Confession: I’m not much of a film and television person. While I do make occasional exceptions, I’m more likely to go on a book binge instead. If I didn’t work full-time, I could read a book a day. Alas, my pace is more like a book a week, bringing this year’s total to 32. Of these just-under-three-dozen tomes, three have been living in my mind rent-free since I turned the last page. In no particular order, here they are.
I Read a Book a Week. These 3 Are My Favorites of 2025 (So Far)
Which one will you read?
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Published Aug 6, 2025
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1. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Song of Achilles
The Song of Achilles debuted in 2012, ultimately becoming a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Orange Prize for fiction. I’ve heard about this book for the better part of nearly 15 years, but it wasn’t until I lived with a gal who was a classics major that I really got an earful. I finally picked up a copy this year and…I don’t know why I waited so long.
Miller offers readers an inventive take on the myth of the doomed Greek hero, Achilles. The narrator is Achilles' closest friend and lover, Patroclus. Interestingly, the author elevates the latter, a minor character in the myth, to protagonist, and we see the famed warrior’s rise and fall through his eyes. The novel is a tender bildungsroman and queer love story rolled into one, as the boys’ adolescence is set against the backdrop of the Trojan war. I kid you not, I read the last page five times over multiple days, and each time was trying not to cry. Though tragic, this is one of my favorite endings in literature.
2. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde’s enduring classic defied all my expectations for a work written nearly 130 years ago. I’m used to older novels moving at a much slower pace than today’s frantic storytelling standards (Jane Austen, I love you), but The Picture of Dorian Gray is an absolute zinger. Through the titular character and his conniving friend, Lord Henry Wotton, Wilde delivers takedown after takedown and a plethora of aphorisms on the pitfalls of beauty, art and vanity. (My book is full of yellow highlights.) Shockingly, but also not shockingly, this novel is extremely relevant in today’s culture of Instagram face and the rat race pursuit of pretty. (It’s also my shortest recommendation, clocking in at 213 packed pages.)
3. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Demon Copperhead
Admittedly, the last time I read Barbra Kingsolver was in 11th grade, when the curriculum included High Tide in Tuscon. However, ever since Demon Copperhead was published in 2022, I’ve had my eye on it, if only because Kingsolver promised a contemporary American retelling of Charles Dickens’ classic. It was a co-recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, an award well-deserved. The epic follows the eponymous Demon Copperhead, born to a single mother struggling with drug and alcohol addiction in rural West Virginia. In this coming-of-age tale, the stakes are life or death, as Demon struggles to make something of himself while the community around him falls victim to the opioid addiction that began rocking the country in the 1990s. It’s heartbreaking, hopeful, yearning and propulsive, making the 546 pages feel like leaves in the wind. And what’s more—Kingsolver used proceeds from her book to build Higher Ground Women’s Recovery Residence in Lee County, where the novel is set.
