The Year in Bibliophilia
Lists & Notes
In 2025 I read 94 books, six books short of my 100-book goal.
This count includes two books that I read more than halfway and then abandoned (Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein and Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza), four that I have been reading at a pleasurably glacial pace (The Broken King by Michael Thomas, Ruth by Kate Riley, The Heart of Practice by Orit Sen-Gupta, The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett), and two that I recently began and expect to finish by year’s end (Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara and A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews).
It does not include books I gave up on in less than 50 pages (Rumors of My Demise by Evan Dando, yeesh) or the hundreds of children’s books I read with my son (some favorites: Little Witch Hazel by Phoebe Wahl, Following the Moon by James Norbury, Farmhouse by Sophia Blackall, The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown and the Provensens, Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown and Garth Williams, The House in the Country by Claire Nivola, and 13 Stories About Ayana by Amy Schwartz).
Every now and then someone asks me how I manage to read with regularity. I am not employed, which may seem like explanation enough, but I am a full-time primary caregiver, which means my labor is unquantifiable and all of my time is circumscribed. This has turbocharged my drive to read, as I’ve become more alert to and more appreciative of the teeniest tiniest opportunities.
I read whenever possible. I read a little in the morning, a little in the afternoon, and some more in the evening. I read standing up at the kitchen counter, I read lying down on the floor. I read sitting on the toilet. I read on the subway. I read in the park. I read while I eat. I read in the bath, I read in bed. I read a page here, a page there. I read while my son draws or builds. I read while he digs in the dirt or collects sticks. I have to remain easygoing in my expectations, and that’s fine. I like my reading to be as quotidian and integrated as cooking, cleaning, bathing, getting dressed, running errands, exercising, etc., and so I treat it that way.
That I deactivated my social media accounts over the last several years (Substack is the sole platform I engage with) seems pertinent. I keep my app usage to a bare minimum. I do listen to a variety of podcasts, mostly literary in nature (Reading Writers, LARB Radio Hour, City Arts & Lectures, Thresholds, the LRB Podcast, Poured Over, Big Books & Bold Ideas, the Fitzcarraldo Editions Archive, Granta, The Book Review, Otherppl, and Backlisted). I limit my overall device use as diligently as I can. This all seems to bolster my reading life.
No doubt my attention span suffers from all kinds of interference, but I believe attention—inclusive of one’s capacity for close, careful, consistent reading—can be rehabilitated, strengthened, protected. Or at least I hope it can, because this is very, very important to me.
Of this year’s 94 books, those that I found most noteworthy were:
Nonfiction
V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrere
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age by Amanda Hess
Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace
No Name in the Street by James Baldwin
Sad Tiger by Niego Sanno
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
Home Game by Michael Lewis
Health and Safety: A Breakdown by Emily Witt
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley
Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso
Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance by Laura Delano
The Tragedy of True Crime by John J. Lennon
Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck
Bread of Angels by Patti Smith
Fiction
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
The Wilderness by Aysegül Savas
The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Scaffolding by Laura Elkin
Isola by Allegra Goodman
Long Bright River by Liz Moore
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
The Novelist by Jordan Castro
The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers
Sleep by Honor Jones
Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey
Trip by Amie Barrodale
Norwood by Charles Portis
Women by Chloe Caldwell
Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth
Clear by Carys Davies
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson
The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus
Playboy by Constance Debré
Assembling a list of books to read in the future feels a bit absurd, but I enjoy comparing what I set out to read with what I end up reading. For 2026 I look forward to:
Nonfiction
East of Dreams by Nastassja Martin
A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children by Haley Cohen Gilliland
When All the Men Wore Hats by Susan Cheever
38 Londres Street by Phillipe Sands
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman
Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood by Jackie Wang
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel by Frances Wilson
Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith
The High Sierra by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anne Lembke
The Haves and the Have-Yachts by Evan Osnos
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial by Helen Garner
Survive the Savage Sea by Dougal Robertson
Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao
Art Work by Sally Mann
Heat by Bill Buford
The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz
You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips
Fascination by Kevin Killian
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future by Shoshana Zuboff
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It by Cory Doctorow
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger
The Buddhist by Dodie Bellamy
The TV Sutras by Dodie Bellamy
Bee Reaved by Dodie Bellamy
Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss
Damaged People: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons by Joe McGinniss, Jr.
