Okay, this feels a little bit like I’m basically working when I’m not working, but, well, here’s my write-up on what I read in 2025, as digested by a little bit of exploratory data analysis.
2025: The year I read 82+ books#
❤️ Here’s the full list on Goodreads 🌈
Yes, I put the + because I’m almost done with Bill McKibben’s Here Comes the Sun and I might have 1-2 more books in me before the year is out. But let’s analyze what I’ve completed so far.
💹 Descriptive stats#
📖 A meta aside#
- What I used to track books: Goodreads
- What I used to analyze my reading: my self-hosted notebook server
I kept up a pretty steady pace. Reading was really the only thing I did this year in the evenings. I was usually too beat from work and domesticity to do anything else. I was also recovering from a major surgery, and so that kept me sedentary and fatigued.
KOReader has a calendar view, which is super fun:
Behold my gloriously cheesy word cloud - thank you, Claude-embedded-in-my-Marimo-notebook.
These are my book tags, and you can see that the vast majority of my reading was from the library (yay Libby App) onto my e-reader (beloved jailbroken Kobo). I made a conscious effort to read politics, tech, and climate. Those are, indeed, my main preoccupations these days: authoritarianism (Strongmen), the climate crisis (A Half-Built Garden), and Big Tech (The Internet Con, The AI Con).
The grihastha (Sanskrit/Devanagari: गृहस्थ) is my “householder” shelf - aka, any book that has to do with being a parent, managing a home, domesticity. I put kid’s books, cookbooks, and general “daily dharma” books in here. Example grihastha books in 2025: The Lion and the Mouse (wordless, watercolor picture book), Emmy in the Key of Code (middle grade book-in-prose about a girl + computers), The Home-Maker (phenomenal, newly-rediscovered classic about gender roles).
I’ve also tried keeping track of the historical setting of my books, since I enjoy reading about, e.g., the classical period. But I never seem to get around to it! That’s what that random 1600s-ce book is (apparently Wild Seed).
Here’s a histogram of the publication year of the books I read: huge recency bias, ha.
And a slightly cursed pie chart of predicted gender - using the Python package gender-guesser to predict gender using an author’s first name. That package is super old (2015!), and hasn’t really gotten the memo on gender diversity. But - meh - it looks like I did decent on reading a pretty even spread?
No more data, now only vibes#
I have already written somewhere on the Internet that I love my e-reader. Oh, how I love my e-reader. People who say “I love the smell of books” can bite me. They don’t actually like reading, they like the aesthetics of reading! And, for what it’s worth, I like the smell of my little Kobo off-gassing its electronic juices.
This image fills me with joy. Someone interrupted me while I was taking this picture. Mortifying.
I read more fiction this year#
I am a little bit allergic to “mainstream”, aka literary fiction. I mostly read non-fiction and science fiction. That has been my preference for nigh 20 years now (!). Anyway, this year I intentionally and unintentionally read a bit more “prestige”, lit fic: A Moveable Feast (and, as a chaser, some fanfic about it via The Paris Wife), The Vegetarian, Fellow Travellers. All were quite good. This fiction stuff, eh! Not bad!
I read some remarkable historical artifacts#
Namely:
- The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher - Originally published in 1924, then forgotten (?!), then re-published by Persephone Books (a British publisher that “reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century”). I think I found this via Kobo’s recommendation. It was phenomenal and was an anchoring text for this year. Can be paired with the equally phenomenal Counting for Nothing by Marilyn Waring, which expanded my consciousness.
- The Oppermans by Lion Feuchtwanger - Originally published in 1933. A book about the Holocaust written before the Holocaust. Tremendously affecting. Can be paired with the equally brilliant Learning from the Germans by Susan Neiman (non-fiction political philosophy) and Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin (sci-fi published in 1935 about the Holocaust, again, before the Holocaust).
All five of the above books really affected my thinking. They were those instant-classic-reads that I ended up citing all the damn time, to everyone. They were those types of books where I’m shocked I only read just now, since they feel so deeply embedded in my brain.
Anyway, some other stellar, brain-embedding books were:
- BoyMom by Ruth Whippman - We need to put emotions back into heteronormative masculinity, for everyone’s sakes.
- The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel - Hey, crazy idea, what if we tried to get equality of outcomes, not just opportunity? 🤷
- NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman - A deep, compassionate history of autism, and its two competing narratives (“we should fix it” vs. “we should make the world more welcoming of it”).
- The AI Con by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna - The spiritual sequel to Weapons of Math Destruction.
- A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck - Super-short philosophical fiction with the bleakest, blackest of humors.
Planning for 2026#
What genres?#
I usually have ambitions to read more widely. At the same time, I also keep making promises to myself to always have certain themes in rotation: dharma (aka, anything Buddhist or philosophical), fem (anything feminist or… uh, philosophical), tech (for fun), scifi (for more fun), climate (for 🌎).That’s a lot!
I tried reading some straight-up romance this year - after last year’s highly successful excursion into the genre via Zemindar (oh, Zemindar, my love). But I couldn’t do it: I couldn’t suspend my disbelief. Similarly, I still struggle with mysteries - it always feels less like a puzzle, more like an unfair riddle.
How to find books?#
Right now, I mostly find new things to read via Goodreads’s “Readers also enjoyed” + recommendations out in the wild (blogs, newspapers, etc) + my LLM librarian. The Kobo store’s recommender system has also been punching above its weight; I think that’s how I discovered the very enjoyable near future cli-fi novellas by Premee Mohamed.
Onwards and upwards! (Wow, I just re-read my yearly review of books from 2018 and I concluded that one with “Onwards!” My brain really has only a handful of subroutines, sigh…)