These days when you want to engage with some media, you can choose from podcasts, videos, games, live performances — or books, one of the oldest and most popular ways to learn something new or escape (at least temporarily) from today’s troubled world.
We polled the staff of The Verge to find out what books they read over the past year that really struck a chord — because the books were enlightening, educational, or just enjoyable. Here are some of the answers we got. (And please let us know what your favorite reads were in 2025 in the comments.)
Screwing up is one of the inevitabilities of life, but dwelling on your own mistakes can get toxic — fast. In SNAFU: The Definitive Guide to History’s Greatest Screwups, Ed Helms breaks down dozens of blunders from the past 70 or so years. Sometimes a river gets so polluted that it catches fire (multiple times), or the US government conducts human experiments involving copious amounts of psychedelic drugs. Or it turns out that a pair of the 20th century’s greatest spies were also swingers. These things happen.While many of the events in the book are absolute tragedies, Helms infuses each chapter with a little bit of humor, mostly in pointing out how stupid the perpetrators are. It’s a relatively breezy book that’ll make you feel better about the time you accidentally overcooked microwave popcorn and smoked out your apartment.
I’ve been on a memoir kick this year, and this one knocked my socks off. Things in Nature Merely Grow explores Yiyun Li’s experience with grief after losing both of her teenage sons to suicide. This isn’t a light read by any means. The writing is honest, beautiful, sometimes aloof, and oftentimes devastating. But as someone who lost both parents relatively young, I felt strangely comforted by Li’s take on “the abyss” and “radical acceptance.”
“Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline.” Some might say this book is unnecessarily harsh in its unflinching look at loss, but that line stuck with me as the truest reflection of how I felt for the longest time. I recommend it to anyone struggling with isolation after loss. (Some honorable mentions for memoirs: Educated by Tara Westover, I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb.)
I’d somehow never read any Le Guin until this year, and while I’ve been told that The Dispossessed is an odd place to start, it’s the book I had around, having borrowed it from a friend who knows how long ago. I would feel bad for having hung onto it so long, but the erosion of private property rights is surprisingly on-brand for the book. Its exploration of a moon with a (mostly) functional anarchist society, and the arch-capitalist planet its community sprung off from, holds a pretty unflinching mirror up against our world, and although over 50 years old, it’s about as relevant as ever.
Don’t go in expecting a rollercoaster plot, but if you like the sound of capitalist critique interspersed with an exploration of how academic bureaucracy works under anarchism, boy do I have the book for you.
After watching 3 Body Problem on Netflix, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So naturally, I just had to delve into the book series to see what details the adaptation left out — and it doesn’t disappoint. Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem details the origins of Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist who’s forced to work on a secretive military project during China’s Cultural Revolution in the late ‘60s. While stationed at the secluded Red Coast Base, Wenjie makes a decision that changes the fate of humanity forever, culminating in a series of unsettling events years later that lead some scientists to question everything they know about the laws of physics. In the present day, Wang Miao, a level-headed nanotechnologist, attempts to brush off strange hallucinations until he’s drawn to a virtual reality game that he discovers is linked to a larger conspiracy tied to Wenjie.
After I finished the first story in Theodora Goss’ weird fiction collection, Letters from an Imaginary Country, I was hooked. Titled “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” it is the first-person account of a group of 19th century female “monsters” from well-known horror literature such as Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among others. The women, who are distinctly other than the perceived norm — either because of their abilities or their appearance, or both — must support each other while navigating the narrow mores of Victorian society. Most of the stories in this collection seem to center on people who are somehow different, outside of their societies, and trying to cope (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) with those differences. I sped through the first story, and while I haven’t finished the book quite yet, I’m certainly looking forward to it.
As a published author myself, I’m always looking for novels that combine a propulsive plot, richly drawn characters, and thought-provoking social commentary to inspire my own craft. What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown fits that bill completely. It’s an exhilarating novel set in the ’90s about a teenage girl named Jane who escapes her rural life in Montana, where she lives in isolation with her father. Motivated by his fears of technology and progress, her father keeps the two of them living off the grid, banning Jane from using the internet and homeschooling her with old books. But as Jane gets older, she becomes increasingly curious about the outside world and about her father’s mysterious past in San Francisco. She also becomes an accidental accomplice in one of his crimes, and it’s this horrific realization that sends her to the Bay Area to find out why he is the way he is.
