For book lovers looking for a new reading project, there’s one and exactly one fail-safe genre: books about books.
 
The books-about-books genre is, of course, a loose and largely improvised designation. That’s what we like about it. These can be stories about authors and writers, the publishing business, literary culture, or books within books. Or the stories might be about magical libraries and time-traveling bookshops. Who can say? Here’s a genre that cuts across pretty much every other genre. It’s great.
 
We’ve collected below an even 100 books about books, all of them published this year, in 2025. We’ve sorted the list into two broad stacks—fiction and nonfiction—to facilitate interesting juxtapositions. 
 
Click around for National Book Award winners and fascinating literary topics—for instance, Dana A. Williams’ Toni at Random, which details Toni Morrison’s amazing and mostly unheralded career as an editor. If you’re in the market for practical advice from published authors, we’ve got that covered too—check out the reading and writing advice on offer from Elizabeth McCracken, Sue Monk Kidd, and Hwang Bo-Reum.
 
Click on the book cover images for more information about each title. You can also use the Want to Read button to add interesting leads to your digital bookshelf.
 

Fiction