2025 Books: A Year in Reading

Goodreads tells me I read 38 books this year—10,619 pages, average rating 4.5 stars. My highest-rated book was The Words of Jesus, which is literally just his words extracted from the Bible with zero context. Which tracks, being the actual Word(s?) of God.

You can export your stats as a CSV. Only the first "date read" gets recorded, so my rereads are lost to the void. My suffering: unquantified. Only my boss—who exports his Spotify data—would understand.

My taste in books, like most things in my life, is eclectic, odd, and mildly masochistic. I prefer nonfiction because if I hate the book, at least I learned something. Finishing fictional stories you hate has no educational upside to redeem the pain—you emerge with nothing but regret and strong opinions about minotaurs. So, I routinely pick up 300-page bricks on textile manufacturing history and then act surprised when "relaxing" leaves me more tired than before.

Favorites

Some of my favorite books are genuinely painful. Or boring. Or so encrusted with pretentious vocabulary that each page requires archaeological excavation. I don't know what this says about me, and I'm not interested in finding out. Regardless, this year's highlights:

1. The Happiness Project

This book handed me a simple revelation: my mood may not be anyone else’s fault, but it can be everyone else's problem whether I like it or not.

It's distressingly easy to coast through life neutral, unimpressed, and vaguely gripey—just "getting through the day" like survival is an achievement. And isn't visible happiness kind of rude when everyone around you is also drowning? Isn't joy just rubbing your wins in the faces of the less fortunate?

To the apathetic, excuse-generating Leenie: no. Happiness is contagious, and hiding it helps absolutely no one. I don't need to transform into a positivity gremlin terrorizing my loved ones with gratitude journals, but if I stop actively hiding joy, I might accidentally improve someone's day.

The book also introduced me to month-long resolutions, which are perfect for someone who routinely goes through cycles of overbooking, overwhelming, and overcorrecting. Try something properly for thirty days, keep it if it works, abandon it guilt-free if it doesn't — no need for the shame spiral of failing a year-long resolution by February. Take that, normal people!

2. Born a Crime

Making me laugh out loud at a book is a significant achievement. I am not a generous audience, but Trevor Noah managed it anyway.

His childhood was both deeply relatable and completely alien, and between stories of pirating CDs and catastrophic car failures, he slips in actual South African history—Apartheid, tribal politics, the linguistic chaos of a country with eleven official languages. Informative and funny. Are books legally allowed to be both?

3. Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time

I fell for Jennifer Wright's It Ended Badly years ago and have been chasing that high ever since. Her signature approach—gallows humor paired with plagues, murderers, and spectacular romantic disasters—is exactly my brand of unhinged.

Glitz, Glam covers Gilded Age socialites: the kind of people whose parties I would attend exactly once, out of morbid curiosity, before fleeing and never returning their calls. Real historical figures, viewed exclusively through their most humiliating moments, pettiest betrayals, and most catastrophic social failures. Mamie Fish once served turtle soup on horseback. Indoors. This is the history education I deserved.

4. The Lord of the Rings

When a book makes you feel like everyone within a five-mile radius should be holding a pipe by candlelight, contemplating mortality, it's doing something right.

The trilogy is one long urgent crawl, perpetually shadowed by doom. Every few pages Tolkien dangles a loose thread—some new species, some obscure dwarf clan with a tragic backstory—but you cannot stop because Frodo needs you.

I read sections aloud to a friend and discovered that of the many Elvish and Celtic names, I was most confident in pronouncing ‘Sam’. Silent reading lets you identify characters by how their names look on the page. Out loud, I resembled a kindergartener tripping over the alphabet. This happened more than five times. Fewer than twelve. I think.

I also read the Red Rising and Hunger Games trilogies this year. Same apocalyptic stakes, completely different texture. Red Rising's Darrow crashes and recovers at superhuman speed—the man is a rubber ball. Frodo, meanwhile, just deteriorates. Slowly. Relentlessly. No dramatic rebounds, no triumphant second winds. He trudges on, increasingly broken, and though he's a halfling, his relatability is increasingly human.

Final Thoughts

I missed my 45-book goal last year, which I'm choosing to interpret as "ambitious" rather than "delusional." Maybe I need fewer dense reads. Maybe I should track pages instead. Maybe quantified reading goals are simply a trap designed to make me feel inadequate about my hobbies.

But, because I always learn my lesson, I'm currently eleven pages into a chaos theory book. I already love it. I will finish it sometime in 2027, presumably while holding an empty pipe by candlelight.

The 2025 List

• Los Cretinos

• El Principe de las estrellas

• Born a Crime

• George Muller: Delighted in God

• The Scarlet Pimpernel

• The Minimalist Guide to Multifamily Investing

• Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time

• She Kills Me: The True Stories of History's Deadliest Women

• Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux

• The World According to Cunk

• St. Athanasius: The Life of St. Antony

• The Hunger Games trilogy

• The Silmarillion

• Big Dumb Eyes: Stories from a Simpler Mind

• Treasure Island

• The House in the Cerulean Sea

• My Happy Marriage, Vols. 3 & 8

• The Lord of the Rings trilogy

• The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

• The Happiness Project

• His Last Bow

• The Words of Jesus

• Making Sense of God

• The Valley of Fear

• Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

• Worship Matters

• The Upward Spiral

• Red Rising trilogy

• The Fabric of Civilization

• The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

• Sense and Sensibility

• Pride and Prejudice