My favorite books of 2025

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It’s time for my favorite post of the year — the roundup of the best books I’ve read. Normally, I do this over the holidays — I started writing these lists 21 years ago on an early Movable Type blog in front of a roaring fire late at night at my parents’ house over Christmas — but this year I wanted to write earlier, both in case you wanted to add any of these to your shopping lists over Small Business Saturday at your local independent bookstore or to your own holiday reading pile for the quieter weeks ahead.

This is also traditionally the time when everyone else, from the New York Times to NPR and others, comes out with their own lists. (Aside: I was thrilled to see my DEVIL REACHED TOWARD THE SKY on NPR’s list of best books, as well as for the audiobook to make Barnes & Noble’s roundup of the year’s best audiobooks. Signed copies available here!)

This was the best year of reading I can remember having — just numerous books I devoured in a state of pure joy — and since I spent most of the year not in the midst of my own book research, I was able to read much more widely and eclectically than I normally do. (In fact, I read so much good stuff this year that for the first time I’m going to break out separate nonfiction and fiction lists below, as well as a special third “bonus” list I’ll explain below.)

I thought several times this year while reading a particularly good book about what amazing bargains books still are — for $20 or $30 bucks, and often even just $5 or $10 used — you can dive into an entire world created by someone else over years of work, research, and creativity. You can have decades, centuries, and even millennia of knowledge, information, discoveries, and history summarized and explained for you by some of the smartest people in the world for the price of a couple cups of coffee. You can spend an entire weekend (or a few nights or even a couple weeks) soaking and subsuming yourself into worlds that you couldn’t have imagined before you picked up the book, getting to know characters and human experiences more intimately than you will ever know most of the people you interact with in real life. You can sit on your couch, or in your favorite chair, or an airplane or bus seat, and be transported vividly to some of the most dramatic moments and turning points of humanity. And then, afterward, you’ll never be the same person you were before reading. What better bargain of self-improvement, happiness, and knowledge is there in the world?

This year, I caught up on a bunch of super popular recent nonfiction — THE BOYS IN THE BOAT, THE WAGER, THE WIDE WIDE SEA, and Candice Millard’s excellent HERO OF THE EMPIRE, about Winston Churchill’s eye-popping exploits in the Boer War — as well as some books that really challenged and expanded how I think about US history, Imani Perry’s BLACK IN BLUES, Isabel Wilkerson’s CASTE, Nancy Isenberg’s WHITE TRASH. David Greenberg’s JOHN LEWIS: A LIFE taught me a lot about the civil rights hero, I read all of John McManus’ trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War, a masterpiece of research and narrative, and had the chance to review WHO IS GOVERNMENT? for the Washington Post. I had the chance to do book events interviewing authors I admire like Chris Bohjahlian’s new Civil War novel THE JACKAL’S MISTRESS and Tim Weiner’s searing new CIA history THE MISSION, and even belatedly made it to Prince Harry’s super-bestseller SPARE, which was quite fascinating and incredibly well-written. I just finished Craig Fehrman’s forthcoming history of Lewis & Clark, A VAST ENTERPRISE, which you’re going to want to put on your reading list for next year. Gosh, there was so much good reading this year!

At the same time, the pile of books I haven’t read expanded even more; what had been a “reasonable” four piles of unread books in the hall of my office has expanded to an oppressive six and the single “about-to-read” pile in the house doubled to two piles.

I’m giving myself two more weeks of mostly pleasure reading before I dive into my next book and research project — the mailman is already starting to deliver the first batches of the 100 or so books I’ll collect as research and read in the year ahead — but I hope to make it through another three or four “fun” books before I turn back to “work.”

Without further ado, this year’s top 25, divided into three distinct lists below. My nonfiction list is particularly heavy this year on biographies — and the list features three tremendous books by friends from my time at Washingtonian, all of whom wrote debut books this year that left me in awe for different reasons.

Nonfiction

1. JOE GOULD’S TEETH by Jill Lepore :: While I just finished and loved Lepore’s latest Constitutional blockbuster WE THE PEOPLE, my favorite read of hers for the year was this very weird and zany mystery about a famous New Yorker article and whether an almost mythical century-old manuscript called “The Oral History of Our Time,” supposedly the longest book of all time, ever existed at all.

