The year in books: 2025, a reading journal.

I read thirty-two books in 2025, which is fewer than I planned and more than I expected. I started fifty-four. The gap between those two numbers is the year, more or less.

I will not list them all. Lists of books are the literary equivalent of a Strava feed — useful to nobody except the person who made it. Instead, here are the twelve I will read again, in the order I will read them, with a sentence each on why.

The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov. Because every year is a year for it, and last year I let it go too long. Stoner, Williams. Because the second read taught me things the first read didn't. A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James. Because I gave up on it in February and want to apologize.

The shelf is not a trophy case. The shelf is a conversation that has not yet ended.

Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid. For the sentences. The Idiot, Batuman. For the laugh I lost in March. The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson. For the way it kept happening to me, all year, in the wrong rooms.

The other six I will save. A good list, the kind that goes back to the shelf, is the closest thing literature has to a friendship. You return to it without explaining why. The shelf knows.

The year was quiet. I read on the train and at lunch and on the small balcony where I keep one plant that has, against my expectations, survived. The books did not save anything. They did the smaller, more necessary work of being there.