My Favorite Reads of 2025

Happy New Year! As has been my practice for over 17 years, today is the day I take to reflect on the past year of reading, list my favorite books of the year, and look forward to the year ahead.

As I look back on 2025, I see a change in my reading habits due to two separate factors. First, I made the deliberate decision to move away from an annual reading goal based on number of books read, and instead began a more intentional focus on reading more slowly and deeply. This is part of a larger goal to live a more contemplative lifestyle, savoring the present moment and appreciating things in more detail. In other words, to live more deeply and less hastily. In the case of reading, what this means is summarized beautifully by Mortimer Adler: “It’s not how many books you get through, it’s how many books get through you.” As 2026 begins, I will not be making an annual goal on Goodreads to finish a certain number of books. In fact, I will not be using Goodreads anymore to track reading progress or books read. For years I have used both Goodreads and LibraryThing, and I have decided to simplify things by only using LibraryThing. In April I will be celebrating my 20th year using LibraryThing to catalog my books, and it has everything I need to organize my reading life. So, farewell Goodreads and the self-imposed pressure of trying to read a certain number of books per year.

The second factor that had an impact on my reading was a major job change. After seven years as a school administrator, I have returned to the classroom as a high school theology teacher. I love teaching, and it is so fulfilling to be back in the classroom in direct contact with students. The transition, however, has required a lot of preparation outside of the school day, and this has heavily impacted my available time for reading. But I am confident that as I move through the rest of the school year the impact will decrease and I will once again have the time I need for the kind of deep reading that is so crucial to my well being.

Even with those two changes in my reading in 2025, I still had a very productive year. According to LibraryThing, I read over 9,000 pages, which averaged out to 25 pages per day. That gives me a good sense of how much time to carve out each day in order to prioritize reading. And when I look back on the books I read in 2025, I wasn’t disappointed in their ability to inspire, inform, and transform.

Favorite Reads of 2025

When compiling my list of favorite reads, I primarily consider those books that moved me the most in this particular year, rather than which ones I think are of the highest quality. The two criteria often intersect, but not always. With that in mind, here are my top ten books of the year:

1. Roots by Alex Haley
2. Metamorphoses by Ovid
3. Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls
4. He Leadeth Me by Walter J. Ciszek
5. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
6. The Tears of Things by Richard Rohr
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. King Henry V by William Shakespeare
9. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
10. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Looking Ahead to 2026 – The Year of Tolstoy

I am very excited for the coming year in reading. I am calling 2026 the Year of Tolstoy. A few years ago I hosted the War and Peace Chapter-a-Day Read-Along, and since then I have wanted to delve more deeply into Tolstoy’s body of work. That’s one of the reasons that I am hosting the 2026 Leo Tolstoy Chapter-a-Day Read-Along, featuring the books Anna Karenina and Resurrection. I look forward to savoring these books slowly, taking them one chapter a day. But that’s only the beginning. In addition to the read-along, I will also be reading the following by Tolstoy:

• A Calendar of Wisdom: This is a sort of daily devotional edited by Tolstoy that collects “the wisdom of the centuries in one book.” In his introduction to the English translation of the book, Peter Sekirin writes, “It was [Tolstoy’s] own favorite everyday reading book, a book he would turn to regularly for the rest of his life.” Each day it features several quotes by the world’s most profound thinkers, organized around a particular theme, and which includes commentary by Tolstoy. I will be reading this book daily in 2026 in parallel with Anna Karenina and Resurrection. If you’re curious about its contents, check out the online version created by Rory Flint.
• What Is Art?: I have just started this book that Tolstoy wrote in 1897, one of his last works. In it, I hope to better understand Tolstoy’s own view of art and how it might shed light on his other works.
• Collected Shorter Fiction in 2 Volumes: This boxed set from Everyman’s Library contains most of Tolstoy’s short stories and novellas. Notable stories include “God Sees the Truth, but Waits,” “What Men Live By,” “Where Love is, God is,” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” and “Hadji Murad.”

In addition to the Year of Tolstoy, I am also looking forward to participating as much as possible in the Hardcore Literature Bookclub schedule of books for 2026, especially the following:

• Ancient Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
• The Idiot by Dostoyevski – Should make for interesting comparison to Tolstoy
• The poetry of William Blake
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
• The Bhagavad Gita – Especially interesting to me because of Thoreau’s interest in it
• Volumes One and Two of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
• Confessions by St. Augustine
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Beowulf
• On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• The annual secret Dickens novel

This is an ambitious list, and I may not get to all of these, but these are the titles I am most interested in.

Finally, I am aiming for a slight change in the format of the books I read. I am going to experiment with reading more of my Everyman’s Library and Britannica Great Books of the Western World volumes this year, rather than trade paperback editions like Penguin Classics. I will also be mixing in some Kindle editions, too, to see how that affects my goal to read slowly and deeply.

I hope 2025 was a good reading year for you and I wish you a Happy New Reading Year, along with many blessings to you and your family!