Well, more or less. I lost the notebook I used from January through mid-July, which is so frustrating, because I put everything in my notebooks: sermon notes, journal entries, weekly schedules and to-do lists, lists of books I want to read and have read. However, the sermons can be recreated from audio (thank you, Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, for recording and posting your services), old to-do lists are unimportant, and as for journal entries, when do I ever reread them? I did manage to recreate a lot of my books-read list by looking up what I borrowed from the library, though, so here they are: most of the books I read in 2025. NF = nonfiction.
Old Babes in the Wood, Margaret Atwood
System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries), Martha Wells
Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret, Benjamin Stevenson
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik
Uprooted, Naomi Novik
See No Stranger: A Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, Valarie Kaur (NF)
A Sinister Revenge, Deanna Raybourn
The Author’s Guide to Murder, Beatriz Williams
Noor, Nnedi Okorafor
Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi
The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer (NF)
The Kaigu Preservation Society, John Scalzi
One Way Witch, Nnedi Okorafor
On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz (NF)
Fire from Heaven, Mary Renault
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (reread)
Long Island Compromise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Marble Hall Murders, Anthony Horowitz
Everything is Tuberculosis, John Green (NF)
What It Is, Lynda Barry (NF)
James, Percival Everett
The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood
Kills Well with Others, Deanna Raybourn
My Murder, Katie Williams
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison (reread)
Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, Alysia Abbott (NF)
All Over Creation, Ruth Ozeki
Everyone Is Lying to You, Jo Piazza
The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey
If You Leave Me, Crystal Hana Kim
Asta’s Book, Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell)
Grasshopper, Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell)
A Dark-Adapted Eye, Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell; reread)
The Face of Trespass, Ruth Rendell
Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens
The Time of Five Pumpkins, Alexander McCall Smith
The Rose Field, Philip Pullman
The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Amy Tan
The Impossible Fortune, Richard Osman
The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
Ten Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World, Elif Shafak
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
Love Marriage, Monica Ali
And Then There Were None, Martha Noyes (NF).
Forty-eight books, three of which were rereads. I won’t try to rate them or summarize them or even start my favorites, but I’m happy to say more about any of them if someone asks.
What’s a book you read this year that stuck with you?
Sermons in Stones 
Leave a comment
Comments feed for this article