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Sarah's Bookshelves Live

Best Books of 2025 Superlatives with Catherine (@GilmoreGuide) | Ep. 212

Sarah's Bookshelves Live

Sarah Dickinson

Arts, Books

4.7 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Ep. 212, Sarah and Catherine of Gilmore Guide to Books start wrapping up 2025 with the first of the two year-end episodes: Best Books of 2025 Superlatives. In this episode, they share their picks for over 25 superlative categories, including Weirdest 5-Star Read of 2025, The Book That Made Us Furious, Most Underrated Gem, Too Dark Even for Me, and so much more!

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.

Highlights

Our best books of the year from over 25 categories, including:

  • My First 5-Star 2025 Release of the Year
  • Weirdest 5-Star Read of 2025
  • The Book That Made Us Furious
  • Most Underrated Gem
  • Most Perplexing Book
  • Best Book to Be Made into a Reality Series
  • Too Dark Even for Me
  • Most Crushingly Depressing Book I Loved
  • Best Horror Book in the Victorian-Feminist-Gory Category
  • The Crime Novel That Hit Me Hardest Emotionally

2025 Superlatives [7:32]

Sarah

Catherine

Other Books Mentioned

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to Sarah's Bookshelves Live. I'm your host, Sarah Dickinson. Join me every other week as we get

0:15.4

real and sometimes a bit snarky about books and reading. Let's get rolling. Welcome to our 2025 year-end superlatives

0:23.8

episode, the first episode in our two-part year-end series. And part two is the 2025 genre awards,

0:31.3

including awards voted on by our member community, which is coming out next week. And Catherine is here for our superlatives episode

0:40.1

today. Welcome, Catherine. Hi, very excited to be here. And I'm very excited to have you. This is

0:46.0

your first time doing this episode. So this will be fun. Yes, let's hope I'm just not too weird,

0:51.2

crazy in my superlative choices. I can't wait to hear them. And y'all, Catherine and I have

0:57.6

not shared with each other in advance what our superlative categories are or the books that we're

1:03.9

going to be sharing. So we are going to be surprised all around here. Yeah, which as you all know,

1:08.0

means this is going to get crazy. Yes, this is going to get punchy.

1:12.7

Yes.

1:14.0

Before we get to superlatives, I do have a great reason for y'all to join our paid community on either Patreon or Substack, if you've been considering it.

1:24.6

And that is that this morning, we launched our 2026 Rock Your Reading Tracker.

1:31.0

Just like last year, the tracker will be available exclusively to $7 a month Superstars patrons

1:37.2

and all paid substack subscribers. It will not be available for individual purchase.

1:43.5

Though you can certainly sign up to be a Superstars patron or join our paid substack for one

1:49.2

month to get the tracker, and hopefully after seeing all the great content we offer to our

1:53.5

paid community, including tons of bonus podcast episodes, you'll decide to stick around.

1:59.0

Our tracker is in Microsoft Excel, but it can be uploaded to

2:02.4

and used in Google Sheets. And after you enter raw data about the books you've finished and DNFed,

2:08.9

the tracker automatically calculates tons of stats about the books you've read, the types of books

2:13.6

that work for you, and don't work for you, diversity stats, DNF stats, recommendation sources,

...

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