We Break Down Our Book Ratings And Some 2025 Stories That Earned Five Stars
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Your reading year tells on you, the genres you chase, the themes you can’t quit, and the books you secretly wish you hadn’t finished. We’re German and Jacqui, and we’re breaking down our 2025 reading highlights with two very different totals (19 books versus 93), plus the unglamorous truth behind ratings, rereads, and regret.
We start by defining our star rating system in a way you can actually use, from rare five-star “masterpieces” to the occasional zero-star disaster. Then we dig into our top picks and why they hit so hard: Nick Cutter’s The Troop for brutal survival horror and teen paranoia, Phil Fracassi’s Boys in the Valley for demonic infection in a 1905 orphanage, and Nathan Hill’s Wellness for a sprawling, satirical look at modern marriage, misinformation, self-optimization, and the emotional inheritance we drag into adulthood.
We also make a case for classics that convert skeptics, especially Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, a giant Western that’s really an epic character-driven story about friendship, loyalty, humor, and heartbreak. And for readers who like literary horror with atmosphere and psychological pressure, Sophie White’s Where I End brings isolation, obligation, identity, and womanhood into a tense, unsettling spiral. We wrap with more rapid-fire book recommendations, plus the books that disappointed us even when we wanted to love them.
If you’re hunting for the best books of 2025, honest book reviews, horror book recommendations, and character-driven literary fiction that sticks, come read with us. Subscribe, share the show with a reader friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show, then tell us what earned your five stars this year.
Books Discussed in this episode:
* The Troop - Nick Cutter (2014)
* Wellness - Nathan Hill (2023)
* Boys in the Valley - Phil Fracassi (2023)
* Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry (1985)
* Where I End - Sophie White (2022)
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