In 2025, I read 36 books, one audiobook, and two essays, totaling a little over 14,000 pages. I am currently reading The Iliad, which I expect will be the first book I finish in 2026. This was the first year that I tried to hit some broad themes in an attempt to sort of simulate an undergraduate class in the subject. I started the year with Russia, and then Mexico, just focusing on non-fiction and literature about these two countries. But I don't think I really figured out a cohesive course of study. I had really just found a lot of books that could be "tagged" with Russia or Mexico, but I didn't really build a cohesive way to learn about the two countries. I did the same thing with attempts at a topic in science and then sort of tried a Cormac McCarthy unit. Science didn't work because it wasn't cohesive and I didn't like the books. Cormac McCarthy didn't work because I really only liked All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, like loved them, but then didn't get into his other works. But I did succeed on "media" as a theme, and that was an excellent and cohesive unit that felt like a real college course. In the next year, I plan to continue with history of the Holocaust as well as do a big unit on the American Revolution in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the revolution. I still have to think of whatever other units I will do.
This year, I also tried to read more fiction and books by women. I'm not sure I succeeded, but I read books by 8 female authors and 4 female translators, and 10 works of fiction. Maybe not as high as I would like in either, but I would guess it's a big improvement. I also tried to read more books from a broader distribution of years, and I worked my way back into the 20th and 19th centuries to do that. I want to keep doing that next year, and reading The Iliad and The Odyssey will help with that. Here are my previous years-in-review, and then my favorite books of 2025:
Fiction:
3. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This is just a magical little book. The Little Prince as a character is just a really charming children's book character, and the book is just really neat. Reading about the author also made me like it extra since he was such an interesting person.
2. All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
These books were incredible. I've never read anything like what Cormac McCarthy writes--he is totally unique. These books just hook me. They're dark, they have great dialogue, and really good descriptions of dialogue. I like the world that Cormac McCarthy's characters live in. It's a really disturbing, harsh world, full of evil people. But it's also a world full of good, simple, and kindhearted people. There are wise people, and the characters have so many interactions that are so deep with these strangers.
1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
What an epic. One of the first books I read this year and it was just incredible. I get the hype and I definitely plan to return to some Tolstoy because this book was so amazing. Tolstoy gets people on a deep level and what life is. He writes with this amazing confidence of someone who totally understands how people act and feel. And I love how the book develops into these abstract concepts less and less related to the story and more and more related to history and philosophy as it goes on. It felt to me like the perfect book.
Non-Fiction:
3. Collapse by Vladislav Zubok
This book is so highly rated because it changed my entire understanding of the fall of the Soviet Union and answered a lot of questions that had been sitting around in my head. Zubok's version of the collapse centers around Gorbachev's attempts at reform bringing down a brittle system. He shows you granular details so that the reader can really understand how the leader of a country can completely dismantle it. He basically gave up all his own power in an attempt to democratize the country, and the result was just simply that the people didn't want to reform the USSR like he did. In the national republics, they wanted out of the Soviet Union, and in Russia, they also felt like they were being oppressed in the USSR. Somehow, everybody thought they were getting a raw deal. The book was also written really well
This book is one of the best works ever created about the Holocaust in my opinion. It combines the personal story of Holocaust survival with the continuation of that story after the Holocaust, as well as the story of the writer getting the story from his father. It's a book you can't do on a Kindle or a phone. The physical copy of it, since it's a graphic novel, is a big part of reading it. The re-read was very worthwhile.
1. Polyglot by Kató Lomb, translated by Ádám Szegi and Kornelia DeKorne
My favorite book of the year is the book that most changed my life this year--thanks to this book, I really committed to learning French, and completed the entire French course on Mango. I have stalled a little and need to set some goals for the coming, but this book was super inspiring. Kató Lomb is such an interesting character who just loves to learn languages and her enthusiasm is infectious. As someone who didn't start learning any languages until she was an adult, she's super inspiring.
Honorable Mentions (in no particular order):
A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs by Theodore Draper
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
My Best-Written Blog Posts of the Year (in no particular order):
Stalin (Volume II): Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 by Stephen Kotkin
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend
A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs by Theodore Draper
Three Themes:
Books and Pages Read:
February: 1 book, 576 pages
March: 1 book, 1,184 pages
April: 5 books, 1,847 pages
May: 4 books, 1,120 pages
June: 5 books, 1,759 pages
July: 4 books, 876 pages +1 audioboook
August: 3 books, 1 essay, 1,009 pages
September: 3 books, 1,295 pages
October: 2 books, 925 pages
November: 5 books, 1,107 pages
December: 2 books, 1 essay, 736 pages
2025: 14,114 pages over 36 books, averaging about 392 pages per book,
2024: 13,057 pages over 30 books, averaging about 435 pages per book.
2023: 15,629 pages over 42 books, averaging about 372 pages per book.
2022: 22,902 pages over 50 books, averaging about 458 pages per book.
2021: 14,144 pages over 27 books, averaging about 524 pages per book.
2020: 13,415 pages over 32 books, averaging about 419 pages per book.
2019: 55,502 pages over 116 books, averaging about 478 pages per book.
2018: 18,122 pages over 33 books, averaging about 549 pages per book.
Gender of Authors:
Female authors: 8
Male authors: 29
Female translators: 4
Male translators: 4
Male editors: 5
Non-binary authors: 1
Languages:
Spanish books: 3
French books: 2
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