WORST to BEST books i read so far this year (2025)

this is a book about astronauts in the8s. It's about competition at NASA. It is about tragic love. If you think that you are having a difficult long-distance relationship because your love is on the other side of the country, imagine if your love was on a spaceship in outer space and it was your job to get them home safely to Earth.

Look, I generally dislike it when a fantasy book's message is super on the nose, very unsuttle, basically like a direct metaphor. But in this book, I somehow did not care. I forgive it. Its critique of sexism, colonialism, and blindness to oppression was just too good.

This is a poetic non-fiction book full of philosophical and emotional musings about the color blue. ... Gorgeous, gorgeous words by Maggie Nelson.

I buddy read this book as a joke with friends and it dared to not even be funny. Do you ever watch like a bad movie just to entertain yourself with how bad it is and then it turns out to just be boring bad and not funny bad. That's what this book was for me. Boring with a few jump scares of sudden extreme sexism.

But looking back, I could summarize this book as just this book truly contributed nothing to my life, either positively or negatively. Also, most of what happened in this book is super implausible.

I would say this is the definition of junk food literature. It's horribly written. It probably gave me brain rot, but my gosh, it's so much fun. I think I would go as far as saying that this was the most fun book that I read so far this year.

But that would be overly harsh. Emily Henry remains amazing at creating tension between characters. In this case, two really tall journalists. Knees touching secretly under the table. I read the whole first half of this book in two days.

If you love the idea of a blood witch main character that hides her arcane powers because she is hunted for being a blood witch, but then secretly hunts down blood witch hunters to take revenge on her lost sisters, you're going to be disappointed in this one cuz that's all promised but it's not delivered on at all. ... That is a promise that this book delivers on. and the tension is delicious.

You know the literary fiction is going to be good when the opening line is when I was a child I used to pretend to be a cucumber. ... This author is a philosopher and a poet.

It is just vibes, purely conceptual, a reflection, a being in awe with the earth, a love letter to our planet. Well, I don't again I don't know like I haven't been to space, but I feel like that feeling is perfectly contained in this small little novel about astronauts orbiting the earth.

Someone described this book to me as a gentle kiss on the forehead and I think that is the perfect description of this series of an unlikely friendship between a te-ong and a robot. This is the second book in the duogy by the way and this second book gives even more interesting ideas on how we could live in a future with no money or more community-based.

I imagine Quicksilver as a kind of monster, a horror monster, like a Frankenstein or a the thing where there's just limbs and eyes sticking out everywhere because this book was like this weird amalgamation of every romanty book you've ever read. I did not anticipate the vampires, but there's no overarching vision.

Was I dead happy reading this? The spirits of nostalgia taking over my body? Yes. Can I also critically look back at it and say that objectively it's really not that interesting? Unfortunately, also yes.

It's the new Hunger Games novel, Susan Collins Never Disappoints. What more can I say about it? ... This prequel to The Hunger Games, where we follow Hay Mitch's games, tells you propaganda is bad, and you are falling for it.

Like the vibes in this book are immaculate. The romance in this book immaculate. Truly vibes alone, this is like a five out of five stars. But unfortunately, there also had to be a plot to sustain in the story, and that's where it kind of started faltering.

This book is proof that you can do enemies to lovers literary style. This book is proof that you can do spicy scenes literary style. Every page in this book have me lying on the floor thinking, "Words? They're so beautiful." It's gorgeously subtle in its themes.

It's cute. It's well written, but just like sleeping for a hundred years. It is a little bit boring and not that immersive.

On the one hand, it does have some of the most beautiful dreamlike scenes and experiences that I've read in a very long time. ... But the only thing that this book managed to touch is a word count cap I think because we were barreling through everything at a breakneck pace. The characters so flat you could origami them.