Every minute spent reading is a minute of culture defended. That’s what I believe.
Therefore, I was both shocked and delighted when Goodreads told me I had managed to read 19 books in 2025. It was my first year of working a full-time job while still writing on the side, and I didn’t feel I read all that much.
Some of those books were short. Others were long. Six of them were part of a journey to read the classics that I began in 2024. The rest were a mixed bag of books written by friends, targeted research, and some bestsellers I picked up along the way.
Books are my all-time favorite gifts to both give and receive. Thoughtful book recommendations are almost as good. Maybe some of my 10 favorites from the year will make for beautiful presents for you as well. You can give them to yourself or whoever they make you think of — because the only surprise better than getting a book is getting a book on a random Tuesday when you didn’t expect anything, let alone the wisdom of a lifetime condensed into a few hundred pages.
You never know where your next great read might come from. Maybe you’ll find yours below. In no particular order, here are my 10 favorite books that I read in 2025, along with the ideas they inspired in my own writing.
1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
How do children perceive the world of adults, and why does that world feel constantly nonsensical? This, to me, is one of the central themes of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it delivers on it so serenely, beautifully, and humorously, this book deserves all its accolades and then some.
I wouldn’t call it an action-laden book, though notable events certainly happen. Still, most of those events fit into the everyday life category. Yet, there’s always tension in the air. You can feel it. Beneath the mundane surface, there is dread, anxiety, and fear. The tension curve feels high, yet Lee elegantly defuses it with consistent little interjections of wit.
In other words? This book hits soft but cuts deep. Reading it as an adult, you get a story from multiple perspectives wrapped into one: You marvel at Scout Finch’s astuteness for a six-year-old, appreciate the nuance she can’t yet understand, and admire her father Atticus for being the purest of heroes there can be: a fallible human trying to do the right thing.
A true tour de force — and a surprisingly easygoing read given its age. 100% recommended.
Ideas I covered on the blog:
- The Humble Shooter
- It’s Not Time To Worry Yet
- Delete the Adjectives, Get the Facts
- One Does Not Love Breathing
2. Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum
How do you nail the books-about-bookshops trope? By managing to make it not feel trope-y at all.
A young Korean woman is burned out from her A-list life. She quits both her job and marriage (ouch!) and moves to a small neighborhood far away from Seoul’s bustling city center. Despite her complete lack of experience, she opens a bookshop. At first, she can barely keep it going. Slowly but surely, however, she builds a place that feels like home for more than just her — and realizes she’s not the only one who feels lost in life.
My description won’t do it justice, but, trust me, Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop does: The expectations, feelings, and burdens of life, work, and entrepreneurship are depicted with a sense of realism that makes this book hit harder than most others in its category. It’s the un-glam version of opening a bookshop, and yet, the different characters’ lives overlap and interact beautifully — sometimes in obvious ways, at other times in very subtle ones.
It’s a fun mix of feeling clued in and subverted guesses of where the story will turn next. Plus, lots of memorable lessons along the way. I highlighted a lot. And if nothing else, this book will truly make you believe in the phrase, “Slow and steady wins the race.” Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop.
Ideas I covered on the blog:
- None yet because I lent it to my sister, and so now she’s got the joy of seeing all my highlights. 😃
3. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol
For as many times as I had watched the movie and rehashed Alice’s story in reading, writing, and the Kingdom Hearts video games, I had never read the original novel. I’m happy to say that, in 2025, I remedied this blemish in my reading history.
This book is as fascinating a read from an adult’s perspective as it must be from a child’s. With the original text and illustrations, you’ll get the real deal. I loved reading some of the endlessly quoted — and misquoted! — lines in their original wording, making this short read worth the 2–3 hours it takes even just to up your general knowledge and mental quote database.
Favorite new line I discovered? “Time, like anyone else, does not like to be beaten. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock.”
This is a book, but it’s also both history and education. Non-negotiable, if you ask me!
Ideas I covered on the blog:
4. Letters of the Dragon by Bruce Lee
I’m a biased Bruce Lee fanboy, but for anyone who’d like to get to know the real man behind the icon, this is it. What better way to discover someone’s true personality in character than in their own, private words shared with friends, family, and, on occasion, fans?
