The CCW 2025 Book Awards
The best books I read this year in over a dozen categories
Another year of reading has come to an end. I read over 170 books this past year, and there were a few duds, but overall it was a wonderful reading year. I decided to do something different this year and offer up what I think were my best books of 2025. While I do hope to do some other roundups (like best fiction, best nonfiction, etc.), I thought it would be fun to do my own awards. Following are a lot of categories that you’ll probably find in other roundups and also a few that I made up for myself because I tend to read a lot of books that fall beneath that category (e.g. CULTS). If you are looking for a good book, these are my top recommendations, hands down!
You’ll see there are a number of somewhat random categories, but at the end of the post I have my top book in each category as well as my book of the year—which was incredibly hard to choose!
Note that I did not write much about any of these books in this post, because I have already mentioned all of them in my monthly recaps of what I read. You can select the link and read a blurb of the book on Amazon, or you can use the search function here on my site to see what I wrote about it when I read it this year!1
Best Book About Cults
Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown by Candace Fleming
Best Fantasy Book
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Best Nature Book
Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton
Best Theological / Biblical Studies Book
Ezra/Nehemiah: The Quest for Restoration by Dale Ralph Davis
Best Memoir/Biography
Wave: A Memoir by Sonali Deraniyagala
Best Book on Current Events
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Best Science Fiction
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
Best Mystery
The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman
Best Marriage Book
The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God by Timothy Keller and Kathy Keller
Best Parenting Book
Get Offa My Case: Godly Parenting of an Angry Teen by Rick Horne
Best Investigate Journalism
The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty by Valerie Bauerlein
Best Historical Nonfiction
Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses by M.G. Sheftall
Best Outer Space-Adjacent Book
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham
Best Self-Help/Psychology
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks
Best Long Book (>500 pages)
The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
Best Short Book (<100 pages)
How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen
Best Devotional
Let Earth Receive Her King: Daily Readings for Advent by Alistair Begg
Best Christian Living Book
Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life by Donald S. Whitney
Best Nonfiction
The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green
Best Fiction
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
Book of the Year
The Spiritually Healthy Leader: Finding Freedom from Self-Sabotage by Dave Wiedis
It was really fun coming up with this list, even though I found it very hard to choose the winners in some categories and felt sorry for the books that didn’t make the cut. Don’t worry, though—I’ve got many new book roundups coming in the new year where I can share some of the ones that didn’t make the cut.
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If you are reading this when I post it on December 29, 2025, then you will not be able to find a few books by searching because I read them in December and I won’t posted all my December reads yet. Stay tuned!