A Year of Reading

izpticadraws
Dec 29, 2025
7 min read

Looking back at the books I read this year, one thing is obvious: I wasn’t reading to escape. I was reading to understand. This was not a year of comfort reads or pleasant distractions. It was a year of bodies, death, power, systems, gender, grief, and the quiet violence woven into everyday life. Here’s a full list, in no particular order (not even chronological):

Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali
The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
Love in Exile by Shon Faye
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World - Naomi Klein
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
The Collector by John Fowles
All That Remains: A Life in Death by Dame Sue Black
Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind by Dame Sue Black
Dear Life: A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss by Rachel Clarke
Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam
A Short History of the World According to Sheep by Sally Coulthard
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law by Kate Morgan
The Body Machines by Alexander Bard
What We Fear Most: A Psychiatrist’s Journey to the Heart of Madness by Ben Cave
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Salt Slow by Julia Armfield
Empire of Ants: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth's Tiny Conquerors by Olaf Fritsche and Susanne Foitzik
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
A Tomb With a View – The Stories & Glories of Graveyards by Peter Ross
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Daniel Maté and Gabor Maté
We Should All Be Birds: A Memoir by Brian Buckbee and Carol Ann Fitzgerald
Penance by Eliza Clark
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark
Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg
Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Kathryn Mannix
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Come as You Are by Emily Nagoski
Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert
Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns by Andrea Gibson
The Madness Vase by Andrea Gibson

To track my reads, I used StoryGraph this year! Not only is everything beautifully organized, it honestly makes tracking my reading so much fun – seeing my stats, charts, and how everything connects. I love that I can log books the moment I finish them and get these little insights about my reading habits.

Here are a few highlights from my 2025 reading:

Total pages read: 16,225
Average time to finish a book: 5 days
Most active months: January, February & August
Non-fiction vs Fiction: 65% nonfiction and 35% fiction
Genres: literary (14 titles), LGBTQIA+ (13), memoir (12), history (8)
Moods: reflective (34 titles), informative (22), emotional (19), dark (16)
Page counts: 50% under 300 pages, 42% between 300–499, 8% over 500

I also made a table in Pages on my iPad, where I wrote down my immediate impressions and a short summary after finishing each book. Looking back, some themes kept appearing throughout the year, and I want to highlight a few titles that stood out in those categories.

The Body as Evidence

Many of the books I was drawn to this year circled around the body – not as something to perfect or optimise, but as something vulnerable, political, and finite. With the End in Mind, When Breath Becomes Air, The Right to Sex, Come As You Are, Female Masculinity, All That Remains, Being Mortal – together they dismantle the fantasy that our bodies belong only to us. Bodies are shaped by medicine, culture, trauma, economics, and expectation.

Death appears repeatedly, stripped of symbolism and treated as fact. Through medical memoirs and forensic writing, death becomes less abstract and more present. Not less painful, but less hidden.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanthi

When Breath Becomes Air is devastating in its restraint. What stayed with me wasn’t the tragedy itself, but the clarity with which Paul Kalanithi writes about ambition, identity, and meaning once the future collapses. There’s no sentimentality here, no heroic framing of illness. Just an honest reckoning with the fact that so much of who we think we are is built on the assumption of time.

This is the book that broke me open, made me cry like I hadn’t in years, and yet somehow left me feeling more alive than anything else I read this year.

All That Remains by Sue Black

All That Remains approaches death from a completely different angle, yet lands just as heavily. Sue Black writes about human remains with precision and respect, stripping away fear through knowledge. The book quietly insists that death is not grotesque or abstract – it is physical, ordinary, and deeply human. In doing so, it removes some of its power to terrify and replaces it with understanding.

Sue takes us through so many fascinating, often brutal, but above all deeply human stories set right in the middle of death. That’s probably why the book stayed with me so strongly. And on top of that, the science of our bodies is endlessly fascinating!

Women Who Refuse to Be Palatable

The fiction I read this year was often dark, unsettling, and unapologetically centred on women. I Who Have Never Known Men, Boy Parts, Penance, The Book of X, Our Wives Under the Sea, Salt Slow, Ghost Wall don’t aim to soothe the reader. They expose shame, control, isolation, desire, and violence without offering neat resolutions. I was drawn to titles that function as studies of obsession, longing, performance, and the desire to be seen.

A recurring pattern emerges: women who are too much or not enough – too sexual, too cold, too quiet, too angry. These stories make it clear how narrow the space is for female existence, and how costly it can be to step outside it.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

I Who Have Never Known Men is not what I expected – a strange, little book that stays with you, keeps you questioning long after you’ve finished.

I loved how spare, bleak, and haunting it was! Its power lies in what it refuses to explain. Deprivation, confinement, and the absence of men are not metaphors to be solved, but conditions to be endured. The novel asks what remains of a person when history, language, and social structures are stripped away – and offers no comforting answer!

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

The Centre feels like a quieter, more contemporary horror. Beneath its minimal surface is a sharp critique of belonging, ambition, and the subtle violence of elite spaces.

What unsettled me most was how familiar its dynamics felt: the desire to be chosen, the willingness to endure discomfort for excellence, and the way exclusion is framed as personal failure rather than structural design.

Systems That Shape Us

Speaking of which : non-fiction this year repeatedly pointed away from personal failure and toward structural design.Technofeudalism, Doppelganger, Nexus, The Anxious Generation, The Body Machines all interrogate the systems we live inside: technology, capitalism, information networks, and digital identities. The common thread is unsettling but simple – many of our anxieties are not individual pathologies but predictable outcomes of the environments we inhabit.

These books don’t claim the system is broken. They show it’s working exactly as it was designed - and honestly, that’s kind of heartbreaking.

What This Year of Reading Tells Me

This year I kept gravitating toward the things we’re usually taught to avoid – death, trauma, power, systemic harm, bodies that break down, minds that don’t behave the way they’re supposed to.

I wasn’t reading in search of comfort or reassurance – or so I thought. Yet, in a way, that’s exactly what I found: the quiet reminder that I’m not alone in questioning, in feeling like the world is sometimes trying to run me down. I read because I wanted things to feel true, for my body to feel alive and fleeting. I wanted to feel, more vividly than ever, just how temporary I am on this beautiful planet we call home. Not to dwell in sadness, but to recognize a simple fact: life is fragile. And it’s precisely this awareness – the mix of awe and sheer terror – that keeps me living, that keeps me fascinated and utterly captivated by existence.

If reading is a conversation, then this year was full of the difficult ones – the conversations you don’t necessarily enjoy in the moment, but that linger, haunt, and transform you long after. They don’t make life easier or prettier, but they make it sharper, more legible. And sometimes, that kind of clarity is the kindest gift a book can offer.