#1 and a few honorable mentions – The 2025 Best Reads List is complete

A novel about video game designers is not my typical fare, but Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 book is about a lot more than gaming. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a decades-long epic about the friendship of Sadie Green and Sam Masur whose relationship is not a traditional romance but is a love story nonetheless.

Sadie and Sam connect with a third collaborator, Marx, and they develop Ichigo, a game that rockets them to success. Zevin captures the fevered energy of a creative project and the strange alchemy that allows very different people to share something all-consuming. Over the years you keep expecting that the two principals will end up in a different kind of relationship, but the connection they do have is so interesting that you’re kind of glad it doesn’t.

There is a lot of complexity here related to power relationships, the aftermath of tragedy, resilience, disappointment, and disability. There’s also a lot of reflection on the way video games have become such an important part of our culture. Sam’s insight, late in the book, speaks to a part of what it means to be human:

Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair. (387)

It’s the kind of satisfying read that made me feel I was seeing a larger picture of the world at the same time that I was getting a new perspective on what it means to be human. So, let’s make a book with another Shakespeare reference in the title the #1 read for the year.

What does the final list reveal? We’re still about books that reveal the realities of the American experience and landscape. History and wonder are still great themes. Poetry didn’t make the list this year, but there is great writing throughout. Let’s pray for more of the same in 2026.

Be sure to read below for a few honorable mentions, too.

Previously in this series:

#2 – The Antidote by Karen Russell

#3 – A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan

#4 – Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

#5 – We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston

#6 – Erasure by Percival Everett

#7 – Middlemarch by George Eliot

#8 – Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

#9 – By the Word Worked by Fleming Rutledge

#10 – Longitude by Dava Sobel

Honorable Mentions: