Since 2016, I’ve used the Goodreads Reading Challenge as a rough guide to my reading life. Some years I race ahead, some years I crawl to the finish, but it’s always satisfying to look back and see the paths my interests took.
This year’s list leans heavily into history, memory, violence, and how people try to make sense of the worst things human beings do to one another. There’s one standout novel in the mix, but everything here fed directly into my work as a public historian and the stories I try to tell.
These are the books from 2025 that stayed with me long after I closed the covers – books I’ve carried into my writing, my travel, and my thinking about the past.
North Woods
By Daniel Mason
I’m not much of a fiction reader, but North Woods came highly recommended and it didn’t disappoint. Mason uses a single piece of land and a lone New England house as the anchor for a sprawling story that stretches across centuries.
I’ve written before about how this book helped me look at history with new eyes. Its shifting voices and eras echo the way I think about places I visit and write about: layers of memory, violence, love, and loss, all piled on the same ground. It raises questions what stories haunt a landscape, and who gets remembered.
Memorial Days
By Geraldine Brooks
Tony Horwitz – author of Confederates in the Attic and Midnight Rising – has been one of my favorite writers for years. His sudden death in Washington, DC in 2019 felt like a gut punch to many of us who admired the way he blended travel, history, and journalism.
In Memorial Days, his widow Geraldine Brooks turns her novelist’s eye inward and writes about her own journey through grief. It’s a quiet, devastating book about learning to live with an absence that never really goes away.
The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb
By Garrett M. Graff
I’m a huge fan of Garrett Graff and his narrative histories, and The Devil Reached Toward the Sky might be his most haunting book yet. Timed to the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this oral history weaves together the voices of scientists, soldiers, victims, and witnesses to the birth of the atomic age.
Graff has a real gift for stitching together individual memories into a clear, gripping story. Here, he shows how decisions made in secret labs and desert test sites reshaped the entire world. Like his past oral histories, these are best enjoyed in audiobook format, with dozens of voice actors bringing these accounts to life.
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires
By Kevin Kenny
I’ve read Making Sense of the Molly Maguires a few times over the years, but I came back to it in a serious way in 2025 as I dug deeper into my own Molly Maguires project. This remains the essential modern study of the Mollies, the violence in the anthracite coal fields, and the tangled roots of Irish secret societies in both Ireland and Pennsylvania.
I even brought my copy with me to Donegal in the spring, reading passages while visiting the same rural northwest of Ireland that sent so many immigrants to the Coal Region. Kenny’s work is foundational for understanding not just the trials and hangings of the 1870s, but the broader world of landlordism, migration, labor organizing, and fear that shaped the era.
Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865
By Damian Shiels
Green and Blue is a crucial addition to our understanding of Irish Americans’ service in the Civil War. Historian Damian Shiels brings together an enormous range of sources – pension files, letters, and official records – to show how Irish immigrants and their families experienced the war in uniform and on the home front.
I’ve had the chance to collaborate with Damian over the years through my work at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, and it was a real highlight of 2025 to spend time with him and hear him talk about the book in Gettysburg. His work pushes us beyond clichés about “the Irish Brigade” and into the lived reality of thousands of families caught between old-world loyalties and their new lives in America.
The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo
By Clea Koff
I’ve long been drawn to histories of genocide and mass violence, trying to understand how human beings come to believe they can erase their neighbors from existence. In The Bone Woman, forensic anthropologist Clea Koff tells the story from a very different angle – through the mass graves themselves.
Koff worked in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, carefully exhuming and studying the bones of victims so their stories wouldn’t disappear and their families could have some measure of justice. Her memoir is unflinching but deeply humane, showing how the work of science, law, and memory intersect on the most difficult ground imaginable. It’s not an easy read, but it’s an important one, and it stayed with me long after I finished it.
I always enjoy hearing what other people are reading. If you have favorite books from 2025 – history, memoir, fiction, or anything in between – I’d love to hear about them in the comments or over on social media.
You can read my 2024 list here.
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