Kitsap Regional Library releases top reads of 2025

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Kitsap Regional Library has released its list of the most popular books from 2025, and while it was a big year for big names, readers continued to show their love for local authors as well.

Staffers at KRL analyzed the number of times each book title in the library’s system was checked out by a patron, then narrowed down the list to titles that were either published in 2025 or added to the library’s collection in 2025.

The 2025 “Checkout All-Stars” include books from well-known authors of nonfiction and fiction alike: James Patterson, Jonathan Kellerman, Anne Tyler, Rick Steves, Geraldine Brooks, Suzanne Collins, and Erin Hunter; as well as recognizable names that may be newer to bookshelves, like Ezra Klein, Bill and Melinda Gates, Mel Robbins and Chris Hayes.

“Across genres, readers sought out stories full of complex and flawed characters, emotionally intense situations, and tempering humor. Ultimately, they gravitated towards authenticity in tone, authorship, and characterization, through books that moved them and led to individual and collective connection,” KRL content specialist Kaitlyn Nicholas wrote on the library’s blog.

Out of KRL’s entire collection of books, the historical fiction novel “James” by Percival Everett and Jonathan Haidt’s investigation of youth mental health, “The Anxious Generation,” were the most popular books of the year, with 259 and 170 checkouts, respectively.

“Abundance,” a compilation of essays by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and novel “The Heart of Winter” by Jonathan Evison, were the top titles at KRL in 2025.

Klein, known for his work as a political commentator and journalist, delves into the “lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States,” like affordable housing, infrastructure, climate change resilience and more in “Abundance.” He and Thompson lament that the country is stuck between a progressive movement that is afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is “allergic to government intervention,” arguing that an “abundance agenda” is needed to manage tradeoffs between the two.

“Heart of Winter” is about a Bainbridge Island couple reflecting on their 70-year marriage as they reckon with their declining health and ability to live independently. Evison, a Bainbridge resident himself, has taken inspiration from Western Washington for his work on other titles, including the acclaimed “West of Here” historical novel.

“For me, the character is the story. All of human drama lies between ‘This is how life is,’ and ‘This is how the person idealizes their life, this is how they want their life to be.’ The story lies in between. It’s the one thing that ties my books together. They’re all very different, but generally speaking, they’re always character-driven,” said Evison in a 2011 interview with Goodreads.

The Kitsap Teen Librarians team compiled the list of young adult books. Themes of doomed love and danger, witches and magic, curses, and reptilian beasts (mainly dragons) characterized the young adult selections in 2025.

“For young adult readers, fantasy and dystopia reigned supreme. Checkouts in the genre showcased a variety of themes and moods, from cozy and cute fantasies to dark and romantic titles, all led by protagonists standing up against injustice and cruelty,” the KTL team wrote.

Suzanne Collins, of “Hunger Games” franchise fame, released “Sunrise on the Reaping” as a second prequel to her popular series about a televised state-mandated battle-to-the-death in a dystopian future America. “Sunrise” follows the character Haymitch Abernathy as a young man, during his own stint in the arena.

Collins has long enjoyed the writing of David Hume, an eighteenth-century Scottish poet and philosopher who discussed the idea of inductive versus deductive reasoning and the idea of implicit submission. In “Sunrise on the Reaping,” she explores the idea of resisting injustice by approaching it through inductive rather than deductive reasoning; seeing the political conditions of the “Hunger Games” not as a fact, but as a series of occurrences that do not necessarily prove a rule.

Deductive reasoning works from a true premise to a specific conclusion — for example, all human beings need oxygen to survive; Collins is a human being, so therefore she needs oxygen to survive, the author explained. Inductive reasoning works the opposite way, using specific examples to draw a conclusion about a wider premise, which can lead to logical fallacies, she added.

“‘My cat Zorro loves yogurt. Your cat Fluffy loves yogurt. Therefore, all cats love yogurt.’ But do they? Your conclusion might be considered probable if you witnessed a bunch of other cats loving yogurt, but it’s not a certainty,” Collins said in an interview with Scholastic. “Lenore Dove applies the idea to Haymitch’s certainty that the reaping will always occur on his birthday, because it always has in the past. But, in fact, the reaping’s only been around for 50 years. And even if it’d been around for a million years, it still wouldn’t be a done deal. She wants him to recognize that and accept that the reaping isn’t inevitable. Because if he believes it’s inevitable, he will never think it can be ended, let alone think that he might be capable of ending it himself.”