Melody's 2025 Reading

 I read 72 books (21k pages) in 2025! That’s fewer books (and fewer pages) than I read in 2024, but still a lot of books, and I’m happy with the numbers.

More e-books than last year but fewer audiobooks and print books. The print book situation is one I want to address in 2026; this has little to do with the sacredness of print and is more because of how I read the different formats. I typically turn to e-books when I would be scrolling instagram (or thredup), which means I’m rarely reading for more than a few minutes at a time. It does not lend itself to long books or rich books. Yet there are long and rich books I want to read! For the first time ever, I’m going to make a list of books I plan to read this year, and these will be long, rich, and print.

The most intriguing element of my reading this year was my commitment to the Goodreads challenges, where you earn badges by reading books from specific lists during a specific range of time. I’m pleased to say I got every badge possible in 2025, and it exposed me to some genres and books I never would have explored! Of the 72 books I read this year, 13 came exclusively from the badge lists. The downside of this is that it takes time from the 1k books already on my to-read list. I have mixed feelings, but I’m very grateful for the breadth of new ideas (and the dopamine from badges completed).

Okay. I’m going to organize my top books a little different this year, because I read so many good non-fiction books, and honestly my fiction books were a little meh.

Non-Fiction

Forty-six non-fiction books this year, and they break down into the following categories.

I read the most in the Memoir and Society categories, with nine books in each. By category, here are my best books of the year.

Christianity

Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God, by Dallas Willard, rewards the slow reader who is willing to read and then sit and listen. This is the book to read if you are wanting to deepen your day-to-day relationship with Christ. Note: There are several versions of this book, as it has been updated and added to over the years; you are missing out if you read anything other than the one with the forward by James Bryan Smith (which I think is the most recent). This cover is the one you want!

Family

I read a few books this year on parenting and motherhood specifically. And while I highly recommend What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice (Anastasia Berg, Rachel Wiseman) and All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (Jennifer Senior), my top book from this category is The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, by Leah Libresco Sargeant. Though focused on womanhood, Sergeant’s book is a must for anyone exhausted by our hyper-independent ideal. Sergeant challenges the reader to reframe what it means to ‘look human’ and argues that shared dependence is not only noble but also natural.

Health

One of the 12 “new releases” I read of 2025 was John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. Green has found his calling in non-fiction, I believe, and he has found his passion in raising awareness of tuberculosis (aka consumption). You will learn things you didn’t know, and you will be frustrated by how treatment is rationed across the globe, causing millions of unnecessary deaths.

If you want to continue on from where Green’s book ends, I also highly recommend Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Tracy Kidder), especially if you’re interested in how to compare the ‘stop for the one’ mindset against effective altruism (or something like it).

Life Design

I read quite a few in this category but the best was On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living, by Alan Noble. For those trying to understand mental health in a Christian context, this is a must-read.

Memoir

Far and away, my favorite books of the year were in the Memoir category. Sorry-not-sorry, I’m going to feature four of them here, but I promise fewer for the other categories. In alphabetical order:

Educated, by Tara Westover, was the harrowing memoir of growing up isolated in a survivalist family in Idaho. The reason it’s so high on the list is not because of the story (which is inspiring) but because of how Tara tackles the issue of memory. We do not remember situations as accurately as we think we do, and Tara’s memoir is its own exploration of knowing what really happened as she compares her own remembrances to those of her family and available factual records.

Runaway Bay: A Memoir of Conversations with the Father who Abandoned Me ... and the One who Never Will, by Amy Cogdell (with Mike Hubbard), floats effortlessly from a true and difficult story of reconciliation to deep revelatory devotions of God’s love, and then back. This book is the story of a reconciliation pioneer, full of hope and a model for those who would follow in Amy’s hard-fought but gloriously beautiful footsteps.

Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth), by Markus Zusak, is about Zusak’s dogs and their lives well-lived. Better known for The Book Thief, Zusak is also a dog owner, and these stories are for anyone who has ever loved a dog (especially one that was a little bit wild).

When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, is the devastating memoir of a philosopher-turned-brain-surgeon who faces his own terminal lung cancer. His life was driven by a quest to understand the human experience fully, and he deftly continues toward this goal as he writes his own story. This is a book about what it means to live fully in the present time and hope for a future you will never see.

Society

This is an overly broad category, but here we are. The best of all the Society books was Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, which I happened to pull off a library shelf on a whim. This is technically an economics book, but it applies to so much more (including, for me, time management). You know that feeling when you finally get down to the "source" book? That is, the book it feels like all the other books are riffing off of? It's this one!

Corporate Disasters

The best of them all was Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams. You’ll think differently (and twice) about Facebook once you’re done. I will never recover from the Settlers of Catan game; hopefully neither will Mark Zuckerberg.

Also recommended:

• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou) about Theranos

• Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Michael Lewis) about FTX

Belief and Disagreements

Alternative facts! Everything is polarized! Why does this happen and how can we stop it and how do we operate within this crazy reality? The must-read in this sub-cateogry is I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, by Monica Guzmán. There are a few books out there with similar subtitles, but this is the best I’ve read. Guzmán practices what she preaches throughout her book, sharing a balance of examples and using her own family as a model of both heartache and hope.

Also recommended:

• Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things (Dan Ariely)

• Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (Amanda Montell)

Fiction

It’s not fair to completely ignore Fiction, especially because I read some interesting novels this year (even if they weren’t my favorite). The Goodreads badges get a lot of credit for that.

My favorites of the year were YA fantasy:

• A Stranger to Command (Sherwood Smith) was a return to a series and world I thought complete, and it was as wonderful as I’d hoped.

• Sky in the Deep (Adrienne Young) contained all of my favorite tropes one after another. 

The Goodreads badges also exposed me to some previously unexplored genres such as dark academia (The Likeness, by Tana French), crime (Five Decembers, by James Kestrel) and gothic (Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia). Of these, dark academia is my favorite new discovery.

Additional Analysis

I had some strong opinions on books this year so wanted to look at where my ratings differed most from the average Goodreads rating.

1. The PLAN: Manage Your Time Like a Lazy Genius (Kendra Adachi) has 3.9 stars on Goodreads but only 2 from me.

2. Trust (Hernan Diaz) has 3.8 stars on Goodreads but only 2 from me. (I will rant on this book if you’re interested.)

3. Atmosphere (Taylor Jenkins Reid) has 4.3 stars on Goodreads but only 3 from me.

4. The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett) has 4.3 stars on Goodreads but only 3 from me.

5. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (Kim Michele Richardson) has 4.2 stars on Goodreads but only 3 from me.

Those are the ones where I gave it a lower rating than Goodreads, which is probably the most interesting. Related, the top-most rated books I did not finish were the following:

• Relaxed: Walking with the One Who Is Not Worried about a Thing (Megan Fate Marshman), which I intend to return to!
• A Court of Wings and Ruin (Sarah J. Maas), which finally failed its sex-per-plot ratio and became incredibly boring as an actual story.
• The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year (Margaret Renkl), which started out so melancholy in winter that I couldn't get through to spring.

This post is already too long, so I will leave it there! If you want to see all the books I read in 2025, check out the full list here. And feel free to friend me on Goodreads to follow along in 2026!

AI disclaimer: I used ChatGPT as input for the categorization exercise.