2025 in Reading
My favorite books of the year and a few thoughts
At the start of 2025, I predicted my reading theme would be time travel. I had just inhaled the first two volumes of On The Calculation of Volume, and I began thinking about the body and memories surrounding illness as a narrative around time travel. Fast forward to the end of 2025, and while I still feel that part of this idea is accurate, it’s also taken on a far more different shape than I had realized. That is, until I found myself sitting with my favorite seven books of the year.
Stillness, sitting, resting, care, and deep listening carried me through this year’s reading. From a memoir about bodies and borders, to another memoir about chronic illness, nature, and not getting better. A poetry collection as an accessibility museum. To a classic feminist thinker on breast cancer. Into fiction that sat with discomfort, allowing both narrators and the reader to question and seek answers from within. Where repetition, death, and obsession hold us back while trying to pull us forward. Writers play with fantastical narrative structures, revealing themselves through their creative projects.
Here are a few short sentences about each book. You can find my full thoughts and longer reviews of each book in my monthly archives! *I have not placed books in order of favorites.*
The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza bears witness to Palestinian heritage, the current genocide, bodies, and their borders. Focusing on Aziza’s near-death experience with an eating disorder in 2019, being hospitalized, and entering the pandemic shortly after, where she struggles to survive and begins excavating her family history in Palestine.
To Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better by Polly Atkin. A personally insightful and eye-opening memoir, I began reading it the day after my official diagnosis of hEDS (hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome), the same condition as Atkin. I read this memoir while adjusting to medication, feeling my mind slip as my joints reconfigured, feeling soothed by the dog-eared pages and underlined lines where our bodies intertwined in a shared understanding. A memoir that beautifully melds the body in pain and the body in conversation and a part of the natural world, not through the toxicity of the “nature cure,” but nature as an enrichment to our lives.
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde, the feminist writer, poet, and thinker, whose book reads as a manifesto through cancer’s silencing to transform language into action. Reshaping its silence into profound, piercing language and a rally to action.
Hardly Creatures by Rob Macaisa Colgate, a poetry collection in which accessibility is envisioned through poems as an accessible museum, where Colgate has created his own “Access Legend”—these symbols are included with each poem throughout the nine sections of the book, which serve as a visual museum. Where metaphorical benches of rest exist within its many accessible galleries.
On The Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara Haveland. A book where our narrator, Tara Selter, wakes up and repeats the same day, November 18th, on an endless loop. Where repetition allows the mind to think, but also deteriorates our ability and desire to break our loops. (As of writing this, I have read Volume III and can say these books go places and continue to propel the narrative forward while also questioning our current culture and society’s many ills.)
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, a novel of deep sadness and obsession with the past. Following Cyrus Shamas, an orphaned and recovering addict, and the son of Iranian immigrants, who finds it difficult to want to stay alive, becomes obsessed with the idea of having a meaningful death. Leading him to sit in the company of another as an art performance, but with nowhere else to be but in each other’s company, and in that stillness, truly listening. (I’m intentionally being vague.)
My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman, a book that plays with genre—an interview with the author about the book you are currently reading about her working on, a conversation with the self as writer and creator. It’s about the conversations between an artist and her drawings, and a writer and her own discussions with writing a lesbian romance that breaks all the cliches, tropes, and pitfalls of other lesbian novels. A true delight of a book.
Coming soon!
December 2025 Archive
2026 Reading Outlook/Substack Goals
A few questions for you!
How was your 2025 in reading?
Favorite book(s)?
What book left the biggest impact on you?
Any theme or idea(s) you carried throughout your year of books?
Beginning in 2026! Reading The Body, a book club that will focus on the body through disability, mental illness, chronic illness, disability justice, and more, since the body can never be contained. We will explore genres from memoir to poetry, fiction, and beyond.
