2025 Reading List
Let’s start with some stats: I read 13 books this year, which is 2 fewer than last year. 4 of those were fiction, which is 1 higher than last year! Not having a behemoth like Infinite Jest backing everything up helped me knock down 33% more fiction books. As usual, Art/Design/Creativity books dominated my mindshare (7 in total).
As usual, you can view my entire list and what I’m currently reading on the public Notion site. And here’s my posts for 2024, 2023, 2022, and… I’ll stop there.
Faves
In no particular order, some faves include:
- The Perfectionists Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler. I just wrote a blog post of my favorite quotes from this one, but this had a lot of advice to help me harness my perfectionist tendencies for positive ends rather than try to suppress them. Highly recommended to any recovering perfectionists, high achievers, type A folks, etc.
- I liked all the fiction books I read (Big Swiss [funny, odd, thought-provoking, unique], Cloud Atlas [which I’ve wanted to read forever and really enjoyed his writing, so I’m glad I got to this. Cool narrative structure too], and A Visit From the Goon Squad [time is definitely a goon, man. I recently learned there’s a follow up to this so that’s going to the top of the to-read list]), with the exception of Underworld by Don DeLillo. Unlike Cloud Atlas, I found the novel’s structure to be confusing and hard to follow (after I had the structure explicitly laid out for me by the author it made more sense, but that was after I read it and, at best, it would have marginially helped me read the book). It was sprawling and hard to follow. It spans decades. Some sections had no names so you had to figure out the where/when/who of the scene via context clues, which was too much work thank you. I have a lot of gaps in knowledge of this book because I regularly could not remember who was who or what they were doing lol. Also the quote-unquote “plot” is thin and doesn’t have much resolution. Thematically has some interesting ideas but they never quite “clicked” for me. I need to read a summary of what happened and key takeaways and then re-read it and maybe it will click (but no I won’t actually re-read it, too many other books).
What kept me going? DeLillo is an excellent writer and some of this turns of phrase and ways of describing people/moods/emotions is so spot on. I’ve read some of his other work and really liked it, and this is supposed to be his best so I was disappointed and surprised to not like it more.
Anyone else out there have a different take? Sound off in the comments! (lol there are no comments but you’ll find a way to reach me). - Make (Sneaky) Art by Nishant Jain. Another one from which I wrote a blog post of selected notes. I’m including it here not because it’s the best book on drawing or sketching or anything, but because it lowered the bar on sketching and has helped me start sketching what I see more, even if it’s for 5 minutes or something small or just for me.
- Also, the Saul Bass book was really well done and beautiful to look at. I didn’t realize how sprawling is oeuvre was so it was inspiring to see all his work collected in one place.
The List
- The Perfectionists Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler 👍
- Learn More Faster by Michael Margolis 👍
- Cue The Sun! The invention of reality TV by Emily Nussbaum 👏
- An Unfinished Love Story: A personal history of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin 👍
- Creative Block: Advice and projects from 50 successful artists by Danielle Krysa
- Big Swiss by Jen Beagin 🐝
- Creative Acts for Curious People by Sarah Stein Greenberg
- Made by James: The honest guide to creativity and logo design by James Martin
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell 👍
- A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan 🎸
- Underworld by Don DeLillo
- Make (Sneaky) Art by Nishant Jain 🧑🎨
- Saul Bass: a Life in Film and Design by Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham 👍