Favorite books I read in 2025
I read or skimmed or glanced-at-and-then-gave-up-on only 60 books in 2025, down from around 120 in some recent previous years. I think the reduced number was mostly because I’ve reached the point in my unread-books project where much of what’s left is giant omnibuses and collections, where even if I skim a given book, it takes me a while to get through.
As usual, I read very little that was published in 2025.
My favorite book that I read in 2025 was a re-read: Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975).
Second-favorite, new to me: Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997, updated in 2016), by Janet H. Murray. Has flaws—areas it leaves out, areas it focuses too much on, ideas that I disagree with Murray about—but overall really interesting. The original version has been sitting on my bookcase waiting to be read for probably 25+ years. I started out reading that, but soon switched to the updated-in-2016 ebook edition.
Third tier (all new to me):
- Democratic Rules of Order (10th ed., 2019), by Fred Francis & Peg Francis. I read this to discuss with the WSFS Business Meeting discussion group, and spent a while trying to convince people that this system could be a viable replacement for Robert’s Rules of Order.
- The Society of Mind (1986), by Marvin Minsky. I found about half of this fascinating, full of interesting and useful insights. A lot of the rest didn’t work for me—it made big assumptions and jumped to conclusions, it seemed too simplistic or too broad. But there’s enough that I liked to counterbalance the aspects I didn’t like.
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston. I liked this quite a bit—partly for the romance between Janie and Tea Cake, partly for the occasionally lyrical prose of the narration, partly for Janie’s liberation. But I recognize that the criticisms of it are valid.
…It continues to surprise me that so much nonfiction and non-sf ends up on my favorite-books-I-read-this-year lists. In general, sf is what I’m most interested in reading, and what I read the most of; but my get-through-my-unread-books project has pushed me to read a bunch of nonfiction and non-sf that’s been sitting on my bookshelves for decades, and some of it has ended up appealing to me more than I would’ve expected.