Reading in 2025

+ other written media consumption.

This is for my personal logging. Stars(*) for books I would personally recommend to a friend. Carets(^) for books I would personally recommend to an enemy.

1. Vox by Nicholson Baker *

2. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

3. The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

4. Nails and Eyes by Kaori Fujino

5. The Employees by Olga Ravn

6. Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima *

7. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie ^

8. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

9. Health and Safety: A Breakdown by Emily Witt

10. Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis ^

11. On Freedom by Maggie Nelson

12. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner *

13. The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

14. Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker

15. The Ants by Sawako Nakayasu *

16. Foreverism by Grafton Tanner *

17. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

18. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone

19. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand ^

20. Bunny by Mona Awad ^

21. All Fours by Miranda July *

22. Xala by Sembène Ousmane *

23. Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson

24. Severance by Ling Ma

25. Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva

26. The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood ^

27. Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion

28. The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan *

29. Death in Her Hands by Otessa Moshfegh ^

30. Chromophobia by David Batchelor

31. The Fraud by Zadie Smith ^

32. The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis *

33. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

34. The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada

35. Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner ^

36. Earth Angel by Madeline Stevens

37. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami

Also reading in 2025:

• You and Your Research (Richard Hamming, 1986)

• Literally everything Corin Wagen writes

  • I think about this post so often

• Will all our drugs come from China? (Alex Telford, 2024)

• So much Asterisk Mag

• So much Asimov Press

• So much Works in Progress

• Claus Wilke

• Stephen Turner

• Abhishaike Mahajan

• Elliot Hershberg

In progress:

• Accelerando by Charles Stross

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Comments:

Big Bret Easton Ellis year! More genre hopping than last year but still stuck on lit fic. Would not be surprised if I only read Substack next year tbh. Read a couple of titles at complete random...honestly regretted most of those (Impro, Death in Her Hands, Solar Politics). My tolerance for reading disinteresting books is at an all-time low. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Next year will try to finish reading Nicholson Baker’s fiction catalogue. Other than that I don’t have any reading goals other than read things that make me smarter, more interesting, and more informed!

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To be read (maybe):

• Your Name Here by Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff

• Blockchain Chicken Farm and Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

• U and I by Nicholson Baker

• Masks by Fumiko Enchi

• Flesh by David Szalay

• Vertical Motion by Can Xue

• Cool For You by Eileen Myles

• Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

• Last Words From Montemartre by Qiu Miaojin

• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

• Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro

• We Computers by Hamid Ismailov

• The Pilgrimage by John Broderick

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

• Satantango by László Krasznahorkai

• Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz

• Stainless by Todd Grimson

• Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai