Reading Recap 2025, Part 2: Top Reads of the Year

In yesterday's post I did a deep dive on how and why I read 200+ books this year. Upon hearing that, many people ask me what my favorite was. I find that question basically impossible to answer, because it's apples-and-oranges problem times ten. I don't even find it easy to pick my "favorite" book on a single genre, because a book can be worth reading without actually being well-written. It can have left a mark on me without being something I'd tell my friends to read.

Today, I'm going to go genre by genre and list out some of the most memorable books that I read this year. Note: I'm very intentionally not saying that these are the "best" books of 2025, or anything of that sort. Some of these books are genuinely great, some are probably subpar from an objective literary standard, and some made me grind my teeth but I'm still glad I read them. I do not share them because I think everyone must read them as well, but because they shaped my thinking in interesting ways.

Without further ado, here are the ten categories:

1. Theology, biblical interpretation, and ethics
2. Memoirs/biographies
3. Writers on writing
4. Human origins
5. Classics/recommendations
6. Sci-fi & fantasy
7. Current events
8. History & historical fiction
9. The natural world
10. Work/self-improvement

Theology, biblical interpretation, and ethics

1. A Hermeneutic of Imagination. I wrote a review of this book by one of my seminary profs, Dr. Knut Heim. His approach toward the Bible emphasizes imaginative engagement with the interpretation of text in a way that I find to be helpful and interesting.
2. Moral Ambition. This book attempts to inspire people to overcome a moral malaise/cynicism about the world, and to attempt morally ambitious things. Rather than just continuing to exist, can we do good while we still live and breathe?
3. Judaism is About Love. Rabbi Shai Held puts into words the problematic way that many Christians approach the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). Namely, that Judaism was about law and that Jesus is all about love. His thesis is right there in the title: no, Judaism is not about law, it's about love.
4. Right Thing Right Now. Ryan Holliday is a modern day Stoic. This title about the concept of doing justice is part of his series on Stoic virtues. Though he comes from a different theological/philosophical grid than I do, I found so much of what he wrote here to be helpful and thought-provoking.

Memoirs/biographies

1. Ghosted. This is a memoir of Nancy French's work as a ghostwriter for many years, writing the speeches and books for many top names in the GOP before she was unceremoniously kicked to the curb as Trump rose to power.
2. Cloistered. I read this for no other reason than pure curiosity about what life is like inside a modern monastery. I have no way of knowing what is or isn't broadly represenative of modern monastic life here, but it was a sobering story of deeply malformative community patterns all ostensibly aimed at fostering spiritual life.
3. The Diary of a Young Girl. I visited Anne Frank's home in February when I was out in Amsterdam and read this book again. The book deserves its status as a classic. I probably wouldn't go back to the Anne Frank House again.
4. Educated. Tara Westover's memoir of growing up in a radically conservative Mormon home hit far too close to home for my comfort. Though I am not Mormon, many of the dynamics she described could've been said of my childhood as well.

Writers on writing

1. Dear Writer. "Stay deep within yourself, and stay alone there. That is where your poems come from." Over the years, I have felt varying degrees of angst and even depression at the loneliness of being an adult male who thinks deeply about things. This quote made a huge difference for me, moving me from seeing it as something to feel sorry for myself about toward seeing it as a gift which I need to channel. Being alone inside oneself is not a problem; the solitude is the space necessary for writing.
2. The Fellowship. This is not a book of writing advice, really, but rather a history of some of the most famous writers of all time: The Inklings. I have long wished to have a group of writer friends just like them, and this history dispelled some of the myth I had built up in my mind about them. Don't get me wrong, I would still love that kind of circle, but my expectations of what it would be are perhaps less lofty than they used to be.
3. The Seven Basic Plots. I have this one on the list because a) I read it, and b) the first section of the book is indeed a very helpful summary of basic plot types. But the latter two thirds of the book, about 500 pages, is terrible. Words cannot express how much I viscerally disliked it. It's this unbelievably long, drawn out theory that all narrative plot types boil down to Jungian psychological archetypes of masculine/feminine, anima/animus, etc. and that all of this means that storytelling is rooted in the hardwiring of human psychology. It's not even so much that I mind him theorizing about that, it's just that he then has the hubris to then assert that stories that don't fit his grid must therefore be bad stories. Could it not (at least hypothetically) be that outliers signify problems in the model? What of stories from other cultures that do not feel "satisfying" to typical Western expectations? Is it really so safe to universalize all stories?

Human origins

1. Sapiens. Yuval Noah Harari's popular book that I read not once but twice this year. I've long been perplexed by the antagonism between the worlds of "faith" (AKA conservative Christianity, really) and "science" (AKA evolution, mostly). This book, along with the others in this genre, were readings I did for a book project that I'm working on.
2. Proto. This is a fascinating exploration of the linguistic relationships in the Indo-European language family and how those relationships point back toward a common ancestor language referred to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
3. Every Living Thing. Today we're used to plants and animals having fancy Latin names, but at one point the concept of naming and classifying every living thing in a formal way was a brand new idea. Someone had to come up with reliable, objective methods of formally classifying things as belonging to this or that species. Every Living Thing is the wild story of how that happened.
4. The Evolution of Adam. Pete Enns is a controversial figure in the Evangelical Christian world, to put it mildly. I read a number of his books this year, and this one in particular was a helpful exploration of how one might reconcile the differences between traditional accounts of human origins and evolutionary accounts. I don't see things in quite the same light as he does, but he was a helpful thought partner here nonetheless.

Classics/recommendations

1. Everything is Illuminated. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, recommended to me by a friend. The less you know about it going in, the better. I was at first shocked, appalled, and then deeply moved.
2. Catch-22. Recommended by the same friend, this is Joseph Heller's classic work from the sixties that introduced the concept of a "Catch-22" into the popular lexicon. A parody of military bureaucracy, it was equal parts depressing and hilarious.
3. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Though I, like everyone else on the planet, had heard of this book and knew the basic idea, I had never actually read it. I listened to it as I wandered up and down the streets and sad monuments of Berlin, contemplating the ways in which we try to control one another. I expected it to end differently than it did.
4. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. This was a book club read. I was so struck by its portrait of poverty and how hard it is to escape, while at the same time presenting its characters as resilient in surprising and beautiful ways.
5. The Grapes of Wrath. A classic among classics, this is another portrait of how human beings cope with poverty, starvation, and class. A lot of my theological readings are often occupied with the question of how the world should be theoretically, while books like this paint a picture of how human beings can and do encounter the world as it actually is.

Sci-fi & fantasy

1. Babel. I read this book because someone described it to me as "Harry Potter for adults" in that it's an academic fantasy novel set in England. I suppose another similarity is that it starts out fairly lighthearted and gets dark quickly. Whereas Harry Potter is about how one person's life can save the world, Babel is about how one people can exploit the nuances of cultural and linguistic difference to extract wealth and life from the whole world.
2. The Illustrated Man. I revisited Ray Bradbury's classic anthology of sci-fi short stories that meditate on the perils of techno-utopian futures.
3. Old Venus. This anthology was a true delight. I remember reading pulpy 1970s space exploration novels as a kid, and they had a tone that was just different from modern sci-fi writing. In 2015 George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois commissioned a slate of authors to rewind the clock to before we knew that Venus was actually a hellscape, back to when we imagined it might be some kind of tropical paradise, and write short stories set on that "Old Venus."
4. Orbital. The cover of this book says, "Orbital: A Novel," but in my opinion it felt more like, "Orbital, A Tone Poem." Beautiful, soaring prose tries to capture what it feels like to be in low earth orbit.
5. Spaceman of Bohemia. This was the basis for Netflix's movie Spaceman (which I have yet to watch). The novel explores the emotional and relational aspects of what exploration entails, how our future is inextricably intertwined with our past, and how our national identity shapes the way we envision our place in the world.

Current events

1. The Cost of Being Undocumented. This is an account of an undocumented, Christian, Mexican, formerly well-to-do immigrant trying to stay alive in America. Immigration is probably the hottest topic of conversation in America right now, and so much of it revolves around our assumptions of who these people must be, why they're here, and why they're undocumented. It's worth hearing from the horse's mouth rather than just relying on assumptions.
2. Enshittification. It's not exactly a shocking observation that much of the Internet today mostly just... sucks. Services that started off as incredibly helpful have decayed into husks that provide very little value and mostly just mine personal data. This book explores not only why that is, but more importantly, what the practical things are that we can do about it.
3. Bad Company. Similar to the previous title, this book explores the catastrophic human impact of what happens when previously great outlets, newspapers, hospitals, and other businesses get bought out by private equity. The common ground with the previous title is... unchecked greed.
4. Revenge of the Tipping Point. Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point became a cultural touchstone when it came out in 2000, and to mark its 25th anniversary he decided that rather than re-releasing it, he would instead write a new work exploring the dark side of how the concept can result in net negative change.
5. Before We Were Trans. Like immigration, the transgender conversation elicits intense emotion from just about everyone. This book strives to situate the modern definition of the transgender experience (largely a medical/pathological one) in the broader history of gender nonconformity. Kit Heyam argues that there is an extremely wide range of reasons why a person might transgress defined gender norms, and that it's worth it to consider all of these reasons rather than thinking about transness from only a medical lens.
6. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. Part of the reason it is so difficult to think well about the conflict in Israel is that it feels like one must pick and then unilaterally defend a side. Either one is on Israel's side, in which case they did nothing wrong and anyone who disagrees is antisemitic, or else one must defend the innocent Palestinian children who have been killed and write off any evils committed by Hamas. This book is a meditation on a Jewishness that yearns for a Jewish homeland but does not excuse Israel's evils. For more on this topic, Tomorrow is Yesterday is a helpful primer on the history of the conflict.

History & historical fiction

1. Twelve Churches. I've read quite a number of Church History books, but this was the first one I've read that was a history of Christianity rooted in actual, physical church buildings around the world. It was a fascinating conceit for a well-trodden category of book.
2. Lower than the Angels. If you read much church history, then you're undoubtedly familiar with Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the most distinguished names in the field. This is his newly released history of sex and Christianity that problematizes the popular notion that Christianity has had a more or less stable posture towards sexuality, marriage, and relationship throughout its history, or at least that it has had a recognizable trajectory in one direction. Instead, the thesis of his book is that sexuality and marriage have cashed out differently at different times and places depending on social norms and intellectual movements.
3. The Beloved Community. Like most Americans, I've long been familiar with the history of the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders. I've read plenty by MLK including his socio-ecclesiological writings about the "Beloved Community," but I had never read a history of it. Charles Marsh's work traces not only the faith-based origins of the Civil Rights Movement, but also how it became unmoored from these foundations after its legal victories as well as the work that folks like John Perkins did to try to carry it forward in the subsequent decades.
4. The Filling Station. In April this year we traveled down to Tulsa to visit some friends who moved there recently. I decided to read Vanessa Miller's new historical novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre along the way. It is the story of two strong, Black sisters and the way they rebuild after the tragedy. It centers around a real, historical place called the Threatt Filling Station that was a safe haven for Black travelers along Route 66.
5. The Women. Woof. I'm not the target demographic for Kristin Hannah's The Women, but boy is it a doozy of a novel. I read a ton of books about Vietnam when I was in high school, but this is the first that I've read that centers around the lives of women who served as nurses over there. The book is incredibly heavy, but well worth reading.

The natural world

1. The Call of the Wild. We read this book as a family and discussed it with another family, all of whom deeply hated the book. For me, however, it was a profoundly moving meditation on our uneasy relationship with base instincts, with the brutal unforgiveness of nature, and what it means to be a creature who exercises mercy in such a world.
2. The Salt Stones. This lyrical account by Helen Whybrow chronicles her career as a shepherd restoring a hundred acre farm in Vermont while raising a flock of Icelandic sheep. For those who are perhaps entranced by a Wendell Berry-esque vision of a romantic agrarian life, Whybrow makes it clear that such a life is far from easy, but it is filled with beauty.
3. Gathered. The subtitle is "On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life." One thing I learned a lot about this year is mushrooms, and I spent many delightful hours in the forests and fields around here looking for mushrooms and trying to identify them. One of Cerberville's emphases is that foraging is not something you have to go out into the middle of nowhere to do; there is plenty to forage even in the middle of our cities if we have eyes to see it. Along the way she shares recipes for found food, and highlights the need to envision the reciprical give-and-take relationship we have with nature in contrast to those who would either completely exploit nature or those who would see it as something that ought not be touched at all.

Work/self-improvement

1. The Culture Map. I work at a company headquartered in Europe, and the very first thing I noticed when I began working there was just how wildly different various folks approached the mundane realities of corporate life. From communication to conflict resolution, from meeting etiquette to what kinds of memes are funny, people have radically different perspectives on how life should be lived. An Argentinian coworker shared Erin Meyer's book with me this year and it was the single most helpful thing I've read so far on navigating inter-cultural differences. She analyzes various world cultures on 8 different axes: communication, leadership, decision-making, trust, feedback, persuasion, disagreement, and scheduling. It's an incredibly helpful way to understand those you need to work with on a daily basis who come from a different background than you.
2. These Strange New Minds. Christopher Summerfield's book serves as an easy introduction to the world of Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, explaining what they are, where they came from, and how they are able to mimic human language with such impressive accuracy. I remain fairly bearish about LLMs and the long-term effects of building an entire economy on the premise that language modeling is equivalent to an artificial "intelligence," but I nonetheless find it super interesting how it all works, and I do think there are some interesting and ethical applications in spite of the overall shape of the industry right now.¹
3. The Explorer's Gene. Alex Hutchinson looks at the "Explorer's Gene," a variant of the dopamine receptor DRD4, that is especially prevalent in populations that have migrated from one place to another. He looks at how it's tied to the drive for novelty and risk-taking, and then he spends time talking about the balance of "explore vs. exploit." Those who never explore and only ever work with what they already know tend to reap smaller rewards and innovate less. Exploring is fun and exciting, but it's also a fundamentally risky gamble: you might not end up discovering anything that makes the exploration worth it. In my career, I see that there are times when I need to grow and learn and there are times when I need to apply that growth to practical applications.