2. BEGIN AGAIN by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. :: This history, biography, and meditation about James Baldwin was surely the most powerful book I read this year — it made me really wrestle with what I think about America is as a country and who we are as a people. The book is as much about the United States as it is James Baldwin and explores how he grew disillusioned by the progress of the civil rights movement and how America lies to itself about race. It was short but completely rewrote my understanding of the country.

3. CUSTODIANS OF WONDER by Eliot Stein :: Stein is a former writer from my time at Washingtonian who has carved out an amazing niche as a travel writer; in his debut book, he collected a dozen fascinating stories of the keepers of “Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive” — think the last traditional Incan bridgemaker; women in Sardinia who make one specific type of pasta; an Indian family who make the world’s best mirror, the one believed to reveal your “truest self,” and Scandinavia’s last night watchman. This book was so moving and evocative; I promise that you will never forget these people. 

4. NIMITZ AT WAR by Craig Symonds :: Symonds is a master naval historian and his biography of arguably the central US admiral of World War II was just fascinating — and even, dare I say, funny. As much an exercise in the study of leadership and command as it is a biography of Nimitz or history of the Pacific theater, it was one of my favorite books from my own book research.

5. AMERICAN PROMETHEUS by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin :: Speaking of my atomic bomb book research, I savored every page of this giant biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer — it was the basis for the Oppenheimer movie — and came away impressed anew at the historical accuracy of the movie. (My major quibble with the movie is how it writes out of the story Arthur Holly Compton, who actually starts the Manhattan Project, but you can’t get everything into a movie even if it’s three hours!) I had the privilege of speaking alongside Kai Bird at the Mississippi Book Festival and started my panel by saying, “Please don’t let anything I say about my book and the uncovered stories of the Manhattan Project in the next hour be read as a critique of AMERICAN PROMETHEUS because it’s exemplary in every way.”

6. A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD by Haley Cohen Gilliland :: I’ve been excitedly awaiting this book for over a year and from the first pages I knew I was in for a treat. Subtitled “The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children,” it’s the story of the “Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo” in Argentina whose children were “disappeared” by the fascist government there and their life-long quest to find what happened to their families. It’s a masterclass in nonfiction writing, the kind of book as a reader you only stumble across maybe once a year or once every few years that you realize instantly is going to be a singular experience to read. It reads like part SAY NOTHING and part MIDNIGHT IN CHERNOBYL, which is about the highest compliment I can pay a book. Oh and the themes it raises — Family! National Identity! Freedom! Memory! It was also an important reminder of how “recent” history really is; much of Argentina’s reckoning with its fascist era has only taken place in the last 20 years as the regime’s long-suspected crimes have been confirmed through new evidence. Anyway, I could rave it about it at some length; if you get just one book off this entire nonfiction list, make it this one. 

7. THERE WILL BE FIRE by Rory Carroll :: A gripping “whodunnit” about the IRA’s plot to kill Margaret Thatcher. I will admit up front misjudging this book from its cover — I read a lot in this category, the “workaday look back at major world event terrorism or crime” book, and most aren’t that good — and was unprepared for how propellent this book was and how I just kept turning the pages. Carroll mixes the history of the Troubles and the IRA with his own fresh reporting to give a new perspective and tell a story you surely don’t know. (It’s an especially impressive writing feat because we all know that the IRA doesn’t blow up Margaret Thatcher in the end.) Again, if you loved SAY NOTHING, make sure to pick this up.

8. HOW TO HIDE AN EMPIRE by Daniel Immerwahr :: I wrote my college history thesis on the 19^th century attempts of the US to annex noncontiguous territory — Alaska, the failed attempt to grab the Yucatan, the Virgin Islands, etc. — and so would have told you that I knew a lot about the “American empire” before I read this, and yet each chapter was rich with surprises. Even as someone whose two most recent own books are both World War II histories, Immerwahr’s chapter on the Philippines in World War II completely changed my perspective on that conflict. Come for the amazing history and stay for the surprising easter egg about who in the book the author turns out to be related to!

