This post is part of my year end "Attack of the Best Lists" coverage. To see every post in my "Attack of the Best Lists 2025" coverage [and more backlist best of the year options] you can click here.
Today I have the list I have been waiting for-- LitHub's aggregation of all the major best lists. From the landing page:
The Ultimate Best Books of 2025 List
Reading All the Lists So You Don’t Have To Since 2017
By Emily TempleHappy List Season, children. I hope you’ve been good. Just like every year, I have arrived to present to you the Ultimate List, otherwise known as the List of Lists—in which I read all (or at least many) of the Best Of lists on the internet and count which books are recommended most.
Is consensus the same as quality? Not always. Is this basically a popularity contest? Sure. But if you want to know which books The Critics are talking about, this is one way to do it. (Three of my own personal favorite books of the year made it to the top five below, which I can only assume means I am either a) boring or b) correct or c) both??)
This year, I processed 58 lists from 49 outlets, which collectively recommended more than 1,300 different books (…help). 90 of those books made it onto 5 or more lists (weirdly this is the exact same number as last year, despite there being more books recommended in total this year), and I have collated these for you here, in descending order of frequency.
- 173 Best Book Covers of 2025
- Lit Hub's 43 Favorite Books of 2025
- 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025
- The Best Reviewed Nonfiction of 2025 (via BookMarks)
- The Best Reviewed Fiction of 2025 (via BookMarks)
- The Year's Best Literary Podcasts
Multiple layer of backlist and indexing are also happening in every list, meaning you can embrace "Best" across multiple years. Reminder, "Best" titles have a longer shelf life than the current year. Last year's best titles, even 5 years ago, are great suggestions for a wide swath of readers. LitHub makes it easy, all year long, with their clear, consistent, and accessible tags at the bottom of their posts. All of these tags pull up useful information in reverse chronological order, meaning you decide how far into the backlist you want to dig.
Here are some of the tags that can help you all year long and include easy backlist access:
- Reading Lists (best lists all year long end up here)
- Ultimate Lists (both end of year and summer going back to 2017)
[Also, I wanted to remind people of the extremely useful Best of the Decade lists they made in 2019. Those are also a great "best" resource, one that truly embraces the treasure trove that is the backlist.]
But wait, there is more...
LitHub owns CrimeReads and they have their own Best of 2025 lists (but no useful tags to collection them all. Here are those best lists:
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