The Biggest Book News of the Week

The Goodreads Choice Winners

I was pretty uninterested in the results, and now the results have come through to fulfill my low expectations. Sunrise at the Reaping garnered the most votes overall (just over 300,000) with Onyx Storm right behind (and just under 300,000). I am unable to muster anything to say, but if you find yourself needing to buy a book at Target, this is probably your best guide to that particular aisle.

I say every year that the two NYT lists, the 100 Notable Books of the Year and the 10 Best Books of the Year, combined to form the single best snapshot of the year in books (or at least the year in books outside the realm of BookTok). This year’s top 10 is both a surprise and not a surprise. It was a surprise in that I would have probably guessed maybe one of these if given 10 title guesses. So the specific books are a surprise. But that I would have not gotten many right feels right for 2025, because there just have not been that many breakout books. Plenty of good books, but in terms of having even a handful of books that were consistently talked about in a way that distinguished them from the hundreds of good books published every year, it was not one of those years. (Shouts to my son, who named Angel Down as his favorite book of the year right when he read it, shortly after it came out.)

Rebecca and I discussed this in the most recent episode of our new podcast, Zero to Well-Read. We went through a bunch of the noteworthy books of the year with a slightly different aim: rather than name the best books of the year, we tried to identify the book we thought most likely to endure. I will spoil it mildly by saying: the list gets short quickly.