I wrote and illustrated a book in 2025, so the purpose of reading was, primarily, not for more writing, but to escape writing. I didn’t give myself any quotas or any goals. I didn’t worry about what I should or shouldn’t be reading. In fact, after years of threatening to do as much, this was the year I read without giving a crap about how the list was going to look later.

I even told myself I wasn’t going to publish a reading list this year. But I’m publishing it here because a) I’m a completist and can’t stand to break my streak b) maybe it’ll encourage this new year of reading — yours and my own. (So far, I’ve read Sherlock Holmes stories and Montaigne essays, so: more of the same.)

This list is unranked and chronological. It’s not everything I read, but it’s what, at this moment, feels like it’s worth noting.

* * * WINTER * * *

Written Lives
Javier Marías

A book of short essays about writers. “Although I have enjoyed writing all my books,” Marías wrote, “this was the one with which I had the most fun.” I had a lot of fun reading it, thanks to Elisa Gabbert’s annual year-end list of every book she read.

Good start to the year, and set up a theme, as I’d go on to read several writer biographies. (Also seeded the idea of finally reading Arthur Conan Doyle, and set me to thinking about writers who later regret their creations and try to either destroy or disown them…)

 

Love is a Mix Tape
Rob Sheffield

A memoir about “love and loss, one song at a time.”

Several people recommended this memoir to me after learning about my monthly mixtape project.

“There are all kinds of mix tapes,” Sheffield writes. “There is always a reason to make one.”

(Right after this I read Peter Ames Carlin’s The Name of this Band is R.E.M.)

 

Brothers
Alex Van Halen

“The magic was in the first years, when we didn’t know what we were doing, when we were willing to try anything.” Alex Van Halen’s memoir Brothers is the 3rd good book I’ve read about Van Halen. (The other two are Crazy From The Heat and Van Halen Rising.)

Forget Bob Dylan — who I love, btw — I want a biopic about the little immigrant Van Halen brothers coming over on a boat and playing piano for the captain, landing in sunny Pasadena without speaking English, and becoming the biggest rock band in the world.

 

Story of A Poem
Matthew Zapruder

“Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.” That’s the great James Tate, quoted at the beginning of this memoir. I have a theory that you can tell whether you’ll like a book just by reading the epigraphs. In this memoir, Zapruder shares the ongoing drafts of a poem he’s working on — very #showyourwork — while also meditating on his experiences with writing poetry and being the father of an autistic son. Could a book be more up my alley? The way he unpacks his feelings about giftedness, overachieving, language, disability, and difference really spoke to me.) Check out his typewriter interview. (I also read Why Poetry.)

 

Four Quartets
T.S. Eliot

A re-read of one of my favorite books of poetry, and an excellent traveling companion:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

(Why haven’t I read more T.S. Eliot?!?)

 

Synth History (volumes 3 & 4)
Edited by Danz CM

I started following Synth History on Instagram, then bought up the zines they had in stock. High quality, and full of good interviews. 

Some of the best advice I heard last year was from musician Sasami in issue 4: “Get off your phone and touch an instrument instead.”

If you know me, you know the highest praise for a publication is, “good commode reading.” (The Idler falls in this category, as well. As does Montaigne’s Essays.)

 

* * * SPRING * * *

The Duane Moore Trilogy (The Last Picture Show, Texasville, Duane’s Depressed)
Larry McMurtry 

I started reading Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show after finally watching Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film adaptation. The minute I finished that novel, I started reading the sequel, Texasville, which came out in 1987 on the heels of McMurtry’s masterpiece, Lonesome Dove. It’s not as deep or quite as good as The Last Picture Show, but it’s funnier and more freewheeling. I then read the third in the trilogy, Duane’s Depressed, which came out in 1999. There are more Duane Moore books that McMurtry wrote, but 3 was just enough for me.

I also read most of Tracy Daughtery’s very good biography, Larry McMurtry: A Life. One thing McMurtry shares with the other two writers I read the most this year — Tolstoy and Conan Doyle — is that they didn’t think their most popular work was their best work. This is probably true of many artists. (McMurtry was one of the inspirations for my letter, “Your next best friend,” which is about, among other things, how “minor” books by your favorite writers are still majorly worth reading.)

 

How We Got Here
David Shields

A short book that attempts to trace the history of ideas — from Melville to Dostoevsky to Bloom to Zizek to Bannon — that brought us to this contemporary moment when “truthiness” rules the day.

I read it as a kind of sequel to Shields’ Reality Hunger, in which he argued that we crave “reality” because we experience hardly any for ourselves. (The way Shields uses quotes to build his argument was a big influence on Steal Like an Artist.)

