We don’t need to tell you that it is cold outside. Which means, it is a great time to curl up in your favorite chair, under a warm blanket, and enjoy some great books. Our book lovers – John Williams, Steve Alexander, Bob Kessler and Sara Tieman – have put together lists of their favorite books of 2025. Hopefully you enjoy many of these, too.
https://serve.castfire.com/audio/7931837/1-23-26_WGN_Radio_Book_Club_Book_Recommendations_for_2025_2026-01-23-184537.128.mp3
John Williams (weekdays 10am-2pm, including The Noon Business Lunch, plus the Mincing Rascals podcast)
John’s books are piling up at his house so he’ll have some recommendations next time. The rest of the staff has you covered!
Steve Alexander (agribusiness reporter)
My favorites from 2025. In no particular order.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Late to the party on this one. It won the Pulitzer Prize, so there isn’t much need for me to say anything. It is one of my favorite novels ever.
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I’m also late on this one (because there was a long wait list at the library). It’s soooo good; just a beautiful and tender story about loss and friendship with a touch of fantasy in the form of a “talking” giant Pacific octopus who serves as a detective and facilitator in helping heal some of the human pain.
MEMOIRS, BIOGRAPHIES, BASED ON TRUE STORIES
Raising Hare by Choe Dalton. This is a delightful, thoughtful look at nature and human interference with it.
The Honey Bus: A Memoir of Loss, Courage and a Girl Saved by Bees by Meredith May from 2019.
I would have added “and by her Grandfather” to the subtitle.
Her grandpa is a role model for all of us grandpas. I can’t recommend this one enough. Bonus: I learned a lot about bees.
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks
This is centered on the unexpected death of her husband, celebrated journalist and author Tony Horwitz, who dropped dead on a Washington sidewalk at age 60. Raw and real.
The Nine — The true story of a band of women who survived the worst of Nazi Germany by Gwen Strauss
The author’s great-aunt was one of “the nine” women who were resistance fighters in France as the Germans invaded.
Gandolfini by Jason Bailey, is a love letter to the actor, who died in 2013 at 51. He’s best known, of course, for his role as troubled New Jersey Mafia boss Tony Soprano, but he acted in a surprising number of other films after that, including many that never saw the light of day. Perhaps you’ll want to experience it as I did: re-watching The Sopranos as I read the book.
In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden by Niall Williams and Christine Breen is a memoir my wife, Diane, recommended about the couple’s 35 years tending a garden in a remote, rural area of western Ireland.
It’s brilliant. A must-read for anyone who loves to garden, or who just loves wonderful writing.
WGN Radio Book Club
The Emperor of Gladness (2025) Ocean Vuong
It’s one of those books I knew I would like from the first page. The mundane setting of the novel is described in such rich detail with skilled prose I knew I was in for something special. It’s a brilliant, sad but also hopeful novel about a young man struggling with addiction and finding his place in the world and how he manages to connect with – an elderly woman slipping away to dementia and a group of misfits at a ‘fast casual’ restaurant.
Fox (2025) Joyce Carol Oates
A brilliantly written and structured novel about a very disturbing person and series of events at a New Jersey boarding school. While there’s the suspenseful thread throughout, the commentary on class, sexual abuse patterns, justice and spirituality make it so much more than a murder mystery.
Best Non-Fiction (a tie):
Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald (2025) John U. Bacon
While detailed and thorough with facts and dates, more importantly it captures the human side of the tragedy: the people who were lost, those they left behind and the many factors involved in what led up to the disaster. Plus an interesting history of the Gordon Lightfoot song inspired by it.
Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of Gun Violence (2025) Jens Ludwig
The gun violence problem in the U.S. has but a few proposed solutions and they tend to run along the lines of a lack of morals, or a lack of economic opportunities. As the author lays out, it turns out it’s neither (although both of the above can be factors, they’re not the real cause in most situations). His case is very well described, approachable, and even applicable in nearly everyone’s day-to-day life, regardless of the presence of guns. Essential reading.
Marvelous Jackson (2024) Laura Anne Bird
A thoroughly enjoyable and heartwarming novel about a middle schooler struggling with the loss of his mother who discovers baking as a way to find meaning in life and shore up his relationship with his widowed father. I am a firm believer that some of the best fiction is in the YA category because it’s often straightforward, positive and full of engaging characters. This is no exception. Bonus: there are recipes in the back!
