Happy New Year! My 2025 Sonderbooks Stand-outs are up!
I can hardly believe it myself, but this is my 25th year of posting my favorite books read in the previous year! That’s a long run, and I’m not planning to stop any time soon.
Because of celebrating #Sonderbooks25, I did much more rereading than usual this past year, but I decided to limit the 2025 Sonderbooks Stand-outs to books I’d read for the first time. (Since most of the rereads were already Sonderbooks Stand-outs from a previous year.)
Here are my stats: I read a total of 527 books this year. But before you get too impressed, a large percentage of those were picture books. Here’s the breakdown:
Fiction for adults: 38
Nonfiction for adults: 34
Fiction for teens: 66
Nonfiction for teens: 9
Fiction for children: 45
Nonfiction for children: 87
Fiction Picture Books: 248
Total: 527
In the totals above, I reread 29 picture books from previous Stand-outs and reread 23 other books.
A lot of the children’s nonfiction are picture books, so you see that’s not as dramatic as if I were reading 500 adult books.
Some comments about my reading year:
I’ve really transitioned to audiobooks as my main way of consuming books. It’s a big switch for me, but now I have a habit of writing reviews ahead of time, and then every evening I do the mechanical task of posting a review while listening to an audiobook, getting a nightly story fix. I also listen while driving and while doing housework.
I’m not sure if I remembered to note them all, but my spreadsheet says that 92 of the above books were audiobooks.
I do still read as part of my daily devotional time – so you’ll see an abundance of Christian nonfiction among my Stand-outs. And this year I did some rereading of Sonderbooks Stand-outs from years 2001 to 2004, as part of #Sonderbooks25. That was a delight! The original plan was to reread one book from each year’s stand-outs, but I got pulled in way too quickly to too many others. I’m still hoping to go through all the old reviews before 2026 is done – and the official 25th anniversary in August. So I expect to get pulled into rereading far more favorites.
Alas! 2025 brought the end(?), at least for now, of the CYBILS Awards, at least in their prior form, so I was not a judge for Teen Speculative Fiction – and read fewer teen books because of that.
I am still a member of Capitol Choices, a DC-area group of librarians who make a list of our picks of the 100 best children’s and young adult books of the year. That membership has helped alert me to many wonderful books. I’m also co-chair of the Mathical Book Prize committee, which does influence some of my reading. (This year’s picks announced in February!)
And this is the time to state that my Stand-outs and their rankings do NOT attempt to reflect literary merit or quality in any way! Do NOT try to figure out how I will vote for the book on any committee from my reviews or rankings! What I try to do with Sonderbooks is go with my gut: Which books did I personally most enjoy reading in 2025?
I will say that I read and even reviewed some wonderful books in 2025 that did not make this list – after all, I only review books I like. Many of them were of exceptional literary quality. But this list is about books that make me smile, and books that stand out in my mind after a year of reading. I confess that some powerful books were well-written and wonderfully crafted – but on such an uncomfortable topic, they just weren’t among my personal favorites.
I always wait to post my Stand-outs until at least New Year’s Day – and indeed, yesterday I spent a good hour finishing a book because I knew it was going to make this list. This means that I haven’t posted all the reviews just yet – but the next books I’ll post this week will be those Stand-outs that still need to be posted, and while I’m doing that, I’ll update the webpages for the reviews of the other Stand-outs. Eventually, each book gets the Sonderbooks Stand-outs seal on its review page.
Bottom line, it’s all about the books! I hope you will enjoy some of the books I loved reading this year!