Assumed audience: People who like reading year-in-review summaries. (I always assume that’s mostly just me, a few years in the future!)

A bit of context:: For many years now, I have made it my habit to write up one of these summaries. In this case, I have tried to make it a bit more digestible by breaking into smaller chunks. You can find them all here.

My stated goal at the start of the year was to read 25 volumes each of non-fiction and fiction. (I picked 25 volumes for 2025.) I may get there with nonfiction in the next few days — my current count is 24 — , but I’m nowhere close with fiction. Fiction is only going to top 5 books this year because I started rereading Harry Potter along with my daughters as they started their first reads through it.1

Some of this is down to my habit of reading long, deep essays instead — magazine articles, essay-length blog posts, and the like. That is particularly true of my before-bed reading, which is when I get done a lot of my reading. This is also just the first of the areas where my sleep deficits hit me hard. Nor were my long stints of time awake in the middle of the night conducive for reading or even listening to audiobooks. I had to spend a lot of time pacing, and my brain was so tired that I could barely handle podcast listening a lot of times.

You can see the full list of books I read here. My top nonfiction reads for the year, in the order I finished them:

• Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation, Kyle Edward Williams (new)
• The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, Andy Crouch
• Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Tom Holland
• Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change, W. David Marx
• The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place, Andy Crouch
• Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir, Craig Mod
• How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World, Deb Chachra
• J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey
• Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story, John Bloom
• Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, Patrick McGee

The only new fiction to make the list for me this year is Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang. The latest Brandon Sanderson doorstopper was fine and fun, and rereading Harry Potter with my girls this week has been fun, but the former is not on my “you should go read it” list, and the latter does not need any introduction from me!

One of my goals for next year is to use Instapaper “Liked” articles as “Best Of” articles, so that I can share my favorite essays at the end of the year. I started moving that way a little bit this year, but I was not perfectly disciplined about it and that list also had some disruption in my move back from Pocket to Instapaper once Kobo launched its Instapaper integration (in the wake of Pocket’s shutdown — more on that later!).

Notes

They’re 13½ and 11½, and while this is much older than many people let their children read the series, we’ve tried to guide our girls to fiction that works well for them at the ages they are with their own levels of sensitivity. One of them will almost certainly be pausing after the first three books, given the sharp increase in seriousness, tonal darkness, and psychological intensity from Goblet of Fire onwards. It’s a big shift! ↩︎