A Year in Books: Tracking What I Read in 2025

The Virtues of Data Keeping, in Brief

For the first time in my life as a reader, I wrote down the title and author of every book I read in 2025. I’ve started a new list for 2026. This is not a reading journal. No pressure to write a sentence about each one or rate them or anything, it’s just a running Note on my phone with the title and author. I have to do it in a way that I can stick to. Sometimes, a day or two after I finish a book, I go to the Note to list it, and find I already have. I am more diligent than I think. 

Before, I couldn’t have told you half of what I read in a year. Now, my memory is prompted just by seeing the list every time I opened the Note to add another book. More than I want to recommend any particular book, I want to recommend that you adopt this simple practice. Now is the time. 

By the Numbers

I read 52 books in 2025. I know, I know. A book a week was my secret goal, but I didn’t really force it, either. 

Here are some data points and brief notes:

30 fiction (mostly novels). Some favorites, in the order in which I read them:

• The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
• Flashlight by Susan Choi
• Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly
• The Bog Queen by Anna North
• The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

14 poetry collections

• Lucky by Mairéad Byrne
• Good Actors by Sommer Browning
• Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
• Foamy Sky: The Collected Poems of Miklós Radnóti
• 40 Names by Parwana Fayyaz

8 nonfiction 

• The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
• Awake by Jen Hatmaker
• The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow
• Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

17 books by international authors, including 6 in translation 

13 books by men. This seems unusually high for me. 

9 audiobooks. My favorite narrator is Marin Ireland.

4 rereads

Weird Little Books

Not captured in my “favorites” list by genre are eight or ten books of prose that I’ve collectively thought of as weird little books. These are books that are sometimes harder to categorize as fiction or nonfiction, often lyric or nonlinear or experimental in form, typically published by indie presses. Some favorites of the year:

• Andromeda by Therese Bohman
• Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg (hardly a novel, she didn’t even change the names)
• The Story Game by Shze-Hui Tjoa
• The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Weird little books are uncanny. They are candlelight or crescent moon. We have a whole bunch of weird little books at Snowfort, many in translation, many published by indie presses, some that I’ve read and lots more that I mean to read. Weird little books are like interesting, unconventional people you’ve known briefly and whose memory is a spark, a pleasure. You had a couple meaningful interactions, meaningful for both of you, and you could tell they appreciated something about you that others overlook. You may not remember their name. 

I resolve to read even more weird little books in 2026, more in translation, more from small presses. 

Hear, hear! Here’s to Audiobooks!

In years past, I thought I couldn’t really “do” audiobooks because I didn’t have a long, solo commute. This year, with our partnership with libro.fm, I could access free “advanced listening copies” of new or upcoming releases and could read/listen to really great audiobooks while doing chores. Really, it’s easy to do the dishes or fold laundry or tidy with a good audiobook going. And I believe with full conviction that there’s almost no neurological or emotional difference in reading via the eyes versus the ears, at least after the fact. Obviously there’s an experiential difference. The narrator’s voice and style is part of the experience, of course. I usually prefer the experience of reading a physical book, in the bath ideally, or during a silent book club meeting. But after reading, the distinctions are pretty superficial. Sometimes, I hardly remember whether I read or listened, and I don’t feel that my memory or impressions of a physical book are stronger, deeper, or more nuanced than those of an audiobook.

The Virtues of Data Keeping, Extended Version

Because I see the previous books every time I list a new one, I find that I remember them more clearly, and remember my experience of them more clearly. So it’s like an invisible journal, or rather an unwritten one that only I can see. I tend to remember where I read a book, and in what season, and from those cues, sensory recollections mushroom. These are, variously, moments of the book and of my life and the world. Underneath, in a reversal of nature, mycelia form among those moments and then others, further afield. I mean, it’s in my brain, a semiconscious membrane of…neurons and synapses, I guess? Or white matter? I really think it’s mycelia itself. I’m coming to the understanding that my brain is basically fungal. 

So you see on my list that I reread Parable of the Sower, and I see images of my kids bouncing around the Disney cruise ship that we sailed on late last year, just after I finished reading the novel the first time, having started it (finally) just after the election, which is also the day I last breastfed my younger daughter (finally). I do not recommend this particular cocktail of cognitive dissonance. It just sounds like a joke. After Trump was elected, I read Parable of the Sower and went on a Disney cruise. And if it is just fodder for a bit, the weaning part will confuse the audience. What’s that got to do with anything?

And I see another, much gentler juxtaposition: two conversations I had after each of the two reading group sessions I led on the novel, each with a separate pair of friends, both concerning God and whether there are other names for God (universe, change) and whether we are still talking about God if we call God other names so we don’t have to say God. The first conversation was immediately after the larger group session, right there in the room, a kind of warm huddle. The second conversation began via group text during the second larger session, when one friend left early to breastfeed her child but wanted to continue hashing out some questions. One or the other of us picked up the thread at odd intervals; this lasted for a few days, and then it was dropped. Neither conversation was resolved, both were uneasy and yet full of feeling and consideration, and yet they were uncannily different. 

You see that I read Andromeda, I see how long and cold the winter must have been. I know I read it in the bath. I think it’s the saddest book on the list. It’s the kind that distills years of a person’s life into the story of one unconventional, gorgeous, disastrous relationship. One person in the book is older and much larger, enrapturing in their wisdom and experience and strong opinions, in their clear and confident choice of the younger person, but that older person then becomes small. They become human-sized through their stupid, understandable human decisions. The younger sees that the older was always very small in their own eyes. As we all are. 

Without my list, I probably wouldn’t recall Andromeda or feel with renewed force the pang of my own periods of disillusionment with once-captivating elders.

The Whole List, in order of completion

Books 2025

1. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
2. The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
3. Orbital by Samantha Harvey
4. Nothing Serious by Emily J. Smith
5. James by Percival Everett 
6. The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
7. The Rental House by Weike Wang
8. Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson 
9. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (reread)
10. Andromeda by Therese Bohman
11. Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg 🎧
12. At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard 
13. Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson 🎧
14. Bandit by Molly Brodak
15. The Oven by Sophie Goldstein
16. My Friends by Fredrik Backman 🎧
17. Lucky by Mairéad Byrne
18. Flashlight by Susan Choi 🎧 
19. The Story Game by Shze-Hui Tjoa
20. Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
21. The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
22. Emergent Strategy by adrienne marie brown (reread)
23. Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly
24. History Lessons by Zoe B. Wallbrook 🎧
25. So Far Gone by Jess Walter 🎧
26. Good Actors by Sommer Browning 
27. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
28. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi
29. Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti
30. Miss America by Cathy Wagner
31. So, Stranger by Topaz Winters
32. Poems of Matsuo Basho iii translated by Anthony Opal
33. 40 Names by Parwana Fayyaz
34. The Present by Emily Kendal Frey
35. Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha
36. You’d Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson
37. [Insert] Boy by Danez Smith
38. Awe by Dorothea Lasky
39. The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis 🎧
40. The Bog Queen by Anna North 🎧
41. The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow
42. Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
43. The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
44. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman 
45. Awake by Jen Hatmaker 🎧
46. Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
47. The Anthropologists by Ayşegul Savaş
48. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (reread)
49. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
50. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
51. Heart the Lover by Lily King 
52. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan