The Best Things We Read in 2025
I love a tradition. I love a list. I love smart people recommending book. It is no wonder that The Stacks annual Best Things We Read This Year list is one of my favorite things I release into the world each year.
Every November, I shyly crawl into the inbox of every guest of The Stacks from that year, and try to be chill when I ask them to write me a few sentences in support of the best book they read that year and the one book they’re looking forward to in the next year.
Every year, I am stunned at how many of them find/make/take the time to do it. What I am not surprised about is how this list is always the best list of must-read books. Last year, two people said Frankenstein was the best thing they read, and honestly, this year, same!
J. Wortham
Journalist, culture writer, and co-author of Black Futures
The most enjoyable book that I read this year was The Compound by Aisling Rawle. I studied a lot of non-fiction books this year, for research and to get a grip on what the hell is happening in the world, and I really needed something dishy to wind down the evenings with, and this one kept me hooked from start to finish. It’s about a contestant playing a reality TV show game that’s a cross between Love Island and Survivor, that somehow didn’t further depress me about the state of the world. I also spent a lot of time with Good Things by Samin Nosrat. Samin’s accessible recipes are invocations to invite people over to cook for them, but also to care for them, and yourself. She shares so much about her own personal difficulties and navigating through them by tapping into the pleasure centers of flavor and taste. Lately, I’ve become consumed with the quality of my life, and inviting in beauty and intention into every area, and Samin makes that so easy with her incredible thoughtfulness. Like, I might only have the energy to make a Japanese sweet potato for dinner, but at least I can smother it in her banging tahini sbagliato, you know?
Books I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, and The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri.
J was our guest for Episode 352, where we discussed the relationship between reading comprehension and social media, their evolving relationship with their name, and what they look for in a great book; and Episode 356, where we discussed The Ministry of Time by Kailene Bradley.
Michael Waters
Author of The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports
Opening up Margery Kempe by Robert Glück is like entering into a literary fever dream. Somehow, the story of a real-life 15th-century Catholic mystic who has a quasi-sexual love for Jesus Christ collapses into the tangled relationship between our contemporary narrator, Bob, and another man, L. And when I say “collapses,” I choose that word intentionally: at times Bob, on the page, becomes Margery. This book demands patience, or maybe just that you let go of trying to decode its secrets—you won’t succeed—but once you lean in, you’ll find yourself in the thrall of one of the most gorgeously written novels I’ve ever encountered.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: I will admit that I’ve already gotten a glimpse of this one, but The Absent Woman: The Genius of Janet Malcolm by Eve Sneider promises to be an intimate and carefully studied portrait of one of our most complicated, and perhaps intentionally inscrutable, nonfiction writers.
Michael was our guest for Episode 355, where we discussed his book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports.
Ira Madison III
Author of Pure, Innocent Fun
The best thing I read this year was Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist, which has long been out of print until this year. I struggled to get into another iconic queer author from this era — I tried Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples after his death and felt unmoved! I’m sad that I was, but I’ll explore his other books next year. But this story felt so contemporary with its hilarious repartee between its gay lovers, compassionate rendering of the narrator’s neuroses, and delving into film criticism by way of analyzing An American Werewolf in London. I’m so glad the cover caught my eye at McNally Jackson one rainy afternoon.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed.
Ira was our guest for Episode 357, where we discussed his book, Pure, Innocent Fun.
Brian Goldstone
Author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
The best book I read this year was Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism by Eve L. Ewing. This is an extraordinary, essential work: a beautifully crafted, wholly absorbing examination of how American schools were built to uphold racial hierarchy, legitimize dispossession, and entrench an exploitative economic order. Everyone—not just educators but everyone—should read this book. It has a wonderful pedagogical quality, as if Ewing is enacting, in the writing itself, the sort of counter-curriculum the book ultimately calls for. On each page, you’re in the room with her as she walks you through how America’s architecture of inequality was constructed, and how its pernicious logics were embedded, layer by layer, in the nation’s educational system.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: The Overseer Class: A Manifesto by Steven W. Thrasher.
Brian was our guest for Episode 368, where we discussed his book There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.