 

Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life
Dan Nadel

A few years ago, I read an article about Taco Bell’s Innovation Kitchen, and wrote their “Distinctiveness Rule” down in my commonplace book: “You can change either the taste or the form, but you can’t change the taste and the form.” That’s what’s so interesting to me about Robert Crumb’s impact on comics, as put by Nadel himself: “There was this idea that Crumb was a bad boy breaking all the rules of the form. Actually he’s a traditionalist who figured out a way to use the language of comics to say entirely new things — to deal with adulthood in America in a frank and confrontational way, while maintaining unbelievable formal rigor.” (I also picked up Nadel’s companion anthology, Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979-2004.)

 

Muybridge
Guy Delisle

I think this book is a contemporary masterpiece?

A cartoonist at the top of his game, a perfect meeting of subject and medium, and beautiful book design by Drawn and Quarterly.

The story has it all: adventure, technological revolution, murder, etc. Much shorter than War and Peace — and it has pictures!

(Bonus: I left it on the coffee table and my 10-year-old actually read it a few times.)

 

Art Work: On The Creative Life
Sally Mann

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this followup to her brilliant 2015 “memoir with photographs,” Hold Still. Art Work seems to be somewhat inspired by her friend and pen pal Ted Orland’s creativity classic Art & Fear — typed excerpts from their letters are woven throughout. This book has more of a DGAF tone than Hold Still, I think, and it works best for me when Mann is telling stories instead of trying to extract a lesson for the reader. (There’s a chapter in particular about traveling to Qatar that I think is really excellent.) I think she gave me the nudge to finally read Tolstoy — check out her typewriter interview, which was wonderful.

 

* * * SUMMER * * *

War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy

At a certain point in the summer, I started telling people, “I only have time for work, family, and Tolstoy!”

I try to read a really big book every summer. This is one of the biggest, but it’s actually one of the easiest, I think. Once you get the families and the names straight, it’s an adventure-filled soap opera, with short chapters that make it easy to enjoy in little pieces over time.

It strikes me over and over again how the “classics” are almost always weirder than you think they are. Like, within 50 pages of W&P, a bunch of drunks have tied a policeman to a bear and thrown them in the river.

On the one hand, reading old books is a luxurious escape from your contemporary moment. On the other hand, it expands you in ways that make you more equipped to deal with your contemporary moment. While reading War and Peace, I marveled over and over again at how something written so long ago can be so applicable to our times while still being very much of its own time.

War and Peace is particularly interesting to think about in terms of “breaking bread with the dead” because it is a work of historical fiction. Tolstoy was, himself, breaking bread with the dead, writing about (mostly fictional, but some real) people in events that happened before he was even born. Like all novelists, he put bits and pieces of the people he knew into these fictional characters, perhaps wondering to himself who and what he would be had he been born just 50 years earlier.

While I was reading War and Peace, I wondered who I would be in that particular time and place, given the class and position of most of the people in my family tree. The answer: a peasant or a serf — essentially a slave — or, at the very most, a merchant. I certainly wouldn’t have a life where I got to sit around reading a 1200-page novel! (Reading old books often makes me grateful for contemporary life and its comforts, especially the ones I take for granted, like anesthesia and antibiotics. I was stuck on a plane sitting on a hot tarmac recently and asked myself, Well, would you rather be marching in Napoleon’s army through Russia?)

In fact, it wasn’t Natasha or the Prince Andrew who made the biggest impression on me in the book, but Platon Karatev, a peasant soldier that Pierre befriends in a prisoner of war camp. Platon has a profound effect on Pierre, leading him to a spiritual awakening. (Platon reminds me a little of Sancho Panza, who spends a great deal of Don Quixote spouting proverbs.) Ever since I read it, I’ve taken to repeating Platon’s nightly prayer, in a twangy Texan accent: “Lord, lay me down as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!”

A note on translation: I started with Pevear and Volokhonsky, assuming a contemporary translation would be better than an old one, but boy, was I wrong! I found things way, way easier-going when I switched to the Aylmer and Louise Maude translation.

 

Processing: 100 Comics That Got Me Through It
Tara Booth

I’m in awe of people who can really do color, and I find it really exciting when I see an artist using color in a way I’ve never seen before. Booth’s formally trained (and her grandparents are watercolor artists!) but her use of color is just so free and unexpected, it makes you want to experiment yourself and join along in the fun. Check her out on Instagram: @tarabooth. (A color tome by an old favorite of mine worth mentioning: Anders Nilsen’s Tongues.)

 

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
Ian Leslie

Picked this up thanks to my friend Alan Jacobs, who, as you can tell, inspires much of my writing. I find it significant that the book began its life as a 10,000-word essay called “64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney.” Every time I read a book about The Beatles it sends me on a Beatles binge. After I read this one, I watched a VHS rip of the original Anthology broadcast on ABC. (I think the absolute best book I’ve ever read about The Beatles is Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties.)

 

Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy

I let a month pass after finishing War and Peace, but then I decided I needed “God’s older brother” back in my life, so I once again traveled back to 19th century Russia. (The Rosamund Bartlett translation is great.)

