My favorite books of 2025

At the start of 2024, I downloaded the Goodreads app and set a goal of reading 30 books for that year.

I made it through 11 books.

In 2025, I decided that this was going to be the year when I put down my phone at night, didn’t scroll social media and read a book instead. This led to a year of rekindling my old habit of devouring books. When this special edition of Popculturology hits your inboxes, I will have read 94 books this year.

At one point, I thought I could hit 100. Which would’ve been cool, right? I assume Goodreads would’ve sent someone to my house to congratulate me. But once the holidays started to kick into gear around Thanksgiving, I let go of that goal. The love of reading for pleasure that I had once again found in 2025 was supposed to be fun. I wasn’t going to force myself to rush through books, cram them in or pick shorter reads just to hit 100.

But I still read a ton of books in 2025.

I finally got around to reading much of Arthur C. Clarke’s foundational science fiction novels. I worked my way through Michael Crichton’s expansive body of work. I finished Lev Grossman’s The Magicians after putting it down almost a decade ago, wrapped up that trilogy and read The Bright Sword, his addition to Arthurian legend. I reread Watership Down for the first time in way too long. I caught up with Saga. And I’m currently revisiting Jeff Smith’s Bone, the iconic series of comics that holds a very special place in my heart.

Oh, and I read so many books about time travel. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

This was also the year I made the jump from physical books to a Kindle. I love the feel of a book in my hands. I love seeing my progress as the pages shift. I love having three giant bookcases in our living room full of all the books I’ve read and hope to read. But there’s only so much space. And when I discovered Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series, I bought a Kindle Colorsoft — great for also reading comics — instead of adding a series of 600-page books to our collection.

Becoming a Kindle person has also made it easier to read on the go. I can pick up my Kindle in the morning before we get out of bed. It was easy to bring on trips. I have the Kindle app on my phone and can easily read a few pages or a chapter while I’m waiting for an appointment.

Before the year officially wraps up — and while you hopefully have some gift cards from the holidays — I wanted to share with you all some of my favorite new books and new discoveries of 2025. (This basically makes me Barack Obama, right?)

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FAVORITE BOOK OF THE YEAR

Dissolution by Nicholas Binge

I’m not sure how I wound up reading so many books about time travel in 2025, but I’m not going to complain. The authors exploring this genre keep finding new ways to tell time travel stories, and Nicholas Binge landed my favorite of the bunch this past year. Dissolution is creative, ambitious and heartbreaking.

You wouldn’t expect the hero of a time travel book to be a woman in her 80s, but that’s just who we follow in Dissolution as a woman tries to decode what’s happened to her husband who allegedly had dementia while a shady figure claims to be on her side as she begins to delve into her own memories.

If there’s a Binge fan club, consider me a member. I also read and loved Ascension, his 2023 novel, and I’m incredibly excited that Dissolution has been optioned for a movie and has Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer working on the script.