The best books we read in 2025, and why they were so lit
It’s likely no surprise to hear how much we love reading over here at The Charlotte Observer. We read all day as part of our jobs, and many of us love to spend our free time reading, too.
So when I asked my colleagues to share with me their one favorite book they read all year, I knew the answers would offer a great reading list. And for the second year in a row, I was not disappointed.
You just might find your next favorite read on the list below ⬇️ — or maybe find that stocking stuffer or holiday gift you needed.
But first: Email us your favorite book of 2025 to charlottefive@charlottefive.com — we might include it in future coverage!
The best books we read in 2025:
“As I Lay Dying”
Author name: William Faulkner
Reader: Diamond Vences
I’m proud to say that my reading capabilities have soared since the last several hundred times I’ve picked up William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” as a student and painfully had to put it back down. Maybe it being in audiobook form did the trick. Just have a computer read the hard stuff for you! Why didn’t I think of that before? The novel often presents a bleak and sometimes cynical view of traditional Southern values through the eyes of the Bundren family and the people they encounter. It was the perfect length of time — if anyone was wondering, this is how long it takes me to find, wash, fold, and iron my family’s clothes. Listening to this was the perfect pastime, as it contributed to my own sense of questionable sanity while reading (or listening) and matching a thousand tiny pairs of socks. I felt an intense solidarity with the characters, who do things out of a sense of duty that borders on exasperation. Basically, it was the rage bait I needed to finish the laundry. I needed Addie’s powerful indictment of traditional gender roles, particularly motherhood, because it made me feel like a good mom by comparison (is there any other way?).
“As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow”
Author name: Zoulfa Katouh
Reader name: Melissa Oyler
My cousin gifted Zoulfa Katouh’s “As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow” for my birthday, and it’s turned out to be one of the best books I’ve read as an adult. The book is set in Homs, Syria, during the revolution — a world I knew nothing about. Yet through the main character, Salama, I feel like I am living vicariously through the mind of this young woman faced with an impossible choice: Stay and try to save her community, or leave and try to protect her life? This book tugs at all the heartstrings. Immersed in these pages, I feel Salama’s fear, her survivor guilt, her grief. Yet, there’s also hope, even a love story. This book will take you beyond the headlines and into the emotional reality of living through a civil war.
“The Ascent”
Author name: Allison Buccola
Reader name: Scott Fowler
I’m a sucker for stories about cults. What makes them tick, why you’d join one, how to escape from one and so on. Why? I’m not really sure. But I can tell you that Allison Buccola’s “The Ascent” is a fine fictional thriller about a cult whose members all suddenly vanish in Pennsylvania, except for a 12-year-old girl who is found wandering on the side of the road. She grows up, gets married and has a daughter and a normal life. But then trouble from her past comes calling. This one is a real page-turner.
“Call Me by Your Name”
Author name: André Aciman
Reader: Desiree Mathurin
Oh, I’m a sucker for love and obsession and tension and the ache and authors who can eloquently string words together to express those feelings and scenarios and yes, Andre Aciman does that in “Call Me By Your Name.” It’s my favorite book I read this year and a top 10 overall. So no, I didn’t watch the movie first. I didn’t even know a movie or this book existed until TikTok told me. (TikTok also told me to read “I Who Have Never Known Men” by Jacqueline Harpman and that was my second fave read of the year.) CMBYN is a coming-of-age, coming-out, summer-love story. But the love isn’t fleeting and the character’s acknowledgement of his sexuality isn’t wrapped in trauma and homophobia. Aciman’s writing in CMBYN is so descriptive that even if you’ve never experienced wanting someone and not knowing whether they want you back, you’ll feel it. If you’ve never experienced knowing that the timing of the relationship was wrong, you’d feel it. And if you’ve never experienced giving up on a person but not really but maybe, Aciman gives that to you. Elio, the main character, is king internal crash out, meaning he’s at war with himself so constantly and relatable. I loved it! Oh, and the movie is great companion to the book but read the book first!
“Creation Lake”
Author: Rachel Kushner
Reader: Adam Bell I’ve been intentional about seeking out more female authors this year, and boy am I glad I met Rachel Kushner. I came into “Creation Lake” intrigued about the idea of an American woman infiltrating a group of French anarchists. She’s not quite a spy, not quite a free agent. What I wasn’t expecting was the book starting out about depressed Neanderthals, then returning to our ancient ancestors as the rest of the story unspools, with wit, vivid writing and unexpected but welcome detours. I don’t want to give too much away other than saying this lake is worth the trip.
“Dining Out”
Author: Erik Piepenburg
Reader: Evan Moore
Erik Piepenburg’s “Dining Out” combines two of my favorite things: food and the LGBTQ community. The book explores queer restaurants and cafés across the country — from a late-night spot in Manhattan to a small diner in Green Bay — showing that these places have always offered more than meals. They were safe havens, where patrons could be themselves in a world that often wouldn’t allow it. Piepenburg defines a “gay restaurant” not just as one owned by LGBTQ people, but as any place where queer diners could gather without fear. Blending personal stories, history and journalism, he connects food with memory and culture, giving voice to lives lived in kitchens, booths and late-night diners. Moving, funny and essential, the book is a heartfelt tribute to overlooked queer spaces and the histories they hold.
“Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection”
Author: John Green
Reader: Mary Ramsey
Best known for his young adult novels, author and YouTuber John Green has made the transition to nonfiction in recent years. His most recent work, “Everything is Tuberculosis”, is proof his storytelling ability remains intact despite the shift in genre. Green weaves together the moving personal narratives of real people past and present navigating tuberculosis with an incisive look at the way our society has succeeded and failed in its quest to vanquish the disease. Equal parts hopeful and brutal, it celebrates life-saving achievements without glossing over the man-made inequities in our health-care system exemplified by one deadly condition. For me, it was the rare combination of a book I both couldn’t put down in the moment and that’s stuck with me throughout the year. I found it particularly insightful as I continued to write and read about the impacts in Charlotte and beyond of substantial cuts to federal aid funding.
“James”
Author: Percival Everett
Reader: Patrick Wilson
I bought Percival Everett’s “James” at an independent bookstore in Charlotte after looking at the Pulitzer Prizes website and reading that it won for fiction in 2025. Many of us studied Mark Twain in school, so this retelling of “Huckleberry Finn” through the eyes of Jim sounded interesting. One of the compelling aspects of the story is the dialogue and the way people speak to each other, and how they’re perceived over how they speak. Everett creates a powerful character who struggles against other people, the dangers of the Mississippi River, and his own inner conflict. The vivid writing created a movie in my imagination; I could see and hear all the adventure, drama and terror. This is a quick read and the book challenged me to think about race in today’s world and in American history. The story and writing rivals any classic.
“King: A Life”
Author: Jonathan Eig
Reader: Joe Marusak
Jonathan Eig paints such an intimate portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in “King: A Life”, a biography of the civil rights great that I instantly understood why the New York Times bestseller won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. I read the 669-page, smaller-print paperback version this year and couldn’t put it down. It was like I was in the car on the road with him, at his home, on stage, in a Birmingham church as he fired up a crowd. I felt his despair when he thought he had failed, which was often, and the energy of his rousing another crowd to action with his unmatched oratory. The book strips away the simplistic understanding generations may have of King, myself included, based solely on his “I Have a Dream” speech and the national holiday in his honor. As Eig told WFAE in a 2023 interview, King “was a radical” who called for reparations and called out police brutality and Northern segregation, too. In Eig’s book, we see King as the flawed human we all are but also, as Eig told WFAE, “a great patriot, the greatest and most influential person of the 20th century.” Bonus for Charlotteans: Eig reveals King testing early versions of his speech years earlier in other cities, including the Queen City.
“The Nightingale”
Author: Kristin Hannah
Reader: Chyna Blackmon
If I’m being honest, history was never my strong suit in school … so it surprises me that my favorite read of the year is historical fiction. But if you’ve ever read a Kristin Hannah novel, you agree in her crafty ability to bring pieces of the past into entertaining, educational and emotional stories. The Nightingale, set in France during WWII, tells the story of “two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France.” And even remembering what I’ve learned of that era in school growing up, this heartbreaking novel not only carries factual elements of that time period, but also themes about friendship, love and integrity that have stuck with me since reading months ago.
“The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend”
Author: Glenn Frankel
Reader: Zach Dennis
How fast can history become a myth? In the case of Cynthia Ann Parker, practically instantly. Out of the books I’ve read this year, the one that stood out to me was Glenn Frankel’s deep dive into the making of the John Ford film, “The Searchers”. That isn’t to say this is just a film history book, it’s more of an American history one. While it eventually leads to the making of the acclaimed John Wayne western, it begins in the 1800s in Texas and digs into the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, a young girl who was kidnapped by Comanches during a raid on family’s land in 1836. Bits of her story, as well as her son Quanah’s story, became inspirations for novelist Alan LeMay when he wrote “The Searchers” in 1954 and further informed the narrative of John Ford’s movie two years later. It’s a fascinating read as it weaves us through how real history can instantly be distorted into myth and how America wields that myth to further a message that tends to stray from the reality of what actually happened. If you’re a film fan, seek it out. If you’re a history fan, seek it out even more.
“Who Gets In and Why - A Year Inside College Admissions”
Author: Jeffrey Selingo
Reader: Heidi Finley
This year my oldest, Ava, is a high school senior, which has stirred up a big emphasis on trying to guide her through those first scary steps to starting her adult life. In one of the first school-led college and career night sessions of the year, the guidance counselors highly recommended we all read “Who Gets in and Why — a Year Inside College Admissions. It checked a lot of my interest boxes: college, higher education journalism, New York Times bestseller. So I dove in. In short, Jeffrey Selingo, a former bigwig at The Chronicle of Higher Education, embedded himself into the admissions department at three schools — one of which just happened to be Davidson College. Afterward, he shared all the lessons he learned about how students are chosen at some of the country’s top colleges and how vastly things can differ between students who may seem fairly similar on the surface. I’ll note that this was a 2020 book, so his research took place pre-COVID. (We all know the world is a different place now, for a lot of reasons.) But it was helpful for me as a deep-dive-into-the-details sort of person to understand the strategies behind it all. And that time spent has paid off, I suppose: She’s gotten four admissions offers so far.
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This story was originally published December 15, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "The best books we read in 2025, and why they were so lit."
