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Sarah's Bookshelves Live

Ep. 199: Best Books of 2025 (So Far) with Susie and Catherine

Sarah's Bookshelves Live

Sarah Dickinson

Arts, Books

4.7 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Ep. 199, Susie Boutry (@NovelVisits), Catherine Gilmore (@GilmoreGuide), and Sarah are all back on the mic, ready to catch up on how their reading is shaping up for 2025 — so far!  They talk about the current publishing landscape, what books are topping bestseller lists to date, and their personal reading as it stands halfway through the year. They share reading stats and talk about expectations and hopes for the remainder of the year. Plus, their TOP 5 books and their biggest disappointments so far.

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.

The Bookish Landscape [1:13]

Books Mentioned

Personal Reading for 2025 (So Far) [22:49]

Books Mentioned

Top Five (So Far)  [31:27]

Susie

Catherine

Sarah

Other Books Mentioned

Biggest Disappointments (So Far)  [57:46]

Susie

Catherine

Sarah

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 real, and sometimes a bit snarky about books and reading. Let's get rolling. Welcome to our

0:23.1

best books of 2025 so far episode. Believe it or not, last year was our first time doing a

0:29.4

mid-year best books episode. We all really enjoyed looking back over the first half of the year

0:34.6

and talking about what we thought might happen in the second half of the year. And y'all liked it too. So we are doing it again. And Susie and Catherine are back with me.

0:42.4

Welcome. Hi. Hi, Sarah. It's good to be here with you too. All right. So here's how we're going to do this

0:48.0

today. We've got four big buckets of segments. We're going to start with the bookish landscape so far in 2025. So that's like

0:55.6

sales data, big hits, stuff like that. Then we're going to talk about how our personal

1:00.8

reading is going so far this year. Then we'll each share our top five books of the year so

1:06.9

far. And finally, we will each share a couple of our biggest disappointments of the year so

1:12.5

far. All right. So kicking things off with the bookish landscape. A bit of sales data for you.

1:18.4

Total industry sales were up 1% over the first quarter of 2024. But this is kind of a fake out number

1:25.7

because January and February of this year were really

1:29.4

sluggish and all of the gains for the entire quarter happened in March. And the big driver of

1:38.1

those gains was, wait for it, Higher education materials.

1:45.1

What?

1:47.9

Yeah, so like nothing in our world.

1:48.7

Right.

1:49.4

In March?

1:50.3

Yeah.

1:57.7

So the reading in our world, meaning adult fiction sales, was down almost 3% compared to last year. And all print formats were down.

2:00.5

Audio book and ebook sales were the only

2:02.9

things that remained strong. And I can interject there, Sarah, because I found, and to cite my data,

...

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