TOP 15 Classic Books I Read In 2025

Hi everyone. Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I’ll be ranking the top 15 classics I read in 2025, from worst to best. Classic literature was my most read genre last year, so I wanted to let you all know which ones were my favorites and which were not. Disclaimer: this list is subjective and it reflects my personal experience reading these novels. I’m in no way saying that the books I didn’t like are bad; in fact, many people love them but, unfortunately, I did not. So, here goes:

15. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

I was deeply disappointed that I didn’t like this book when I finished it in September 2025 because I thought I would love it. But alas, I did not and it is actually the worst classic book I read all year.

14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I didn’t like this book because I didn’t connect with either one of the protagonists, Bernard Marx and John “The Savage”. I also didn’t like Huxley’s writing style. However, I do think that the content of the book is relevant today and I recommend it to anyone interested in reading it because of that. You can recommend a book although you don’t like it, and this is a prime example of that for me.

13. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

This novel is considered one of the best books of American literature but it was not a book for me. I didn’t like any of the characters; in fact, I couldn’t care any less about them and the writing style is very hard to get into. I know that the way this book is written is a big part of why it ranks so high in several lists of the greatest books here and there, but I was just put off by this and didn’t really see what was so great about this book at all.

12. Metamorphosis by Ovid

I liked this book, but it was not a favorite. The myths that Ovid relates in this book are all linked by their common theme of metamorphosis (hence the name) and it ends with a strong praise for Augustus, presenting his “peaceful reign as the culmination of world history after the deification of Julius Caesar.” Ovid was a master at writing about love and the art of seduction, and this did not please Augustus, who sought to institute moral reform in Rome at the time so the poet was exiled from Rome and his books banned from the city’s libraries.

11. City of Thieves by David Benioff

This book is quickly becoming a contemporary classic and I think it deserves all the attention it is getting. Set during the siege of Leningrad in September 1941, the protagonist sets out to find a dozen eggs for a wedding cake. It being a siege, there are of course no eggs in Leningrad. Food is more valuable than gold during a war, and this book reminds us of that lesson. After being arrested for looting the dead body of a German, Lev is taken to the commander of the Red Army and tasked to find the eggs. If not, he will be executed. But, in order to find those eggs, Lev and his companion, Kolya, a Russian Army deserter, must cross the enemy line. The egg hunt however is not the most important thing about the book. That is Lev’s budding friendship and comradeship with Kolya and this is what makes the book so good.   

10. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer retold by Peter Ackroyd

This is one of those books where it is very important to pick up the right translation for you. If you don’t, you will not like this book at all. Reading these tales in the original Middle English they were written in can be very hard for some and you need to be in the right mind set for that. I wasn’t, so I picked up the retelling of these tales written by Peter Ackroyd and it was superb. I laughed a lot with this one.

 

9. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Frankly, I did not expect to like this book as much as I did. I had tried to read it before in college and couldn’t get into so I was hesitant to pick it up again for years. However, in 2025, I did so for one of my book clubs and I was surprised at how quickly I read it. The most memorable scene in this book is Emma’s death, the complete opposite of Anna Karenina’s in Tolstoy’s eponymous novel and the main reason why this book is number 9 in this list.

8. Moby Dick, or the Whale by Herman Melville 

On the surface, Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville is an adventure story about a mad captain’s quest for revenge against a great white whale. The novel’s complexity, however, lies underneath the surface. Moby-Dick is the ultimate allegory of obsession, ambition, and the hunt for meaning. We all have our white whales, and Melville gives us a crash course on self-awareness. Second, Moby-Dick celebrates the value of the weird and tangential. I mean, who hasn’t gone off on a tangent in the middle of a conversation before? I know I have, and Melville is no exception. He takes detours; long and nerdy detours, about just everything concerning whales. These tangents don’t serve the plot of the novel, but they let Melville experiment in narrative voice and literary genre. Finally, the novel is a philosophical treaty on attempting and failing to comprehend the incomprehensible.

I learned a lot with this novel. I didn’t know, for example, that the popular coffee chain Starbucks is named after a character in this novel. I also loved the ending.

I didn’t like though that the author didn’t explore the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg all that much or that Queequeg dies in the end.

7. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Heavily inspired by events in her own life, du Maurier said that Rebecca was a “study in jealousy inspired by her own feelings toward her husband’s first fiancée.” The story, she said, was rooted in her experience of living with the influence of a previous wife and that the anonymous narrator’s reserved personality reflected parts of her own nature. This is not a ghost story, but Rebecca’s ghost is everywhere. And this is where du Maurier writing excels. Rebecca is dead, but she is not at rest. Her memory haunts both Maxim and his new bride from beginning to end. And once her body is discovered, the mystery is not about finding her killer but in figuring out why (spoiler) Maxim killed her. 

I also found that the ending makes you want to go back to the beginning and start reading the novel again. The difference is that this time you’ll know why the narrator and her husband are drifting from hotel to hotel in exile.

6. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Creature in this book is a severely misunderstood and maligned person. He is a monster created by trauma and rejection; a monster who could have not been had he been accepted and loved by the one person who was supposed to do so without question: his father, Viktor Frankenstein. How many of us have not experienced this in one way or another? A lot.

My heart went out to him, and he is represented today in such a way that, in my opinion, he doesn’t deserve. He is a monster, but not by choice.

This book was excellent.

5. Odyssey by Homer

The Odyssey is must on this list and I am happy that I got to read it again this year.  I still loved this book as much as I did when I first read it 20 years ago or more. A tale as old as time worth reading over and over again.

4. Iliad by Homer

If you’re surprised that the Iliad by Homer is in fourth place on this list, knowing that this is one of my favorite books ever, it is because I wanted to give other books a place to shine. I still love this book, but in 2025, it wasn’t my favorite read of the year.

AND NOW, FOR MY TOP 3 BOOKS OF THE YEAR…

3. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Winston Smith, the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four represents all of us in a totalitarian society that gains power from the complete and utter destruction of the self; from manipulating, torturing, and brainwashing its citizen into believing and conforming to every wish and desire of the government. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the story of Winston Smith’s fight against that all-pervading government or Big Brother. This book is ““horrifyingly relevant for the present day and possesses the rare ability, as great novels do, to transpose itself, to exist simultaneously at all times while existing independent of time itself (Weingarten, Iowa State Daily, September 2024).” I highly recommend it.

2. Animal Farm by George Orwell

Animal Farm by George Orwell is an allegory of Bolshevik Russia leading to Stalin’s rise in power. The story begins with Orwell’s loss of faith in communism and how the idea of working for the communal benefits of all and all people being equal is hijacked by those who take the lead in government. In other words, those who have power at the tip of their fingers cannot escape the temptation to dominate those they’re governing. And Orwell wanted to explain in Animal Farm what happened in Russia after Lenin died, Czar Nicholas II was deposed from the throne, and how Stalin rose eventually to absolute power.

The premise of this book is that if you have control of the military, police, and the press you can basically do whatever you want. The unintelligence of the masses also contributes to keep to tyrant on the top. This is scary, and something that is still relevant today. Sometimes it is easier to believe the lies we are being fed than the facts, the reality that you don’t want to face. And people will deliberately blind themselves in order not to do that. That is why I think that this book is very prescient and speaks a lot about the politics going on today. 

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

This is the first book I read in 2025 and incidentally the best book I read last year.  Nothing topped One Hundred Years of Solitude. I liked it so much, I read it twice. One in Spanish and another in English, and the book is worth reading in both languages. It is not, however, a book for everyone and if you don’t like magical realism, you will not like this book either. But this book is a classic of Latin American literature; a book that stands the test of time and that deserves its place in the list of giants of world classical literature.

That is everything for today. Thank you for stopping by.