How War Begins: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Invasion (2022) Igort, Jamie Richards (translator)
A heartbreaking and human depiction of the horrors of the ongoing war in Ukraine since the Russian invasion of 2022. It’s difficult on this side of the world to truly understand the atrocities that have been taking place and this manages to communicate some of that.
Best musician memoir or autobiography (I read a lot of them):
Heartbreaker (2025) Mike Campbell
He’s one of the great and truly essential band members in rock and roll. While Tom Petty had top billing, his picture on the album covers and did most of the song writing, it would not have taken on the sound and shape it did without Mike Campbell. Like the music he created, this book is straightforward, honest, approachable while imparting deep insight and feelings.
I Cheerfully Refuse (2024) Leif Enger
It’s an even better book than I remember from last year and I appreciate the artful prose (an Enger signature, I have learned) and how the narrative is closely tied to the main character. The story comes through his mind, which shapes how he sees and experiences all that surrounds him. The more recent read also resonates far more with the present reality. In early 2024 I thought, ‘if we’re not careful, this is the world we could become.’ Reading it in late 2025, it feels like we are frighteningly far closer.
The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter (2025) Peter Orner
It’s a good read, but I’m not sure it’s a good book. Creatively written as a postmodern meta-novel about an author working on writing about the murder of a real-life daughter of Chicago columnist and TV personality Irv Kupcinet. He certainly has a go at the grieving father for his lightweight writing and self-made popularity. That’s not something you would probably find a lot of disagreement about among Chicagoans of the period. But it still felt a little mean spirited, given a murdered young woman is at the center of all of this. Still, I found myself enjoying the reading experience itself as it jumps around from one era to the next, profiling the crime, the victim, her family and friends, and the author’s contemporary struggles, even if it felt like it might just be too clever for its own good.
Patriot: A Memoir (2024) Alexei Navalny
An incredibly powerful and moving memoir. It details the outer experiences and inner life of a person who lives up to his convictions in the truest sense. It also shows how true imprisonment is only a mindset. Be grateful for everything! It’s how he lived and died.
Sara Tieman (promotions & public relations manager emeritus and station book club international correspondent)
Culpability (2025) – Bruce Holsinger
This is a book for our current times as we are further immersed into a world with artificial intelligence and unpacking the implications of AI. A family with their 17-year-old son behind the wheel of an autonomous vehicle is in an accident and the couple in the other car are killed. The family retreats to a previously loved vacation spot to recover and deal with the fallout from the accident. It’s a page-turner of a book with plenty to discuss for book clubs!
Harlem Rhapsody (2025) – Victoria Christopher Murray
This is the fictionalized story of real-life Jessie Redmon Fauset who comes to Harlem in 1919 and is hired by W.E.B. DuBois as the literary editor of his magazine “The Crisis.” In this role, she finds new young writers to publish like Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. But Faust sets her aspirations higher to editor while navigating her affair with the married DuBois and writing her own novel. Historical fiction is my favorite genre and while familiar with some of the other names in Murray’s book, Fauset and her influence on the Harlem Renaissance had previously been unknown to me.
The Berry Pickers (2023) – Amanda Peters
Not a new book, but it’s still an in-demand title and was such a page-turner, I’m only sorry it took me this long to pick it up. The story is told in alternating viewpoints by two characters – Joe and Norma. An indigenous family from Canada comes to Maine every summer to pick blueberries. One summer, their youngest child Ruthie vanishes and her brother Joe is the last person to see her. The guilt he assumes because of that sends him reeling for the rest of his life and running away from his family. Norma is the only child overly protected by her mother with dreams that haunt her and the belief that her parents are hiding something. Note: The book does contain elements of abuse, family trauma, addiction, violence, racism and othering.
Under the Same Stars (2025) – Libba Bray
Don’t let this book marketed as “young adult” deter you as an adult reader. My favorite genre is historical fiction and this one encompasses three timelines: 2020 in New York City, 1980s in West Berlin and 1940s Germany. Finding out how all these timelines correlate is a surprise and, yes, I’m crying at the end. Worth the read for hope, resilience, and resistance.
