The Biggest Book News of the Week

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

The Most Googled Books in 2025

Google released its annual search trends, and the most queried book titles are about what you’d expect. Save perhaps for #1, which was Colleen Hoover’s  Regretting You–I didn’t realize there was that much heat behind this one. The rest (Onyx Storm, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Frankenstein ) were books with huge launches and adaptations.  It by Stephen King and 1984 by George Orwell make the list, both for scary reasons.

The Goodreads Choice Winners

I was pretty uninterested in the results, and now the results have come through to fulfill my low expectations. Sunrise at the Reaping garnered the most votes overall (just over 300,000) with Onyx Storm right behind (and just under 300,000). I am unable to muster anything to say, but if you find yourself needing to buy a book at Target, this is probably your best guide to that particular aisle.

The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2025

I say every year that the two NYT lists, the 100 Notable Books of the Year and the 10 Best Books of the Year, combined to form the single best snapshot of the year in books (or at least the year in books outside the realm of BookTok). This year’s top 10  is both a surprise and not a surprise. It was a surprise in that I would have probably guessed maybe one of these if given 10 title guesses. So the specific books are a surprise. But that I would have not gotten many right feels right for 2025, because there just have not been that many breakout books. Plenty of good books, but in terms of having even a handful of books that were consistently talked about in a way that distinguished them from the hundreds of good books published every year, it was not one of those years. (Shouts to my son, who named Angel Down  as his favorite book of the year right when he read it, shortly after it came out.)

The Canon Contenders of 2025

Rebecca and I discussed this in the most recent episode of our new podcast, Zero to Well-Read. We went through a bunch of the noteworthy books of the year with a slightly different aim: rather than name the best books of the year,  we tried to identify the book we thought most likely to endure. I will spoil it mildly by saying: the list gets short quickly.