Our favorite books of the year

NPR staffers pick their favorite reads of 2025 (so far!)

View this email online June 25, 2025 Hey newsletter readers! We thought you might enjoy our mid-year, best-of list from NPR’s “Book of the Day”. If you’re an avid reader on the hunt for your next book, consider signing up for the Books newsletter or subscribing to the Book of the Day podcast. Books We Love, Summer Edition Studies show the best way to stay cool in the heat is to read a good book indoors (this is a joke, if you are one of my coworkers on the Climate team, please don’t yell at me).  And those very same studies say that the best place to find a good book is to check out the list of NPR staff picks of our favorite books of the year so far! There’s a lot here – kooky sci-fi, hard boiled thrillers, chunky history books and more.  Check out the Summer Books We Love Here are some picks to get you started: Audition by Katie Kitamura I guess I could explain the plot to you – a woman meets up with a man who is convinced she's his mother. It turns out she's not. I think? Maybe she is? Or, maybe she's not but actually kind of is? What is a mother? The most impressive thing about this book is how Katie Kitamura plays with narrative and toys with these questions presented to the reader without being overly clever about it all. She's stingy with details and answers, but generous with intrigue and depth. — Andrew Limbong, correspondent, host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast The Naming of the Birds by Paraic O'Donnell This Victorian mystery novel is Dickens meets Sherlock Holmes meets La Femme Nikita, and it wears its genre conventions proudly. The heroes: a brilliant, gruff police officer and his bumbling assistant, aided by a plucky lady journalist. The crimes: elaborate serial murders of insignificant elderly men. The killings are connected to the book's prologue, a harrowing tale of mistreated orphans seemingly in training to be assassins. The reader knows this, but the detectives do not, giving the events a frisson of dramatic irony as the body count ticks up. — Holly J. Morris, digital trainer On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters by Bonnie Tsui I listened to this meditation on muscle over the course of a long bike ride. Physically, I pumped my legs over miles of pavement. Mentally, I was in Scotland with female weightlifting pioneer Jan Todd as she strained to lift the fabled, 700+ pound Dinnie Stones, or I was pondering how humpback whales propel their 50-ton bodies out of the water with the flick of a tail muscle – a feat that tests the limits of muscle fiber. Bonnie Tsui melds scientific fact with memoir and storytelling, weaving a thoughtful reflection on muscle as the stuff that allows us to weather hard things with grace. Like a long bike ride on a beautiful day, it was so lovely I didn't want it to end. — Pien Huang, health correspondent Sign up for the Books newsletter And we’re always happy to hear about what you’ve been reading too! The inbox is bookoftheday@npr.org. This email was sent by: National Public Radio 1111 North Capitol Street NE Washington, DC, 20002, US   If you have any questions, please submit a help ticket here. Update Preferences  |  Privacy Policy