Attack of the Best Lists 2025: Barnes & Noble

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.

Barnes & Noble has released their Best Books 2025 portal making them the first major outlet to release their list and they are covering a lot of bases with many categories including books in Spanish.

And for the second year in a row, this is also marks the beginning of my Attack of the Best Lists coverage for 2025. 

From the portal landing page: 

The Best Books of 2025

The wait is over – meet the best books of 2025. This year delivered stories that inspired us, magical tales that transported us, novels that made us fall in love and thrillers that kept us guessing. There were picture books that left us laughing and fiction that moved us, nonfiction that helped us thrive and gave us something to think about and cookbooks we couldn’t live without. Celebrate the books that kept us turning pages.

There are 19 categories for all ages here.

Of course B&N has more than one best list. The more the merrier in their eyes because ultimately they want to sell as many books as possible. And as the holidays and gift giving opportunities approach, they want it to be as easy as possible to help you find the right books for your people.

While getting the most sales is the reason, it is nice to see the categories themselves and the books found within as more inclusive than previous years. They have categories for Best Audiobooks, Best Spanish Books for adults and kids, and have multiple nonfiction categories. They are thinking about how people read and making sure they see a category that works for them or their friends and family.

Speaking of the ease at which the average reader can access enticing titles, keep a list of those B&N categories to use as display titles and conversation starters anytime of year.

You can make a display anytime of year with these categories as well especially if you use the backlist of best lists. So while at the end of a year you can use these categories as a way to ask patrons to weigh in on their best reads of the last year, you can also use these categories and the backlist "Best" options  to make genre or reading category displays anytime of year. 

Ask you patrons to help by using  this link to see how to turn a conversation starter into a display. 

Access the backlist of Best titles through with my attack of the best lists coverage from year to year to have all the best lists, from any of the past years, all in one. But specifically, here is the B&N Best Books portal from, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020.

Look for MANY more "Attack of the Best Lists" post coming soon.