Ep 28 Favorite Books of 2025
Show Notes
In this episode, Matt Kelland and I discuss our favorite books read in 2025. Both Matt and I read a lot of books every year, but a few stand above the others. These are the books we re-read and recommend to other people. Matt read almost 200 books in 2025. I read close to 100. Both of us have a wide range of interests, from science to pop culture, so you’ll find unusual and unique books in these lists.
Let’s start with Matt Kelland’s favorite books of 2025.
Matt’s Favorite Books
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (French: Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers) is a science fiction adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne.
- Flight into Danger is a 1956 Canadian live television play starring James Doohan, Corinne Conley and Cec Linder. It was written by Arthur Hailey, produced and screened by CBC Television, and broadcast on April 3, 1956, on the General Motors Theatre series. It was later adapted into two different feature films, a parody feature film, a novel, and international television versions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia.
- Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill. Beneath the perfectly still surface of the lake lurks a monster. Jenny Greenteeth is always hungry and ready to strike, until an angry mob tries to drown a witch in her waters. Jenny has never spoken to a human before, but something about Temperance makes her decide to rescue the witch
- The Stormlight Archive is a high fantasy novel series written by American author Brandon Sanderson, planned to consist of ten novels. As of 2024, the series comprises five published novels and two novellas, set within Sanderson’s broader Cosmere universe. The first novel, The Way of Kings, was published on August 31, 2010.[1] The second novel, Words of Radiance, was published in 2014 and debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller List.[2] This was repeated by Oathbringer (released November 14, 2017) and Rhythm of War (released November 17, 2020). The fifth novel, Wind and Truth, was released December 6, 2024. Sanderson has indicated that he will start drafting the latter half of the series after he finishes writing the upcoming Era Three Mistborn trilogy and the two Elantris sequels.[3] The series has been adapted as a video game and a tabletop roleplaying game.
Ricky’s Favorite Books of 2025
- Storyteller: The Life of Robert Lewis Stevenson by Leo Damrosch. In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life a remarkable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods—playful, imaginative, at times tragic.
- Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser. As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson—Fraser’s Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in Ted Bundy’s Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was hardly unique in the West. As Fraser’s investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, including some who grew up to become serial killers.
- The Memory Police (Japanese: 密やかな結晶, Hepburn: Hisoyaka na Kesshō; “Secret Crystallization” or “Quiet Crystallization”)[3] is a 1994 science fiction dystopian novel by Yōko Ogawa.[4] The novel, dream-like and melancholy in tone in a manner influenced by modernist writer Franz Kafka, takes place on an island with a setting reminiscent of that in George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four. An English translation by Stephen Snyder was published by Pantheon Books and Harvill Secker in 2019
CO-HOST, MATT KELLAND
Once again, to discuss these book-to-movie adaptations, I’m joined by my good friend Matt Kelland. I always enjoy talking about books and movies with him, because, like me, he’s into a wide variety of different styles, genres, authors, and directors. He also has a professional background in writing, video games, animation, music, and visual art, so he has a lot of different experiences to draw on. He and I don’t always agree with each other, but that’s what makes our conversations interesting! I’d recommend checking out his collection of short stories, Nothing To See Here