Books I've Read in 2025

To start out strong, I'm immediately sharing my book list for the year, including books I'm partway through (noted accordingly.)

Nowadays, I use The Storygraph as my preferred reading tracker, but I still love having the full list on the blog too for reference. Check the review archive and books category page to explore each read more in-depth; I'm still in the process of building out more reviews and transferring hundreds over from my old site. And, of course, book club with me about my 2024 reads.

reviewed & linked

Some Themes I Notice

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• endurance, fatigue, physical limitation, and exhaustion
• the process of translation & the impossibility of verbal precision
• various writers tackling craft
• reverence for nature, the outdoors, and what we lose when we don't seek out real-life experience
• the tension between self-reliance and connection (or individual vs. collective identity)
• of course, the tension between control and surrender
• taking a break from any books I perceive as similar to mine in genre/voice (for a beat) because I don't want to overthink
• + my own book a dozen times, always!

Finished

1. Mountain Sounds by Grace Smith (this year, I'm counting it)
2. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
3. Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver
4. On Writing by Stephen King
5. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
6. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
7. How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins by Helena De Bres
8. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
9. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
10. The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr
11. The Incurable Romantic and Other Tales of Madness and Desire by Frank Tallis
12. The Nature Fix by Florence Williams
13. Nature; Self-Reliance; The American Scholar; An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College... (essays) by Ralph Waldo Emerson
14. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
15. All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld
16. All-American Girl by Meg Cabot
17. Novelist as Vocation by Haruki Murakami
18. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
19. Nature, Man, and Woman by Alan Watts
20. The Will to Change by bell hooks
21. Awe by Dacher Keltner
22. Becoming Wise by Krista Tippett
23. Mountain Sounds by Grace Smith (round two)
24. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
25. Consider the Lobster: & Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
26. Benito Cereno by Herman Melville (novella)
27. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz
28. The Course of Love by Alain de Botton
29. The Attachment Effect by Peter Loveheim
30. The Love Prescription by John Gottman, Julia Schwartz Gottman
31. Mountain Sounds by Grace Smith (III)
32. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
33. The Science of Kissing by Sheril Kirshenbaum
34. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
35. The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays by Albert Camus
36. Mountain Sounds by Grace Smith (IV)
37. The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin
38. The Finishing School by Dick Couch
39. The Fran Lebowitz Reader by Fran Lebowitz (she's so funny—love her)
40. The Warrior Elite by Dick Couch
41. The Portable Emerson (edited by Carl Bode with Malcolm Cowley)
42. Mountain Sounds by Grace Smith (V)
43. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
44. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
45. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
46. When Men Behave Badly by David M. Buss, PhD
47. After the North Pole by Erling Kagge
48. Spiral by Bal Khabra
49. The Plague by Albert Camus
50. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
51. The Iliad by Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)
52. Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau
53. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (audio)
54. The Brothers K by David James Duncan
55. Mountain Sounds by Grace Smith (VI)
56. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
57. Collide by Bal Khabra
58. On Muscle by Bonnie Tsui
59. Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky
60. The Poetry of Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Edward Snow)
61. Rockets' Red Glare by William Webster and Dick Lochte
62. Done and Dusted by Lyla Sage
63. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
64. The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
65. The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
66. Instructions for Traveling West: Poems by Joy Sullivan
67. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling (audio)
68. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling (audio)
69. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling (audio)
70. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
71. Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr
72. The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen
73. Beartown by Fredrik Backman (audio)
74. Lost & Lassoed by Lyla Sage
75. Us Against Them by Fredrik Backman
76. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling (audio)
77. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Currently Reading (Many)

1. This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Dr. Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas*
2. A Nietszche Reader by Friedrich Nietzsche*
3. The Urge: Our History of Addiction by Carl Erik Fischer*
4. Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver*
5. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez*
6. Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Glück*
7. The Manor of Dreams by Christina Li*
8. Plutarch's Lives Vol. 1*
9. A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman*
10. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff*
11. The Winners by Fredrik Backman*
12. End of the Earth: Voyaging to Antarctica by Peter Matthiessen*
13. The Odyssey by Homer*