9. BUCKLEY by Sam Tanenhaus :: This is almost surely the best book I read all year — which is not something I would have predicted about a 1,000-page biography of William F. Buckley, someone I knew very little about ahead of the book. As much as he is the intellectual godfather of the modern Republican Party, I’ve mostly only ever read Buckley’s spy novels about CIA agent Blackford Oakes (seriously: If you’re an Alan Furst or Joseph Kanon fan, track these down — SAVING THE QUEEN is the first, STAINED GLASS the second, which isn’t as good but is worth getting through to read the third, WHO’S ON FIRST.). Tanenhaus worked on this book for almost a quarter century and I would guess it’s a shoe-in for next year’s Biography Pulitzer (although maybe it’ll be topped by the new Baldwin biography), but it encompasses everything great about a masterful biography — and even made me laugh out loud at parts. The book, as majestic as it is as a piece of writing and research, is not altogether complimentary about Buckley — you can’t walk away from the book without reeling from his racism and seeing clearly the path from Buckley to Donald Trump.

10. THE COLOR OF TRUTH by Kai Bird :: Much like the Buckley book, I wouldn’t have guessed that reading a dual biography of brothers McGeorge and William Bundy, two of the main figures of the Cold War and, particularly, Vietnam, would be as fun and interesting as this one was. Their lives serve as a microcosm of the rise and fall of the postwar Washington Establishment, the peak and the valley of the “Best and Brightest” generation.

11. EVERYONE WHO IS GONE IS HERE by Jonathan Blitzer :: This half-century epic about America’s immigration crisis — deeply reported and intimate, switching back and forth between the waves of Central American immigrants who have headed north to the United States since the 1970s and 1980s and the US policymakers whose meddling in Central American politics provoked so much of this crisis to begin with — will forever change the way you read the day’s headlines. As any reader of this newsletter knows, I’ve covered the law enforcement side of this — ICE and Border Patrol — for a decade, and I was horrified by how much of the policy and human background of the immigration story I didn’t know. We so badly misunderstand in public debates the motivations (and even basic realities!) of migration and, especially, America’s own role in creating and circumstances of instability and political and economic disruption that drive so many people to our borders.

12. GIRL ON GIRL by Sophie Gilbert :: I was in awe of this book, from the trenchant writing to the super smart analysis. Gilbert was also one of my writers at Washingtonian and she’s gone on to the Atlantic and become one of the great cultural critics of our time — winning a National Magazine Award in 2024 and being a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2022. (Read her recent “President Piggy” piece if you haven’t.) Her first book looks back on the last decades of pop culture and all they’ve done to warp girls and women. The book has been on seemingly every “best of 2025” list I’ve found, from the New York Times to the Washington Post to NPR. I think we’re long overdue for a very critical reappraisal of the 1990s and 2000s — in politics as well as culture — and this book is the first landmark entry.

Fiction

This year I read more fiction than I’ve read in ages; most years amid work reading I only make it to one or two “Fancy Novels” (usually whatever book most electrifies Traci Thomas, like last year’s MARTYR), but this year I read one or two a month, alongside my normal fiction escapism diet of thrillers, noir, and spy novels. My first book of the year was the excellent PASSPORT TO PERIL, a spy novel by Robert B. Parker — no, not that Robert Parker — who wrote my favorite thriller of last year, TICKET TO OBLIVION, which made me very sad because I’ve now read the only two thrillers the World War II correspondent ever wrote.)

Several times since the pandemic, I’ve worried that I’ve lost the concentration to read fiction — I have a pile of nearly a dozen novels next to my bed that I’ve made it 40 or 80 pages into and then abandoned this year —  but amid this year’s reading, when I tore through a half-dozen novels in single weekends, I’ve realized that I’ve lost the patience to read sub-awesome fiction — anything less than say a A-/B+ novel. Life’s too short for mediocre novels. So here are eight that aren’t (again, in no particular order):

1. THE SAVAGE, NOBLE DEATH OF BABS DIONNE by Ron Currie :: Don’t sleep on this electric wonder of a book. I spend most of my fiction reading life chasing the high of reading and discovering FIVE DECEMBERS, by James Kestrel, which remains one of the greatest (the greatest?) literary thrillers of my life. (It was blurbed by, of all people, James Fallows, which is what got me to pick it up.) This year, the closest I came to that high — no drug-dealing pun intended! — was this literary thriller about Waterville, Maine, and the French-Canadian matriarch who runs the local drug trade. The book has gotten not nearly the acclaim it should, although it was just featured on NPR’s best books of the year. I read it in a single weekend; I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this book since I read it and what precisely made it such an incredible reading experience, and I think it keeps coming back to simply amazing writing and pacing.

