AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Listen, I don't know where you live, but unless it's Honolulu, the weather is probably not fantastic. It's just too cold out there. But you can stay inside by a crackling fire with a cup of hot cocoa and a good book. Heck, even a space heater and a fluffy blanket is good. Books We Love, NPR's list of best reads, has hundreds of recommendations, and today some of our colleagues share their favorite nonfiction books from 2025.
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CHLOE VELTMAN, BYLINE: Hi. I'm Chloe Veltman, a correspondent on NPR's Culture Desk. I usually read books on my Kindle, but I was drawn to "The War Of Art: A History Of Artists' Protest In America" by Lauren O'Neill-Butler when I happened to be browsing around in a bookstore and caught sight of the punky-looking cover with its bright pink lettering. Each chapter of this nonfiction read concerns the creative, if often short-lived and not always successful ways in which different individual artists and creative collectives have fought for social change in the U.S. since the 1960s.
Personal favorite - the story about how the scrappy video collective Top Value Television - aka TVTV - changed the public's view of political conventions with artist-led protests once again becoming a thing. This book about the past feels super important. It provides a powerful frame for thinking about artist-led actions today.
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DIAA HADID, BYLINE: My name is Diaa Hadid. I'm an NPR international correspondent based in Mumbai, and I'm here to recommend that you read "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions And The Making Of Modern Asia" by Sam Dalrymple. He investigates the five major partitions that the British undertook as they ended their imperial rule over India, an India that we no longer know that included Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, but also parts of the Arabian Peninsula, including places you might now know as Yemen and the Emirates. The book is sweeping in scope but evocative in the small people and moments he brings forward.
I know. Maybe you have to be a South Asianer to be into this book. But maybe you don't because it's a magnificent way of also understanding the broken promise of ethnonationalism at a time when some on the populist right are calling for a return to a fictional past of ethnic purity.
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TINBETE ERMYAS, BYLINE: Hi. My name is Tinbete Ermyas, and I'm an acting supervising editor on the General Assignment Desk here at NPR. My pick for Books We Love is "Toni At Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship" by Dana A. Williams. It's about Toni Morrison's years as a senior editor at Random House in the 1970s.
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ERMYAS: In the book, we meet a Morrison that many of us never really got to see - the caring editor who guided her young writers towards finding their voice, or the astute businesswoman, one who was skilled at convincing bottom-line-obsessed executives to take a chance on fledgling writers, but also equally brilliant at demanding the most of her writers even when it created tension, or the working mom who was juggling a demanding career while raising two young boys and having to coordinate child care and school pickups when she was in a pinch.
Through it all, Williams does a fantastic job of bringing Morrison back to life and paying homage to the many gifts she honed before her own writing would thrust her into worldwide acclaim. But more importantly, it creates a record of the important work that Toni Morrison did to document the Black experience in America and share it with the public. The world has long known about the brilliance of Toni Morrison's work. It's just really nice to have a fuller picture of it.
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MELISSA GRAY, BYLINE: This is Melissa Gray, senior producer here at WEEKEND EDITION. I quilt. I make things with my hands. It's kind of cool. And I love to talk with other people who make things too, to hear what they're thinking about when they work and how the finished project also is a marker of what's going on in their lives and in their heads. Well, Maddie Ballard gets that too. She writes in "Patchwork: A Sewist's Diary" about a time of big personal change and how she learned to sew while moving through it.
Ballard was in her 20s and part of a couple with a lot of time on her hands during the pandemic. She made a simple dress and got hooked. Then she became single again. Sewing became a ballast as she figured out herself and what came next. Her memoir is a thoughtful progression of mistakes and corrections and fabric, as well as in her outlook. And now I want to make a pair of perfectly fitting pants too.
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RASCOE: Those books again - "Patchwork," "Toni At Random," "Shattered Lands" and "The War Of Art." For the full list of Books We Love, you can head to npr.org/bestbooks.
(SOUNDBITE OF CASPIAN'S "CMF") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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