JDSutter.me

In 2025, I read 96 books and of those, I had 19 books that I rated 5 stars. And an additional 41 more were 4 stars or between 4 and 5. (The StoryGraph, the tool that I use to track my reads, allows for fractional ratings down to a quarter of a star.) As with last year, most of my 5-star reads were part of a few thriller series I was reading and a few were re-reads. It was actually a little bit of a disappointing reading year; I read several books that were highly rated and hyped up that just didn’t really work for me. (If you’d like to hear more about that, let me know.) But I want to share some thoughts on 6 of my favorite reads from last year. If you are interested in more takeaways from my media consumption last year, I wrote a post about that here . I went through all of my 4- to 5-star books, set aside all the series ones, and looked at all the standalone books, both nonfiction and fiction. I considered which ones impacted me the most as I looked back on them. Or another way to sa...