April 22, 2026

The Best Books I Read in 2025

As always, this is a list of the best nonfiction books I read this year, not a list of favorite books published this year. You can see most of them are decades old. They are in no particular order.

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel

The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts

Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy by Hannah Marcus

Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs

The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

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My favorite fiction reads of the year were philosophical novel The Fall by Albert Camus, and the brilliant The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy.


Photo by Olga Tutunaru on Unsplash