Bruce was a human to behold, and in Letters of the Dragon, you get him unfiltered. I read this as part of my research for the Empty Your Cup book, and I discovered more new ideas in here than in any other book on this list.
Heads up: I also read Words of the Dragon, which is a collection of interviews and articles about Bruce. Since these are all third-party sources, they’re repetitive, riddled with errors, and much less authentic. It’s still an informative book for fans, but I highly recommend you start with Letters of the Dragon. Oh, and it includes some awesome photos, too.
Ideas I covered on the blog:
- Improving Without Criticism
- Be a Rock Dropped in Water
- Going Where You’re Needed
- If You Want To Break Something, Use a Hammer
- Mastery Is Interesting
- “Well, Enough of Theoretical Information”
- The One-Line Letter
- Choose the Right Means, Find the Right Ends
- Using Your Judgment
5. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
Trying to go in chronological order of the events taking place in Middle Earth, I read The Silmarillion in 2024. The Hobbit was next. Does the grandfather of high fantasy even need a review, let alone an introduction?
This book is a wonderful story full of hope, magic, and wit, and, nearly 90 years after its first release, it still reads like a modern-day bestseller. If you’re like me and have watched the movies before picking up the book, you’ll be glad to find variances between the two are limited enough in order to not completely smash your nostalgia.
Among the many classic quotes and new story bits I discovered and rediscovered, two of my favorites remain consistent between both media — that we should value home above gold, and that it’s okay to be a hobbit.
Read this timeless masterpiece, find your own takeaways and wonder, and decide for yourself.
Ideas I covered on the blog:
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
From a pure story perspective, this book was a 4/5 for me. At times, it’s verbose, self-indulgent, and too obvious. But when you consider it “with skin and hair,” as we say in German, with all its historic context, then this for sure is one for the ages.
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things,” Wilde wrote in a preface added after the fact. It’s my favorite section of the book, for it’s a beautiful ode to “art for art’s sake” yet reveals Wilde’s inner turmoil at the same time. First censored by his editor, then himself in hopes of fending off the accusations of, at the time illegal, homosexuality, the preface restores power to both Wilde and his story. It’s also where my many highlights in this book begin.
Wilde truly was a walking book of original quotations, with many of his great lines originating from this work. It’s too bad we never witnessed him on Twitter (yeah, yeah, I know, “X”). One of my favorite, not-already-popular ideas? “If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.”
If you’ve never had the privilege of reading The Picture of Dorian Gray in school — I didn’t — it sure is one of the few worth putting on your list.
Ideas I covered on the blog:
7. What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
Five chapters, five individuals. From a 21-year-old clothing sales rep to a former marketing executive turned stay-at-home mom in her 40s to an unemployed young man, a frustrated salaryman, and a retired manager: Each of the main characters faces real, relatable struggles. The kind of struggles we, too, might suffer in quiet for too long.
Though separate stories, their threads weave together in the library of a local Tokyo community center. There, Ms. Komachi, a perfectly normal yet somewhat mysterious librarian, uncannily recommends just the right book to each of them — even though every title seems wholly unrelated to their situation at first.
What You Are Looking for Is in the Library is subtle, easygoing, and beautifully crafted despite its, at times, rather weighty subjects — and I’m not talking about Ms. Komachi’s favorite, Kuremiyado Honeydome Cookies, here!
This one is similar to Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop. The stories are less connected, but it’s just as beautiful in its own way. If you need a reminder that we don’t have to turn our lives upside down to improve them, this book is for you.
Ideas I covered on the blog:
8. Creative Doing by Herbert Lui
Don’t be fooled by Creative Doing’s just over 100 pages: It’s so dense with insight, I spent nine months reading it. This book is like a daily inspo calendar to unblock your creativity, and it works brilliantly.
I don’t believe in writer’s block, and I rarely lack inspiration, but every time I picked up this book, I found some great idea or interesting new perspective I wanted to sit with and reflect on. So I put the book aside, perhaps wrote about it on my daily blog, and revisited it later. Hence the long reading time — and highlights on every single page.
Herbert backs up his own curated advice with over 1,000 entries in his daily blog, by the way. That’s an uncommon achievement we share, but we would have become friends regardless, as we did so years before either of us even published daily. Still, unlike many others dispensing creative advice, Herbert walks the walk before he talks the talk.
