The Books I Read in 2025

I am happily not an expert in anything...

Photo by Gülfer ERGİN on Unsplash

So it goes, and another year slips away. The year arrived quickly and was quickly spent and here I am in a chair, one now not my own, in a living room, one now not my own, scribbling notes. We are indeed temporary. The books I read for 2025 are not ordered or very curated, yet all of them added something more to life. I am happily not an expert in anything. I remain grateful for the more that sometimes arrives on a printed page or in a sip of tea. These, too, are wonders.

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• What You Are Looking for Is in the Library—Michiko Aoyama

• Turning to Stone: Discover the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks—Marcia Bjornerud

• C.P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems—Trans. Daniel Mendelsohn

• The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic—Darby Penney

• The Back Chamber—Donald Hall

• A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety—Donald Hall

• Pages of the Wound: Poems, Drawings, Photographs 1956-1996—John Berger

• Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human—Richard Wrangham

• Confabulations—John Berger

• Song—Brigit Pegeen Kelly

• Hold Everything Dear—John Berger

• Trusting Your Life to Eternity and Water: 20 Poems of Olav H. Hauge—Trans. Robert Bly

• Osip Mandelstam: 50 Poems—Trans. Bernard Meares

• Isabelle: A Story in Shots—John Berger and Nella Bielski

• George Sefaris: Collected Poems—Trans. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrad

• Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being—Neil Theise

• Lady Susan—Jane Austen

• Second Place—Rachel Cusk

• Selected Poems of Anne Sexton—Edited by Diane Wood Middlebrook & Diane Hume George

• Splitting an Order—Ted Kooser

• Holy the Firm—Annie Dillard

• Cosmopolis—Don DeLillo

• The Summer Book—Tove Jansson

• Philip Larkin: Collected Poems—Philip Larkin

• The Edge of the Orchard County—Robert Morgan

• Six Facets of Light—Ann Wroe

• Big Indian Creek October 1994—Dave Hughes

• Duane’s Depressed—Larry McMurtry

• Abducting a General: The Krieps Operation and SOE in Crete—Patrick Leigh Fermore

• The Mysterious Affair at Styles—Agatha Christie

• Remains of Elmet—poems by Ted Hughes, photographs by Fay Goodwin

• The Old Ways: A journey on Foot—Robert Macfarlane

• Near the Ocean—Robert Lowelll

• The Before Morning—W.S. Merwin

• Reality Is Not what It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity—Carlo Rovelli

• Transit—Rachel Cusk

• Out—Rachel Cusk

• Kudos—Rachel Cusk

• A Small Porch—Wendell Berry

• Axe Handles—Gary Snyders

• In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex System—Giogio Parisi

• Still Another Day—Pablo Neruda

• A Shining—Jon Fosse

• Bleak House—Charles Dickens

• Delirium Vita—David LeBrunn

• Chasing the Sun: How the Science of Sunlight Shapes Our Bodies and Minds—Linda Geddes

• Mountains and Rivers Without End—Gary Snyder

• Out of Africa—Isak Dinisen

• Shadows in the Grass—Isak Dinisen

• When the Light Goes—Larry McMurtry

• Selected Poems: Olave Hauge—Trans. Robin Fulton

• Mariette in Ecstasy—Ron Hansen

• Philosophy for Polar Explorers—Erling Kagge

• The Complex World: An Introduction to the Foundations of Complexity Science—David C. Krakauer

• The Last Lecture—Randy Pausch

• The Strange Death of Europe—Douglas Murray

• The Green Hills of Africa—Ernest Hemingway

• Greek Lyrics—Trans. by Richard Lattimore

• The Waves—Virgina Woolf

• Selected Poems 1954-1983—Georgee Mackay Brown

• My Name is Red—Orhan Pamuk

• The Shropshire Lad—A. E. Housman

• And our Faces, My Hart, Brief as Photos—John Berger

• King Lear—Shakespeare

• The Varieties of Religious Experience—William James

• South of the Border, West of the Sun—Haruki Murakami

• The Future of Truth—Werner Herzog

• The Order of Time—Carlo Ravelli

• Why You Should Rad Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise—Katherine Rundell

• A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat—Arthur Rimbaud, trans. Louise Varese

• Days of Reading—Marcel Proust

• Over to You: Letters Between a Father and a Son—John Berger & Yves Berger

• Eugene Onegin—Alexander Pushkin

• Friedrich Holderlin & Edvard Morike: Selected Poems—Trans. Christopher Middleton

• The Dance Most of All—Jack Gilbert

• The Wind in the Willows—Kenneth Graham

• The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality—William Egginton

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra—Friedrich Nietzsche

• Notes from the Underground—Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Read Damon’s list from 2024 here:

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Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.

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