The Best Books of 2025

At the risk of infuriating diehard doomsayers, has there ever been a better time to be a reader? Some may point to other periods that seem more appealing from a literary standpoint (forgetting that most of those books, even if out of print, are easier to get now than they were decades ago). They could convincingly argue that the bestseller lists are something of a genre wasteland these days, with serious literary fiction getting ever more pigeonholed as a specialty taste.