A Librarian’s Most Meaningful Fiction Reads of 2025
For me, 2025 was a year of change, not all of it for the better. My reading reflects that. The books I chose to read throughout the year were not selected consciously with a common theme in mind. Yet, as I sat down to review them for this article, I was struck by how a cohesive theme of community, family, and slowing down emerged.
Working in a public library is like trying to drink from a firehose that sprays books, instead of water. Librarians spend an inordinate amount of time reading reviews, purchasing, cataloging, and circulating our collections, so it can be quite hard to choose which books we actually want to read – at least it feels that way for me. Every year, we buy thousands of books to add to our collection. I would love to read them all, but – unfortunately – that remains humanly impossible.
Note: The books are listed in alphabetical order by author’s last name because – librarian.
The List:
The Wandering Inn by Pirate Abba
I’d been hearing about this web series for years and finally decided to give the first installment a read. I’m glad I did. A night out on the town finds Erin Solstice thrown into a strange world of dragons, goblins, necromancers, poisonous blue fruit, and leveling systems. She takes over an abandoned inn and turns it into her home and business. Over time, she builds a found family, changes a community, and finds her place in the world as an Innkeeper.
Pirate Abba’s tale is a story of a young woman who, through hospitality and chess, takes a crumbling inn, fills it with goblins, animated skeletons, antinium, humans, drakes, and even a minotaur, and makes them get along. Erin Solstice shows that being kind to those who are different from you can have world-changing effects.
I’d recommend The Wandering Inn to fans of Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, looking to continue that LitRPG theme in a cozier setting. Watchers of the anime Solo Leveling may also enjoy reading it. Plus, anyone looking for a near-endless supply of free-to-read cozy lit-RPG content will be quite pleased with Pirate Abba’s god-like prolificacy.
Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree
This is the third installment of the Legends and Lattes series. Brigands and Breadknives follows the Ratkin Bookseller Fern as she tries to settle into her new life in Thune with her Orc friend Viv. What follows is a tale of adventure, midlife crisis, and found family.
This book surprised me in that it wasn’t the story I wanted to read. I wanted a wholesome reunion between friends followed by years of coffee, book talks, and baked goods. What Baldree delivered was so much more.
Legends and Lattes was my first foray into the cozy fantasy space. Reading Brigands and Breadknives was extra special as it was my first review on NetGalley. I felt blessed to be able to read such a highly looked forward to book and share my thoughts on it. A full review of Brigands & Breadknives can be found here.
I’d recommend this book to anyone going through big life changes of their own. Fern doesn’t cope well, but she finds people who help, and along the way, she is reminded that those who care for her the most were always there. She just needed to talk to them.
Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum
Obviously, I went through a bit of a cozy reading phase this year. Welcome to Hyunam-dong Bookshop is a Korean slice-of-life style novel that follows Yeongju, a burnt-out professional, who decides to leave that life behind and open a Bookshop. I think I enjoyed it so much because a lot of what she goes through in operating the bookshop is what I do in operating a library. Selecting books, organizing programs, author interviews, etc. This is an insanely quotable book. It is littered throughout with gems like:
“Books are not meant to remain in your mind, but in your heart. Maybe they exist in your mind too, but as something more than memories. At a crossroads in life, a forgotten sentence or a story from years ago can come back to offer an invisible hand and guide you to a decision.”
“If more people read, I think the world would be a better place.”
These quotable snippets often come in little philosophical conversations between the characters that are deeply enjoyable.
I would recommend this book to fans of bookshops, philosophy, and coffee.
King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby
Other than fantasy, southern noir is my go-to genre, and S.A. Cosby is the king of that space. His latest tale of family drama highlights the lengths people will go to avenge and protect the ones they care about most in the world. It’s dark and gritty but has love as its central theme.
King of Ashes is the third book of Cosby’s I've read. Good ‘ol gritty realism with characters who are just trying to make the best life with the hand they're dealt. Sometimes that life means selling drugs or poaching your dinner. Oftentimes, it means going after those who hurt your family.
The Carathurs family owns and operates a crematorium in Jefferson Run, Virginia. Overrun by criminal activity due to a poor economy, the Carathurs' father is attacked in a hit-and-run incident. What follows is the tale of a brother and sister as they work to bail their baby brother out of a bad situation with local drug dealers. It's dark. It’s violent. I couldn't put it down. The ending was just…damn.
I’d recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a dark story that has no “good” guys.
The Will of the Many by James Islington
I devoured this book on a family vacation to Puerto Rico. It's not your typical “beach read,” but this dark academia tale worked for me in that setting. The Will of the Many follows the orphaned prince Vis Telimus as he infiltrates an elite academy of Will (magic) users, in an attempt to avenge his family. The magic system feels all too familiar to the real world. Think of it as a pyramid where each person on the lower levels cedes their will to those higher up. It leaves the lower tiers weak, while the top grows ever more powerful.
I am currently reading book two of the Hierarchy Series, The Strength of the Few. I’m sure it will be just as good, if not better than its predecessor.
I’d recommend The Will of the Many to all fantasy fans who enjoy political intrigue and power struggles in their stories.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
Admittedly, this entry lacks the theme of community, family, and slowing down, but man, it was a good book. I'm not a big horror reader, but since I was introduced to Stephen Graham Jones’ work by a friend a few years ago, I read everything he puts into the world. This was an exceptional Western horror tale of revenge against colonialism. It follows a Lokata vampire by the name of Good Stab as he takes his revenge on the buffalo hunters and settlers who destroyed his people.
I’d recommend this book to fans of the horror genre who are interested in revenge through an indigenous lens. If you like this one, you may also enjoy Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams (the movie is terrible, but the book is good). You may actually want to read Butcher’s Crossing first. The brutal scenes of senselessly slaughtering buffalo for their hides, while leaving the flesh to rot, may put you in the mood for a good revenge tale, especially once you get to the ending.
Shadows Upon Time by Christopher Ruocchio
Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series may be the greatest science fiction series ever written (sorry, George Lucas). Shadows Upon Time is the seventh and final book in the series. I honestly don’t know how to summarize this one. It's a massive culmination of Hadrian Marlowe’s life. It’s both hopeful and sad. It too plays on the theme of found family. It’s a story of a husband’s grief and a father’s love for his daughter, especially when that love gets in the way of her growth. It's a tale of friendship, betrayal, epic space battles, aliens, and the importance of surrogate fathers when our own fail us. This is Star Wars for a more mature audience, looking for a bit (ok, a lot) of philosophy sprinkled into their high-stakes space opera.
I’d recommend this series to fans of Star Wars, Dune, Lord of the Rings, and even Dr. Who (it’s got “timey-wimey” stuff).
My Storygraph places me at 45 books read for 2025. Narrowing that down to my seven most meaningful reads was not an easy task, but I enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on my reading for the year. The common themes of community and found family were a nice surprise, but looking back on my life in 2025, I find that apropos.
2/100