2025, in books

Inspired by Preethi Vemu 's yearly recaps on the books she reads, adding my own list of what shaped my thinking this year. Every year I set a goal of reading at least 30 books, which is around 2-3 books a month. There are some years where I meet or exceed and some I don't, this year I got to a 23/30.

More importantly, this year I realised the genres I enjoy reading - poetry, non-fiction (essays, mostly) and classics. I still struggle with keeping my motivation on, to read the classics, but AI is helping me, I engage in a dialogue with what I understood for each chapter and ask the assistant to help me get a narrative of the key ideas and continue to build on them as I move along - been using that to read The Rebel by Albert Camus and hoping to finish it this year.

Books that stood out for me, listed below in the order of the aftertaste I was left with, are -

1. Upstream by Mary Oliver - One of the greatest joys of my life was discovering Mary Oliver’s work; she made me look at her naturally crafted strings of words as peonies, blue irises, lilies, and petunias of this sun-kissed beautiful earth. My relationship with them will never be the same again, I discovered her through  an article on The Marginalian and picked up her Blue horses and continued to read the other ones like, Blue iris, Why I wake early, but Upstream was the book that left an indelible mark for me and I understood why that is, as she states in this book - I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate.
2. Novelist as a vocation by Haruki Murakami - A quick disclaimer - long time Murakami fan - so there is a bias here and I absolutely loved The city and its uncertain walls that I read this year too. I enjoy his craft and his writing and this book gave me an insight into understanding the writing process of Murakami in this no-holds-barred conversational style book , which is inspiring, to put it mildly. The words that stayed with me - ‘The novel I produce may be praised by people (if it turns out well), but no one seems to appreciate the process itself that led to it. That’s a burden a writer must carry alone.’ I wanted to go back and reread all of his books so I know what he meant when he was talking about how his style evolved or how his characters pushed him by taking a life of their own
3. Consider the lobster and other essays by David Foster wallace - I am still hopeful that one day I will finish reading Infinite jest, and chanced upon this book in Luna, our local book store and picked it up on a whim to get a glimpse into how he writes and I am blown away by his wit and his extensive footnotes. This is a collection of reporting he has done, in no particular order, and a great insight into the minds of one of the most fascinating writers of our time. In the essay where he is dissing a tennis player’s autobiography , DFW writes ‘Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves’  - is a crafty, clever and poignant portrayal of most of the sports fans
4. Samarkand by Amin Malouf - One of the few historical fictions I read, I was drawn to it because it was centred around Rubaiyat by Omar Khayaam which had been one of my favourites,  and these lines - ‘Samarkand, the most beautiful face the Earth has ever turned towards the sun.’ The pace was gripping and I got to learn and appreciate a lot more about The Silk Route and The Omar of Nishapur.
5. Die with Zero by Bill Perkins - I was expecting this book to give me numbers and some financial wisdom on maximising savings, however it turned out to be a set of seemingly simple insights like - don't try to save when you are young, give charity or inheritance when it matters and articulating that utility of money changes over time with good examples made this a refreshing read and anchor in some of the choices I make.

Other notable mentions are  Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong  bookshop where I discovered Tim Minchin’s - You dont have to have a dream and other life lessons, which is sharp, funny and painfully practical, and  the charming prose of Amor Towles - A Gentleman in Moscow , Pico Iyer’s beautiful essays in The half known life - in search of paradise and the classic - Fahrenheit 451. I am glad to have read some brilliant and delicious writing this year.