So far in 2025, I’ve read 4 books:
Ratings legend:
| ★★★★★ | Completely enthralling, couldn’t put it down. and/or More than just entertaining (e.g., educational, enlightening). Would highly recommend. |
| ★★★★☆ | Really great book in all respects with perhaps some minor flaws. Would definitely recommend. |
| ★★★☆☆ | Average. An entertaining read but probably forgettable. Might or might not recommend. |
| ★★☆☆☆ | Finished, but did not like. Would not recommend. |
| ★☆☆☆☆ | Abandoned before finishing, usually because it was poorly written or just uninteresting to me. |
The books I’ve read so far in 2025—summary
Clicking on the title of a book will take you to its detailed entry further down on the page, which contains a description of the book and some thoughts I had about it.
| Number | Title | Author | Format | Pages | Duration | Rating | Genres |
| 4 | Some Trick (Abandoned) |
Helen DeWitt | 197 | 01/16/25 – 01/19/25 (4 days) | ★☆☆☆☆ | literary fiction, short stories | |
| 3 | All the World Beside (Abandoned) |
Gerrard Conley | 353 | 01/15/25 – 01/15/25 (1 day) | ★☆☆☆☆ | literary fiction, historical fiction, queer, LGBT, Romance | |
| 2 | All the Ugly and Wonderful Things | Bryn Greenwood | 421 | 01/10/25 – 01/13/25 (4 days) | ★★★★☆ | fiction, justice, domestic abuse, drugs, drama, crime, contemporary romance | |
| 1 | Arthur & George | Julian Barnes | 388 | 01/01/25 – 01/09/25 (9 days) | ★★★☆☆ | fiction, historical fiction, mystery, British literature, crime, justice |
The books I’ve read so far in 2025—details
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| 📕10-word summary: Thirteen short stories; didn’t understand 2 of the first 5. 🖌6-word review: Not my cup of tea. Abandoned. |
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| Description:* [DeWitt’s] jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.” *From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: Read the description. ‘Nuff said. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Two men negotiate dangerous, secret love in Puritan New England. 🖌6-word review: So lyrical it obfuscates plot. Abandoned. |
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| Description:* Cana, a utopian vision of 18th-century Puritan New England. To the outside world, Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and his family stand as godly pillars of their small-town community, drawing Christians from across the New World into their fold. One such Christian, physician Arthur Lyman, discovers in the minister’s words a love so captivating it transcends language. As the bond between these two men grows increasingly passionate, their families must contend with a tangled web of secrets, lies, and judgments that threaten to destroy them in this world and the next. And when the religious ecstasies of the Great Awakening begin to take hold, igniting a new era of zealotry, Nathaniel and Arthur search for a path out of an impossible situation, imagining a future for themselves that has no name. Their wives and children must do the same, looking beyond the known world for a new kind of wilderness, both physical and spiritual.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: “Lyrical writing is used to create a piece that feels more deeply evocative than usual, thanks to its song-like, poetic property. In a way, it’s prose that sounds more like a poem.” I’m not a fan of it. I have survived some lyrical writing: In 2020, I read What Belongs to You, and although containing lyrical writing and having a 40-page paragraph, I not only finished it but gave it 4 stars. In 2022, I read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, for whose 6-word review, I wrote, “Chapter 9 is so lyrically beautiful,” and I gave it 5 stars. However, when the writing is so lyrical that I can’t follow the plot, that’s a deal-breaker—as was the case with this book. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Young girl negotiates her family’s abusive, criminal, and dysfunctional lifestyle. 🖌6-word review: Gloom, despair, agony abundant. Unconventionally triumphant. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “I mostly liked high school. I liked learning things. How numbers work together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: lassitude, keening | |||||||||
| Description:* As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It’s safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight. Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father’s thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold. By the time Wavy is a teenager, her relationship with Kellen is the only tender thing in a brutal world of addicts and debauchery. When tragedy rips Wavy’s family apart, a well-meaning aunt steps in, and what is beautiful to Wavy looks ugly under the scrutiny of the outside world. Kellen may not be innocent, but he is the fixed point in Wavy and Donal’s chaotic universe. Instead of playing it safe, Wavy has to learn to fight for Kellen, for her brother, and for herself.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: This is the third book in 2025 for our Mostly Social Book Club. There are several trigger-warning-worthy topics covered in this book—primarily for domestic abuse and rape; although, one reviewer purports: “trigger warning basically for everything.” Goodreads lists “young adult” as one of the genres of this book, which is mind-boggling to me. I spent a lot of time while reading it in a mental debate about the definition of pedophilia, while “seeking first to understand, then to be understood.” (And, yes, I know Stephen Covey was a homophobe.) I look forward to our book club discussion about this book when we get to it. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Two distinctive men’s lives intersect in a most unlikely way. 🖌6-word review: Slow until the connection is made. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “Flowers. Each year, without fail, on the 15th of March, Jean receives a single snowdrop with a note from her beloved Arthur. A white flower once a year for Jean, and white lies all the year round for his wife.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: succoured, cynosure, glaucous, locum-tenens, amanuensis, packstaff, oleaginous, paterfamilias, purlieus, tantalus, coir, drayman, carapace, interregnum, fettle, jocosities, febrile, mendacious, mephitic, fulminate, pusillanimous, palaver | |||||||||
| Description:* As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later—one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife—their fates become inextricably connected.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: I received this book a couple of years ago from my friend Susan Katz. Thanks, Susan! I found the first half of it slow moving, during the telling of the story of each of the main characters, Arthur & George (duh). I put this book down a lot, which is why it took me 9 days to read it. In addition to (the first half) not being riveting, it’s a pretty dense book comprising (as you can see by my list) a lot of words I had to look up while reading—it sure would have been easier reading it on a Kindle. Learning about Arthur and George in alternating story snippets, we find out who Arthur (really) is a good way into his story—and since I hadn’t read anything about the book beforehand, it was a nice surprise that kicked up my interest in the book a little bit. I considered abandoning this book a couple of times, but in the end, I was glad I stuck with it. With that said, I wouldn’t recommend it without a couple of caveats, which is why I gave it 3 stars (Average. An entertaining read but probably forgettable. Might or might not recommend) instead of 4 (Really great book in all respects with perhaps some minor flaws. Would definitely recommend). I see that this book was made into a 3-part 2015 PBS Masterpiece TV mini series, but I don’t plan to watch it. | |||||||||
Go to my books read list for: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019