Happy New Year! Every year, I record and rank all of the books that I read from every category. These are ranked in order of how meaningful each one was to me (relative to the others) versus its literary significance to the world as a whole.

In addition to this being my 2025 Book List (Ranked), I finally created a website to go with some life goals that have sat on the back burner for many years. I took to heart the numerous recommendations to ‘just start’. So, I made a minimal home page and this post… to just start.

2025 was full of unexpected significant changes in my life and full of significant changesthat I wished I made.

• I didn’t read 50 books.
• I read 37 books.
• I did read nearly 11,000 pages.
• I am currently reading 7 at once as we enter 2026.

Full Disclosure: All the book titles are Amazon Affiliate links. If you click them and purchase an item, I will receive a small commission.

📚 2025 Book Rankings

Ranked by rating • 37 books completed

Rank	Book Name	Author	Completion Date	Pages
1	Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did.	John Mark Comer	Mar 12, 2025	304
2	Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better	Lyn Alden	Nov 28, 2025	522
3	Demon Copperhead	Barbara Kingsolver	Aug 3, 2025	560
4	Jesus & John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation	Kristin Kobes Du Mez	Jun 11, 2025	368
5	The Almanac of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness	Eric Jorgenson	Feb 14, 2025	224
6	Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward	Henry Cloud	May 20, 2025	238
7	The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook	Hampton Sides	Oct 8, 2025	432
8	Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World	Anne-Laure Le Cunff	Dec 22, 2025	299
9	When Church Was A Family: Recapturing Jesus’ Vision For Authentic Christian Community	Joseph H. Hellerman	Feb 4, 2025	240
10	Braving the Wilderness: The quest for true belonging and the courage to stand alone	Brene Brown	Jan 10, 2025	179
11	The Lincoln Highway: A Novel	Amor Towles	Apr 26, 2025	588
12	By Any Other Name: A Novel	Jodi Picoult	Mar 5, 2025	525
13	CABIN: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman	Patrick Hutchison	Feb 26, 2025	304
14	The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store	Cait Flanders	Mar 5, 2025	200
15	Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - And How to Think Deeply Again	Johann Hari	Nov 22, 2025	347
16	The Bitcoin Standard The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking	Saifedean Ammous	Dec 16, 2025	287
17	The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us	Karl Vaters	Oct 23, 2025	231
18	Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now	Jaron Lanier	Aug 27, 2025	157
19	The Jungle	Upton Sinclair	Dec 30, 2025	264
20	The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao	Junot Diaz	Jun 5, 2025	340
21	Bel Canto	Ann Patchett	May 24, 2025	336
22	Tell Me Everything: A Novel	Elizabeth Strout	Jun 16, 2025	352
23	The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About	Mel Robbins	Mar 14, 2025	311
24	Source Code: My Beginnings	Bill Gates	Apr 4, 2025	371
25	Up From Slavery	Booker T. Washington	Sep 17, 2025	164
26	Salvage the Bones: A Novel	Jesmyn Ward	May 20, 2025	273
27	Pulling Back the Curtain on the Former Soviet Union	Carla Sundberg	May 18, 2025	128
28	Romney: A Reckoning	McKay Coppins	May 7, 2025	415
29	You Said Yes	Life Church	Apr 15, 2025	56
30	Add A Zero	Rose Han	Sep 23, 2025	264
31	The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward	Melinda French Gates	May 13, 2025	176
32	Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell	Dec 11, 2025	534
33	Virginia’s General: Robert E Lee and the Civil War	Albert Marrin	Aug 28, 2025	201
34	Around the World in 80 Days	Jules Verne	Nov 15, 2025	252
35	The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World	Robin Wall Kimmerer	Jan 15, 2025	124
36	The Red Badge of Courage: A Novel of the Civil War	Stephen Crane	Jan 22, 2025	132
37	The Quitter’s Manifesto: Quit a Job You Hate for the Work You Love	Rhode Tim	May 22, 2025	124