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...