I love Tolstoy because you get a third of a way into his book about a lady having an affair and the best chapter is about a dude experiencing a state of “flow” while mowing a field with his country peasants.

I read a bunch about Tolstoy while reading his novels. A.N. Wilson’s Tolstoy: A Biography is excellent.

Tolstoy learned to ride a bicycle when he was 67 years old. He’d just lost a son, and the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers gave him a bike and a free lesson. He got really into it and rode it around after his morning chores. I learned this fact in Elif Batuman’s essay, “Who Killed Tolstoy?” (Collected in The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a book that waited patiently for 15 years in my anti-library.) Tolstoy did a lot of things late in his life, like taking up tennis and driving his long-suffering wife Sofia crazy.

Probably the most illuminating thing I read about Tolstoy was Isaiah Berlin’s long essay, The Hedgehog and The Fox. The title refers to an Ancient Greek aphorism: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin uses the aphorism to explain that some writers are “foxes” — they “are fascinated by the infinite variety of things” — and some writers are “hedgehogs” — they “relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.” Berlin says that Tolstoy was a fox who really believed in being a hedgehog. Once you recognize this ongoing tension, Tolstoy’s life and work makes a lot more sense.

 

* * * FALL * * *

A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

That’s the opening of “The Green Fields of the Mind,” collected in this slim, wonderful volume. Recommended if you like thinking about America, baseball, and The Odyssey. (“Baseball is about going home, and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need. It tells us how good home is.”)

 

Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska
Warren Zanes

“Songs, unlike people, have remarkable patience as they wait for someone to hear what they’re saying.” I read this and listened to the album for the first time (!!!) in anticipation of the biopic and Walter Martin’s Springsteen Season. (I love the beginning of the book when Zane just lists the stuff that Springsteen was into while he was making Nebraska: Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop,” Hank Mizell’s “Jungle Rock,” Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People,” Hank Williams’s “A Mansion on the Hill,” and Robert Frank’s The Americans.)

 

The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories
Gianni Rodari

“Fairy tales… are useful for everyone, and not just for the dreamer.” One of the most gorgeously-produced books I read, with illustrations by Matthew Forsythe. (I’m a long-time fan — I actually own the original painting of the hippo in the book!) I first heard about it from Mac Barnett’s review in the NYTimes. You can read more about Rodari and his idea of “the fantastic binomial” — or, the creatively fruitful combination of two seemingly unrelated words — in The Marginalian. 

 

Stories by John Cheever

“Cheever’s is an autumnal world, all burning leaves and dying roses, rain-wet stones, house lights, ‘beards of gold-green weed.’”

In the fall, I spent some good time switching back and forth between reading The Journals of John Cheever and The Stories of John Cheever, which contains one banger after another: “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Enormous Radio,” “The Country Husband,” and especially “The Swimmer,” which I read around this time every year. (I love to listen to Anne Enright read it in her Irish accent.)

 

The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris

I saw a clip of Anthony Hopkins on Instagram, and the next day I thought, “Oh, maybe I’ll re-watch The Silence of the Lambs and answer some emails.” I got sucked in again by the opening titles, and two hours later, I had answered zero emails. That night I started (and spent the weekend finishing) the novel for the 3rd time.

 

Train Dreams
Denis Johnson 

“First he became aware how much he needed the winter to rest and mend; then he suspected the winter wasn’t long enough to mend him.” Yet another re-read, in anticipation of the film adaptation. (Which I still haven’t watched?!?) It’s as sad and beautiful as I remembered, but also funnier. I recommend listening to this 2003 event when Johnson read from the story and discussed his writing with writer Chris Offutt. Johnson’s writing advice: “Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.”

 

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.” To give my brain-attic a winter’s rest, I started reading a bunch of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, in their order of publication. I read the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, and then the The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which collects the short stories that first ran in The Strand Magazine and made the character famous. I continued with the story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and then novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. (Standard Ebooks has them all available on one handy page.) I also read critic Michael Dirda’s On Conan Doyle, a lovely short book I’d never heard of that I spotted on the shelf at the library — hooray for the serendipity of the stacks! 

 

The Three Cornered World
Nantsume Soseki (trans. Alan Turney)

I mentioned online I wanted to read a book that had the same vibe as Hiroshi Yoshimura’s music or the movie Perfect Days — what I call “Japanese chill.” More than one person recommended Nantsume Soseki’s 1906 novel, Kusamakura. The story is about an artist who retreats to a hot springs hotel in the mountains and meets a mysterious woman. (A fun complement to Sherlock, as the narrator spends much of his monologue discussing art-making and seems to have it out for detectives! “Once you start asking why, it all turns into detective work,” he says. “The usual novels are all invented by detectives… they’re utterly boring.”)

* * *

You can read my other reading years here.