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100 Notable Books of 2025
The New York Times: “Each January, the editors and critics at the Book Review begin sifting through thousands of new books. By February, we’re meeting regularly to debate and discuss the standouts.
All of us are passionate readers, but our tastes don’t necessarily overlap, so the conversations are lively! By September, we’re winnowing down our big list of contenders to arrive at 100 Notables.
A hundred may seem like a lot of books, but not to us — we all have favorites that didn’t make the final cut. As you browse, you can save the books you’ve read or want to read. By the time you reach the end, you’ll have a personalized reading list to share…”
Best non-fiction books of 2025
The year started off slow, but it ended up being a normally strong time for quality, readable non-fiction. Here is my list, noting that the links lead either to my reviews or to Amazon. These are roughly in the order I read them, not ranked ordinally. Here goes:
Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State.
Tirthankar Roy and K. Ravi Raman, Kerala: 1956 to the Present.
Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life.
Amy Sall, The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema, and Power.
Michael Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin.
David Eltis, Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades.
Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor.
Daniel Dain, A History of Boston. Short review here.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance.
Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.
Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism
Roger Chickering, The German Empire, 1871-1918.
Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism: A Journey Through History.
Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.
Joseph Torigian, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping.
Rupert Gavin, Amorous or Loving?: The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English.
Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America.
Erik Penman, Eric Satie Three Piece Suite.
Dwarkesh Patel, and others, The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025.
Jeff McMahan, editor, Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought.
Paul McCartney, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.
William Easterly, Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest.
Nicholas Walton, Orange Sky, Rising Water: The Remarkable Past and Uncertain Future of the Netherlands.
What else? I will give you an update on anything notable I encounter between now and the end of the year. And here is my earlier post on the best fiction of the year.