Welcome to your Sunday edition of Today in Books. Here are the stories Today in Books readers were most interested in this week.
Amazon’s Best Books of the Year
In a year without a novel like James owning headlines and bestseller lists, the field has been wide open for end-of-year lists. At the top of Amazon’s newly revealed Best Books of 2025 list is Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye, which was also the September selection for both Read With Jenna and Barnes & Noble’s book club. Other highlights among Amazon’s top 20 include Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, which was Amazon’s #1 pick in the mid-year checkin, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs, and King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby. Both of this summer’s blockbusters, Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid and Katabasis by R.F. Kuang also made the top 20. See the full list and Amazon editors’ selections in nonfiction, mystery/thriller, and many more genres.
Barnes & Noble Picks Its Book of the Year
This year’s Barnes & Noble’s book of the year had been popping up a little even before it was one of the retailer’s finalists. And Mona’s Eyes by Thomas Schlesser feels a little like a throwback. It’s a novel about a a girl who is losing her vision and her grandfather’s quest to show her works of art, one a week for a year, across Paris’ museums. The cover is a close-up of a painting that appeared on another crossover breakout, and the theme of sucking the marrow out of life on the precipice of loss is not without precedent among books that have become sensations. And its publisher, Europe Editions, had a global bestseller that had a similar bittersweet, affirming message. Intrusive thought: did attention for this book have anything to do with people getting excited about the Louvre because of this?
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David Baldacci Donating $13 Million to Fund Civil Discourse Initiative
Bestselling author David Baldacci is donating $13 million to fund an initiative to promote civil discourse and educate people about “how to be informed members of a democracy.” Citing books as “body armor against bigotry,” Baldacci is partnering with his alma mater Virginia Commonwealth University and the Library of Virginia to plan, among other things, a speaker series and public debates intended to foster “civil, constructive and respectful dialogue about complex issues.” The details are still in the works, but Baldacci’s vision is clear: get people off their phones and into rooms with each other.
“I think when you bring people together physically and the anonymity goes away, that all of a sudden they’re accountable — it’s a totally different dynamic,” he said. “Just bring people back together and have good debates, civilly, peacefully, knowing that everybody deserves respect, regardless of what they think.
May his efforts succeed.