Year of Books

According to The Global Story, enough people don’t read that we may very well be out of the ‘literate society’ that took off in the 18th century and Neil Postman described as revolutionary in Amusing Ourselves to Death. 

As a person who distrusts popular things, being an outlier on this particularly disturbing trend is just fine.  I love reading, and love books.  If it’s subversive and difficult now (once AGAIN, thank you history) to hold and read a book, I’m there for it.

On a typical day around here there is NEVER much time to sit and read.  Yet somehow, my notes and library receipts and Book Outlet orders show that I read 55 books in 2025. It must be true then, that we can read (or do anything we love) in tiny pieces every day, and still be getting somewhere.

Any practice gets easier the more you do it. This year I wanted to read more books, and apparently did.  Whether that equates to reading better, or deeper, is all up for debate – but I’m proud of the significant dent I was able to make in a very long reading list that perpetually grows.

What was different about my reading in 2025?

I always always always carried a book with me. Reading two pages before a kid's appointment or making coffee in the dark was better than reading no pages at all.

I read one book at a time, until that book was done.

I read multiple books by the same author in a row (Tom Wolfe, Kristi Coulter) and saw more connections between best sellers (Charles Duhigg paving the way for James Clear) or picked up on research that is always retold (the Milgram experiments, Skinner’s pigeons, the Asch paradigm) or finally read a couple of classics (Frankl, Sun Tzu) who are constantly cited by people and we never covered in Western Civ. By reading more I'm also seeing how many books share common threads and references.

I truly loved just under one in five books, learning either that I'm a harsh critic or there are a lot of mediocre books in the world.

What I don't like in a book:  ghostwriters, platitudes, millennials complaining about how hard it is to be a millennial, and books by professional influencers in particular. Why read a book by a person whose life’s work is partly robbing people of their ability to read books??

What I do like in a book: specifics, counter-narratives (Tom Wolfe's take on the canon of modern painters, wow) deep dives with relevance to our current times (The Sullivanians, Broadcast Hysteria), big subjects (war, attention, myth) and anything that’s trying to get at what it means to live a good life, or live well. 

Reading books often sparked something to share here, or became the material for a great conversation. Reading books right now has also become a way to fuel myself, make time to recharge, and reenergize by learning.

And that's just me! It's a personal quirk and part of my imprint (haha) that BOOKS are a big deal in my life, and have been for a very long time.

What do you love, what fills your cup, and how do you make space for that thing?

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