I don’t think I’ll finish James tonight, so I’ll wrap up 2025 with 77 books to my name. A perfectly respectable total, though far behind Olivia’s quite amazing 177 (!).
For ’26 I’d like to read more novels, and probably fewer books tied to the contemporary moment. I’m starting with James in print, and Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet on audio. Both are great so far!
I might also return to some 18-19c figures – the Brontes, Conrad, Hardy. Maybe Smollet? We’ll see!
December (5)
Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The LIfe of Bob Dylan
Marty Rhodes Figley, Emily and Carlo
Matt Strassler, Waves in an Impossible Sea
Elif Shafnik, There Are Rivers in the Sky
Paula Byrne, The Real Jane Austen
November (4)
R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory
Al Mennie, Night Swimming
Peter Brennan, The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything
October (5)
Eli Clare, Unfurl
Pauline Oliverors, Quantum Listening
Carlos Eire, They Flew
Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
September (4)
Ordinary Time
James Bradley, Landfall
Michael Grunwald, We Are Eating the Earth
David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics
August (8)
Vincaine Despret, Living as a Bird
Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun
Candice Kelsey, Postcards from the Masthead
Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband
Paul Hawken, Carbon
Paula Byrne, Six Weeks by the Sea
Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History
Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America
July (7)
Leif Weatherby, Language Machines
Bruce Holsigner, Culpability
Jennifer Fleishner, Maladies of the Will
Daniel Kraus, Whalefall
J.M.W. Turner, Turner’s Last Sketchbook
Ian Warrell, J.M.W. Turner
Lee Child, Tripwire
June (5)
Marcus Rediker, Freedom Ship
Tom Higham, The World Before Us
Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance
Laura Spinney, Proto
Leah Littman, Lawless
May (5)
Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West
Hiromi Ito, The Thorn Puller
Bonnie Tsui, On Muscle
Steven Hahn, Illiberal America
Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures
April (9)
MIchelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice
Terry Bisson, Tomorrowing
Elaine Pagels, Mysteries and Wonder
Dan Beachy-Quick, Spell
Rob Wilson, Oceanic Becoming
Colombe Schneck, Swimming in Paris
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites
Daniel Mark Epstein, The Ballad of Bob Dylan
Julia Armfield, Private Rites
March (8)
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Carless People
Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk
John Waldman, Heartbeats in the Muck
Reid Hoffman, Super-Agency
James Scott, In Praise of Floods
Morgan Vo, The Selkie
Ellen Arnold, Water in World History
February (5)
Grant Shreve, What Universities Owe Democracy
Bruno Latour, If We Lose the Earth, We Lose Our Souls
Melody Jue, Coralations
Chris Hayes, The Sirens’ Call
Orlando Reade, What in Me is Dark
January (6)
M.I. Rio, If We Were Villains
Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls
Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass
Alanna Mitchell, The Sprinning Magnet
Ursula K. LeGuin, Lavinia
Madeline Miller, Circe
Christos Tsiolkos, Barracuda
Mark Polizzotti, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisted
Dan Beachy-Quick, Of Silence and Song
Daryl Sanders, That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound
Rhodri Lewis, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art
David Perry and Matthew Gabriele, Oathbreakers