Books I Read in 2025
A dozen mostly amazing reads.
I read thirty-five books in 2025. More than I’ve read in a few decades. I’m trying to get that up to fifty-two in 2026. Most of them were contemporary, some classics, and a lot more nonfiction than I’ve read in a long time.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow
I’ve been on a mission over the last year to stop using a lot of the services that make up the core complaints of this book: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Twitter. Oh Twitter, how I miss your early days. Oh Amazon, you’ve been a real pain in the ass to escape. Oh Apple, you still have your claws in me, I say as I type this on a Mac Mini, but I’m trying.
Doctorow is brilliant, as always. I heard him speak about this book at a Brooklyn Public Library talk and immediately devoured it. I didn’t learn a whole lot of new information, but the mechanism of what has been happening was written out in a much clearer way, and it was a good read.
The Uncool: A Memoir by Cameron Crowe
I found myself thinking about Elvis Costello’s memoir I read a few years ago, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, as I read Cameron Crowe’s. There are similar threads and similar tones. Both men love music, met a lot of their heroes, went through some hardships, but generally everything worked out fine. In both, the hardships are a bit glossed over and the triumphs are listed as no big deal.
One anecdote in The Uncool keeps rattling around in my head. Basically, an awkward and “uncool” teenage Crowe asks the hottest girl in school out to a concert and she says no. He writes his reaction as basically “I was sad, but glad I asked!” And then wastes no more ink on the thought. Brief, but unfulfilling.
Still, it was a quick fun read and a trip down memory lane. Specifically the background of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I mostly knew but was interesting to see through his eyes.
Most importantly this book reminded me to pick up some Joan Didion…
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
A masterpiece. Perfect vibes, thoughtful prose, wit, and verve.
I’d dabbled in Didion, but this was my first time diving into her nonfiction. The fact that Crowe idolizes her makes perfect sense, but she has less of his innocent sentimentality.
It’s funny that she writes so much about California and leaving New York, because she reads as pure Gotham to me. The next coming of Dorothy Parker.
“On Keeping a Notebook” was a high point for me, to the degree that I immediately found the text online and sent it to friends and muses. “John Wayne: A Love Song” was like Hemingway if he used adjectives properly. “On Going Home” and “Goodbye to All That” really got to the heart of things in a profound and beautiful way.
It left me with the best feeling a book can give me: the need to immediately write something. Specifically about being a native New Yorker and watching the dreamers come here to either thrive or dash themselves on the rocks of the East River.
How To Fuck Like A Girl: Vera Blossom’s Sex Diary by Vera Blossom
I read this around the same time as Luster and there is something tied together in me. Still, Vera Blossom’s memoir(?) is part diary, part poem, part blog post, part rant, and I’m here for it.
My own queerness has been one of the defining discoveries of my life and yet as a white, relatively straight-passing person (when I want/need to be), I’ve always been surrounded by people with far more intense struggles. Specifically queer people of color, trans people, and sex workers. All of which are explored in this book.
I found it most profound when it was at its most poetic and most raw. Both of which happen often.
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
As someone who grew up loving Woody Allen’s movies, and his few books, and listing some of Roman Polanski’s works as my top favorites, this book tackled lots of things I’ve been grappling with for a few decades now.
The bad news is, it doesn’t give many answers. The good news is it picks apart the questions pretty well.
I don’t think it helped me figure out if and how to separate the art from the artist, but it gave me some new tools for that work.
This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It by Tabitha Carvan
I love fandom. I love fan fiction. My love of writing started early, but didn’t seem to gel until I found fandoms. The X-Files, specifically, though I just missed the Star Trek ships. Then Buffy. It was all a good reminder that writing is a worthy endeavor and a way of creating that shouldn’t be limited to publication and monetization.
We tell stories, sing, dance, cook, all for the joy of those things.
But that’s not really what this book is about. This book is about obsession. I like the premise, the honesty, the horniness, though I didn’t feel any of those things went far enough for my liking. At times it felt too academic for something casually read and not at all academic enough for something intellectually read. The middle is an odd place to sit with this kind of work. Still, I get it and I liked it.
