The Best Books You Read This Year

On this special Christmas Eve edition of A Public Affair, KGNU listeners called and wrote in to tell us their favorite books they read in 2025. Hosted by Sam Fuqua.

Here is that list of books:

Prodigal Summer – Barbara Kingsolver
In the Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight – Andrew Leland
You Dreamed of Empires – Álvaro Enrigue
An Immense World – Ed Yong
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
Blood in my Eye – George Jackson
The Wright Brothers – David McCullough
Vaster Wilds – Lauren Groff
Uzumaki – Junji Ito
Migrations – Charlotte McConaghy
When the Clock Broke – John Ganz
Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? – Robin Williams
The Last Battle – Cornelius Ryan
Shopping All the Way to the Woods – Rachel Gross
An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs And The Nation They Created – Santi Elijah Holley
Here Comes the Sun – Bill McKibben
The Martians – David Baron
The New Wilderness – Diane Cook
Man V. Nature – Diane Cook
A Warning – Miles Taylor
Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps – Michi Nishiura Weglyn
Witness at Sand Creek – Nancy Niero
Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir – Craig Mod
Latinoland – Marie Arana
Stalebread Charlie and the Razzy Dizzy Spasm Band – Michael Mahin
Everything is Tuberculosis – John Green
The Women – Kristen Hannah
Old Growth – Mike O’Connor
Unsung Matriarch: Memoirs of Joyce C. Burt – Jill Strunk
Skinny Dip – Carl Hiaasen
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Absolution – Jeff VanderMeer
There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift – Kevin Evers
Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International – Kevin Coogan
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Story of the Donner Party – Daniel James Brown
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck – Sophie Elmhirst
How Democracies Die – Steven Levistky and Daniel Ziblatt
Escape from Shadow Physics – Adam Forrest Kay
Insectopolis: A Natural History – Peter Kuper
The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works – Helen Czerski
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry – Neil deGrasse Tyson
My Friends – Fredrik Backman

This story aired on A Public Affair, KGNU’s weekday morning show featuring in-depth discussions on local news issues. Click here to listen to other episodes of A Public Affair.