Reading, Writing, and Me

Welcome to the final 2025 book ranking list! We've almost made it to 2026! There will be more in this series of end/beginning of the year posts. I'll be rolling out my reading stats and a post about the 2026 books I'm incredibly excited about as a way to launch into the new year. I'm also going to reflect on my 2025 reading goals and set some for 2026, so plenty of New Year's content coming your way.  2025 was a weird reading year for me. I found that in 2023 and 2024, I was much more excited about more of the new releases, and I had a lot of new release reads that really stuck with me. I was wondering if this was more an issue with me and my headspace this year, though when I sat down to make this list, I realized that all of my favorite reads of the year that really did set off those sparks for me were 2024 releases with a handful arriving earlier. I think, like I said on my 2025 new release only list that maybe this was just a kind of dip year. I'll happily t...

Nonfiction makes up a huge part of my reading each year (currently sitting at 48% of my annual total), but I don't really talk about it with you guys. Sometimes, if I manage to make a monthly wrap-up, I'll share mini reviews, but I just don't generally feel like they have a spot on here unless there's something particularly special going on (for those, see the links on the titles). A lot of this comes from the fact that I consume almost all the nonfiction I read on audio, almost more like a podcast, so I don't feel like I've truly engaged with the books deeply enough to review them in a helpful way. (This is not to say audiobooks are a lesser form of reading, just that I know I'm easily distracted and liable to miss things). It's kind of my way of having "just for fun" reading that's for me instead of being for me, for my writing, and for this blog like fiction ends up being labored by. So don't expect frequent nonfiction reviews from m...

Simple Passion  by Annie Ernaux  The shock I had when I saw Goodreads classifies this as fiction. I'd read a bit of Exteriors  for a class in an excerpt, and I considered Ernaux a nonfiction writer, a literary nonfiction writer. Not even really auto fiction because it feels like she liberally inserts herself factually into the narratives that are pulled unaltered from her life. This affair really happened... I'd gotten into this book hearing it talked about by one of my classmates so much that I got curious, and that was a great way to sink in. A slight idea that the prose would be good from my previous skim and then an effusive reverence for the writer as the only precursors. Usually, I'll give you a summary of the book before we get started, but I'm not sure how to do that here except to say this is a slim volume about her affair with the married man. Nothing in the summary speaks to what makes it compelling, though. So, instead, I'm going to give you two quotes I...

Personally—and I've seen this expressed a bit around the bookish internet and various podcasts I listen to so I don't think I'm entirely alone—2025 has felt like a bit of a let down of a new release year. There are years where I nearly every new release I pick up sparkles, and this year, I really struggled to find a 2025 release that really captured my attention the way that, say, the 2024 slate of releases did. Last year, I was struggling to narrow down the list of books from the year to make my final list. This year, it's truly only the top two that I fully recommend without reservations. There were plenty of interesting books this year (I'm about to tell you about nine of them), there were just very few that wholeheartedly captured my heart or got me extremely excited. Hopefully, 2026 is another uptick year (more on the books I'm already anticipating in a minute).  I feel like my best reads of 2025 really came from backlist titles, which you'll see in a ...

What I'd Rather Not Think About  by Jenna Posthuma (translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey) Overview: Posthuma has written a book with a quite simple mandate at face value. The novel chronicles grappling with an incredibly deep grief as a sister works through the loss of her twin brother to suicide. There's not much to say in a summary as the magic of this book is purely in the execution, the use of language, the framing. There's so much beauty and insight into grief to be found here but an equal amount is invested into illuminating life. I had a friend criticize a book as "death affirming" recently, and this is one of those books that's the antidote to that.  The novel follows the sister from childhood through around age thirty-six or seven and the observations that come from that period of growth, of becoming an adult. There's no proper way to encapsulate this for you. You just have to read it. Overall: 5 When you're truly caught off guard by a certain ki...

Universality  by Natasha Brown Overview: The novel opens with a lengthy magazine feature revolving around an assault that takes place at a countryside farm outside of London that's been taken over by a group of anarchist. The night of a rave, thrown by the anarchists, in the middle of COVID lockdown, ends with one man hitting another over the head with a gold bar and then disappearing into the night with the stolen riches turned weapon. The piece bounces around between the man who owned the farm, the anarchists that took it over, the culture wars columnist that links the anarchists and the owner of the farm, and additional unique characters. The second half of the book narratively follows some of these characters as well as the journalist who wrote the piece in snatches that further their portraits. Overall: 4 I'm not entirely sure what to make of this very short novel. My main impulse is that it doesn't quite feel like a novel as a reading experience. It doesn't feel l...

You all know that the first thing I was going to do when I got to Dublin was get a library card. Well, I did have phone/cell service, a government appointment, a Leap Card, and a few other admin things to sort out first, but by week two, I was on my way to my local library branch to get access to even more amazing books. You all know I love to collect library cards from all the places I've lived to add them to my quiver.  So what was it like to get a library card in Ireland? Very similar to getting my LA library card, not surprising as this is another quest in a major city. It's a two step process. I got online through the library's outpost of the government services website and registered. This gives you access to a few basic online parts of the library by providing your address, phone number, email, and other details. Then, to use the physical library, you take a confirmation number to a local branch along with some form of proof of address. For me, I used my ultimate pro...

Culpability  by Bruce Holsinger Overview: The book opens during the car accident that ensures that Cassidy-Shaws's life will never be the same. Their autonomously driven minivan collides with another car, killing its two passengers. While various members of their family are injured, all five of the Cassidy-Shaws survive and are left to reckon with the roles they played in this fatal car accident where the two people in the second car died. A family vacation to attempt to regroup only makes things worse as a second tragedy befalls the family, further complicated by the involvement of the tech billionaire next door. In the backdrop of these incidents and the family's attempt to cope through the investigation, Holsinger demonstrates how AI and LLMs are pressing in on everyday parts of being alive, interfering with our lives, and calling certain freedoms into question. Overall: 3.5 Bruce Holsinger attempts to package a kind of crime thriller with a family drama and then swirl in a ...

Gunk  by Saba Sams Overview: Jules is accustomed to strange situations. After a hen do takes her to a student bar as a twenty-eight-year-old woman in Brighton, she meets the club owner, starts working at the bar, and eventually marries him. They're together for years before they divorce, but Jules keeps working at the club. During their marriage, Jules never gets the baby she so desperately wants. Then Nim, nineteen and the adult version of a teenage runaway, comes into the picture and offers Jules a very strange, roundabout way to having a child. That journey is what constitutes Gunk . Overall: 4.5 Characters: 4 Jules and Nim and Leon are interesting character sketches that feel both very human and also watery and impressionistic. Leon is an addict who likes to pick up students at the bar. He's scummy and provides a constant low hum of disaster in the background. Jules has never had great love in her life, and what she feels with Nim isn't quite that either. It's neith...

Breakdown  by Cathy Sweeney Overview: One day, a woman wakes up in the morning and decides not to turn right and go to work. Instead, she goes left to the seaside town she grew up in that she hasn't seen in years. From there, she continues making choices that push her further afield from the Dublin suburb she lives in, from the family she's raised to maturity and the husband who sends impatient texts about wanting his gym bag brought to him. The book is told in a vignette style that plays with linear time. Each cluster of vignettes is arranged by the general place she's in where the majority of the scenes take place—the town, the boat, the train, the bus, the breakfast room of the hotel, etc. But she also dips heavily into memory and pulls us forward into her present time, working to contextualize these near term memories as she tells this story of her escape from regular life that is at once extremely mundane and truly wild. Overall: 5 Characters: 5 We are deep inside this...