2. THE GREAT DIVIDE by Cristina Henriquez :: This novel about the construction of the Panama Canal focuses on the “small” lives caught up in that grand project. It was beautifully written and highly evocative. I liked some of the characters so much that at times I didn’t want to keep reading because I was worried something bad would happen to them later in the book. It’s a well-rendered portrait of a lost world and the types of people who are written out of and ignored amid the Grand Events of History.

3. THE GOOD EARTH by Pearl S. Buck :: I may turn out to be the last person to read Pearl Buck’s Nobel Prize winning-masterpiece on China. Every person I’ve raved about this book to in recent months has rolled their eyes and been like, “Yea, obviously I read it in high school,” but somehow I never had. Just completely propulsive. I read it like I was inhaling it and wanted nothing more than to read it. Completely profound and rich. I actually put this on the bookshelves in our living room — I read so much that most books never make it onto the house shelves and instead just pile up in my office — and sometimes I look up on its spine just happy to have read it.

4. THE MAN FROM BEIJING by Henning Mankell :: In Burlington, our local library puts shelves of used books in a half-dozen restaurants and bakeries around town — you Venmo the library $5 for a book if you want one — and I picked this up at my favorite local pizza lunch spot downtown. I’m not normally a “Nordic Noir” reader and was delighted by what a good investment that $5 was. This was a banger of a mystery with great writing.

5. HARM’S WAY by James Bassett :: I have no idea which used book store I found this 1962 novel about the Pacific theater in World War II, which went on to be a Kirk Douglas and John Wayne movie, but similarly I’m glad it found it somewhere. It’s a tremendous ride and weaves together fiction and nonfiction in some wonderful ways — and helps bring alive the early years of the war, before anything felt certain. 

6. BEST OFFER WINS by Marisa Kashino :: I’ve always thought Marisa Kashino was a star — she was both my first and last hire as editor of Washingtonian, the literal first person I recruited to the magazine when I took it over and then, after she left four years later for another opportunity, I also brought her back as my last act before leaving, knowing hiring her would smooth the transition.) Then and after, she spent a decade covering the wild housing market in Washington, D.C., and sold this debut novel about a real estate deal gone very very wrong a year ago. It got an enormous amount of buzz — it’s a Good Morning America book club pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, and the lead #1 Indie Next pick for December, and instantly sold the Hollywood rights too. I very specifically waited to read it until publication day, this past Tuesday, and then found myself staying up late to finish it in a single sitting. So so so good. Dark and funny and worth every penny of your own “best and final.” I would tell you that I’m incredibly proud of Marisa, but the more amazing thought to me this week has been imagining that over the next few years she’ll become one of the bestselling novelists in the country. I’m so impressed by her.

7. BUTTER by Asako Yuzuki :: A Japanese bestseller I discovered at McNally Jackson in New York (How could you pass up something pitched as “A novel of food and murder”?), this book was a simple pleasure to read. It mixes delicious good, Japanese culture, journalism, and a serial killer. It evidently was even inspired by a real-life story in Japan. 

8. HUMAN SCALE by Lawrence Wright :: I deeply admire Wright’s oeuvre — award-winning nonfiction, novels, plays, the whole gamut — and his novel MR. TEXAS was another recent favorite. His latest mystery dives deep into the family and cultural context of the Israel/Palestinian conflict, bringing together his decades of reporting and personal experience in the Middle East to craft a literary but intense thriller. It took me [warning: minor spoiler ahead!] about halfway through the book to realize that the dates counting down in the book were leading inexorably toward October 7th.

