Top 10 Books I Read in 2025!

This is book three, A King and Waiting, which I think for me was the big strongest one of the three because it just book by book, chapter by chapter, character moment by character moment just built and built and layer upon layer of complexity and emotionality got to a point where this book three just exploded for me.

It's beautiful. It's mystical. McCarthy is a true poet in a way, but at the same time he doesn't shy away from the brutality of life.

It is the best book I've ever read that deals with the cost of magic. What would it mean if we had this power? What would we use it for?

This is really about a character journey into the depths of that character's soul as she moves through this adventurous book. Really, really loved this book.

This is the story of a world going backwards and forwards into infinitum. It is a story of a world not just on the physical plane but on that spiritual plane of what we would hit our knees and pray to and what type of agency do they have and what are they trying to achieve not only the characters on the ground in this physical world.

It's everything you want a penultimate book in a long series to be. It raises all of the stakes. It brings, as every book in the series does, new realities to our setting and our world and our character as they go through this long journey.

It's just a beautiful, beautiful book.

I don't even want to say what the story is here. I will say the best setting I've read in an epic fantasy because this underwater city that we get to go to that we get to visit is just amazing.

I read the first one. I could not stop. I had to read the next two with the next two months.

You have the family drama like you're watching this amazing Arthur Miller play in front of you. You have the everything gets ratcheted up because this is a crime family.

It's a life experience. And I put off reading it for so long because I knew I knew that my father was equal parts Woodro Call and Gus McCrae. And it was going to hit me in a very personal way. And it absolutely did.

there's so much going on here and he takes no time to ease you into the story. You're just breathlessly trying to keep up. But what does absolutely grab you by the collar and won't let you go as you travel through this world is a new voice and a new world.

This is so evocative of this place, South Boston, and what it means to grow up there and the kind of people that live there and the cyclical nature of this type of tragedy there.

So I did love the ships of Marrier. I've loved every book in the Wars of Light and Shadow so far, but Warhost of Vasmark stands out as my favorite until it's overtaken as we go for further into the Wars of Light and Shadow.

if you want something entirely weirdly different something you have not read before. Something that has left me absolutely wanting to pick up book two.

Warhost of Vasmark stands out as my favorite until it's overtaken as we go for further into the Wars of Light and Shadow.

this one did as well. So even though he tried a little bit of a different structure, a little bit of different pace, a little bit different way of telling the story. The emotionality is still there.