The Impossible Fortune (2025) – Richard Osman
This is the latest installment in Osman’s bestselling The Thursday Murder Club series and, oh, how I’ve missed our crime-fighting retirees of Coopers Chase – Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron. This book’s action gives Ron more of a starring role along with Joyce’s newly married daughter Joanna. As always in this series, there are poignant moments that are both sweet and sad. If you’re new to The Thursday Murder Club, I recommend starting with the first and working your way through. I’ll be honest – I didn’t get immersed into the action in this one as I have with the others, but I love these characters so much and I was glad they’re back that the book is claiming a spot in my top 10.
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection (2025) – John Green
In the last two centuries, tuberculosis has caused over a billion human deaths and is the world’s deadliest infection. Writer John Green introduces you to Henry, a boy he met in Sierra Leone with TB and interweaves Henry’s story throughout, sharing how tuberculosis has shaped and intersected history and culture. It’s not dry science and medicine – it’s engaging and interesting and I found myself saying, ‘wow,’ or “I didn’t know that” along the way. Green illustrates why ‘everything is tuberculosis’ – a preventable, treatable and curable disease that has been romanticized (think ‘consumption’ and pale 1800s waifs) and is an illness of injustice.
The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan (2025) – Lyse Doucet
Journalist Lyse Doucet has written non-fiction that reads like fiction with Kabul’s Inter-Con hotel and the employees within acting as witness to five decades of political changes, wars, and upheaval in Afghanistan. It’s an empathetic history as we, the reader, become invested in the lives of those employees who are trying to provide for their families and make a living, just as you or I would, but in perilous, uncertain circumstances.
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (2024) – Robin Wall Kimmerer
This is a delightful work of non-fiction by the author of the 2013 bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass that takes a deeper look at how we can live and benefit from a gift economy instead of the market economy where scarcity rules. Wall Kimmerer highlights the serviceberry, a plant known by many names depending on the place and how this plant shares its resources. Wall Kimmerer presents an invitation to live in community and temper excess when we know we have enough.
Cher: The Memoir Part One (2024) – Cher
This is a book we’ve talked about quite a bit, but gosh it’s worth the read! It’s just fun to get a glimpse into someone’s life and wow – what a life Cher has led starting with a tumultuous upbringing and colorful family past followed by her years with Sonny. The name drops and stories are wild and the author bio is a fitting mic drop in and of itself: “Cher is a global icon.” It kept me engaged and interested the whole way through. The second installment of this memoir is due to be released this year and I’m anxiously awaiting it!
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (2025) – Sophie Elmhirst
Non-fiction that reads like it must be fiction! The book stars our married couple Maurice (socially awkward and a loner) and Maralyn Bailey (charismatic and gregarious) who give up their suburban English home to build a boat and sail the world in 1972. All goes to plan until an encounter with a whale sinks their yacht in the middle of the Pacific and they spend 117 days adrift at sea. It is a gripping, unbelievable page-turner of a story.
From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir (2024) – Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough
I relish audiobooks with a little extra something – be it production or music to make them feel special and more than just the book itself and this one delivers! Lisa Marie had been taping herself telling stories but felt stuck in writing anything down about her life and asked her daughter Riley Keough to help with her memoir. Lisa Marie died a month later and Riley took up the pen, knowing her mother well. You’ll hear Lisa Marie’s voice on her original tapes and Julia Roberts narrates the words written by Lisa Marie and Riley reads the parts of the memoir she wrote. Their voices come together for a haunting story and give a snapshot of Lisa Marie’s world. Be prepared for grief, loss, addiction, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and suicide.
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (2024) – Hanif Abdurraquib
You want to hear Abdurraquib read his book. The pace varies in intensity, not unlike a basketball game. But you don’t have to love (or even care about) basketball or sports to be moved by this book. Abdurraquib is a poet and his writing is beautiful, weaving in his story of growing up in Ohio compared with LeBron James (the two were born a year apart), The Fab Five, success, failure, fathers, hair, music and culture. I enjoyed it so much that I’d like to come back to it and read it.
Bonus: Sara’s full list of books read during 2025: “I am happy to say that I finished out 2025 with 102 books – a near perfect split of fiction (52) and non-fiction (50) of which 17 were audio books – thank you, road trips!”
* = audiobook
** = re-read
More book recommendations from Sara Tieman
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