(Chiming in with an update from Future Sushi, I had most of this written early in 2026 and then… put off posting it for six months. I have no idea why, but here it is so I can finish writing about the books I liked during the first half of this year.)
Finally, more book reviews! This post wraps up the best of my 2025 reading.
Some 2025 stats while we’re here:
I read 51 books in 2025. Of those books, 22 are fiction and 29 are nonfiction. This is well under my 50% fiction goal that I’ve been aiming for over the last couple of years, so I’m going to try and move back toward 50% fiction this year.
FICTION
5 stars – 3
4 stars – 14
3 stars – 4
2 stars – 1
DNF – 0
total: 22
mean: 3.8636
median: 4
NONFICTION
5 stars – 9
4 stars – 15
3 stars – 4
2 stars – 1
DNF – 0
total: 29
mean: 4.0689
median: 4
I haven’t crunched the numbers in the past so I’m not sure if this rating distribution happened because I read more compelling nonfiction, if I’m pickier with rating fiction, or simply because I read more nonfiction this year.
Enough numbers, says the numbers person. On to the reviews!
Fiction
Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail and Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date by Ashley Herring Blake: I’m putting these two together because these are the second and third book in a trilogy. Delilah finally found love and stayed in Bright Falls, so of course we have to pair up the rest of the friend group in the other two books. Astrid’s book is a relatable tale of late bloomer bisexuality and too-high expectations from parents where she has to learn to do what she wants to do and not what others (aka her mother) want her to do. It was also nice to see her sisterly relationship with Delilah develop since they didn’t have much of one in the past. Iris tells the story of finally being the one you love and not just the one you fuck, even though she’s good at that too. There’s also fake dating and authorly swooning and I’m so here for that.
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino: This book is easily in the top five that I read this year, and it’s definitely my top fiction book. I’m not sure I’ve read anything like this. An alien takes the form of a girl who is born in a human body, and she grows up as a human. She doesn’t feel like she fits in–at school or on earth. Then she discovers the fax machine and starts communicating with the rest of her kind via fax, because this is the eighties and this sort of thing just happens. I don’t even know how to describe this book. It feels like things are just happening, but she always comes away with some insight about humanity and what it’s like to be human over the course of her life.
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse: The boyperson recommended this to me, and he left me his copy before he moved. I enjoyed this book, even though a spiritual journey is something I spend zero percent of my time thinking about or pursuing. Then again, I probably liked it because this book wasn’t about a Christian journey. It’s very different from the type of books I tend to read, but that’s not always a bad thing (nor is it saying much).
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab: Toxic sapphic vampires, here I come. I was on the wait list for this book forever, but it was worth the wait. I found myself waffling over which points of view I wanted to get back to as the story developed because Sabine’s point of view started to slow down while Alice started to search for answers, but I also knew Charlotte had to come into the story somewhere. To be honest, I liked Alice’s point of view the least, and while I really liked the book, I didn’t like the ending. Despite it, I enjoyed the Sabine and Charlotte storylines and would recommend it.
Nonfiction
When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong: I really liked this book. This book tells the stories of four women in the early days of television, including Betty White’s early career. Did you know she got divorced relatively young because she was tired of her husband being tired of her career? What a badass. But this book isn’t just about Betty White’s early career, as fascinating as it was. Ever heard about Irna Phillips? Gertrude Berg? Hazel Scott, the first Black person to host a national evening show? I hadn’t before reading this book.
The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild: You know the phenomenon where in straight relationships, women and men both feel like they’re doing half the work but in reality, only the women are most of the time? This book studies that in depth, and damn it hits. The author studies about ten couples in depth throughout the book, and in many of them, it goes just as I described it, even if the woman makes more money or has a more demanding job. Despite being written in the 80s, it’s still very relevant today.
Off the Spectrum: Why the Science of Autism Has Failed Women and Girls by Gina Rippon: Hey look, a book that made me mad, not because of the book’s contents but because of history! It probably won’t surprise you to hear that early research in autism was centered around men and boys, so early autism symptoms were based around what was observed in these men and boys. You’d think that getting data on autism in women and girls would be easy, right? Wrong. Because they don’t fit this typical profile that was built primarily on data from boys, they often aren’t qualified to be studied, thus excluding them even further from the data. Gaaaaah. I listened to this book several months ago and the nitty gritty of it is even more frustrating.
The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics by Michael T. Osterholm: This book shifts between two perspectives: the actual world perspective of how we’ve prepared for and handled pandemics, and the imagined future scenario of a worse pandemic than COVID. It provided an interesting perspective of what we can do for future pandemics, although listening to the book meant the transitions between these perspectives were sometimes confusing and I regularly forgot where I was.
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green: I read the dead tree version of a nonfiction book for a change. This book isn’t just about tuberculosis. It’s about society and medicine and equity and so many other things that may vaguely relate to tuberculosis. Sometimes this book feels like John Green playing six degrees of tuberculosis (which he did for a couple of questions at his book talk in Atlanta, and if you can connect to something over a hundred years ago, you can often say “so-and-so had tuberculosis”).
Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyonce, and the Women Who Built Pop’s Shiniest Decade by Nora Princiotti: Spotify Wrapped guessed my age correctly in 2025, and it made me feel ancient. I thought this book would just be a bunch of stuff I already knew, which would be perfectly fine for listening to while walking around or doing chores. While I already did know a good bit of the stuff, I hadn’t heard it all laid out in a historical context (oh gods my childhood has historical context now). My only complaints are the anti-Avril content and the fact that the author introduces the book with her own story of Hilary Duff’s Metamorphosis and then barely mentions Hilary in the rest of the book. I enjoyed this book; it felt like your friend with the tea telling you everything over drinks, except it’s a book so it feels like you’re doing something educational.
Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood by Gretchen Sisson: This book makes me mad. Not because I disagree with its contents or its findings, but because anti-choice people make adoption sound like a ~noble alternative~ to abortion, but the adoption industry in the US is in fact an industry that hardly takes an interest in the people relinquishing their children. Many of the people interviewed for this book wanted to parent their children, but they didn’t have the money to take care of a broken car, or they lost their job, or their parents kicked them out, or some other short-term emergency. Not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe two thousand dollars. Meanwhile the adoption agencies are using SEO and ad display tricks to have their site show up when pregnant people are searching for, well, things that pregnant people search for. They don’t fully educate the parents on all the options, and certainly not on how parenting your own child can be an option for the people who want to do that–because the adoption agencies are struggling to find babies to place. Uh, maybe that’s because parents aren’t fond of giving up their kids. As for contact with the child after relinquishment? That’s a whole other mixed bag. Anyway, I now want to throw things even harder if I hear someone suggest giving up for adoption as an option.
And finally, that is the rest of my 2025 books. My 2026 post is coming… sometime. I’ve identified the books, so now it’s a matter of writing my reviews and making sure I’m not backed up this far again.
And who knows, maybe I’ll write about my life at some point in here.