Kara Brown
Screenwriter & Producer
The Deluge by Stephen Markley was both the best and most terrifying book I read this year. It was also the longest, which is probably just a coincidence. It really is one of those epics spanning something like fifty years with an extensive cast of characters that feels daunting in the beginning but comes together, dare I say, perfectly? It’s also a pretty horrifying look at what might happen if we don’t curb climate change and fascism, so, you know, not a light read, but an excellent one.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: This year I read the first three installments (out of what will be seven books) of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume and I can’t wait to read the fourth next year.
Kara was our guest for Episode 370, where we discussed book adaptations and the writers who inspire her, and Episode 373, where we discussed Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley.
Frederick Joseph
Author of This Thing of Ours
My favorite read of 2025 was Truth Is by Hannah V. Sawyerr, which I finished just a couple of days ago. It’s a novel in verse about a Black teen who has an abortion and after people find out, she has to figure out family, friendships, romance, and what it means to carry truths that feel too heavy to say out loud. The book moves through moments with a beautifully raw honesty, showing how much of growing up is shaped by what we are taught to keep to ourselves. It’s one of the best verse novels I’ve read in a long time, and the kind of book that sits with you after you close it. Truly loved it.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: In 2026, I will be spending my time working on my debut adult novel, and I plan to return to reading a lot of Toni Morrison and N. K. Jemisin in the process.
Frederick was our guest for Episode 372, where we discussed his book This Thing of Ours.
Ceara O’Sullivan
Host of the Petty Crimes podcast and Writer at Saturday Night Live
The book I loved reading most this year was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (which I think The Stacks covered in August!!). I don’t usually read nonfiction books about botany (lol), but I completely fell in love with this one. I learned so much about plants and the natural world, and loved how Kimmerer balances logic and reverence in her work as an Indigenous scientist. I haven’t convinced anyone else to read it yet, so clearly my sales pitch needs some work — but they’re definitely missing out.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: The book I’m most looking forward to reading next year is The Wedding People by Alison Espach. I read the first chapter and thought it was really sharp and funny, but I haven’t had time to keep going. I’m looking forward to finally giving it the attention it deserves in 2026.
Ceara was our guest for Episode 374, where we discussed her TV writing career, and Episode 377, where we discussed The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel.
Dana Williams
Author of Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship
The best book I read in 2025 was Howard French’s The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide. French is a consummate scholar in the guise of a journalist/author. The book’s prose is lovely, and his centering of Kwame Nkrumah (and Africa) in any serious understanding of the modern world is powerful.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: The book I’m most looking forward to reading in 2026 is Grown Women by Sarai Johnson. Who doesn’t love an acclaimed debut novel that you’ve long wanted to read but hadn’t yet made time for? Before the end of the first quarter of the new year, I’m finishing Grown Women!
Megan was our guest for Episode 378, where we discussed her book Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship.
Megan Greenwell
Author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
The best thing I read in 2025 was Walter Kempowski’s final novel, All for Nothing. I stopped reading nonfiction for a solid half of this year, needing to immerse myself in worlds that were not our own. Kempowski’s book, which tells the stories of a string of visitors to an East Prussian estate in the final days of World War II, isn’t light fare. But nor is it a simple tragedy. Kempowski is too singular a writer for that.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: Effingers by Gabriele Tergit
Megan was our guest for Episode 380, where she discussed her book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream.
After several years of reading mostly for research, falling asleep under a flurry of court documents and interview transcripts, I finally returned to pleasure reading in 2025, and what a pleasure it was! I read many excellent books, but perhaps my favorite was Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin. Rob’s descriptions are deeply original and often bitingly funny; he weaves incisive commentary on race and class through his narrative with remarkable grace. One of his blurbers, Kaveh Akbar, said it best: Great Black Hope is “full of sentences I want to cut out and glue to my forehead.”
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: A book I’m looking forward to in 2026 is London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. (As a narrative nonfiction person, is there another answer?)
Haley was our guest for Episode 381, where we discussed her book A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children.
