How has your reading year been going so far, bibliophiles? I feel like I lucked out in 2025 because the first book I finished was this delightfully sweet romance novel by author Sonora Reyes. It wasn’t completely luck, though. I knew what I was getting into with this author. Their young adult novel The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School completely melted me with how sweet, honest, and entertaining it was. With The Broposal, Reyes’s debut adult novel, I was pretty sure we could expect more of the same A+++ storytelling. I was not disappointed, and you won’t be either.

As Book Riot does every year, we have launched the annual Read Harder challenge to help you expand your reading horizons. We are also launching some posts, including this one, to give you ideas about how to rise to that challenge! What’s great is whether or not you’re taking the formal challenge, you’ll be able to discover some great new reads.

The nice thing about comics is that they usually don’t take as long to read as a prose book but still 100% count as reading. So whether you’re falling behind on your Read Harder goals, don’t have as much reading time these days, or just really like graphic novels, the books on this list will give you a boost.

While there are comic-specific Read Harder goals, graphic novels can apply to many, if not all, of the challenges on this year’s list. To prove it, let’s look at a few titles that will help you check “read a standalone fantasy book” off your list. Most will even knock out multiple challenges at once — I’ve noted those in the blurbs.

Whenever I plan my New Year’s Resolutions, some iteration of “cook at home more often” finds its way on my list. Sure, there are the usual reasons for this, like saving more money or getting more nutrients in my diet. But as I browse shelves of new cookbooks, I know that the one I bring home will not only teach me new skills but also help my mental well-being.

I appreciate the way learning new recipes makes me focus on the present as I cook, and it gives me a built-in opportunity to spend time with my husband after busy workdays. Plus, you can learn to make your favorite meals whenever you want (a dangerous and wonderful power)!

As you prepare your culinary TBR for the coming months, take note of these highly anticipated cookbooks of 2025. You’ll find plenty of recs perfect for the aspiring or seasoned chef, from comprehensive guides like Bread: The Ultimate Cookbook and Real Japanese Cooking to practical, accessible picks like Shred Happens. All are organized by release date so you know when to look for them at your local library or bookstore.

Let’s get your to-read lists—and your dinner plans—in order with the best and most anticipated cookbooks of 2025!

Monday through Friday, Today in Books highlights news from around the world of books and reading. In this weekend edition, enjoy a look at the stories we covered in-house.

New Mexico Becomes Fourth State to Introduce Anti-Book Ban Bill for 2025: Here’s What They Are (& What You Can Do To Help Pass Them)

Jenna Bush Hager and Random House Publishing Group Partner to Publish Emerging Writers

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

A Big List of 2025 Books By Women of Color

Electric Literature rounded up 48 books by women of color to look forward to in this fresh, new year. Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma is appearing everywhere and is on my reading list. I scrolled down for books publishing later in the year since those aren’t getting as much hype in these early months and a couple standouts for me include Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn, a satire about trans athletes, and Zeal by Morgan Jerkins, which is a multi-generational look at the legacy of slavery and has a banger blurb from Kiese Laymon. It’s easier to face down what’s gearing up to be a hard year knowing great books by great authors are coming to bring us some joy and remind us of our humanity.

S&S Launches Audio-First Imprint

Simon & Schuster is launching an audio-first imprint, Simon Maverick, with Jason Pinter (formerly of Polis Books) as VP and editorial director. The plan for the imprint is to mostly work with self-published authors to mostly produce original audiobooks. There are a lot of mostlys here because it sounds like this isn’t an all or nothing scheme when it comes to audio or authors–Pinter is staying open to opportunities printing works under the Maverick banner and working with books by S&S authors under other divisions. It’s not hard to see this as a business model where the focus on self-published works and audio formats allows S&S to quickly surface and mass produce unrepresented works in successful genres (ahem, romantasy) that come with a built-in readership ready and willing to hear their favorite story in audio format and capture fans who might not know of X author but have a big appetite for the genre. And if an audiobook takes off, Simon Maverick would be set up with a framework to quickly pivot to print. The imprint is already planning to publish at least 50 titles this year.

