2025 book year in review

 I read 105 books this year - as the kids get older and (slightly) less needy, it turns out I have time and energy to read more!

	Woman	Man	Trans Man	Nonbinary	Multiple authors	Grand Total
Asian, Asian American, and Asian British	11	6				17
Black	6	3		1		10
Latine	4	2				6
Middle Eastern	5					5
Multiracial	7					7
Native	2					2
White	32	23	1	1		57
Multiple authors					1	1
Grand Total	67	34	1	2	1	105

Not a ton of variation in the racial breakdown compared to recent years:

Time period	Asian & Asian- American	Black	Latine	Middle Eastern	Native	Mult- iracial	White
Childhood	0.6%	1.8%	0.6%	0%	0%	-	97%
High School	0%	3.7%	0%	1.2%	0%	-	95.1%
College	1.4%	2.9%	2.9%	11.4%	1.4%	-	80%
Post-College to 2016	2.1%	22.4%	2.8%	4.2%	0%	-	65%
2016	8.5%	22.3%	11.7%	11.7%	4.3%	-	33%
2017 and 2018	4.5%	36.4%	4.5%	3.0%	1.5%	6.1%	43.9%
2019	14.2%	24%	9.5%	9.5&	6.3%	-	34.9%
2020	8.6%	28.6%	7.1%	10%	2.9%	11.4%	31.4%
2021	18.9%	18.9%	9.0%	7.2%	5.4%	5.4%	32.4%
2022	25%	17.2%	3.1%	3.1%	1.6%	6.3%	42.2%
2023	24.3%	6.7%	8.1%	2.7%	5.4%	5.4%	46.0%
2024	14.1%	9.1%	10.1%	4.0%	2.0%	7.1%	53.5%
2025	16.2%	9.5%	5.7%	4.8%	1.9%	6.7%	54.3%
Overall	9.9%	12.4%	4.8%	2.4%	1.9%	3.5%	64.0%

The biggest change is that this year I made an effort to read more authors that aren't American - in particular, I read a lot of the International Booker nominees and had my least American-centric year since high school.

Time period	Authors that aren’t American
Childhood	17%
High School	56%
College	28%
Post-College to 2016	21%
2016	12%
2017 and 2018	14%
2019	24%
2020	17%
2021	27%
2022	11%
2023	30%
2024	25%
2025	42%
Overall	23%

Favorite fiction books of the year:

• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. This novella is like a little diamond of a book - it's only about a hundred pages, but it packs so much in there that I'm still thinking about it months later. It's about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, but really it's about one man wrestling with how to live in a society where everyone is looking the other way from a deep injustice. The friend who recommended it to me has a tradition of reading it every year at Christmas, and I am planning to do the same.
• The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota. This novel follows several Indian immigrants trying to make new lives for themselves in the UK, and it is told with such incredible empathy and attention to detail that by the end you feel like you are in a relationship with the characters. You see them making some truly poor decisions, but at the same time you see how they had no other choices and your heart aches for them. An unbelievably beautiful book.
• Flashlight by Susan Choi. This book is really hard to describe - it starts with a young girl going for a walk on the beach with her father, then waking up on the beach and he is gone. It's hard to say more without giving too much away, but the writing is incredible and draws you in from the very beginning. It's not a "thriller" per se, but there are mystery elements that do get resolved, and none in the way I was expecting.
• Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The best way I can explain this book is to imagine four overhead transparencies, each of each has all of one particular color in an image (e.g. one has all the blue, one has all the red, etc...). You look at each individually and don't really know what you're looking at, then you lay them on top of each other and suddenly a whole complex picture snaps into view. That's what reading this book is like - there are four sections, each of which is profiling a moment in time for one of four women who are close friends. They are all stuck at home during the pandemic and reflecting on their lives in various ways, but it's not until you read all four sections that all the interconnections and relationships come into full view, and you immediately want to read it again so you can see all the little hints and clues you didn't pick up on the first time around.

Favorite nonfiction books of the year:

• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders. I don't generally love short stories, and I'd previously read some of the short stories discussed in this book and felt like I didn't "get" them. So I was surprised and delighted when Saunders' page-by-page, sometimes line-by-line or even word-by-word, breakdown opened them up to me in completely new ways. Reading this book is like being in English class with a charismatic teacher who genuinely loves literature and somehow makes you love it too.