In 2025, I managed both to finish more books than in 2024 (35) and to buy more books than ever before (395). I know, the latter number sounds alarming, and, frankly, it is. It amounts to more than one book acquired per day. In my defence, some of these books were bought as gifts, which is a perfectly respectable way of inflating one’s book count. Others were purchased in triplicate for the joint reading “seminars” I do with my two sons. That still leaves quite a few books unaccounted for, but here my buying habits offer at least a partial explanation. I tend to buy in bursts, keeping a long wish list and regularly checking for sales, often picking up books for less than five dollars. This explains some of the volume, though probably not all of it. The more honest explanation is that I suffer from a long-standing case of book addiction, contracted sometime in childhood and never treated. But there are probably worse conditions to live with.
What made 2025 unusual is that I read a relatively large number of books that were actually published in 2025 (and definitely not on sale), nine of the 35 books, which is high by my standards. Normally, I work my way through the backlog. Even the oldest book I read this year was relatively recent, dating from 1990 (Edmund Phelps’ Seven Schools of Macroeconomic Thought).
As for subject matter, politics dominated my reading (12 books) in 2025, with a strong bias toward U.S. politics. But I also read two books on Brazilian politics, in preparation to our summer vacation in Brazil. Economics followed with six books, and history with five, including one on Brazilian history. I even read three works of fiction, all from the 1990s. Fiction remains underrepresented in my reading habits; my standing goal is at least one fiction book per year, so this counts as progress, if not exactly a breakthrough.
Which books stood out? Among the political titles, the most unsettling—at least to me—was Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. In economics, Ken Rogoff’s Our Dollar, Your Problem was unsurprisingly a good read, while Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance was a genuinely positive surprise. The title and the introduction had led me to expect rather little, and I was happy to be wrong.
In biography, I very much enjoyed Peter Richardson’s Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo, which felt like particularly appropriate reading given the political tone of 2025. Among the older books, Richard Lewontin’s Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991) was particularly rewarding. The science itself is, of course, dated, but Lewontin’s broader arguments about science remain sharp and worth preserving.
Finally, I managed, at long last, to finish Dave Marsh’s Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World’s Most Famous Rock ’n’ Roll Song, which had been sitting unfinished on my shelf for some time, quietly judging me. It is the most thorough history of the song and the strange cultural afterlife of the Kingsmen’s 1963 recording. But the true centerpiece of the story is of course legendary: the FBI’s two-and-a-half-year investigation into what Jack Ely actually sang on Louie Louie, following allegations of obscene and subversive lyrics. The investigation came ultimately to the sharp conclusion that whatever he sang was unintelligible. Long live Rock’n’Roll.