I was talking with Laura in a bar on Friday, and the topic of Goodreads and 2025 reading ambitions came up. I am regrettably addicted to Goodreads since deleting my Twitter two years ago and limiting my use of Instagram severely. My internet idling needs to manifest somewhere. In 2024, the Goodreads “Reading Goal” reached a compulsive head for me as the year-end got closer and achieving my goal of finishing 40 books became more and more out-of-reach. I picked up shorter and shorter books in order to log them, finish them quickly, and get closer to the end. This stalled when I read Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, a 120-page novel that is psychological, slow and creeping. It took me two weeks to finish this book - this was my Waterloo. I finished 38 books in 2024.
I recently read Hayley’s 2024 Book Report. Formatted in Google Sheets, I found it succinct, simple to follow and interesting. I was impressed at the volume of books she digested, and her ability to recall themes and plot months after finishing them. She told me she completed the report in the last few weeks of the year, rather than recording her thoughts as she finished each one. It was enlightening to look at the books read like a data-points in a graph, and trace her interests from year-start to year-end, how they deepened, veered, transformed. The impact each book had could be perceived by the specificity or vagueness applied in each entry.
While I was home for the holidays, I took a walk in the woods with my parents nearly every day. My father was trying to achieve 11,000 steps taken on average every day in 2024, and as 2025 approached he was behind and anxious he was not going to meet the quota he set out for himself. We took a hike in a metro park one day, and he urged us to walk with him back and forth from one end of the parking lot to the other, in order to inflate the number of steps he had taken that day. It occurred to me I was approaching reading in a similar way, namely avoiding long books I had bought months ago (i.e. A la recherche de temps perdu and The Golden Notebook), instead opting for short novels. This is all to say, I do not have a quantitative reading goal for 2025, but I aspire to turn my approach more holistically and read what draws me in regardless of how quickly I can finish it.
In our conversation Laura expressed she does not like Goodreads and has no interest in it, but she would appreciate a reading list from me to recommend books to for her if she felt bored or looking for inspiration. This idea tickled me because I love to talk about what I am reading, and I love to read the same books as my friends. Kait and I have done this for years, swapping books off of each others’ shelves, referring to our mutual book collection as a “lending library.” Also, it would be an amusing way to analyze books I have enjoyed recently in a more comprehensive, qualitative, vibes-based approach.
Following I will recommend a novel for every month of 2025 just in case you find yourself in a position and you don’t know what to read next. It seems simpler to narrow it down generically to novels only. Plus I don’t really read nonfiction so if you’re looking for that, you should go somewhere else.
January - Within a Budding Grove, Marcel Proust, 1918
This is the first book I am reading this year. I recommend it because the contemplative, anti-climactic nature of the work is cozy to read curled up at home. The work starts off at the New Years holidays, with pensive reflections as to what a New Year means for all of us.
“I might dedicate this new year, if I chose, to Gilberte, and as one bases a religious system upon the blind laws of nature, endeavor to stamp New Year’s Day with the particular image that I had formed of it; but in vain, I felt that it was not aware that people called it New Year’s Day, that it was passing in a wintry dusk in a manner that was not novel to me; in the gentle breeze that floated about the column of playbills I recognized, I had felt reappear the eternal, the universal substance, the familiar moisture, the unheeding fluidity of the old days and years.”(pg. 86)
February - Chilly Scenes of Winter, Anne Beattie, 1976
A novel about working a dead-end job and being heartbroken in a small American city during winter. The protagonists hang out with friends, listen to music, make each other dinner, and get drunk in empty bars. I suggest you read it in February because it is surprisingly romantic and there is a happy ending. (Not to spoil it)
March - Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence, 1920
An Edwardian courtship novel dripping with sexuality, humanity, ripeness. A philosophical work which discusses art for art’s sake, the role of men and women in relationships, the possibility of more than one kind of love. Dramatic, psychedelic action presents falling in love as melding your psyche with another’s. This is an essential novel to read in spring as the first spurts of sunshine warm our legs. In the words of Robert Duncan, ˆWe have susceptibilities, though. We have spring, the season when we are more sexually aroused than during the other three.”
April - Daybook, Anne Truitt, 1982
A monumental memoir bound by humility, I recommend this book to every creative woman I know. Anne Truitt reflects on conflicts and compartmentalization she experiences in her two most central roles of her life –- artist and mother. Her ability to recall memories in granular detail throughout her life impresses me. It’s also inspiring to read about her material struggle as a single mother and professional artist. A miraculous combination of domesticity and artistic philosophy.
