The books I read this year (2025)

Somehow, it’s December?! I’ve started a tradition of reporting on my reading list for the year; you can read 2024’s post here, and 2023’s is here.

I traveled a lot this year, which allowed time for a lot of reading. After finishing 15 books in 2023 and 16 in 2024, I bumped it up to 18 in 2025! No links, because you know where to buy a book! If you have a local, independent bookstore (shoutout to mine: Boulder Bookstore), please give them your business!

Top picks

Each year, I try to single out a few books that I would particularly recommend, and here are my top three for 2025, all very different from each other!

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. I picked this one up because you can’t go wrong with a Booker Prize winner, and I really loved it. It’s short but pretty epic: a meditation on life and space, through the eyes of six astronauts from different countries, as they orbit the earth for a day.

The Postcard, by Anne Berest, translated from the French by Tina Kover (who I fangirled on LinkedIn and she wrote back…highlight of my year!). Published in French as La Carte Postale, I read this in English because I bought it in an airport. It’s so flipping good: combining a true story (the author receives a postcard with no message other than the names of her great-grandparents and their son and daughter, all killed at Auschwitz) and fiction (what happened to them after they were deported). The author ultimately sleuths out the postcard’s origin: read the book to find out!

The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial ambition, first contact, and the fateful final voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides. I’m not much of a history/historical biography reader (love Robert Caro, but made it through about the first 10 pages of the Lyndon Johnson series), but this one is a winner. It looks at the 1700s age of exploration in general, and Cook’s fateful end in the South Pacific in particular.

The rest (and no duds this year!)

In past years, I’ve had a few DNFs, but this year I honestly really liked everything I picked out, and they all got finished eventually!

Atomic Habits, by James Clear.  I know. The rest of the world read this when it came out in 2018, and I just got around to it. I really love James Clear’s writing style, and his thoughts on the factors that underly productivity (and lack thereof).

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. I feel like Colson Whitehead is kind of a polarizing author (people really like his books or really dislike them) and I’m a huge fan. I had to read this after seeing the movie, and of course the book was better. It’s not a peaceful read (based on the true story of child abuse and murder at a reform school in Florida), but so well written.

Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel. Wait, didn’t Hilary Mantel pass away in 2022? Yes (sadly…I miss her writing so much). But this is a compilation of everything she ever wrote for newspapers and magazines. I feel like I read it mostly because I miss Hilary, but the topics are incredibly varied and interesting!

Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead. What can I say, I was on a Colson Whitehead kick this year and I read these on the beach in Fiji. Kind of unlikely beach reading, but they’re outstanding novels about small-time crime culture in New York.

A Change of Habit by Sister Monica Clare. I went down a rabbit hole with this book after listening to a finance podcast about how you have to be debt-free in order to become a monk or a nun (seriously). They interviewed Sister Monica Clare about her transition from LA hipster to nun; kind of fascinating!

Playing Dead: A journey through the world of death fraud by Elizabeth Greenwood. OK, this one actually should have been on the top picks list! Another podcast rabbit hole: this time an episode of Stuff You Should Know, about people who try (with varying degrees of success) to fake their own deaths. Pro tip: Don’t take out a large life insurance policy and then “die” in a boating accident!

The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. This is one of those personal growth books that can kind of be summed up in one sentence (let other people do what they do and think what they think, while you do what feels meaningful to you), but gives tons of great examples and stories to help you actually put the idea into practice.

Penitence by Kristen Koval. I heard this reviewed on a radio show about Colorado authors. It’s a novel about a complicated family dynamic (fratricide, old flame, rocky marriage) and is well written.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I feel like this book—about how government policies meant to solve the problems of past decades are hindering progress in the modern era—didn’t totally live up to my passion for Ezra Klein, but it’s not bad! Lots of wonky deep dives into what “liberalism that builds” means.

I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney. John Kenney writes for The New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmurs” column. If you like that writing style, you’ll like this book. If not, skip it. I liked it a lot: a novel set in New York, about a burnt-out obituary writer who accidentally publishes his own obituary, then starts attending the funerals of strangers as therapy.

Nothing More of This Land: Community, power, and the search for indigenous identity, by Joseph Lee. Another one I found from a podcast! A really interesting memoir/ethnography/family history about Native American culture on Martha’s Vineyard.

Wishful Drinking: A family history, by Carrie Fisher (I listened to the audiobook, read by the author). I also miss Carrie Fisher! I had kind of forgotten about this book (a book version of Carrie Fisher’s one-woman stage show by the same name) and found it on a list of short audiobooks because I wanted something that I could finish on a cross-country airplane trip. Carrie Fisher’s life was literally crazy (she has a breakdown in London and her mom sends Ava Gardner to check on her??), and she was so smart and funny and a great writer.

Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. I haven’t seen any of Matthew McConaughey’s box-office hit movies, but I think his performance in season one of the HBO series “True Detective” is one of the best screen performances I’ve ever seen. His memoir is, well, kinda off the rails (he alternates between going on retreats at monasteries and getting arrested for playing the bongos naked), and he’s a good writer and has interesting observations about life.

We Computers: A ghazal novel, by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega. I’ve read exactly zero Central Asian novels, but I had to get this after Shelley presented about it at the ATA conference. It’s kind of a wild ride, about a French poet who writes a computer program that analyzes and generates literature, interspersed with musings on the life of the Persian poet Hafez and other interesting elements! How Shelley translated this so well is beyond me, but it’s in progress and I’m enjoying it!

New for this year: Limited-series podcast recommendations

I can read on airplanes, but I prefer podcasts if I’m in motion. In addition to traveling a lot this year, I’ve been doing a lot of driving for my court interpreting job, which leaves a good amount of time to listen to audio stuff. Here are a few limited-series podcasts I really enjoyed (in various ways!).

• The Retrievals, Season Two, hosted by Susan Burton. Susan Burton only seems to write and talk about intense topics (check out Empty, her story of recovering from a long-term eating disorder in middle age) and this podcast is no exception, and it’s also really good. It focuses on the experience of pain during C-section births, and everything that goes along with that (why aren’t the women believed, what’s going on medically, how do doctors see this).
• The Mysterious Mr. Epstein, hosted by Lindsay Graham. I know, you’re probably totally sick of hearing about Epstein, but I really didn’t know much about the story, and this podcast is pretty fascinating.
• The Good Whale, hosted by Daniel Alarcon. The story of the real-life whale who played Keiko, the whale in the move “Free Willy.” You can probably guess that it’s not a happy ending, but the storytelling is amazing.
• The Big Dig, hosted by Ian Coss. OK, don’t laugh…an entire podcast series about a tunnel. It’s so good! And it won a Peabody Award! If you’re interested in Boston, or why America is so bad at large-scale infrastructure projects, you’ll like this podcast!
• Lost Patients, hosted by Will James. A difficult but really informative look at the US’s system for forcibly treating people with severe mental illness. I see a lot of these types of cases when I work in court, so I was interested to learn more about it.
• Camp Swamp Road, hosted by Valerie Bauerlein. A true-crime story about a road rage incident in South Carolina. Kind of reinforces everything you might assume about small-town law enforcement in the South, but it’s well done!

Thanks for reading, and I hope this list gives you some suggestions for your own reading and listening if you’re (hopefully!) taking some time off over the holidays.

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