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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Here are the biggest headlines from last week.
The Atlantic‘s Best Books of 2025
Alert alert! We have another major best books list in the ether. The Atlantic released a list of their picks for the 10 best books of the year. Hats off to any outlet able to whittle it down to so small a number. If you’ve been scouring all of the lists, you won’t find any surprises here and, as a note, this isn’t where one would turn for genre picks. Among the 10, we have books recognized by major literary awards and book clubs (A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, for one), a Kirkus Prize winner (King of Kings, The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson), and the newest from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris). Are we now approaching the end of Best Books season? Who knows!
Book Riot’s 2026 Read Harder Challenge
The time has come! For all of you who enjoy a good reading challenge and are looking to broaden your bookish horizons, we have your 2026 reading goals. Our annual Read Harder Challenge begins at the top of the year and, to help you prepare, we’ve announced the 24 challenge tasks. As always, we lean on inclusivity, originality, and fun to make your reading life more thoughtful, interesting, and engaging. Hop on in and check out what’s in store for the 2026 Read Harder Challenge.
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The Tournament of Books Shortlist
I don’t know what I expected to find when I went to check out the Tournament of Books shortlist, but I was delighted by the selection of books. We’ve got award winners like Flesh by David Szalay, this year’s Booker Prize winner, big names like Angela Flournoy (The Wilderness) and Stephen Graham Jones (The Buffalo Hunter Hunter), and books that fell entirely off my radar like The Burning Heart of the World by Nancy Kricorian. For the uninitated, the Tournament pits fiction books against each other with judges choosing which book advances in the brackets. Previous winners include James by Percival Everrett, Normal People by Sally Rooney, and My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Check out the full shortlist and the books that made the play-in round themed, “the Academy, 2025–2026 edition.”
The New York Times‘ Favorite Hidden Gem Books of 2025
We love an under-the-radar read here at Book Riot, so I hurried over to this New York Times list of the Book Review staff’s favorite and lesser-known personal best-ofs. The list includes a massive graphic novel that took a decade to complete (More Weight by Ben Wickey), a “disorienting” novel in translation (Eye of the Monkey by Krisztina Toth, translated by Ottilie Mulzet), and a tense debut following a group of young men on a wilderness road trip (The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana). I have, in fact, not run into most of these titles. Now if only there was endless time to read all of the great books published this year.
A Holiday Gift Guide for Readers From Publishers Weekly
If you’re still wrestling with uncertainty over what to buy the readers in your life, Publishers Weekly has stepped in to help you out with their annual gift guide. The lists are sorted into the following categories, for your convenience: Illustrated & Art Books; Children’s & YA; Fiction, Poetry & Comics; and Nonfiction. While PW doesn’t discuss what makes these picks gift-worthy, at a glance it looks like they’re all 2025 releases and they’re highly diverse in subject matter, so an easy assumption is that these are books giftees are less likely to have read yet and that PW is trying to cover ground for all kinds of readers. Some highlights include Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats (Illustrated & Art Books), Legendary Frybread Drive-In edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith (Children’s & YA), What a Time to Be Alive by Jade Chang (Fiction, Poetry & Comics), and So Many Stars by Caro De Robertis (Nonfiction). Browse the full guide and may we all be done with holiday shopping toot sweet.
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