As the end of the year approaches, we asked UVA Library staff to recommend their favorite books they read in 2025. The books could be any genre, published in any year, so long as they were available in UVA Library’s or the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library’s collections.
Take a look at our extensive list below, which includes everything from Jane Austen to Andy Weir, and check some books out for the holidays. Members of the UVA community can even request books ahead of time for easy access. Please note: the publication years listed correspond with the editions in our collections, not necessarily the original publication dates.
Happy reading, and come visit us at any of our six locations before we close for winter break (beginning Dec. 20 for some libraries) … or after we reopen January 2!
UVA Library is now offering free access to online editions of the New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, giving UVA community members a gateway to two of the most esteemed publications in the United States. Both magazines are known for their long-form journalism, literary fiction, criticism, and cartoons. Harper’s Magazine has won 22 National Magazine Awards and the New Yorker has won 59, as well as 11 Pulitzer Prizes.
Jacquelyn Kim first joined the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library in 2022 as a student worker, where she helped build an exhibition that examined the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. The exhibition was curated by UVA alumni and community members and gave Kim a crash course in what she calls “the importance of co-creation.”
Kim’s time as a student worker was so successful that she joined UVA Library as an Exhibitions Coordinator after graduating from UVA in 2023. Her duties include helping to build exhibitions — from developing themes and writing display text, to painting walls and mounting objects — as well as public engagement, through social media management and class tours. In addition to her full-time job, she is pursuing a Master of Library and Information Science degree from Indiana University, for which she was awarded a scholarship by the American Library Association.
2025 is the year of the zine at the University of Virginia, according to Erin Dickey, Librarian for the Arts at UVA Library. From the Library’s Makerspace to classrooms across Grounds, Dickey has observed an uptick in students and faculty experimenting with creating the self-published, do-it-yourself magazines thanks in part to a new Library initiative, Zines Now!
November is Native American Heritage Month, an opportunity to celebrate the heritage and cultures of Indigenous groups in the United States. In honor of the occasion, UVA Library staff members have gathered some reading and viewing recommendations by and about Native Americans.
In 2024, Julia Mathas, then an Editorial Assistant at the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), was conducting research on the literary magazine’s history in anticipation of its centennial anniversary the following year. While looking for a file on Ezra Pound in the correspondence archives of VQR’s longest-serving editor, Charlotte Kohler, Mathas stumbled upon a folder labelled “Sylvia Plath.” Within it she found a signed 1958 letter from Plath asking the editors to consider three of her poems for publication.
“I was shocked,” Mathas said about finding the Plath note among Kohler’s alphabetized correspondence files, as none of the current editors had any idea Plath had once submitted to the magazine. “As it turned out, Kohler rejected Plath’s poems, which is why no one knew she ever wrote to us. Unless the author appeared in VQR, there’s no official record of them engaging with VQR.”
International Open Access Week begins on October 20th, with events happening across universities to educate and spread the word about the potential benefits of open access.
The theme of 2025 Open Access Week is “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, addressing questions about information control and how we as authors and creatives can make our works available to the public without compromising values or integrity.
Shannon and Brown Libraries will be hosting hybrid brown bag lunch sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss OA topics. Register and bring a lunch (or watch online) and enjoy some lively presentations and discussions about open access!
The University of Virginia Library was pleased to welcome Leo Lo as University Librarian and Dean of Libraries in September of this year. The Cavalier Daily, UVA’s student-run news outlet, talked to Dr. Lo in early October about his hopes for the future and experience so far at UVA.
Leo Lo, photographed in Shannon Library. Photo by Ken Fabia for The Cavalier Daily.
The concept is simple: gather together on Wednesday afternoons and read in peaceful silence in Shannon Library’s light-filled Memorial Hall. Silent Reading Study Break, a new weekly event created by librarians Haley Gillilan and Mandy Rizki, along with the Library Student Council, is the University of Virginia Library’s way of carving out time for reading.
The latest exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library takes an alphabetical approach to UVA Library’s collections. “The ABCs of the UVA Library,” curated by UVA Library staff members, displays approximately 200 Library items grouped into 48 topics. Each topic corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, ranging from architecture (A) to zines (Z).
“This exhibition showcases the rich and assorted collections of the University of Virginia Library, highlighting the Library staff who make those materials discoverable and accessible,” said Holly Robertson, Curator of University Library Exhibitions, who organized “ABCs” along with Exhibitions Coordinator Jacquelyn Kim. Nearly 50 Library staff members served as curators, and the exhibition itself is just as wide-ranging, with display locations not only in the Special Collections gallery but also in Shannon, Clemons, Fine Arts, and Brown libraries as well.
When Gayle Cooper was a little girl picking cotton on her family’s subsistence farm in Alabama, she had no idea she would go on to become one of UVA Library's longest-serving employees.
The ‘Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift’ catalog, showcasing the photos and stories of African Americans in central Virginia during the early 20th century, is in partnership with ... the University of Virginia’s Small Special Collections Library.
Linton worked with Sue Donovan, a book conservator in Special Collections at UVA Library to study the bodices and ensure they did not contain traces of arsenic.
The theme of 2025 Open Access Week is “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, addressing questions about information control and how we as authors and creatives can make our works available to the public without compromising values or integrity.