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
2025 was the first time I went to ALA, the American Library Association conference. Context: I have worked for Brooklyn Public Library for ten years, but I am not a librarian, sadly. I do marketing, production, all kinds of stuff. So going to ALA was really helpful to understand what other systems are doing. Also, ALA is one of the happiest conferences I’ve ever been to because it’s a huge building full of librarians being given free books. Free unreleased books!
Thus it was a place where Katabasis was being talked about a lot. I hadn’t read any Kuang, but the taglines of this book had me very intrigued. Basically two magic students going to hell to find their dead professor, mostly because he promised them letters of recommendation.
I devoured this book. The snark, the sexual tension, the trauma! The unique magic system and the literary hellscape. It made me immediately read Babel, which I liked even more, but it seemed appropriate to put Katabasis on this list.
Really a wonderful read and I wanted to bask in this work a little more, though at the same time I was very pleased to have a full narrative and not the standard set up for a trilogy.
A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper
Stopping by The Nonbinarian Bookstore a few blocks away from my house, I picked up this bit of strange queer horror. I love when people subvert HP Lovecraft, who certainly deserves to be subverted, perverted, and reclaimed.
I’ve loved the concept of The King in Yellow for years. That love was stoked by True Detective. This fictional play is a dominant character in A Game in Yellow and I thought it wonderful as both a MacGuffin and a metaphor for drugs/kinks/obsession.
The book did drag a bit in the middle, with the ideas losing steam. I wanted the mythology to be explored a bit more, but I enjoyed the writing, the characters, and the world. Two women in a non-monogamous BDSM relationship. Realistic power dynamics mixed with fantastical horror elements is a winning combination.
Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver
One of my partners (I have two, I’m sure I’ll write something about that here at some point) read 100 books in 2025! They read a lot more Romance and Romantasy than I do, so I’ve been trying to understand the genres a little more. As someone who grew up on 90s sci-fi, where a happy ending was the worst thing you could have, it’s been difficult getting into the headspace.
That’s why it’s fun to find romance like this. Weird, freaky, dark. Basically two serial-killers-who-only-kill-bad-people who fall in love. It was a lot of fun, with some nods to Hannibal and other stories I love. I heard the rest of the series has diminishing returns, but I enjoyed this a lot.
Luster by Raven Leilani
A queer graphic designer in a poly relationship living in Brooklyn? Throughout the book I found so many similarities to my life, yet the main character was wildly different in so many other ways.
Luster is a book about race, about love, about the complicated alchemy of being an adult and an artist, a human, a lover, a complex individual.
As someone for whom not having a child is a big part of my identity these days, so much of this struck me and messed with me. Being inserted into a married couple’s life seems really bizarre at times and the novel never backs away from the strangeness and curiosity of that.
Audition by Katie Kitamura
It’s funny how I romanticize my love for postmodern literature and the literary concept of “play” and breaking rules, but when faced with something actually weird I sometimes recoil. It’s okay though. I got over the recoil and enjoyed this very strange book.
Is it a dream? Is it an alternate reality? Is it a play? Parts of it reminded me of one of my favorite bits of postmodern lit, The Body Artist by Don DeLillo, which was a remarkably odd novella about a woman living with… a ghost? A memory made flesh? Who knows.
Both left me with more questions than answers and sometimes that is perfect. It’s one of those book I initially came away from disappointed, but have liked more as I thought about it more.
Little Mysteries by Sara Gran
A while back, I read a book that really changed me. Sara Gran’s The Book of the Most Precious Substance was so vivid and mesmerizing and exactly the kind of book I want to publish. Part The Club Dumas, part Eyes Wide Shut, part Rosemary’s Baby. It sent me down a rabbit hole where I read all of Gran’s books in short order. This small anthology of mysteries, all orbiting around Gran’s all-too-real-feeling detective, Claire DeWitt, was not as satisfying as her novels, but full of amazing moments, images, and ideas that kept me fascinated and amazed.
I’ve been waiting for Gran’s next work and no matter what it is, I’m certainly going to devour it.