What Kind of Paradise is a brilliantly drawn examination of the impact of technology, how deeply your family can influence your identity, and the kinds of doomsday fears that drive people to madness. It’s part coming-of-age tale, part thriller, part family drama — you can’t quite classify it, but its ingenious genre-bending is one of my favorite things about it. If you’re looking to really sink your teeth into a story, this is the one. I promise you will devour it whole.
People will tell you Moby-Dick is Melville’s masterpiece. This is wrong, but understandable — it flatters Americans to think that we bear some resemblance to the insane Ahab, speaking in Shakespearean blank verse as we speed toward our doom.
Melville’s actual masterpiece is his last book, The Confidence-Man, one of the meanest and truest things ever written about this country. It takes place on April Fools’ Day, on a riverboat full of scammers and other assorted riffraff; one of them may or may not be literally Satan. Among the scams being perpetrated on the ship: selling stock of a struggling company, bringing “the Wall Street spirit” to charity, hawking supplements, finessing a free haircut, and forming a cult. There are nasty caricatures of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, all funny. The book is by turns bizarre, bitter, hopeful, and oddly credulous. Read it — you will recognize several of its characters immediately, as their current incarnations have been barely updated in 2025. Sure, The Confidence-Man isn’t as pretty as Moby-Dick, but then, the truth rarely is.
It’s rare for a book about a company’s successful founding to be a page-turner. Usually, corporate drama centers on the company’s fall, its unraveling, or the criminal activity of its leaders. Not so in Empire of AI by Karen Hao. This is a book about OpenAI’s founding and growth, and it’s truly a riveting read. (It also helps that Hao is a lovely writer.) She tracks the personality quirks of visionary leaders over time. She monitors the changing corporate mission. And yes, she dives into The Drama, when Sam Altman was temporarily ousted from OpenAI by the board. But she doesn’t just stay in Silicon Valley. You travel with her to countries in Africa and South America to see how AI is impacting societies there.
I’ve heard complaints that Hao’s personal views on AI, and the technology’s societal repercussions come off a little heavy-handed. She does include opinions, often tucked away at the end of chapters, and it feels all okay to me. Her expertise in the field gained through years of covering OpenAI is a useful perspective for those of us trying to make sense of a rapidly growing industry. You can read the facts presented in her book and come to different conclusions.
Honestly, the less you know going in, the better this book might be. The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow is a love story about a lady knight. It’s also a masterful deconstruction of Arthuriana, the way mythology works, and the very idea of nationalism itself. A brilliant, bittersweet puzzle box that solves itself incredibly satisfyingly at the end. I only wish I could read it for the first time again.
Agustina Bazterrica’s last novel, Tender is the Flesh, is unflinchingly bleak. And The Unworthy isn’t exactly an uplifting tale. It’s a postapocalyptic story set in the convent of a cult that “rewards” its Enlightened members with physical mutilation. But, where Flesh reveled in its gore, The Unworthy offers moments of genuine beauty and hope.
There are still plenty of passages that showcase Bazterrica’s skills at making your skin crawl, but perhaps the most impressive thing about the book is how much world-building this epistolary novel manages to do in a mere 177 pages — you could easily blow through this in a day. If you’re a fan of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood or I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, I don’t think you’ll want to miss out on this excellent piece of Argentinian feminist horror.
I read Chris Hayes’ book about attention, The Sirens’ Call, early in the year and found myself returning to it regularly. Two insights were particularly useful. The first is from the computer scientist Herbert Simon: that as the quantity of information increases, attention becomes the scarcest and therefore most valuable resource — information can be infinite, but we have only so many hours in the day to spend consuming it.
The second is that it is easier to capture attention than to hold it. In Hayes’ example, it’s an easier challenge to get everyone’s attention in a room by, say, screaming or tearing off your clothes, than to keep the room rapt for an hour with a monologue. It follows that if you move public discourse, politics, or culture onto platforms where everyone can say anything at all times, and where the platforms are financially incentivized to keep everyone there transfixed as long as possible and therefore reward their best attention-getters, an arms race occurs that ends in a rapid-fire media environment that is impossible to look away from but also fractured, incoherent, and generally bad for everyone’s brains.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.