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene
God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church by Caroline Fraser
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery by D.T. Max
Practicing Dying by Charlotte Northall
Notes to John by Joan Didion
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden
It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground by David Litt
Enough: Climbing Toward a True Self on Mount Everest by Melissa Arnot Reid
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe by Jamieson Webster
Homeschooled by Stefan Merrill Block
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer
Love & Trouble by Claire Dederer
I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally
Love, Joe by Joe Brainard
I Remember by Joe Brainard
Hemlock by Gabrielle Wittkop
Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane
Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux
America, América: A New History of the World by Greg Grandin
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik
Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera
Hinterland by Phil A. Neel
Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson by Ted Geltner
First There Is a Mountain by Elizabeth Kadetsky
Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey by David Schneider
Fiction
The Time of the Novel by Lara Mimosa Montes
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
The Names by Don DeLillo
The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrere
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Whalefall by Daniel Kraus
Angel Down by Daniel Kraus
Big Chief by Jon Hickey
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Eye of the Monkey by Krisztina Tóth
The Trees by Percival Everett
Erasure by Percival Everett
I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett
Dr. No by Percival Everett
You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town by Zoë Wicomb
Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard
On the Calculation of Volume II & III by Solvej Balle
Muscle Man by Jordan Castro
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
The Guest by Emma Cline
Playworld by Adam Ross
Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell
The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek
Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Emma by Jane Austen
Flesh by David Szalay
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone by James Baldwin
Another Country by James Baldwin
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
Near Flesh by Katherine Dunn
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
True Grit by Charles Portis
The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes
Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
Liberation Day by George Saunders
Vigil by George Saunders
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela
The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela
The Old Man by the Sea by Domenico Starnone
The Moral and Immortal life of the Girl from Milan by Domenico Starnone
The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone
The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
Murder Most Serene by Gabrielle Wittkop
The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop
Leave Society by Tao Lin
Offenses by Constance Debré
Love Me Tender by Constance Debré
Name by Constance Debré
Lion by Sonya Walger
Audition by Katie Kitamura
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
Torpor by Chris Kraus
Independent People by Haldor Laxness
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith
Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith
The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn
Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman
Overstaying by Amanda Koch
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
New Paltz, New Paltz by Mike Powell
Service by John Tottenham
Television by Lauren Rothery
Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo
Worsted by Garielle Lutz
I really do feel lucky every time I have a book in my hands. Reading is more than a pastime, it is a companion. My relationship to it is suffused with an attitude of no-matter-whatness. It is both a retreat from and a means by which to meet the world. It is a delight and a regimen. It encourages beginner’s mind. It brightens my solitude and affirms my connection to others, to culture, to history.
Michel Abehsera’s very special Zen Macrobiotic Cooking, published in 1968, is dedicated “to my fellow man—for whom I worry and dedicate my life.” Simple and true, and relatable. I worry so much. Our real-time nightmare continues to metastasize. Disgrace upon disgrace, injustice upon injustice. A layer cake of bullshit and terror. Sometimes I can’t believe people are still making things. But of course we are, thank God. There is such creative abundance on offer from the past and in the present, so much lucidity and rigor. So many artists and writers trusting in their audiences’ capacity for critical thinking and deep contemplation. So many people dedicating their lives to their fellows, giving us more to live for. This is love.
Toward the end of Abehsera’s introductory chapter—after providing a history of Zen macrobiotic cooking and its philosophical underpinnings, after pages of do’s and don’ts, after an overview of vitamins and minerals, after a list of recommendations—he coaxes the reader “not to fall victim to anxiety”: “Nothing is absolute save the laws of relativity and change. I cannot urge you enough to be flexible and unafraid; seek to know yourself and your needs.”
Thank you thank you thank you for reading. May you and yours enjoy contentment, good health, and peace in the new year. May we be flexible and unafraid. May all beings be happy, may all beings be safe, may all beings be free. May truth prevail.