Here is a list of all the books I completed reading in 2025.
I finished reading 28 books this year, which is the least amount of books I’ve read in a year in a long time. In 1997, I read 28 books, and every year since then I’ve read between 33 and 75 books. Until this year. Refer to the post below, “Movies I Saw in 2025,” for an explanation.
The shortest book I read this year is Benito Cereno, by Herman Melville, with only 78 pages. The longest book on this list is the 462-page An Immense World, by Ed Yong. I read three of these books for school; besides the Melville novel, this also includes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Yellow Birds. This trio of novels, plus A Father Reads to His Children and When We Cease to Understand the World are the only fiction books on the list. My five favorite books from the year appear in bold.
| TITLE | AUTHOR(S) |
| 50 Universe Ideas You Really Need to Know | Baker, Joanne |
| Ask A Historian: 50 Surprising Answers to Things You Always Wanted to Know | Jenner, Greg |
| Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune | Cooper, Anderson / Howe, Katherine |
| Benito Cereno | Melville, Herman |
| Condom Nation: The U.S. Government’s Sex Education Campaign from World War I to the Internet | Lord, Alexandra |
| Cunk On Everything: The Encyclopedia Philomena | Cunk, Philomena |
| Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…And It’s All Small Stuff | Carlson, Richard |
| Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, the | Freeland, Jonathan |
| Father Reads to His Children, a | compilation |
| Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution | Dawkins, Richard |
| Genius of Birds, the | Ackerman, Jennifer |
| Hidden World of the Fox, the | Brand, Adele |
| How to Do Things You Hate: Self-Discipline to Suffer Less, Embrace the Suck, and Achieve Anything | Hollins, Peter |
| Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, an | Yong, Ed |
| Little Book of Lost Words: Collywobbles, Snollygosters, and 86 Other Surprisingly Useful Terms Worth Resurrecting, the | Gillard, Joe |
| Logic of Miracles: Making Sense of Rare, Really Rare, and Impossibly Rare Events, the | Mérő, László |
| Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy | Stewart, Katherine |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Kesey, Ken |
| Rise of Wolf 8: Witnessing the Triumph of Yellowstone’s Underdog, the | McIntyre, Rick |
| Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body | Ackerman, Jennifer |
| Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets, the | Singh, Simon |
| Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, the | Kolbert, Elizabeth |
| Stuffocation: Why We’ve had Enough of Stuff and Need Experience More than Ever | Wallman, James |
| Travels with Charley: In Search of America | Steinbeck, John |
| Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea, the | Hoare, Philip |
| When We Cease to Understand the World | Labatut, Benjamín |
| Who’s Bigger?: Where Historical Figures Really Rank | Skiena, Steven / Ward, Charles B. |
| Yellow Birds, the | Powers, Kevin |