Y’all. you know what’s exciting? At the end of this year, I will have been writing these book posts regularly for five years. And that means that in January 2026 I am going to write a best of, best of post–that is to say that I will do a top-ten post out of the past five years, and I will tell you my favorite book I read in all that time. Well, I am excited about it!
If you have read these yearly posts then you know I make my own rules. In general, I don’t count rereads–unless I read it so long ago that it feels like a new read, if that makes any sense.
I had set a goal for myself to read seven books each month in 2024. That would have been 84. I read . . . 91! I’ve been increasing my goal but I did not even set a goal for 2025.
As I went through the year, though, I was disappointed that no one book leapt out as the best book of the year, which has always happened to me before. Perhaps that’s a message to me that I need to set my standards a little higher.
Anyway, what do I mean when I say “best book” of the year? It is a combination–it has to be legitimately a Good Book, and I have to like it. I like plenty of the legal thrillers and police procedurals that I read, but to me they don’t fit into this category. To make this list, a book cannot just be entertaining and well-written–it has to leave you with something; it has to MEAN something. And to be honest, this year I could not even come up with ten that I thought deserved to be on this list, unless I broke another arbitrary rule and added some of the classics that I have read many, many times. But I did not, so what you have here is a list of the EIGHT best books I read last year, in no particular order except for the last one. They are linked to the months in which they first appeared.
The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman
The Late Mrs. Willoughby by Claudia Gray
The Echoes of Old Books by Barbara Davis
 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
The Stillwater Girls by Minka Kent
And finally, the best of the best:
The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni
As I look over this list, a couple of additional criteria for inclusion come to my mind. To make this list at all, I have to want to read it again. And to be the number one book of the year, I have to think that other people ought to read it too.
What books have you read that you think other people ought to read?