“The first feelings of marriage are so heavenly. I remember I used to wake up on purpose just to feel how happy I was. The heady potpourri of marriage delighted me: the lavish closeness, the just balance between delight and responsibility, household decisions, the openendedness (the whole rest of our lives!), and the incredible beauty of being allowed to love someone as much as I wanted to.” (pg. 95)
May - Mating, Norman Rush, 1991
A great beach read with a little more depth tells the story of a narcissistic floundering grad student who falls in love with a successful anthropologist who runs an idealistic, female-only commune in the desert of Botswana, The first ~fantasy~ book on my list. It’s an adventurous, funny, sexy criticism of the most racist of all social sciences. There is also some humorous debate of the Shakespeare authorship question. I enjoyed reading it and traveling to Africa in my imagination.
June - A Nest of Ninnies, John Ashbery and James Schuyler, 1969
I bought this book at Spoonbill and the dry older woman who works there said wryly, “this is a very funny book.” A loose story of a group of friends in Long Island, as they travel to New York, Paris, Miami, Italy, fall in love, marry, lose their jobs, get new jobs, written by two of prolific 20th century American poets. Referential to culture both high and low. You will learn all kinds of ‘50s dinner party jellos, ices, dips, and spreads. It’s as pleasant and light as an early summer breeze.
July - The Bell, Iris Murdoch, 1958
The story of a priest who founds an alternative community outside a Benedictine abbey and the odd characters this new way of living attracts, specifically the young man he had an affair with while the priest was teaching at a boys’ school and the young man was a student. The priest struggles with his urges to bury himself in his work and his inability to resist temptation, all the while seeking advice from the nuns who live at the Abbey who are locked away in service to the Lord. This novel mixes sex and religion in Murdoch’s immaculate style.
August - The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima, 1954
Descriptions of rural island life in Japan and how the ocean impacts their daily lives, foregrounding a love story. The setting, a remote island off Japan’s coast untouched by industrialism and still dominated by tradition feels like a work of imagination. One can close their eyes and hear the ocean lull and see the cliffs and the lighthouse.
September - Bid Me To Live, H.D., 1960
A roman a clef tells of memories locked in an apartment during the Blitz in London, a failing marriage with a poet, his love affair with the upstairs neighbor, an emotional affair with D.H. Lawrence, and escaping London finally for the beach. A treasure of modern prose, read it in September which is H.D.’s birth and death month. At the end she goes into a tangent about Lawrence’s physical similarity to Van Gogh.
October - Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet, 1986
I guess I recommend this book in October as a remembrance of the atrocities of October 2023. However this book does not pretend to be a history or an analysis of fedayeen tactics during the ‘70s. Written in Jean Genet’s characteristic stream of consciousness style, this book it one man’s account living with Palestinian guerrillas (is that an accurate word to use here?) in Joradan/East Palestine, and the impressions they left on his soul. He searches for a man and his mother whose home he spent the night in during an Israeli siege. I think this book is fairly un-polemical and even suggests ideas that modern leftists would reject or classify as problematic. There is little “future” or political ideation involved. Genet captures the contradictory nature of the fedayeen’s fight, i.e. Jordan, Israel, and America (in that order) are their worst enemies yet they aspire to a European-model nation state? The fact is they have never considered victory to be theirs. They are pure revolutionaries, pure energy, joy, brotherhood, and Islam is their dogma. It’s nonetheless hard to argue with someone who was there. The story is egoless and grounded in first-hand experience.
November - Three Lives, Gertrude Stein, 1909
I know, I know.. you hate Gertrude Stein. Her style is horrendously boring and unreadable and you know the Melanctha chapter uses the *n* word and Stein is a racist who received protection from the Nazis… but hear me out. This novel made me feel connected to my 20th century relatives who immigrated from Germany and worked as cobblers in Philadelphia. It never occurred to me before to contemplate their day lives, their passions, how they spoke and how they lived. It’s astounding to read about Baltimore as an industrial city — not post-industrial. Let the repetitive nature of the text wash over you until you’re numb to it and you can reach the text’s living heart. This text moved me to tears. I cannot name another American writer who derives inspiration from the American language. This book is if Huckleberry Finn was good.
December - Pan, Knut Hamsun, 1894
The afore-mentioned Norwegian proto-modernist… This is a gorgeous love story told beside the passage of the seasons as a metaphor for passion; the budding spring, burning intensity of summer, withering fall, and cold winter. It’s a short and surprisingly simple novel that takes place in the backwoods of Norway. It’s very masculine, a young boy lives in a hunting cabin and befriends the local aristocrat and his daughter. In the preface of the Penguin Classics edition there is a note about the difficulty translating all of the Norway-specific bird names. In summer the sun never sets.