
Everyone in my Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson
Continuing with my love for narrators with a distinctive voice, we have this one that I stumbled on and bought on a whim. I had a blast with this one.
This is a whodunit starring the dour Cunningham family as they witness murder while reuniting in a faraway cabin during a snowstorm. It’s the usual, but different, thanks to Stevenson’s storytelling.
I’m going to say right now that I could tell from the beginning that people would either find Stevenson’s writing style charming, or they’d be annoyed with it. I was part of the former group and loved how inventive it was. He tells you the pages on which people die. He breaks the fourth wall constantly. And yet, he still manages to catch you off-guard with twists and turns throughout the story. I will say that the ending felt a little out of left field, but it wasn’t enough to mess anything up for me.
Don’t you love when you stumble on a new favorite by accident? I do.
Next up:
A Rival Most Vial: Potioneering for Love and Profit by R.K. Ashwick
That’s right. I read a cozy fantasy with romance notes. Big whoop, wanna fight about it?
This one came highly recommended in the cozy fantasy community, and it was actually the last book I was going to give a chance before writing off the genre entirely.
Just a quick sidestep into backstory, so you get what I mean: I read The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna last year and it quickly became one of my favorite books ever. I found out it would be considered “cozy fantasy,” and I got excited at the idea of such a genre. I was like, “hell yeah, something that fits the Stay At Home With Tea and Cookies vibe? Yes please.”
But then, I found that there are degrees of cozy, and I can’t do full cozy.
Some of these books are literally “she woke up. She ate a pie. She opened her shop and talked to someone neato. She went to bed” for 500 pages (I’m only sort of exaggerating). I couldn’t do it. I’d run into too many like that by the time I ran into A Rival Most Vial, and so I was a bit jaded.
But this one is a fun read. It keeps things interesting, the characters are well-built, and the plot – two competing potion makers tasked with making a potion for the mayor’s daughter – is enough to hold attention through the whole thing.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend this if you’re looking for an adrenaline rush, but for something that’ll get you through a few rainy afternoons? This is the book.
King Sorrow by Joe Hill
Fair warning: I’m biased. I love Joe Hill. He wrote one of my top 5 books of all time (Horns), and he wrote Heart-Shaped Box, and I find his style fucking brilliant. So I’m not going to be fully impartial here.
This one is the newest book I’ve read on this list, coming out October of this year. It follows a group of students at the fictional Rackham College in the Northeastern US who, once backed into a corner, wind up summoning an honest-to-God dragon who demands a name of someone to kill every year, lest he kill someone in the group instead. The story is told through rotating POVs over many years, and I’m not gonna lie: it gets weird sometimes. But the story never gets boring, the lore is incredibly fascinating, and I found myself really drawn into the whole thing in the end especially, which I think was exciting and beautifully written. There are a couple moments in the book that had me asking plot questions, but otherwise I had a really good time reading this.
This bitch is looooong though. It took me two weeks to read, and I don’t take that long to read anything. So if you’re going on a long flight, this one might just last you til you land.
And finally:
The Reformatory by Tannanarive Due
This was so good, but also incredibly infuriating.
Not the story. The story was great. It’s about a boy named Robert who winds up unjustly imprisoned in a boys’ “school” that’s rampant with murder, rape, and abuse against the boys interned therein. Robert is also able to see ghosts of the boys killed there, and it winds up putting him on the headmaster’s radar, which is not somewhere you want to be.
The writing is wonderful, the spooky parts are perfectly spooky, and the story is engrossing. No, the story isn’t the angering part.
The angering part is that the reformatory in this book is based off of a real school, the Dozier School for Boys, in Marianna, Florida. This place was known for hurting and killing many boys in its time, and yet it stayed open for 111 years. In fact, in the notes for the book, Due says that she wrote The Reformatory because she had a family member who went to Dozier, and she wanted to write him a happier ending than the one he actually got. The fact that adults willingly, knowingly sent boys – many of them Black – to a place to be essentially tortured by authority figures pisses me off. And there are many moments in this book where you’ll go “please. No one is that evil.” Only to realize that, yes they are. They existed, and most of them got away with the things they did. It’s enough to make you ragey, honestly.
But the book itself is incredible and one I highly recommend.
So those were my favorites this year. I read way more than that, but I would be here forever if I went through all of them. I will say that I DNF’ed three books this year:
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, because while I get that the house is a character in this, I can only read so many paragraphs describing curtains before I feel like throwing the book against a wall.
The first book of the Scholomance series by Namoi Novik, because her main character was too sarcastic, even for me. I like sarcasm – love it, even – but when it makes the main character an asshole to even those who are kind to them, I lose interest. Also, there was quite a bit of expo and lingo dumping that made things a little hard to follow and I felt like I was getting hit with too much too soon.
And American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I know he’s poison, but I’d been wanting to read this one for awhile and I already had it. After getting about 50% through, I gave up and read a review that said that they felt like they were “reading and reading and nothing was happening” which summed up my gripe perfectly. It was well-written, but I got so bored and was tired of going nowhere.
Also, I just want to bring up that I read Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski this year, too, and I loved it. It’s an eye-opening look into sex psychology and I think anyone should read it whether they’re in a relationship or not.
That’s all I’ve got for this year. If you’ve got any other books you want to suggest to me, if you want to make my TBR truly insurmountable, drop them for me. I’m always taking recs!
