Welcome to your Saturday edition of Today in Books. Here’s the highlight reel from the week that was.
The Biggest Best-Of-2025 List Has Landed
NPR’s annual “Books We Love” feature is the antithesis of the hyper-curated top-ten. “More is more” readers, rejoice: the crew at NPR—hosts, producers, editors, everybody—has rounded up more than 380 books to celebrate. The gloriously massive list is filterable by all the usual genres, along with gift-assistance categories (art lovers, history lovers, etc), staff picks, book club recommendations, options for readers who prefer the “rather long” or “rather short” read, and, my favorite, “seriously great writing.” The 2025 selections join the collection NPR has been amassing since 2013, and yes, Virginia, you can see all of those lists, too. If you can’t find something exciting, something you haven’t heard of before, and something for everyone on your holiday shopping list from the 4,000+ titles in the omnibus collection, I don’t know what to do for you.
The New York Times‘s 100 Notable Books of 2025
I think the day the New York Times drops its 100 notable books of the year is my favorite day of Best Books Season. The selections are reliably well-rounded, making it the kind of list you could happily build a year (or several) in reading around, and it’s fun to tally up how many you’ve read and make note of new titles for your TBR.
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Also notable is if/where the big award winners appear. Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip, which won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, appears on the notables, as does Booker winner Flesh by David Szalay. Rabih Alameddine’s National Book Award-winning True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is not to be found.
We’ve talked about a bunch of the books that are on the list on the Book Riot Podcast this year. Eavesdrop on our book club convos:
BIPOC Books to Gift This Year
We’ve got gift guides for every kind of reader rolling out this season. Here’s Erica Ezeifedi with picks for the person on your list who makes it a point to celebrate BIPOC authors. I heartily second the emotion for Good Things by Samin Nosrat; give a great cookbook and guarantee yourself an invitation to the dinner parties that follow!
Part Book Club, Part English Class, All Fun.
We wrapped up the first regular season of the Zero to Well-Read podcast earlier this week with a conversation about Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, and I can’t tell you how happy spending the last several months reading truly great books and talking about them with a smart friend has made me. It has rewired my brain and reminded me of all the best parts of English class. Lock in with us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcatcher of choice.
