I keep a running list of books I want to read. Anytime I come across something that piques my interest, it goes on the list. I put Chapter Nine of Moby Dick on there because someone who recommended it as the best book they’d ever read — which, as someone who has not read it, I believe is true through the lens of a sunk cost — said if you didn’t have time for the whole thing to just read chapter nine. I put Worry by Alexandra Tanner on there because it was recommended as the best book to read in 2025 by some outlet which I thought was The Atlantic but when I went back to look for it it wasn’t on there so now that recommendation is lost to time. I put Grand Rapids by Natasha Stagg on there because obviously the universe connected us and because she’s part of this group of wonderfully literate, opinionated, documentary women I can’t get enough of that includes Sophie Kemp, Daisy Alioto, and Kaitlin Phillips.
This year, whilst reading Stagg’s Substack (which you should also subscribe to if you want to feel cooler than you are), she linked to a collection of also-very-cool people’s thoughts about what they read in 2025. It wasn’t a ranking or a ten-best, it was a re-telling of their year through the books they consumed: A Year in Reading.
I don’t read “this year’s books.” There are so many I want to read from… all of history, that I can’t keep up with the best of the best every year. (I have to rely on my list.) This approach can also make for a schizophrenic reading annual list. All in, I’m stealing it. Here’s my personal A Year in Reading.
Martyr by Kaveh Akbar
It was the first book I finished in 2025. I have memories of living in Puerto Rico, having gotten an extreme allergic reaction to mangoes that bridges 2024 into 2025, and finding a hardback version of this to get me through January. In case you don’t know, mangoes can cause an allergic skin reaction from an oil called urushiol (yoo-ROO-shee-ol) found in the peel and in the sap that’s also the “poison” of poison ivy and poison oak. We have a mango tree in our backyard on the island, and I was just standing under there, happy as a clam, gleefulyl ignorant, popping mangoes off the tree using a fruit picker, letting the sap fall gracefully down onto my arms, neck, and face, bathing in poison.
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
I knew I wanted to finish this before One Battle After Another came out. The book was dense, hard to follow, irreverent. I didn’t love it. I kind of labored through it, but a) felt like I had to give it its due since it was the first Pynchon I had ever read, and b) I really wanted to be prepared for the movie.
As it would turn out, the architecture of the movie is nearly perfect. Paul Thomas Anderson lifted exactly as much as was needed for the movie. For a book that packs six novels worth of plot into one novel-length book make PTA’s accomplishment even more impressive.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Recommended by Sophie Newman, my editor, after only knowing me through our first two or so professional meetings, she could not have been spot-on: I loved it. A lot. And then I watched the movie. And I greatly regret watching that movie.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
I really. really. wanted to hate this book. It’s exceptionally well-written, but I kept hearing Cormac McCarthy’s voice. I kept going and now I think it might be the second-best thing I read all year.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
One of the rare times I re-read anything; I have some kind of pathological distaste for re-doing anything, like watching a movie for a second time, like I’m literally wasting my life away returning to it, I should really be writing or designing or working on a business. First of all, the novel rips. It’s a profoundly tragic work, an allegory that paints human nature in its truest colors. Anyway, I wanted to be prepped for Guillermo del Toro’s take on the work; like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I was disappointed in the result. The movie was a little too masturbatory for me (made way too much in his image, which is his right, as is God’s), while I took away something completely different from the book.
When I was done reading it, I left the book in an Airbnb in Marseilles, France. I like leaving books behind when I’m done with them.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
The first best thing I read all year. I read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (right after we left Marseilles!) and while she’s a good author, she writes about nothing. She’s like a Richard Linklater or Jim Jarmusch or Samual Beckett or Jean-Paul Sartre or Sofia Coppola. So I read about a couple of brothers who get into relationships and… go through with them. And then the next book I read was this one.
It’s what I love about art. I would have never sought out anything about an elder Polish woman who is violently defensive of animals, translates William Blake, and reads astrological cards as people die around her in a small mountain village. I want more of this in the world. I want to read more things like this. I want people to write more things about batshit things so I can read them.
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh
I feel like I should have included her in the introductory paragraph as she is a magnetically cool woman I admire, but I’m not sure she would like to be included with anything popular. I find her work inexhaustible, and I don’t know if I’m on an island here? From my armchair perspective of the critical book discourse in 2025 even though I don’t have a TikTok, I understand her to be polarizing. Eileen was such a great, self-contained period piece (and the movie rocked, too). My Year of Rest and Relaxation is writing about nothing at its peak. And then she puts out Lapvona, a fairy tale about a malformed boy and his world, plagued by famine and fanaticism, about incest, cannibalism, domestic child abuse, pedophilia, sexual exploitation. People seem to think this was written solely to shock her reading audience; don’t fact check me but these were much more common aggressions for people in the middle ages, and in the context of modernity it feels more like holding up a mirror to us as humans. “It’s like the author went out of their way to create the most unlikeable, heinous characters and make them do the weirdest, most grotesque shit.” And I think Moshfegh would be proud someone would write that about her.
The Full List
Here are all the books I finished, in the order in which I read them. I was hoping to finish 20, but November and December became months I wanted to knock out awards movies and I found myself spending more time there. Next year, I my goal is to finish 25 books.
- Martyr — Kaveh Akbar
- All Fours — Miranda July
- Everybody Knows — Jordan Harper
- Less — Andrew Greer
- Vineland — Thomas Pynchon
- The Goldfinch — Donna Tartt
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera
- Prophet Song — Paul Lynch
- The Human Stain — Philip Roth
- Frankenstein — Mary Shelley
- Intermezzo — Sally Rooney
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead — Olga Tokarczuk
- Creation Lake — Rachel Kushner
- Demon Copperhead — Barbara Kingsolver
- There There — Tommy Orange
- The Trial — Franz Kafka
- Lapvona — Ottessa Moshfegh
- White Noise — Don Delillo
- Liberation Day — George Saunders