{"id":46068,"date":"2026-01-01T22:34:44","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T03:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/?p=46068"},"modified":"2026-01-07T22:14:54","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T03:14:54","slug":"2025-sonderbooks-stand-outs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/?p=46068","title":{"rendered":"2025 Sonderbooks Stand-outs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Happy New Year! My 2025 Sonderbooks Stand-outs<\/a> are up!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Because of celebrating #Sonderbooks25<\/a>, 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.)<\/p>\n

Here are my stats: I read a total of 528 books this year. But before you get too impressed, a large percentage of those were picture books. Here’s the breakdown:<\/p>\n

Fiction for adults: 39
\nNonfiction for adults: 34
\nFiction for teens: 66
\nNonfiction for teens: 9
\nFiction for children: 45
\nNonfiction for children: 87
\nFiction Picture Books: 248<\/p>\n

Total: 528<\/p>\n

In the totals above, I reread 29 picture books from previous Stand-outs and reread 23 other books.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Some comments about my reading year:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure if I remembered to note them all, but my spreadsheet says that 92 of the above books were audiobooks.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Alas! 2025 brought the end(?), at least for now, of the CYBILS Awards<\/a>, at least in their prior form, so I was not a judge for Teen Speculative Fiction – and read fewer teen books because of that.<\/p>\n

I am<\/em> still a member of Capitol Choices<\/a>, 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<\/a>, which does influence some of my reading. (This year’s picks announced in February!)<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Bottom line, it’s all about the books! I hope you will enjoy some of the books I loved reading this year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[426,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sonderbooks25","category-stand-outs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46068"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46099,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46068\/revisions\/46099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}