📚 Best and Worst Reads of 2025
I thought this might be fun to sum up, my top three best and worst books for the year. I probably have enough to do top fives but I don't know how interesting that would be. Some of these I wrote blog posts about, and others I started writing posts but then fell off and never finished them. So now I get to do a quick summary for some I wanted to talk about but don't feel like going back and finishing those posts for.
This year, Goodreads claims I read 16 books. Though it counts books that I mark as did-not-finish (DNF) as "read", so those are in the count. In reality, looks like I finished 14, one of which was a graphic novel volume as well. My bests and worsts here are in no particular order, but stand out against the others I read this year.
Best of 2025
In no particular order, the winners are:
- Circle of the Moon by Barbara Hambly
- The Witchstone by Henry Neff
- Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen
Circle of the Moon
This is the sequel to Sisters of the Raven and I enjoyed it a lot more. While the first book is a bit of a murder mystery, the second one focuses on the aftermath of magic flipping hands from men to women, and the predatory moves the king's advisors make to try and take the throne for themselves.
The Witchstone
This was really fun. I took a chance on it in that, I found it through Libby and I don't normally read ebooks, but I saw that my library had quite a few copies of it available. It had the vibes of a mature Monster's Inc, but instead of monsters scaring children to power their cities, it features demons managing curses. The main character Laszlo is consistently funny and made me laugh throughout the book. This one I don't own so I'm considering buying a physical copy of it for my bookshelf.
Other Birds
I did a whole blog post on Other Birds already, and while I gave it four stars and gave other books this year five, I really enjoyed this overall.
Special shoutouts to The Garden, which was also close to being on the final three list. It's definitely very good too and worth a read.
Worst of 2025
I hate giving things bad reviews since I don't like the idea of dogging on someone's work, necessarily. That could be someone's passion story that I'm tearing apart and, I know at times I just may decide I don't like something based on vibes and assign reasoning later. But I also love watching youtube videos where someone hate-read something and wants to talk about all the problems. So this isn't a statement on the authors or anything else here, but these books just didn't work for me, and that's okay.
And in no particular order, this year's losers are:
- The Summoning
- If Cats Disappeared From The World
- To Shape A Dragon's Breath
The Summoning
One of the last books I read last year, I picked this up on impulse at B&N a handful of years ago. It's one I'd been excited to read but wanted to save it for October to set the mood. But several Octobers came and went where it just wasn't the right time, so this year I started it in November.
I think I'm going to post a review for it, because I was sufficiently motivated to do so from my hatred of it. So I may not go into too much detail here. But tl;dr, this book had a very fun premise but failed to deliver, and the writing deteriorated the further I got in the book.
If Cats Disappeared From The World
This one I want to give a little slack because the original was written in Japanese. I don't want to discount that there may be some of my complaints came from the translation itself, or the fact that there are cultural differences that I don't have context for. But this was a novella where the synopsis (and honestly, the quotes on the book) gave me the impression that it was going for a sad story, but it didn't really attempt that until the last stretch of the story.
And the main character was kind of an idiot. Which didn't make me too sympathetic to my issues with the story.
To Shape A Dragon's Breath
This one I also wrote a review for. Unlike the other two on this list, I didn't finish this one. And I'm banning myself from getting any more new "dragon rider" books. Maybe I'll step back into some older ones like Anne McCafferey if I really want to explore it, but this one was more focused on real-world analogies and performative takes than actually having fun with dragons.