My favorite books of 2025

See you next year!

It’s been a great third year for Let’s Talk Books. We’ve reached over 230 subscribers. My posts on medieval knights and Jonathan Franzen blew up. I suppose the lesson is that listicles and mentioning famous people are effective ways of attracting attention. (You’re here for the list, right?)

Thank you for subscribing, reading, liking, and commenting. If you have any book recommendations, please let me know. And if you know someone who might enjoy this newsletter, consider sharing it. Next year is going to be GOOD.

Now it’s time once again for my annual, completely unfair forced ranking of books. Enjoy!

Philosophy

1. The World As Will and Representation, Vol. 1 (Post)

2. Plato on Love: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades, with Selections from Republic and Laws (Post)

3. The Ethics of Ambiguity (Post)

4. On the Nature of Things (Post)

5. Why Honor Matters (Post)

6. Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness (Post)

History

1. The Knight in History (Post)

2. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (Post)

3. Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Post)

4. Karl Marx: Thoroughly Revised Fifth Edition (Post)

Literature

1. Pedro Páramo (Post)

2. Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Post)

3. The Big Sea: An Autobiography (Post)

4. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (Post)

5. What If We Stopped Pretending? (Post)

Related:

My favorite books of 2024

My favorite books of 2023

2025 set to be second or third warmest year on record, continuing exceptionally high warming trend¹ (WMO, 11/6/25)

Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions Set to Hit Record High in 2025² (Time, 11/12/25)

1. “The past 11 years, 2015 to 2025, will individually have been the eleven warmest years in the 176-year observational record, with the past three years being the three warmest years on record. The mean near-surface temperature in January-August 2025 was 1.42 °C ± 0.12 °C above the pre-industrial average, said the WMO report.”

2. “Global fossil fuel carbon emissions are expected to grow 1.1% in 2025, the report found, higher than the average growth rate of 0.8% per year over the last ten years. … ‘We have to have emissions of CO2 declining every single year over the next 20 to 30 years if we want to leave warming below two degrees,’ says Pierre Friedlingstein, a professor at the University of Exeter who focuses on global carbon cycle modeling and led the study.”