These days when you want to engage with some media, you can choose from podcasts, videos, games, live performances — or books, one of the oldest and most popular ways to learn something new or escape (at least temporarily) from today’s troubled world.
We polled the staff of The Verge to find out what books they read over the past year that really struck a chord — because the books were enlightening, educational, or just enjoyable. Here are some of the answers we got. (And please let us know what your favorite reads were in 2025 in the comments.)
Brandt Ranj, commerce writer
Screwing up is one of the inevitabilities of life, but dwelling on your own mistakes can get toxic — fast. In SNAFU: The Definitive Guide to History’s Greatest Screwups, Ed Helms breaks down dozens of blunders from the past 70 or so years. Sometimes a river gets so polluted that it catches fire (multiple times), or the US government conducts human experiments involving copious amounts of psychedelic drugs. Or it turns out that a pair of the 20th century’s greatest spies were also swingers. These things happen.
While many of the events in the book are absolute tragedies, Helms infuses each chapter with a little bit of humor, mostly in pointing out how stupid the perpetrators are. It’s a relatively breezy book that’ll make you feel better about the time you accidentally overcooked microwave popcorn and smoked out your apartment.
Victoria Song, senior reviewer
I’ve been on a memoir kick this year, and this one knocked my socks off. Things in Nature Merely Grow explores Yiyun Li’s experience with grief after losing both of her teenage sons to suicide. This isn’t a light read by any means. The writing is honest, beautiful, sometimes aloof, and oftentimes devastating. But as someone who lost both parents relatively young, I felt strangely comforted by Li’s take on “the abyss” and “radical acceptance.”
“Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline.” Some might say this book is unnecessarily harsh in its unflinching look at loss, but that line stuck with me as the truest reflection of how I felt for the longest time. I recommend it to anyone struggling with isolation after loss. (Some honorable mentions for memoirs: Educated by Tara Westover, I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb.)
Dominic Preston, news editor
I’d somehow never read any Le Guin until this year, and while I’ve been told that The Dispossessed is an odd place to start, it’s the book I had around, having borrowed it from a friend who knows how long ago. I would feel bad for having hung onto it so long, but the erosion of private property rights is surprisingly on-brand for the book. Its exploration of a moon with a (mostly) functional anarchist society, and the arch-capitalist planet its community sprung off from, holds a pretty unflinching mirror up against our world, and although over 50 years old, it’s about as relevant as ever.
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