The Most Popular Stories of the Week
Welcome to your weekend edition of The Best of Book Riot. Pour a cup of whatever makes you happy and dig into the highlight reel.
The Most Anticipated Books of 2025
It’s a new dawn, a new day, and a new year. You know what that means: new books! We’re always excited about the year’s new releases, but we’re especially looking forward to these books. So prep those preorder and library hold lists, and send our regards to your TBRs.
13 New Mysteries, Thrillers, & True Crime for January 2025
Your offerings this month for fiction include a Succession-style family reunion that leads to murder, a fun middle grade series about crime-fighting kids, a drag queen sleuth, and a culinary cozy mystery. We also have a twisty thriller centering two missing strangers on the same plane, an FBI procedural solving cryptic clues, a cryptozoologist and bookstore owner on a murder case, a romance + cozy murder mystery blend set at a wedding, and more! And in the nonfiction department, there’s the history of the rape kit and a blend of history, classic literature, and true crime. There are plenty of great offerings to start the reading year with your best sleuthing foot forward!
5 Exciting SFF Debut Novels Coming in 2025
Today’s list contains five exciting debut sci-fi and fantasy novels headed our way in 2025! These all sound extremely interesting and have fabulous covers. It’s always great to see a debut novel catch fire and light up the reading world. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the first book the author has ever written—a lot of writers have books hiding in drawers and files on their computer that weren’t chosen to be their first release, for whatever reason. But as the first novel to introduce readers to an author, there is something extra-special about a debut.
The Best New Book Releases Out January 7, 2025
In less eye-rolling news, there are, of course, new books to highlight. Under the science fiction and fantasy umbrella, there’s Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay, an epic Nepal-set dystopian; and Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear, the 10th entry of the Wayward Children bestselling series by Seanan McGuire. Meanwhile, The Unexpected Diva by Tiffany L. Warren is historical fiction that tells the very real story of a Black opera singer born into slavery, and Single Player by Tara Tai keeps it cute with a sapphic enemies-to-lovers romance centering video game creators.
The Unbearable Whiteness of the Goodreads Choice Awards
Goodreads’s largest traffic source and use comes from the United States. A whopping 48% of users are in the US, with the United Kingdom (7%), Canada (6%), Australia (4%), and India (3%) rounding out the top six. Goodreads has more female-identifying users than male, at about 60% to 40%. Demographically, the site’s users swing younger, with those between 25 and 34 accounting for about 30% of total users. This is followed by those between 18 and 24 at 21% and those between 35 and 44 at 18%*. If you’ve got a book that’s going to reach a young female readership, Goodreads is an excellent place to be.
But Goodreads has a problem. The platform is dominated by white users and as a result, the Goodreads Choice Awards reflect back a whiteness that is not only unrepresentative of the year in publishing but that fails to acknowledge a decade’s worth of work on increasing the visibility of diversity throughout the book world.
What are you reading? Let us know in the comments!
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