2025 Books I've Read

 

Here are my ratings for the 54 books I read in the past 12 months.  In case you've forgotten, the scale goes like this: 1 - pass, 2 - some good some bad, 3 - recommended, 4 - can't stop raving about it, 5 - fundamentally changed my worldview. 

Please weigh in with recommendations. Especially seeking to diversify into more fiction and more non-white and female authors. Also trying to sprinkle in longer reads and classics. Tell me your must-reads!

Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World (Cooper) 4

Monster (Myers) 4

Bronx Masquerade (Grimes) 4

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (Hannah-Jones) 4

Selected Poems (Brooks) 4

Stay True: A Memoir (Hsu) 4

A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation in America (Martin) 3

The Diary of a Young Girl (Frank) 4

In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life (Schneider) 3

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (Oliver) 4

Who You Are: Internalizing the Gospel to Find Your True Identity (Cha) 4

We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (hooks) 3

A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial (Nguyen) 3

How to Raise Kids Who Aren't Assholes: Science-Based Strategies for Better Parenting—from Tots to Teens (Moyer) 3

Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson) 3

The Poet X (Acevedo) 3

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Gabriele, Perry) 4

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (Harjo) 3

Jane Eyre (Bronte) 3

Merging Colleges for Mutual Growth: A New Strategy for Academic Managers (Martin, Samels) 3

When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir (Santiago) 4

Jerusalem (Moore) 3

Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel (Habib) 3

Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories (Rothschild) 3

Romney: A Reckoning (Coppins) 4

Les Miserables (Hugo) 3

Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You (Stulberg) 4

The Family Chao (Chang) 3

Look at Me (Egan) 3

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet (Lorenz) 4

Thicker Than Water: A Memoir (Washington) 4

Unf*ck Your Habitat: You're Better Than Your Mess (Hoffman) 2

Being Henry: The Fonz…and Beyond (Winkler) 4

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (Knight) 4

The Loneliness Files (Dixon) 3

Ladysitting: My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century (Cary) 4

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (van der Kolk) 4

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America (Harriot) 4

Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World (MacPhail) 4

LeBron (Benedict) 4

Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation (McGrath) 4

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery (Rutkow) 4

Let Us Descend (Ward) 3

The Alchemist (Coelho) 3

Three-Body Problem (Liu) 3

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Bohannon) 4

Bicycle Diaries (Byrne) 4

This is Your Mind on Plants (Pollan) 4

The Message (Peterson) 5

Straight Talk, No Chaser: How to Find, Keep, and Understand a Man (Harvey) 3

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (McBride) 4

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican (Posner) 4

Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 2

Pale Fire (Nabokov) 3