The Best Books I Read in 2025
I try to track (most of) my reading every year, and this year I read quite a few books and finished 82 of them. You can find the whole list of books I finished in 2025, along with the lists from previous years, here: https://www.susanrigetti.com/reading-list. It was a wonderful year for reading, and I found myself with a large number of favorites at the end. It was difficult to narrow down, but here is a list of my very favorite books I read this year, starting with my absolute favorite:
I’ve seen the old True Grit movie with John Wayne dozens upon dozens of times and know the dialogue by heart, but for some reason I’ve never been able to figure out, I’d put off reading the novel it’s based on…until this year. It quickly became one of my favorite books of all time, and as soon as I finished the last page, I went right back to the beginning and read it all over again. It’s that good. In fact, it’s about as close to perfect as a book can ever get.
I found myself reaching for this book when the Christmas season rolled around, something I’ve been doing every Christmas now for years. Some years, I just read the Pilate chapters and the end. Others, I read the Margarita chapters and the end. This year, I read the entire thing again from start to finish, then went back and re-read the parts I loved the most. To me, it is a Christmas story, because it captures the modern spirit of Christmas so perfectly, something I wrote about in a piece for The Boston Globe this Christmas: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/25/opinion/master-margarita-book-christmas/
I was on a Walter Tevis kick this year, and read The Queen’s Gambit (which I had read forever ago) as well as The Man Who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird, both of which I’d never read before. I loved the first two books but was flat-out astounded by the brilliance of Mockingbird. It has to be one of the best works of science fiction ever written, up there with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I won’t say more about it than that, but if you haven’t read it, you should get your hands on a copy immediately.
I love everything Werner Herzog does, writes, and makes. I love his films, I love his memoirs, I love his performances, and, dear god, I love this novel. The Twilight World is a fictionalized account of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who was stationed on a island in the Pacific in World War II and remained there, not knowing the war was over, engaging in guerrilla warfare against the island’s inhabitants. I read the book, was obsessed with it and sad it was over, then listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by Herzog himself, and loved that even more. In fact, this is one of those rare books where I recommend the audiobook over any other format, simply because hearing Herzog tell the story is a remarkable experience.
This is not your average journalist or editor memoir, and Graydon Carter was not your average editor. I could not put this book down (which, for me, is rare when it comes to memoirs). I especially loved the early chapters about his upbringing and experience as a lineman, but the entire book was fascinating, insightful, wickedly funny, and sometimes horrifying (when it came to the rise of Donald Trump). I’ve recommended this to so many people from many different backgrounds who are interested in a wide range of things — it’s one of those rare books that I think has something for everyone.
6. The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (read together)
I’d never read Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau before, and was surprised at how modern and spectacular it was, but I felt a bit incomplete after reading it. I remembered that Silvia Moreno-Garcia had written a retelling with a twist, so I immediately jumped into The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (which was utterly fantastic), and the combination of the two together made it all feel complete. Reading them back-to-back with the original first was a great experience, and I’m now on the lookout for more original and retelling combinations to do this with!
Reading this was an incredible experience for me, as someone who was raised in an Evangelical Christian family that very much believed in the book of Revelation and was waiting for its events to happen. I always kind of ignored the book and was sure there was more to the story, but I didn’t know much about the historical context and questions about it have been lingering in my mind since childhood. A few months ago, I randomly came across a review in The New Yorker of Elaine Pagel’s Revelations from 2012, and all the questions I’d ever had came back to me. I read it, and a handful of her other books, and she managed to answer every question I’d ever had and helped me come to an entirely new understanding about the New Testament, Christianity, and Jesus.