I read 22 books last year. 7 of them were on my Kobo e-reader and the rest were deadtree format. 12 of them were fiction. 10 were non-fiction.
There were so many great books this year. I’ve returned to listing a separate top three for fiction and non-fiction, plus a list of runners-up.
Fiction in 2025
- Piranesi - Susanna Clarke - “I was in a house with many rooms. The sea sweeps through the house. Sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved.”
- Dragon song - Anne McCaffrey - “Oh, Tongue, give sound to joy and sing / Of hope and promise on dragonwing”
- The Penderwicks at Point Mouette - Jeanne Birdsall - “A different bed can bring you different dreams, she thought.”
- The Razor’s Edge - W. Somerset Maugham - “Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose”
- The Cheese Monkeys - Chip Kidd - “After age twenty-five, you’re not a victim anymore — you’re a volunteer.” (accidental re-read)
- A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan - “There are so many ways to go wrong. All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.”
- The Magician’s Elephant - Kate DiCamillo “That is surely the truth, at least for now. But perhaps you have not noticed: the truth is forever changing.”
- The Warren - Brian Evenson - “The feeling that you, or rather I, are at once dreaming and remembering and simultaneously doing something as if for the first time.”
- The Seven ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton - “Too little information and you’re blind, too much and you’re blinded.”
- Bunnicula - James Howe and Deborah Howe - “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Harold. I come to writing purely by chance. My full-time occupation is dog.”
- Mother Courage and Her Children - Bertolt Brecht - “You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization. And when do you get organization? In a war.”
- The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday - Saad Z. Hossain - Melek Ahmar, the Lord of Mars, the Red King, the Lord of Tuesday, Most August Rajah of Djinn, wakes.
Non-Fiction in 2025
- On Tyranny - Timothy Snyder - “Take responsibility for the face of the world.”
- Einstein & the Honeybee - Rees Shad - A collaboratively written introduction to game design.
- Gritty City - Nigel Webber - Oral history of Winnipeg hip-hop from 1980 to 2005.
- My Salinger Year - Joanna Rakoff - “To read Salinger is to engage in an act of such intimacy that it, at times, makes you uncomfortable.”
- Tidy First? - Kent Beck - “The biggest cost of code is the cost of reading and understanding it, not the cost of writing it.”
- Devotions - Mary Oliver - “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
- A Philosophy of Software Design - John Ousterhout - “Overall, the best way to reduce bugs is to make software simpler.”
- Level Up - Scott Rogers - “If you think something is innovative, it just means you haven’t been paying attention.”
- Deep Fitness - Philip Shepherd and Andrei Yakovenko - A mindful approach to strength-training.
- Becoming a Video Game Designer - Daniel Noah Halpern
Top Three Fiction Books of 2025
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Piranesi lives inside a metaphor, a House with seemingly infinite Halls and nothing outside it save for the Sun, the Moon and the Stars. The House contains an Ocean and many Statues.
No Hall, no Vestibule, no Staircase, no Passage is without its Statues. In most Halls they cover all the available space, though here and there you will find an Empty Plinth, Niche or Apse, or even a blank space on a Wall otherwise encrusted with Statues. These Absences are as mysterious in their way as the Statues themselves.
This book left me feeling delightfully melancholy. Like I had visited somewhere strange and sacred and beautiful, and wasn’t ready to leave.
The Razor’s Edge - W. Somerset Maugham
Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.
There are psychologists who think that consciousness accompanies brain processes and is determined by them but doesn’t itself exert any influence on them. Something like the reflection of a tree in water; it couldn’t exist without the tree, but it doesn’t in any way affect the tree.
I picked this up after learning that Bill Murray agreed to star in Ghostbusters in exchange for Columbia Pictures agreeing to make a film adaption of The Razor’s Edge. It probably would have been best for me to have read this in my early twenties. It would have paired nicely with On The Road, Siddhartha, The Beach, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Mother Courage and Her Children - Bertolt Brecht
Back in January of 2025 I posted this poem to social media by German playwright Bertolt Brecht:
Motto
In the dark times,
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
about the dark times.
My cousin Carrie wrote back to recommend I read one of his plays, and later lent me her copy of Mother Courage.
Mother Courage and Her Children was written in 1939 in response to the rise of Fascism and the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. The play is set during Europe’s Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century, and follows Anna Fierling (Mother Courage) and her three children. Courage makes her living selling supplies to soldiers, and we watch in horror as she slowly loses all three children to the war. By her own admission, Courage isn’t all that courageous. But then, like many of the play’s characters, she is both a victim of the war and, in her own small way, complicit in sustaining it.
Top Three Non-Fiction of 2025
On Tyranny - Timothy Snyder
Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century:
Do not obey in advance. Defend institutions. Beware the one-party state. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Remember professional ethics. Be wary of paramilitaries. Be reflective if you must be armed. Stand out. Someone has to. Be kind to our language. Believe in truth. Investigate. Make eye contact and small talk. Practice corporeal politics. Establish a private life. Contribute to good causes. Learn from peers in other countries. Listen for dangerous words. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Be a patriot. Be as courageous as you can.
Recommended: Watch John Lithgow’s reading of the lessons.
Gritty City - Nigel Webber
Gritty City is the first book to tackle the history of Winnipeg hip-hop, treating it not as a passing fad or a subgenre of rock, but as its own distinct and significant culture and artform. Much like the city itself, hip-hop locally was born out of struggle, out of the intense racism that plagued elements of Winnipeg for much of the 1980s. As the culture blossomed and gained acceptance, slowly but surely the community became more and more prominent, leading from the DIY ‘90s to the heyday of the early 2000s.
I first discovered my love of hip-hop (Thanks Jeff!), and the local hip-hop scene, 25 years ago. If you want a taste of the current scene I’ve put together mixtapes of my favourite local hip-hop artists from the last few years:
Tidy First? - Kent Beck
Software design is an exercise in human relationships.
Does this still hold in an era of AI-generated coding? Perhaps. I’m not quite ready to give up being part of the code creation process, even when I’m using AI tooling.
This is a tiny book about ways to clean up a codebase before adding to it. A catalog of 15 “tidyings” that will improve code “readability”, making it easier to understand and to change.
Runners Up
- The Seven ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton - Groundhog Day meets Memento meets Quantum Leap in the 1920s.
- The Warren - Brian Evenson - Unsettling!
- A Philosophy of Software Design - John Ousterhout - Paired incredibly well with Beck’s Tidy First. After reading both books I was inspired to put together a series of lectures on code smells and refactoring for my game development students.
- Devotions - Mary Oliver - A collection of Oliver’s favourite poems. Her poems urge us to pay attention, reflect, and maintain a sense of amazement at the world and our place in it. She writes of loss, salvation, joy, and the wilds of nature. You can read some of her poems here.
I’m still reading aloud to my youngest. We very much enjoyed The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, The Magician’s Elephant, and Bunnicula. Revisiting Bunnicula in particular, a book my mom read aloud to me and my sister, was a lovely thing.
I also read more poetry this past year than usual, but I’ll save that for another post.