Tre Johnson
Author of Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy
My favorite thing I read this year was Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, an author I’d always assumed had a writing orientation too far afield of what I’d ever be interested in. But I bought Demon last minute on the way to CDMX and enjoyed the surreality of Demon’s voice feeling so present, real, and natural. Demon Copperhead is epic in nearly every form—time, characters, locations, depth of emotion, and a truly lived-in experience in rural, poor America. Astonishing stuff.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: In 2026, I want to return to my shelved practice of an annual read. I’m looking forward to starting 2026 re-reading John Gardner’s Grendel; the philosophical, humorous, painful, and humanizing retelling of Beowulf from the voice and POV of the ‘monster’ Grendel.
Tre was our guest for Episode 384, where we discussed her book Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy.
Cleyvis Natera
Author of The Great Paloma Resort
The best thing I read in 2025 was Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Casualties of Truth. The novel kicks off on a night when the protagonist, Prudence, and her husband, Davis, are heading into a stormy DC night to meet Davis’ new colleague. But when they arrive, Prudence recognizes Matshediso, who she knew decades earlier when she spent time in South Africa as a law student and attended the 1996 truth and reconciliation hearings. The secrets these two share threaten to bring Prudence’s entire life crumbling down. As we visit the past and learn the details of what binds these two together, it’s impossible not to ponder some big questions. Can a country move forward toward forgiveness and repair after unforgivable acts of the past? What happens to the festering nucleus of rage and helplessness when injustices are systemically accepted by a society? And more critically, what is Prudence willing to do to safeguard the life she so treasures? This book is INCREDIBLE. I loved it. A brilliant story.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: Xochitl Gonzalez’s Last Night in Brooklyn.
Cleyvis was our guest for Episode 389, where we discussed her book The Great Paloma Resort.
Jordan Thomas
Author of When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
The best book I read this year was Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. It’s so difficult to capture a lived experience of environmental collapse, especially the ways it becomes entangled in people’s bodies, emotions, and relationships. McConaghy manages to do this while telling a brilliant story.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: In 2026, I’m most looking forward to reading Days of Love and Rage by Anand Gopal.
Jordan was our guest for Episode 394, where we discussed his book When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World.
Jade Chang
Author of What a Time to Be Alive
I have loved a lot of books this year, but my most singular reading experience was definitely Stay Dead by Natalie Shapero. I generally have a hard time reading books of poetry, but I loved this one from the very first line. So funny, so dumb, so gorgeous, so dirty, so profound—it’s everything I want from a reading experience.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: I’m starting the year with Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which feels daunting and exciting. Will I ever finish? Who knows!
Jade was our guest for Episode 395, where we discussed her book What a Time to Be Alive.
Mikey Friedman
Founder of Page Break
The best thing I read this year was We the Animals by Justin Torres. And I promise I’m NOT just choosing this because Traci and I read it together for The Stacks Book Club! I’m choosing it because this book is a TRIUMPH. Every single word is meticulously placed in this 144-page novel. Every scene is so full of life, every chapter left me wanting more. It’s a sensory novel that I felt physically in my bones, I literally have chills writing this...
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: Waiting on a Friend by Natalie Adler.
Mikey was our guest for Episode 397, where we discussed all things Page Break and Mikey’s favorite books.
Quiara Alegría Hudes
Author of The White Hot
Many great reads this year, including Misunderstood, Allen Iverson’s gut-punch of a memoir of basketball, inner city family, coming-of-manhood, wrongful incarceration, and being a once-in-a-generation talent. My husband, Ray Beauchamp, co-wrote it with Iverson, so I suppose I’m biased, but my heart was in my throat seeing how Iverson first discovered his talent, and how racial politics played into his media reception. I also really loved This Is the Only Kingdom by Jaquira Díaz, a novel of queer Puerto Rican girlhood in the height of the AIDS crisis; Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, a searing novel taking ableism to task; and the creepy dystopian novel Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, in which men can finally get pregnant and sex is vestigial of a world when pleasure mattered.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: Next up for me is There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib. It’s been out for a bit, but I’m always slow on the uptake.
Quiara was our guest for Episode 399, where she discussed her book The White Hot.