He covers creative work in 3 parts: starting, maintaining momentum, and sustaining your creative purpose. Each section is filled with both out-of-the-box examples as well as familiar references and reminders to some of our literary, musical, and cinephile greats.
Having honed his taste in the arts over many years, Herbert’s own points of view are also insightful. My famous moments were discovering those when they were tucked away in the fringes of the pages. A half-sentence here, a short line there, but… Did you know you can make chance your ally? That your hands don’t have an ego? Wow!
There’s a beautiful hardcover edition of this beautiful book, which I’ve given as a gift several times. I highly recommend you treat yourself to the same — and, in doing so, support a rare breed: a dedicated, thoughtful, independent writer!
Ideas I covered on the blog:
9. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
In 2024, The Stranger was one of the first literary classics I read on my 45-book quest. In there, I found a reference to The Myth of Sisyphus, a short-ish philosophical treatise on existentialism and happiness.
You may have come across its famous first and last lines, the latter of which I won’t spoil for you in case you haven’t. But here’s the former: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” When you collapse the book into these two sentences, it seems easy to understand. Trust me, it is not.
Still, it’s an interesting premise to start asking “What makes life worth living?” from, and Camus provides, and frequently dismisses, various answers from there. In the end, it all adds up to a beautiful conclusion using Sisyphus, the famed human in Greek mythology cursed to roll a boulder uphill forever, as a metaphor for willful human suffering.
Despite its figurative weight and density — the book itself is only around 130 pages — there is a common thread running through it. And while I’ve only partially succeeded in highlighting the key points in order to later assemble Camus’ logic step-by-step, I have found the exercise rewarding, and I feel the message has sunk in regardless.
Grappling with words, engaging with a mind we don’t entirely understand, and having faith that our time spent will be worthwhile — isn’t that what reading the classics is about? To me, this one delivered on all these fronts. For anyone interested in philosophy, it is a must-try.
Ideas I covered on the blog:
- None yet. Maybe someday I’ll find the time to pull together Camus’ argument in an essay. Cross your fingers for me!
10. The Life Impossible by Matt Haig
My sister and I are both big fans of The Midnight Library. When she first lent me this book, I figured I could leave my highlighter in my drawer. Some books I just cruise through and, for some reason, enjoy them more when I’m not in scouting mode at all. This time, I was wrong.
210 pages later, I relented and grabbed a marker. Two extra hours a good month after I finished reading, I finally have all my quotes and quips together, and I can say: This one feels like The Midnight Library and The Comfort Book rolled into one. It is quintessential Matt Haig, and it is beautiful.
The protagonist is as unlikely as they come. Grace Winters, a retired maths teacher, widowed wife, and bereaved mother in her 70s, is a bold choice of character — and a bold character. Grace is both witty and tragic, yet still somehow relatable.
The story spools off so smoothly, in hindsight, I’m not surprised it took me 210 pages to start making time to highlight. Wrapped in the same frame — hindsight, as she is telling her story in a letter to a former student — narrator Grace can provide just the right context at the right time, then get back to the action. It works.
A fascinating tale with an unlikely cast uniting for a good cause, The Life Impossible comes with punchy action — well, figuratively, since Grace isn’t exactly Lara Croft — corny jokes, deep philosophy, and wise life lessons interspersed in just the right places.
It won’t quite knock The Midnight Library off the throne for me, if only for the latter’s core story concept. But it absolutely is a marvelous, five-star book you should get your hands on — especially if you like anything Matt Haig, of course.
Ideas I covered on the blog:
- None yet, since I only got done highlighting, but there are some bound to appear!
Honorable Mentions
- Startups for Outsiders by my friend Amardeep Parmar, which I covered recently and extensively.
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, which I also reviewed already.
- Same As Ever by Morgan Housel, which wasn’t quite as good as The Psychology of Money but still led to two interesting ideas: Reality Hits Different and On Using the Airbags.
Every minute spent reading is a minute of culture defended. So thank you. Thank you for choosing to be a reader. Of this post. Of books. Of some of my other work, perhaps. But most of all of great writing — wherever you might find it.
