The 10 Best Books I Read This Year (2025)

Early in 2025, I told myself I was going to read more novels. Less history. Less science. 

By February, I was already halfway through a massive history of the atomic bomb.

So that went well. But later in the year I clawed back with more fiction. Good thing I did because 4.5 fiction books made the list. Half? Yes, you have Sam Kean to thank. You’ll see. 

In no particular order…but why not start with the aforementioned history of quite possibly the grandest scientific accomplishment ever.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes

Pulitzer Prize in 1987.

This book is long, dense, and somehow impossible to put down.

What makes it work isn’t just the science — though there’s plenty of that. The whole gang is here. Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer, Rutherford, Curie, and more — but the way Rhodes centers these people: brilliant, competitive, shortsighted, idealistic, afraid. The story of the atomic bomb ends up being less about physics and more about human decision-making under extreme pressure.

Incomprehensible pressure. I mean how many of your decisions deal with the fate of humanity on a societal level and on a species level. How many of your decisions might ignite the atmosphere and kill everyone if your calculations are wrong?

It’s one of those books that quietly resets your sense of scale — of what individual minds can accomplish, and what the consequences can be.

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This — Omar El Akkad

If I had to recommend one book on this list for you to read it would be this one. 

Part memoir and part manifesto, it describes the plight of the Palestinian diaspora as a whole, and the most recent decimation of the Palestinian people in Gaza by Israel today.

El Akkad writes with clarity and restraint about something that is neither abstract nor complicated: mass civilian suffering, justified after the fact by power, language, and selective outrage. The title captures the central lie perfectly — that once history settles, everyone will claim they were always on the right side.

As I’ve said many times, life is one grand rationalization. 

This isn’t a book that argues. It documents. It names. It refuses the comfort of distance. Reading it felt less like consuming a political book and more like having someone articulate, calmly and precisely, the thing you’ve been watching unfold in real time while being told not to call it what it is.

Dinner with King Tut — Sam Kean

Sam Kean specializes in making you smarter without ever sounding like he’s trying to.

I’ve read every single book he’s published, but this is his most unique.

It’s a collection of strange, funny, and genuinely fascinating stories from the overlap of science and history. At the heart of it, Kean's trying to help us understand what it was truly like to live in different times, in different places throughout human history. Sure, we know about the pyramids but what was it like for the workers who built them? What did they eat and drink? Who fed them? How did they make it? What did it taste like?

Also, what were these people like? How far would one of them go for love? What if they couldn’t repay a debt?

Perfect for reading in short bursts. I’d pick it up intending to read one chapter and suddenly realize I was late for something because I was entwined in some imaginary life in the hills of Turkey, three thousand years ago, or I was trying to understand how a native Alaskan cooked walrus meat, or how they stored food in seal skin.

A reminder that curiosity, when handled well, can be pure entertainment.

John & Paul — Ian Leslie

No, not the John and Paul from the Bible, the Beatles.

First a confession. I don’t really love the Beatles, but I’m a sucker for deconstructing the creative spark or process of anything (a movie, a song, a piece of art).

I haven’t really met a documentary or a “Song Exploder” episode I didn’t like.

That’s why this book worked for me. It isn’t really a Beatles book so much as a book about collaboration — how creative partnerships work, why tension is often essential, and how rivalry and insecurity can be fuel rather than poison. Leslie does a great job resisting mythology and focusing instead on process.

And you’ll understand cool things like why John Lennon sounds so hoarse in the famous recording of “Twist And Shout.” You know the song. The version from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Yes, that’s the Beatles. No, I didn't know it either.

They had a lot of hits.

Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari

Not sure if you’ve heard of this whole AI thing, but boy, humans might be in trouble. 

Harari is great (Sapiens and Homo Deus were in previous years’ top 10). He has a knack for taking broad ideas and holding them up in your face to digest. He gets you to think, and he can slightly terrify you. Not with horror, but with the ramifications of what he is telling you.

Nexus looks at how biology, technology, and power are converging, and what that means for human agency going forward. I didn’t agree with every conclusion, but I appreciated how seriously he treats uncertainty and unintended consequences.

It’s the kind of book that makes you stop and ask whether the future we’re building is happening with us or merely to us.

Abundance — Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson

I came to this one already biased in its favor. Derek Thompson has been one of my favorite writers at The Atlantic for years, and Ezra Klein hosts one of the few podcasts I listen to religiously. So I was predisposed to like the book. Thankfully, it earned that trust.

At its core, Abundance is an argument against the quiet assumption that things have to be as hard, slow, and constrained as they currently are. Housing, energy, infrastructure, healthcare, technology — the book makes the case that we haven’t run out of ideas or resources, but of the ability to actually build and execute.

What I appreciated most is that the optimism isn’t fuzzy or motivational. It’s structural. It’s about incentives, institutions, and the self-imposed rules that turn good intentions into paralysis. You don’t have to agree with every policy prescription to feel the force of the broader point: progress is not automatic, but it’s also not impossible. It’s a choice — one made (or avoided) collectively, over and over again.

You Are Here — David Nicholls

Nicholls is exceptionally good at writing about ordinary lives without making them feel small.

This is a quiet, funny, occasionally heartbreaking novel about connection, timing, and the ways people miss each other despite their best intentions.

Nothing flashy. No big plot tricks. Just very good emotional calibration as we follow a group of people on their hike across the width of England.

It’s the kind of book that reminds you why understated fiction still matters.

Wild Dark Shore — Charlotte McConaghy

This is the book on this list that most felt like a movie playing in my head while I was reading it.

On the surface, it’s a suspense novel: remote setting, rising danger, secrets, momentum. But underneath that, it’s very much a climate book — about what happens when the natural world starts pushing back, when the margins of safety we’ve always assumed are there…aren’t.

Tension and tenderness volley back and forth as the characters deal with the quiet panic of isolation and responsibility.

The action keeps you turning pages; the context makes it linger.

Martyr! — Kaveh Akbar

This is Akbar’s debut novel, and you can feel the poet in every sentence — not in a showy way, but in the precision. The language is doing real work.

Martyr! follows a young Iranian-American man moving through grief, addiction, faith, and the temptation to turn suffering into something that looks like purpose. It’s about the hunger for meaning, and the danger of confusing intensity with significance. 

What I loved is how searching the book is. It doesn’t perform certainty. It doesn’t offer neat resolutions. It just keeps circling the question of how to live a serious life without turning it into a kind of self-mythology.

Playground — Richard Powers

Richard Powers continues to write novels that feel like intellectual experiments with real emotional stakes.

Not sure who he is? He wrote the Pulitzer winning Overstory. The best book about trees you’ll ever read.

Playground isn’t as good as Overstory (how could it be?), but it stands on its own as it explores technology, identity, and human adaptation.

What stayed with me was the quiet discomfort of it. Not dystopian in a sci-fi way, not alarmist — just a steady recognition that the systems we now live inside are training us, nudging us, rewarding certain instincts and dulling others. Powers never shouts the warning. He just lets you see the patterns and sit with them.

And man, that seat does a number on the intellectual lumbar.

Here were the books that didn't make the list:

Flesh

The God Of The Woods

Buckeye - Least Favorite

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

Playworld

Proto

Who Is Government?

How To Win The Premier League

Pillars Of The Earth