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Sarah's Bookshelves Live

Best Books of 2025 Genre Awards with Chrissie (@ChrissieWhitley) | Ep. 213

Sarah's Bookshelves Live

Sarah Dickinson

Arts, Books

4.7 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Episode 213, Sarah and Chrissie (@ChrissieWhitley) wrap up the year with the Best Books of 2025 Genre Awards. They reveal their Overall Best Books (Fiction and Nonfiction) and a full breakdown by genre, including: Best Literary Fiction, Best Romance, Best Brain Candy, Best Genre Mash-Up, and more! Plus, they share the winners for these same genres as chosen by the Sarah's Bookshelves Live Member Community.

This post contains affiliate links through which I make a small commission when you make a purchase (at no cost to you!).

CLICK HERE for the full episode Show Notes on the blog.

Announcements

  • The 2026 Reading Tracker is out! This year brings upgraded features across the board — including NEW average star rating and 5-star book tracking for every stat on the Dashboard — plus an updated Lite Tracker for those who prefer a streamlined version. Both Trackers are ONLY available to paid Patreon or Substack subscribers ($7/month) and is no longer sold separately. To avoid Apple's 30% fee, be sure to join directly from the Patreon website (mobile or desktop). Join our Patreon Community (here) OR become a Substack Paid Member (here)!

Highlights

  • Podcast reflections from 2025 — including top episodes based on download stats.
  • A brief overview of Sarah's and Chrissie's 2025 year in reading.
  • Their favorite books of the year: overall and by genre, including the SBL Member Community's picks.

2025 Genre Awards [12:39]

Sarah

Chrissie

SBL Member Community

Other Books Mentioned

Top Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to Sarah's Bookshelves Live.

0:11.9

I'm your host, Sarah Dickinson.

0:13.9

Join me every other week as we get real and sometimes a bit snarky about books and reading.

0:19.2

Let's get rolling.

0:20.7

Welcome to the 2025 year-in genre

0:23.5

awards episode, which is the last big show of the year, which is kind of hard to believe that

0:29.3

we're already here. And Chrissy is with me today to talk through the year in books. Hi, Chrissy.

0:34.0

Hi, Sarah. We are going to share Chrissy's and my picks for each of our genre

0:38.6

awards categories. And we surveyed our Sarah's Bookshelves Live member community for their

0:45.0

picks for each of these categories as well. And we're going to share those results with you today.

0:49.9

Chrissy is going in completely blind about the member survey results.

0:55.6

So she is going to try to guess each winner before it's revealed.

1:00.5

So today we're going to start off with some brief reflections on how 2025 was for the podcast.

1:08.3

And looking ahead what things will be like next year in 2026. We're going to do a

1:14.4

very general overview of Chrissies and my reading years. We're not going to go into detailed

1:20.1

stats because we are doing a much more detailed discussion of our reading years, including

1:25.8

stats and including Catherine, in our January

1:28.7

episode of Unscripted for our paying members. We're going to talk about our favorite books

1:34.1

of the year by genre. So looking at the podcast in 2025, for the second year in a row,

1:41.6

our average 30-day downloads per episode is about flat compared to last year.

1:47.2

It is really hard to grow a podcast these days.

1:50.0

Though I'd love to see these numbers shooting through the roof, we still have a relatively large audience for a book podcast.

...

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