What I Read in 2025
Does it feel like there are more wrap-up posts this year than usual? It seems like every magazine, blog, and newspaper I subscribe to wrapped up something. The usual best-of and worst-of lists were present, but there also seemed to be something else going on. Like the stats were intended to Say Something about the person who shared them. I think this is thanks to the Spotification of everything we consume. Spotify's Wrapped feature hands users their listening preferences over the past year along with some AI-generated personality insights. I'm not a fan when Spotify does it, and I'm really not a fan of everyone doing it for everything.
And yet here I am telling you that I read 59 books in 2025, which is pretty typical for me. I did graduate from my master's program in May, but all of the reading for that had pretty much been done by the start of the year. Early 2025 was spent revising and revising and formatting and revising my thesis, which didn't require new research.
Some of the books I read were for research for other things. I reread Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phil Dick and The Idiot by Elif Batuman for an essay I'm working on, for instance. I also read some of these books for review, like The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar and There's No Turning Back by Alba de Céspedes.
The StoryGraph, which I love and which supplied the cool graph at the top of this post, puts together a cool collage of book covers that I can see on my 2025 stats page, but it's not an image I can download and save. Each book cover is clickable, which is useful for remembering what I read, but I can't share the pretty graphic of a cascade of book covers with you.
I can, however, share a text list of what I read. All of these are searchable online, so go buy them from your favorite bookstore or Bookshop.org! Or borrow them from your library! In the same way that I am experiencing wrap-up resentment, I am also suffering from affiliate link fatigue.
- The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch
- The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar
- Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham
- It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over, Anne de Marcken
- Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem, Michael Schmidt
- The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, Neko Case
- Orbital, Samantha Harvey
- Scientist: E. O. Wilson, A Life in Nature, Richard Rhodes
- Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, Sebastian Smee
- The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, Isaiah Berlin
- Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly
- J'emporterai le feu, Leïla Slimani
- Autism Is Not a Disease: The Politics of Neurodiversity, Jodie Hare
- Woodworking, Emily St. James
- Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, Yoko Tawada
- Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein
- Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, Yoko Tawada
- The Wall, Marlen Haushofer
- A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Becky Chambers
- Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, Tricia Hersey
- Practice, Rosalind Brown
- Homework, Geoff Dyer
- The Moëbius Book, Catherine Lacey
- Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker, Zachary Leader
- Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Sarah Wynn-Williams
- The Idiot, Elif Batuman
- Hunchback, Saou Ichikawa
- Either/Or, Elif Batuman
- The Hounding, Kenobe Purvis
- The Crucible, Arthur Miller
- Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey, Alberto Manguel
- Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Post-War America, Merve Emre
- On The Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle
- Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance, Joe Dunthorne
- The Secret Within: Hermits, Recluses, and Spiritual Outsiders in Medieval England, Wolfgang Riehle
- On Close Reading, John Guillory
- The Reason I Jump, Naoki Higashida
- I Am in Here: The Journey of a Child with Autism Who Cannot Speak but Finds Her Voice, Elizabeth M. Bonker and Virginia G. Breen
- Einstein and the Quantum Revolution, Alain Aspect
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
- A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel
- On the Calculation of Volume II, Solvej Balle
- The Coin, Yasmin Zaher
- Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary, Kate Loveman
- Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievitch
- Racebook, Tochi Onyebuchi
- Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, Carlo Rovelli
- In the Margins, Elena Ferrante
- Acid for the Children, Flea
- Your Name Here, Helen de Witt and Ilya Gridneff
- The Usual Desire to Kill, Camilla Barnes
- On the Calculation of Volume III, Solvej Balle
- Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
- Simplicity, Mattie Lubchansky
- The Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin
- The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki
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KHG’s latest translations, Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion, Volume 2: Spectacle, and Volume 3: Luck, are available now. Volume 4: Payback will be published January 27, 2026.
