| Thank you for the support in 2025 🫶 | | You help keep Marketplace accessible to all, with no paywalls and no barriers. We’re grateful to have you with us in 2026, as we continue telling the human story of the economy, together. |
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Happy new year! This newsletter is still on break for one more week, but we hope you’ve been enjoying “Marketplace” on your local public radio station or podcast app through the holidays.
Today, the Marketplace staff is sharing the best books we read in 2025. It’s a long, varied list so hopefully every listener will find something to enjoy. Heads up: If you buy a book using our links, we earn a small commission. It’s a great way to support public media at no extra cost to you! — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor |
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| Crown Currency | | Number Go Up: inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall |
| by Zeke Faux |
A wild, crazy and disturbing non-fiction ride to understand the culture driving a technology in search of a reason to exist. I stumbled into this book when researching where those random spam texts were coming from. Zeke figures it out and the answer is ugly, and involves both forced labor and crypto. — David Brancaccio, host of “Marketplace Morning Report”
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| Ballantine Books | | The Black Bird Oracle |
| by Deborah Harkness |
| I was reading so much heavy news in 2025 that I really tried to escape with my books and downtime content consumption. So I was super jazzed in the spring when the latest book came out from a series I've been enjoying for several years. "The Black Bird Oracle" is book five in Deborah Harkness' "All Souls" series, which is a fun and fascinating mix of fantasy, history, and the supernatural. My sister and I have been reading the series together since the first book, so it was nice to have another
installment this year. — Kimberly Adams, host of Marketplace’s “Make Me Smart” |
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| Norton | | Open Socrates |
| by Agness Callard |
| Not my most casual read of 2025, but I already enjoyed Callard’s work and this book was a helpful crash course in Socratic thinking. A good reminder to question our assumptions and the ways we think. — Reema Khrais, host of Marketplace’s “This Is Uncomfortable” (New episodes coming in two weeks!) |
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| Penguin Press | | Bleeding Edge |
| by Thomas Pynchon |
| A luminous, loving picture of NYC in the wake of the dotcom bust and on the threshold of 9/11. The prose is gorgeous, the detail remarkable. A masterpiece. — Noia Karr, senior editor | | | |
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| Macmillan | | Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism |
| by Sarah Wynn-Williams |
| I don’t normally reach for business or tech insider books like this, but my friend highly recommended it. My jaw was on the floor every other page, and months later I think about this book all the time. Consequently, it helped me significantly cut back on my Instagram usage! — Hayley Hershman, senior producer of Marketplace’s “How We Survive.” |
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| Pantheon Books | | Simplicity |
| by Mattie Lubchansky |
| This is a graphic novel about a separatist group functioning alongside dystopian, hyper capitalist NYC. Come for the sci-fi body horror, stay for the meditation on whether it’s possible to escape capitalism. — Alice Wilder, producer of “This Is Uncomfortable” |
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| Macmillan | | The Game of Life and How to Play It |
| by Florence Scovel Shinn |
| A short, deceptively simple read that’s surprisingly powerful. Its blend of spirituality and mindset reframes how intention, language, and belief shape outcomes, making it both timeless and oddly modern. — Kelly Silvera, news director (Editor’s note: This one is in the public domain! Full text and links for various e-readers here.) |
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| Pantheon Books | | The Dream Hotel |
| by Laila Lalami |
| In “The Dream Hotel," dreams are surveilled by AI, and violent dreams can be cause for arrest. It made me think a lot about privacy and what we’re willing to give up to make life more convenient, particularly in this new era of AI wearables. — Courtney Bergsieker, “Make Me Smart” producer |
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| Random House | | Color: A Natural History of the Palette |
| by Victoria Finlay |
| On the surface it’s a history of pigments, but along the way this book touches on history, travel, art, technology, trade and so much more. As someone who feels emotionally attached to specific colors (It’s not synesthesia, but I vividly remember the exact shade of blue I encountered at Black Rock Beach in Maui, and the specific shade of gold of the sunrise hitting the cliffs in Meteora, Greece, where I visited more than 20 years ago), it’s just such a cozy, fascinating read. I love that blue,
indigo and violet all have separate chapters. — Stephanie Siek, senior editor |
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| Grand Central Publishing | | A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting |
| by Casey Johnston |
| It’s a very cool book for strong women (we’re following her lifting journey!) but also there’s a great Marketplace angle when she gets to some history of Turner Halls in the United States. They were early gyms and social centers for German immigrants that often had a social justice angle. — Bridget Bodnar, director of podcasts |
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| Penguin Press | | Bastard Out of Carolina |
| by Dorothy Allison |
| In Allison's semi-autobiographical novel, young Bone confronts generational poverty, violence, and the painful experience of girlhood in rural South Carolina. It is gut-wrenching and so, so good. (Bonus nonfiction rec: “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson) — Jordan Mangi, assistant digital producer
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| Crash Course Books | | Everything is Tuberculosis |
| by John Green |
| Immediately after listening to this book on tape, I bought it to read again. Part history, part personal journey, Green tells the story of tuberculosis, a 100% totally curable disease that takes over a million lives every year. The stories in this book are both heart-wrenching and hopeful. It’s a must read for any history nerd! — Sofia Terenzio, associate producer |
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