Best Book of 2025?

A lot of books are released every year, across many genres, and a lot of them are quite good. Some are even excellent.

Every year, Fantasy-Faction puts together a list of the fifty best fantasy and sci-fi books released. This list is proposed and voted for by the members of the Fantasy-Faction Facebook groups, well over 100,000 members – well worth checking out if you get a chance.

(Hint: A Good Day to Die is on this list.)

What were my favourite reads?

Last year, I read 29 books, from a Goodreads challenge target of 12. Clearly, I wasn't confident in my reading speed.

I read all of Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl books. It is difficult to recall where I first heard of them, but it was probably on r/fantasy. They are of the LitRPG genre, where the world is destroyed, Carl enters a dungeon, and everything is televised: The Truman Show with magic, or Big Brother with magic underpants—though Carl doesn't go to the diary chair until the later books. I enjoyed them all, and as the danger ramps up, so does the silliness and humour.

Also, I finished four books of the Stormlight Archive, along with the short stories in between a few of the books. I was, kind of, buddy-reading these with a friend, but given the books are over a thousand pages long, our schedules diverged, and while I have finished them all, he is just on the last book. The books are both epic in scale and have moments of real excitement and wish fulfilment. The first two books, Way of Kings and Words of Radiance, were my definite favourites of the series. The later ones lag a little in the middle but were still enjoyable.

Babel by R F Kuang was a good read, and the world drew me in and certainly focuses on the theme of colonialisation and imperialism. Also, there were a few non-fiction books in my areas of interest: geography and early mediaeval history.

I am going to say that The Way of Kings was my favourite read of the year, and it encouraged me to read the rest of that series. Also, Kaladin's arc from slave to... whatever he becomes (no spoilers here)... was emotive and addictive. You read to see just when things would turn around for him.

What was your favourite book of 2025?

Let me know, as I'm always looking for new books to read!