Here’s A Post About What I Read During 2025

This is cross-post from my Facebook. It’s becoming an annual tradition for me to recap my reading over the past year. There’s a couple music books here so I thought I’d shared the entire list!

With the year wrapping up, a look back at my reads for the year. I read 61 books during 2025. This number was helped largely because I had a six-week furlough while the government was shutdown in October and half of November.

I read every day anyway, but I was really able to push through the books without having to deal with a pesky desk job for at least 8 hours a day.

So, what did I read? Way more fiction than ever before!

Since 2025 was a bit "extra," I needed a good distraction and my love for Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child came through for me, big time. Their novels helped take me on adventures around the world, with amazing professionals in the world archaeology, crime and justice and some good supernatural fantasy.

Here’s a listing of my reads and a note if the book is new from this past year. Nonfiction books are also noted.

• The entire Dungeon Crawler Carl series to date (7) books to date, by Matt Dinniman. You want to laugh out loud? Read this series. Book 8 comes this summer!

• The entire Agent Pendergast series (22) books to date, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. It is hard for me to pick a favorite because each book is important to the series overall, as the story continually builds. Some standouts for me are Relic, Still Life With Crows, White Fire, The Cabinet of Curiosities, Brimstone, Two Graves and Crooked River. But seriously, I love them all.

I joke that FBI Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast is my boyfriend now. There’s a new Pendergast book coming at the end of January!

• Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly by Jeff Weiss (2025) – My favorite nonfiction book of the year.

This one was straight bonkers. Weiss is a music journalist but he was just getting started around the year 2000 and that was when paparazzi scrums were common and photogs could make six figures off one good shot. Weiss tells the story of being paired up with an overly ambitious photog for an L.A. based tabloid and their daily hunt for the princess of pop, Ms. Spears herself. By the middle of the book, Weiss is disgusted with literally all of it and tries to get out but it takes him a few months and more wild stories before he really drives away from that wild side of journalism. Totally recommend. You don’t need to love Britney to enjoy this book. And the amount of celebrities mentioned is mind-blowing.

• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer – nonfiction. A classic about a fateful climb of Mt. Everest that happened back when I was in high school. So many different climb teams were involved in the tragedy and people died unnecessarily. Krakauer is an avid climber and went on the trip to cover it for Outside magazine. A climb that still haunts him all these years later.

• The entire Gideon Crew series (5) books total, by Preston and Child.

• Murder by Cheesecake: A Golden Girls Cozy Mystery by Rachel Ekstrom Courage (2025). Yes this is new fiction based on the Golden Girl sitcom. It’s still the 80s in the books and I had to remind myself of that occasionally. Book 2 is due in 2026.

• Thunderhead by Preston and Lincoln Child.

• The Ice Limit by Preston and Child – Book #4 of the Gideon Crew series is Beyond the Ice Limit. Holy cow. The Ice Limit is a standalone book but apparently readers kept demanding a sequel, so this is how Preston and Child handled it. I can’t describe it. Just read them both.

• The Codex by Douglas Preston.

• Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik – nonfiction. So I had to get the rabies shots series after a scared little bat flew into me when I opened the front door and stepped onto my porch at nighttime. Obviously that was an adventure. Did you know it costs like $11k for the shots? True story. Naturally I needed to learn more about rabies and how it kills animals and people. This one will keep you up at night.

• Mount Dragon: A Pandemic of Apocalyptic Proportions by Preston and Child.

• The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi – nonfiction. I read this before I even realized Netflix was coming out with a documentary on the Florentine serial killer. The book is better than the Netflix series. A decades long murder string that still baffles the Italians.

• Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew by Brian Hicks – nonfiction.

• UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life by Garrett M. Graff – nonfiction.

• It Doesn’t Have To Hurt: Your Smart Guide to a Pain-Free Life by Sanjay Gupta (2025) – nonfiction.

• The Mole People: Life In the Tunnels Beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth – nonfiction. This book was amazing. It is from the 90s and paints a fascinating and heartbreaking story of family, poverty, mental illness and what it means to be unhoused in New York City.

• Riptide – Preston and Child. My favorite standalone book from my beloved writing duo. If you like pirates AND modern technology, you would probably like this one too.

• The entire Nora Kelly Series (5) books to date, by Preston and Child. A spinoff series from the Pendergast books. Dude. The series opener Old Bones rocked my world. Of course I had to "dig" into the source content for it. I’ve learned so much about the American southwest from this series.

I get interested in something and go off on a fact-finding tangent to track down what is real and what is fiction. Preston and Child are known for their painstaking research and details they add to their books. Sure, they bend places and dates to fit their stories when needed, but man. If you enjoy Native American history or desert exploring, you would probably love this series.

• Never Flinch: A Novel by Stephen King (2025)

• Mile 81 by Stephen King

• Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont by Saul Austerlitz – nonfiction. A full review of this one is on my website:

• The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator by Timothy C. Wingard – nonfiction.

• Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis (2025) – nonfiction. Interesting timing on the release of this book. Especially interesting to me being a civil servant and all the stuff that has happened to Feds over the past year.

• Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (2025) – aside from the original, the best book in the Hunger Series. Yes, I said what I said. I can’t wait for the movie to come out around Thanksgiving!

• Into the Abyss: An Extraordinary True Story by Carol Shaben – nonfiction. If you don't like flying, skip this one.