Joel Anderson
Senior staff writer at The Ringer and co-host of The Press Box
After years of dawdling, I finally downloaded the audio version of Dream City: Race, Power, and the Revival of Washington, D.C. when President Trump deployed the National Guard to the nation’s capital over the summer. I had always planned to read Harry Jaffee and Tom Sherwood’s voluminous history of Washington, D.C, told through the rise and fall of Mayor Marion Barry. But it seemed so much more urgent to grapple with now, as the same fight that has defined D.C. for decades once again flared up with total GOP control of the federal government: Will the (formerly) majority Black city ever truly be able to govern itself? The answer might be discouraging but the truth of the seeds of that fight come through in the book.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: A Dream Deferred: Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power. Just seems apropos given our present circumstances, plus I want to read and learn more about our aging and beloved Black Baby Boomers.
Joel was our guest for Episode 401, where we discussed whether we’re freaking out enough about the state of media and why he loves books on place.
Alejandro Varela
Author of Middle Spoon
The best thing I read this year, apart from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center’s Red Cards about knowing your rights and the transcript of the Mamdani-Trump meeting, was Jane Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan. Apparently, Austen wrote it at the worldly, enlightened age of... 18. She truly was the Alicia Keys of her era. With the pitch-perfect humor one comes to expect from genteel oppression, Austen throws us into the precarious life of the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon, whose take-no-prisoners, hate-the-game-not-the-player approach to survival upsets not only every single person she meets, but also the natural order of the times. Apparently, no one likes a mirror held up to their hypocrisies. I can pay this classic book—did I mention it was written in 1794 and published posthumously in 1871?—no greater compliment than that, immediately after finishing it, I sat down to write.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: As for next year, I’m waiting anxiously (please, Goddess, please!) to read more impeachment transcripts. It’s been too long since the last editions. Am I right? I’m also looking forward to welcoming Julián Delgado Lopera’s gorgeous, quite funny novel about love, loss, queerness, intergenerational trauma, and the power of liberation, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You. (Full disclosure: I might have given it a sneak peek. Hashtag sue me.)
Alejandro was our guest for Episode 402, where we discussed his book Middle Spoon.
MJ Franklin
Editor at The New York Times Book Review
The best thing I read this year, THE book of the year in my opinion, is We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. This book is so many things: It’s about the weight of history; it’s about how we recover from tragedy; it’s about care, friendship, and family; it’s about how we have to feel pain to get through it; and more. It’s a challenging book, but dear god, what Han Kang is about to do with an image or a metaphor!! Incredible. We Do Not Part is wholly original and powerfully haunting. Don’t miss out on this one.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: Kin by Tayari Jones
MJ Franklin was our guest for Episode 404, where we discussed our favorite books of the year.
Greta Johnsen
Host of Happy to Be Here podcast
One of the best things I read this year was Kristen Arnett’s Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One. It’s a deeply strange story about a woman who isn’t exactly living her best life, but she wants to be a professional clown, and she has absolutely no qualms about how totally weird that is. This book is written in bright hues. It’s funny, and it’s also very sad. It’s perfect for people who like Annie Hartnett, Kevin Wilson, and Jess Walter.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigley.
Greta Johnsen was our guest for Episode 404, where we discussed our favorite books of the year.
Traci Thomas
Host and creator of The Stacks
I am breaking with my own tradition of picking a book published this year, but I can’t deny the greatness of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was the best thing I read. It led to some of my favorite conversations, both on the podcast and with my friends offline. It has been in my mind at every turn for every book I’ve read since. Mary Shelley managed to drag men, call out colonialism, give me scene on top of scene of drama, craft allegory for damn near everything, and do it all in 200 pages. Mary Shelley is the teenaged dream, Katy Perry sang about. I stan.
Book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026: This feels like a trick question, because I have to say London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe, because what kind of girlfriend would I be if I said anything else. But also, we’re getting so many books from so many legends2 there is no acceptable answer. I’m most looking forward to ALL OF THE BOOKS!
To contribute to The Stacks, join The Stacks Pack, and get exclusive perks, check out our Patreon page. We are beyond grateful for anything you’re able to give to support the production of this show. If you prefer to do a one time contribution go to paypal.me/thestackspod.
The Stacks participates in affiliate programs. We receive a small commission when products are purchased through links on this website, and this comes at no cost to you. This in no way effects opinions on books and products reviewed here. For more information click here.