Current Events

I read an enormous amount for work, much of which is pretty dry and repetitive — one of my writing mantras is I’m a firm believer that most policy books should just be a long Atlantic article — and too many of which are downright bad or poorly argued, even if they’re packed with valuable information. A few times a year a “policy book” rises above the rest or a history book lands so perfectly as to end up filed mentally in my “current events” catalog. So my third (short) list of the year is five books that have helped me understand the current moment we’re living through:

1) THE HIGHEST LAW IN THE LAND by Jessica Pishko :: I really admire Pishko’s reporting on criminal justice issues, and she’s been an absolutely vital voice this year as ICE and CBP have rampaged across our country. Her reporting pièce de resistance is this book explaining the history of the country’s sheriffs and how the basic corruptions inherent in elected law enforcement threaten democracy.

2) STUCK by Yoni Applebaum :: The subtitle of this book “How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity” begins to explain the book’s thesis, about how the country’s postwar ladder of economic advancement calcified and fractured. This book brings all the receipts and is an eye-popping read. Unlike a lot of its category peers [cough, cough], which spend most of their time admiring the problem, defeating strawmen, or ignoring marginalized communities, this book is a very clear-eyed, thoughtful, and revelatory portrayal of what led our country to the edge of an economic populist revolution. 

3) WE THE PEOPLE by Jill Lepore :: Lepore’s book takes on and skewers the invention of “originalism” that has so corrupted our legal system as it’s been seized by an activist and extremist right-wing Supreme Court. She traces 240 years of how we’ve amended and updated and regularly fixed the Constitution — up until recent decades, when a variety of reasons led both the right and the left to give up on the regular process of amendment that has helped our country grow and expand over previous eras.

4) THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH by William Shirer :: Okay, so this isn’t exactly a “current events” book, but I found reading it this year enormously useful in understanding how democracies willingly give themselves up to fascism. Page after page, I marked up and underlined watching the approach of the Third Reich and the complete capitulation of one institution after another in Germany across the 1920s and 1930s.

5) BAD COMPANY by Megan Greenwell :: If it seems like behind bad economic story is a rapacious private equity firm pillaging a cornerstone of the US economy, you’re not imagining things. Greenwell traces the downstream human effects and stories left behind when blood-sucking Wall Street private equity firms descend on Main Streets across the country. It’s actually a hard book to read emotionally because once you start understanding the trends at play, you realize how much worse private equity has made it for so much of the country while taking home enormous profits for itself.

Anyway, that’s my top 25 of the year. One more literary recommendation: TV-wise, I’m super curious over the holidays to watch Train Dreams, which is based on one of my favorite novellas by Denis Johnson. The year TRAIN DREAMS came out, I gave copies of it to everyone I knew for the holidays.

Please let me know what your favorite books of the year were! Even as the “to-be-read” pile expands, I’m always eager for more recommendations! And if you’re interested in past years’ lists, you can read them here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, or skip all the way back to those early bare-bones versions of 2004, 2005, and 2006 — or you can dig through my comprehensive 101 nights of #GMGReads recommendation during Covid.

Whatever you’re reading right now, go out this weekend and support your local small businesses — and especially your local independent bookstores! And don’t forget your local libraries — even if you’re an audiobook listener, you can draw on your local libraries through Libby.

Happy reading! And Happy Thanksgiving. I’m enormously grateful this year to all of you for reading — this list has expanded over the year from just 3,000 in January to nearly 25,000 subscribers now — and these columns are regularly read by another 100,000 people online — and I really appreciate all of you willing to give me some slice of your precious attention and time.

GMG

PS: Here’s the full write-up of the Barnes & Noble accolade for the THE DEVIL REACHED TOWARD THE SKY audiobook, which was so kind and generous I have to share it in total:

“Superstar historian Garrett M. Graff, who also garnered a spot in our “best of” list in 2024 for his history of D-Day, teams up again with Audie winner Edoardo Ballerini—the narrator The New York Times called “a master in his field”—and more than 30 additional voice talents, for his latest epic narrative about the building and detonation of the atomic bomb during World War II. The production work here is as daring as the history it reveals: a march through history drawn from oral accounts, books, official reports, letters, and diaries. We hear from 400+ participants, including the famous (J. Robert Oppenheimer and President Harry Truman) and not-so-famous—scientists, soldiers, workers who knew nothing about the purpose of their work, and survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to enlighten virtually every aspect of the topic. The result is a supremely powerful testament to how the audio format can bring history alive in ways that go far beyond the printed word.”

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