One of the trends we’ll see in book censorship over 2025 is the increased use of unprofessional, politically-driven book review websites like BookLooks to make decisions in professional library and educational settings. Just days after writing that—including an example from Warren County Public Libraries in New Jersey which happened at the time of writing—another library made headlines nationwide for their decision to begin using BookLooks to make library decisions. This time, it was Anoka County, Minnesota, public schools. Many online shared anger and frustration by this decision, while others talked about how glad they were to be in a safe state with anti-book ban laws. The latter, of course, being an attitude that we’ll see continue to increase in 2025, too, and it’s an uninformed one at that. Minnesota is among the states that have an anti-book ban law in effect.

BookLooks is the most well-known website for unprofessional, biased book reviews. That’s because it is a tool created by a former Moms For Liberty member and continues to be the tool they put their weight, energy, and time behind. I broke that story back in November 2022. Much like anything related to Moms For Liberty, though, BookLooks is not the be-all, end-all when it comes to these kinds of biased “review” websites. It is simply the most well-known because it has had the most ink put behind it; Moms For Liberty, likewise, takes up far more column space when it comes to book censorship than any of the hundreds of other large and small groups nationwide doing the same kind of work. Those groups, some of which are far more dangerous and destructive than Moms, just aren’t as easy or safe to meme online (certainly misogyny plays a nice sized role in this, too—no matter how appalling Moms For Liberty is, they get more play because it is easy even for “nice people on the left” to degrade women and women-adjacent projects).

Getting up to speed on the review sources being used and given legitimacy outside of BookLooks matters because in order to effect actual change, we have to be aware of the various ways these tools are being used and implemented. Certainly, get to know BookLooks. But if your knowledge ends there, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Even since the last time I did such a roundup of these biased online book ratings systems in November 2022, more have popped up and become favored by the myriad groups working to ban books in their local community schools and public libraries.

It might not feel good to give these sites any views by clicking the links. But it is vital to see how they’re operating in order to understand why they’re not worthy of being used in professional settings. Compare review sources that are long-running, professional resources by and for library and education professionals such as Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, and you’ll see why and how any institutional leadership should be embarrassed and ashamed to even consider their use. Even Common Sense Media, which is also inappropriate for use in making determinations about library and educational acquisitions, does a better job of providing information about books and materials in context than any of these slapdash sites do.

We’ll begin with a couple of the longer running sites, including BookLooks, and then dive into several other review sites gaining traction. Even if you have just tuned into book censorship, you’ll see that the titles that pop up on these sites are those which are quickest to then begin seeing challenges in public schools and libraries. Most of those complaints are simply copy-pasted from any of these resources. Book banners can’t even be bothered not to plagiarize their grievances—a reminder why libraries and schools need to update and strengthen their collection policies in such a way to toss out complaints that do just this. If college students are getting failing grades because of terrible AI detectors falsely identifying their work as AI, then your local right-wing instigator shouldn’t be able to steal the time and money of taxpayers for challenges that they just downloaded from some site on the internet and slapped their own name on.

Well, so far, the most read books on Goodreads in 2025 look very similar to the most read books in 2024! Before you scroll down, try to guess which three authors have titles in the top five. If you’ve been following this series, you can definitely get them all.

Because these are familiar titles, I’ve also included the most read books in three countries across the world. This time, we’re looking at the reading habits of Goodreads users in Brazil, Indonesia, and Norway. There is some overlap with the global list, but there are also titles uniquely popular in each country, including one that isn’t available in English: the Portuguese book Ainda estou aqui by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, which is one the most popular titles in Brazil at the moment.

As usual, the global list of the most popular books on Goodreads doesn’t include many authors of color. Approximately 98% of the authors with books on the top 50 list are white. (Relatedly, I recommend reading about The Unbearable Whiteness of the Goodreads Choice Awards.) I’ve included a couple of excellent books by BIPOC authors that came out this week at the end of this list, but if you’d like recommendations in your inbox every week, sign up for Book Riot’s In Reading Color newsletter!