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I read some really good books this year, both fiction and non-fiction, so if you have readers in your life, they may enjoy receiving one of these this Christmas:

THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans.

“The Correspondent is this year’s breakout novel no one saw coming.” – The Wall Street Journal.
“I cried more than once as I witnessed this brilliant woman come to understand herself more deeply.”
– Florence Knapp, author of The Names

Filled with wisdom and wit, it’s a quick read, and once I started, I couldn’t stop until the end. I loved this book! 

THE VEGETARIAN by Han Kang.
Winner of The International Booker Prize • One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21ST Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century

This Korean author won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature but this book won’t be for everyone. Most translated works are tricky, but her voice is so unique and her use of language so poetic that she has become my favorite new author, which led me to another book of hers…

WE DO NOT PART by Han Kang.
Longlisted for the National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal

“Even through the veil of translation, the quiet intricacy of the author’s prose glitters throughout, but nowhere is this so evident as in her descriptions of the snow: “As the snow lands on the wet asphalt, each flake seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a final cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone.”

This is a mysterious book that resists easy interpretation, but it’s clearly addressing the violent legacies of the past.” (KIRKUS)   

THE FRIEND: A NOVEL by Sigrid Nunez.
Winner of the 2018 National Book Award • One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21ST Century
A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.

If you love dogs and the impact they have on our lives, you will love this book! The film, with Bill Murray and Naomi Watts – and Atlas, the Great Dane – is really good too! One of my wife’s favorites this year.

THE TREES: A NOVEL by Percival Everett.
Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize • Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award • Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award • Finalist for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award • Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 

The author is a USC English Professor (Fight On!) and winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for James, which I read, loved, and reviewed for you last year.  

It’s a mystery. It’s a buddy adventure tale. It’s disturbingly violent and graphic. And it is surprisingly, laugh-out-loud funny in spots. I really liked it! 

BECOMING DUCHESS GOLDBLATT by Anonymous.

“Unforgettable . . . Behind her brilliantly witty and uplifting message is a remarkable vulnerability and candor that reminds us that we are not alone in our struggles—and that we can, against all odds, get through them.”

I missed this one when it came out a few years ago but I’m glad I found it and read it. It’s really good! 

FATES AND FURIES: A NOVEL by Lauren Groff. 
A Finalist for The National Book Award • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
“…these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home.” 
 

HEART LAMP by Banu Mushtaq.
Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize 

This is a translated work, so not for everyone, but if you’ve spent time in South Asia, this story will resonate and move you deeply.

“She said that she does not see herself writing only about a certain kind of woman belonging to a certain community, that women everywhere face similar, if not the exact same problems, and those are the issues that she writes about.

“Material things had become priceless, and human beings worthless. Behind those material possessions, people’s feelings were on sale. Things decided the relationships between small people with big shadows.”

“If you were to build the world again, to create males and females again, do not be like an inexperienced potter. Come to earth as a woman, Prabhu! Be a woman once, oh Lord!” 
 

SALVAGE THE BONES: A NOVEL by Jesmyn Ward. 
Winner of the National Book Award, 2011

This is an incredibly compassionate, tender and moving book about poverty and love within a family in coastal Mississippi leading up to Hurricane Katrina. A really good book! 

TELL ME EVERYTHING by Elizabeth Strout.
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction • A Best Book of the Year:

From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a “stunner” (People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world. 

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON by Elizabeth Strout. 

“I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you. I feel that people may not understand: It was all right.” 

I just feel like I know all these characters so well now that they’ve almost become family.

In Non-Fiction, my favorites included:

OURS WAS THE SHINING FUTURE: THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN DREAM by David Leonhardt.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • One of The Atlantic’s Ten Best Books of the Year • A Financial Times Best Book of the Year. 

The clear-eyed, definitive history of the modern American economy and the decline of the American Dream, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist behind The New York Times’s “The Morning” newsletter.

 

THE BEST MINDS: A STORY OF FRIENDSHIP, MADNESS, AND THE TRAGEDY OF GOOD INTENTIONS by Jonathan Rosen.
Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

“Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved.” 

DARK MONEY: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE BILLIONAIRES BEHIND THE RISE OF THE RADICAL RIGHT by Jane Mayer.
One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year.

Studies have shown that “increasingly concentrated wealth in America resulted in more polarization and extremism, especially on the right. Very rich benefactors in the Republican Party were far more opposed to taxes and regulations than the rest of the country. “The more Republicans depend upon 1% of the 1% donors, the more conservative they tend to be.”

This book is fascinating, and terrifying, but it helped me understand some of what’s going on in American politics today. 

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF ABED SALAMA: ANATOMY OF A JERUSALEM TRAGEDY by Nathan Thrall.
Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction 

Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day. “It is hard to think of another book that gives such a poignant, deeply human face to the ongoing tragedy of Palestine. Thrall’s evocation of both a terrible crisis and the daily humiliations of life under occupation is nothing short of heart-breaking.”

Given what we’ve watched happen in Israel and Gaza this year, I really wanted to read this book, and I was not disappointed.

Ok, there’s others, but this post is long enough as it is. Solid ideas for the readers in your life for this holiday season, understanding that reading is such a personal thing, it’s often impossible to predict what someone will love.

I’ll share more books I really enjoyed reading in 2025 in a future post, but these were my favorites, the best books I read in 2025!