Seattle Staff Faves 2025: Nonfiction
Each year we ask our staff across the library system for their favorite books published in the current year. Enjoy this variety of nonfiction staff favorites, with annotations by staff members or as noted. (created November 2025)
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Feed Us With Trees
This exploration of how perennial nut trees like oaks, chestnuts and hazelnuts once sustained human diets challenges modern agricultural practices and offers a vision for a more ecological, abundant and regenerative food future. (NoveList)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Ugliness
Part personal narrative, part cultural critique, with photography and poetry interspersed throughout, this is a brave and profound exploration of a thorny subject. - Abby
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Are You Mad at Me?
Psychotherapist Josephson debuts with a cogent exploration of the least-known yet "arguably most common" threat response: fawning. She also provides an insightful look at the cultural factors that influence fawning, explaining that in a white-dominated, patriarchal society, women and minorities are socialized to be agreeable in order to win the favor of the powerful. Recovering people pleasers will find plenty to chew on. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Forest Euphoria
With immense knowledge, grace, experience, and lyrical prose ... Kaishian persuades us that there is never just one way for living things in the natural world to reproduce or evolve or interact and that greater, more diversified ecological possibilities beautifully coexist. A celebratory appreciation of the ubiquity of queerness in the natural world. (Kirkus)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Free
Tracing a harrowing journey from criminal exoneration to inner liberation. Twelve years after publishing her bestselling memoir, Waiting To Be Heard, Knox revisits her transformation from wrongfully accused murderer to exonerated woman. An engrossing reflection on reclaiming identity and finding peace in the aftermath of global notoriety. (Kirkus)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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I Want to Burn This Place Down
Unexpectedly charming personal essays about disillusionment, diabetes, and despair. (Kirkus)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Things in Nature Merely Grow
Eloquent and absolutely gutting reflections on immense personal loss. A difficult but necessary read. - Abby
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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108 Asian Cookies
108 Asian Cookies is an ode to [the] personal and intimate world of cookies-a world as varied and rich as the tapestry of Asian cultures and ingredients that inspired these recipes. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Pure Innocent Fun
Blending memoir and pop criticism, Madison’s essays lace deeply intimate stories with lavish praise and punishing blows for icons of the ’80s and on. An engaging and often hilarious memoir-in-essays from a pop-culture fiend. (Kirkus)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Cudi
Cudi fans, be blessed and enjoy! To have been in college when "pursuit of happiness" dropped, is to know the pure joy and reckless abandon of young adulthood. - Victoria
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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