Book Wrapped 2025

I entered this year having just finished the entirety of Brandon Sanderson’s cosmere - a huge span of books (almost four million words) comprising a trilogy, a five book series, numerous standalone novels, and a bunch of short stories. It was fantastic, and I highly recommend it, but entering the new year having finished it I was unsure where to go next. Luckily, I read lots of cool books this year! Here they are, in no particular order, along with my ratings.^[1]

Artemis by Andy Weir

Artemis is about a girl named Jasmine who has lived her whole life on a colony on the moon. She gets wrapped up in a corporate conspiracy and helps unravel it before it can threaten the colony as a whole.

I wouldn’t recommend this one. This was an interesting premise, but the execution wasn’t amazing. This was Andy Weir’s first book, so I’ll give him a break.

• Rating - 2/5

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary follows Ryland Grace, an astronaut recruited to help save the planet from the effects of the sun going out. He heads to a planet light-years away hoping to find a cure, and meets an unlikely friend along the way.

This book was fantastic - definitely my top book of the year. Great characters, engaging premise and settings, and chock-full of nerdy shit that I ate right up. Super excited for the movie coming in March.

• Rating - 5/5

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

This is a great analysis of the history of tuberculosis. It talks about its past, present, and possible futures, and the far-reaching effects its had on the world.

I’m not currently a huge non-fiction reader, but I had heard good things about this, so I gave it a chance. It was great! Very interesting - so many things about the world and culture now actually have roots in the effects of tuberculosis. It’s also a pretty short read and easy to digest. I highly recommend it!

• Rating - 4/5

The Man In The Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell

Sean Ferrell came up with an interesting take on a time travel story - a man with a time machine celebrates his birthday every year ^[2] with all of his past and future selves at an abandoned hotel in New York City. One year, he discovers that the next year’s version of himself has been murdered, and he needs to solve his own murder before it happens.

This is another example of cool premise and not-as-cool execution. This book had a strong start, and it was interesting the way Ferrell wrote the main character interacting with past and future versions of himself. The way he choose to have the past and future interact is really interesting. The murder mystery premise along with some interesting world building were also similarly engaging. However, the second half of the book is not as good, and the ending isn’t very satisfying. It sort of devolves into a weird romance story with way too many sex scenes written in odd detail. I think it should have stayed as sci-fi mystery, or been a romance book from the start. It tries to be both and fails.

• Rating - 2/5

Congo by Michael Crichton

As most Michael Crichton books goes, this one follows some cool scientific discovery that goes bad almost immediately. This one is about a mythical lost city that houses diamonds needed for semiconductor manufacturing, but of course the expedition into it goes horribly wrong.

This was a fun read, I typically like Michael Crichton books. The characters were well-written and the mystery of the lost city was interesting. I liked the addition of Amy, a gorilla who knows sign language, to the crew on the expedition. She was sort of a wild card and made the reading both more silly and at times more tense. I definitely recommend this for a quick, enjoyable read.

• Rating - 3/5

Sphere by Michael Crichton

Sphere is about a group of scientists employed by the military to investigate a mysterious structure discovered in the ocean, presumed to be extraterrestrial tech. However, not all is as it seems, and the crew find themselves fighting for their lives against a mysterious enemy.

This book was great. Lots of plot twists I did not see coming, and a pretty interesting take on the power of the human imagination.

• Rating - 4/5

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

A far-future dystopian sci-fi novel about a young man recruited from the lowest caste of society to help overthrow the system from the inside.

This book to me felt like a bit of a retelling of the Hunger Games, since the main character attends a school where they basically throw the students in an arena and they fight to the death, but the world building was interesting and I’m curious to see where the rest of the series goes.

• Rating - 3/5

The Gorgon’s Fury by Brandon Mull

This is a return to the Fablehaven universe, but this time through the eyes of two fan-favorites - the satyrs Newel and Doren. It’s a short story that takes place after the two main series.

This was a fun read, definitely aimed for a younger audience, but this series was one of my favorites growing up so it was fun to get some more content in it. If you haven’t read them, the Fablehaven and Dragonwatch series are both great!

• Rating - 3/5

Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson

You can never stay caught up on the cosmere for too long - Sanderson just writes too fast (as I’m writing this, another book has just been announced to release in March!). This book is a story about a planet that is forced to adapt to the universal political field when extraterrestrial humans arrive and begin trading and interacting with a civilization that’s barely begun to industrialize.

This was a banger, I love Sanderson’s books. It was an interesting analogy for colonization, though one that ends more-or-less positively. It’s also based on Polynesian culture, which was cool to read about. The two viewpoint characters are complex and interesting, and the plot had some cool twists and fun tie-ins to the larger cosmere. The world building and magic systems are always great in his books too. Fun read!

• Rating - 4/5

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

This is a fast-paced ‘solve the mystery before the bad guys catch you’ book about the Holy Grail. It follows a symbologist and a French law enforcement agent as they try to find the Holy Grail.

This was a interesting read. It was well-researched and had a cool take on what the Holy Grail is (I won’t spoil it here). My only real gripe with it is that major plot points that were a mystery to the reader kept being teased without being revealed to the point where it got a little annoying ^[3]. Other than that, it was a cool read. There was also a big plot twist that I did not see coming at all. I definitely recommend this for a fun, quick, read.

• Rating - 3/5

Michael Vey Books 8-10 by Richard Paul Evans

I read the first seven books in this series in middle and high school, and I loved them. It’s about a group of teenagers accidentally given electric powers by a new medical device, and about their efforts to escape their parent company’s attempts to use them to take over the world. I had thought that the series ended on book seven (and I think the author did too), but these last three books got released recently without me knowing and I discovered them over the summer.

These were quick reads and they were solid. Not fantastic, but not bad like some ‘return to the series that made you a lot of money’ have been (I’m looking at you, John Flanagan). They take place a few years after the first part of the series, so it’s cool to see the main characters as adults, tackling new problems. My only complaint with these books is the pacing, it feels off sometimes, with problems either being drawn out way too long or being solved way too quickly.

• Rating - 3/5

Reading in 2026

You may know that I’m a big re-reader - I come backs to books I love quite often. For example, I’ve read Harry Potter probably more than 10 times in my life, and I come back to the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini once a year or so. I love doing this, but sometimes it feels like it keeps me from reading new books, so this year I want to focus on crossing books off my ‘to read’ list.

Specific Books I want to read:

Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. I read the Hobbit a while back and liked it a lot, and I can’t even call myself a fantasy fan if I haven’t read this. It’s top of my list for a reason. I am currently about halfway through the first book and I am liking it so far.

Red Rising Saga by Pierce Brown. I read the first book in this series this year, as you read, but I want to finish it. I’ve heard they get better as you go.

Awaken Online series by Travis Bagwell. This is another series I read the first book of and never finished, so I want to go back and finish it.
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. I’ve heard this is really interesting, and I never finished it, so I want to go back and read it through.

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Again, another interesting read that I’ve heard great things about. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf since August so it’s time to read it.

The Fires of December by Brandon Sanderson. This is coming out in March and I definitely want to read it when it does.

The Dune series by Frank Herbert. Another fantasy/sci-fi epic that I want to read, especially after seeing and enjoying the movie.

I also want to read more nonfiction in general, as I typically stick to sci-fi and fantasy.

Thanks for reading! I’m going to try and keep better track of books I read this year (maybe I’ll finally start using Goodreads or something) and I will report back next year! Happy 2026!