Here are our reading groups’ favorite nonfiction books of 2025 based on our survey results.
ALL IN HER HEAD
Elizabeth Comen, MD
A surprising, groundbreaking, and fiercely entertaining medical history that is both a collective narrative of women’s bodies and a call to action for a new conversation around women’s health. For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined…
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
David Grann
At the end of the 19th century, the Osage Indians were driven onto a presumed worthless expanse of land in northeastern Oklahoma. But their territory turned out to be atop one of the largest oil deposits in the United States; to obtain that oil, prospectors were required to pay the…
BECOMING
Michelle Obama
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African…
BEING MORTAL
Atul Gawande
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should. Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own…
MATTIE, MILO, AND ME
Anne Abel
Anne grew up in an abusive home, leading to severe depression and a determination to do better as a mother. One of her sons wants a dog from the time he is a baby; Anne very much does not. For years she appeases him with creatures who live in cages…
MEMORIAL DRIVE
Natasha Trethewey
A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy. At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her…
THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS
Michael Finkel
A National Geographic Best Book of the Year National Bestseller Many people dream of escaping modern life. Most will never act on it—but in 1986, twenty-year-old Christopher Knight did just that when he left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the woods. He would not have a conversation…
UNFIT PARENT
Jessica Slice
Navigating the joys, stigma, and discrimination of disabled parenting—and how the solutions offered by disability culture can transform the way we all raise our kids In Unfit Parent, Slice debunks the exclusionary myths that deem disabled people “unfit” to care for their children, instead showing how disabled parents and disability…
84, CHARING CROSS ROAD
Helene Hanff
This charming classic love story, first published in 1970, brings together twenty years of correspondence between Helene Hanff—at the time, a freelance writer living in New York City—and a used-book dealer in London at 84, Charing Cross Road. Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they…
ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE
Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver takes readers through the seasons, chronicling the joys and challenges of eating only foods that she, her husband, and two daughters grew in their backyard or purchased from neighboring farms. Part memoir, part cookbook, and part exposé of the American food industry, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is one family's inspiring…