Top 10 Reads of 2025

10: The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

I tend to be drawn to non-fiction, but I make efforts to read more fiction. It’s easier for me to slog through non-fiction, but if I don’t like a novel, I have to force myself to read it. And who wants to be forced to read something as an adult (that’s what high school English class was for). For this reason, I like Matt Haig. I like his writing style, I like his imagination, and it’s nice for me to know that I will likely enjoy a book I’m reading before I start it because I have a good track record with the author.

My taste in fiction shows preference to the supernatural being written in a realistic way. The Life Impossible will light up your imagination, and help you to appreciate simple joys in your not-super-natural life, too. Here’s a quote I saved from the book:

To be human is to be scared of our own innate ridiculousness, so we do anything to reduce that ridicule. We clothe our bodies, we procreate behind closed doors, we hide every bodily function, we don’t cry in the post office, or sing in the street, and we try to keep our own ideas in line with what we are told we should think.

9: Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

I loved The Anthropocene Reviewed, and to be quite honest, I liked that book more than this one. BUT that doesn’t mean that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy this book. I love John Green’s writing, and I am especially partial to his non-fiction work. In this book, Green claims that he can connect tuberculosis to almost everything. I still think often about the connection he draws between tuberculosis and the start of WWI.

8: How to Fall in Love With Anyone by Mandy Len Canton

Don’t ask me why I read this one. I don't know. I think it was because I was on Libby, looking at audiobooks that were “available now”, and this was toward the top of the list and it seemed interesting enough. She wrote an article that got published by the New York Times about a psychological experiment that asserts that people can fall in love by asking each other these 36 questions. Her article is about how she tested this experiment with a real-life man she barely knew, and the book gives lots more context to that story, and it goes on to tell what happened in the years after the article was published. I wasn’t familiar with the article, and I enjoyed reading this book without knowing how anything would turn out. This is not the typical premise that would draw me into a book (I am not a romance fan), but her storytelling reeled me in. Canton narrated the audiobook herself, and listening to it feels like a one-sided conversation with a friend — maybe that’s because she seems like she’s around my age, and I bet if we had gone to college together, maybe we would have joined the same sorority.

7: Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

I think I came to this book in the same way I came to How to Fall in Love With Anyone: the audiobook was available to check out on Libby the day I happened to go looking. In this book, Robinson reads through Genesis like a literary scholar would read through a masterpiece novel. She compares it to contemporary works of its time (I’ve never thought about The Epic of Gilgamesh so much in my life), and she investigates not only what is written, but also what is not written — meaning she compares what the characters in the story of Genesis, i.e.: God, do compared to what the gods in comparative works of literature do. The bummer with reading audiobooks is that it’s harder to grab quotes; I could see myself buying my own copy of this book someday so that I can underline passages to come back to. And look: Obama liked it, too.

6: Exoplanets by Michael Summers and James Trefil

I’ve decided that one of the best things for my mental health is to learn about outer space. It helps me to put everything into perspective: how small I am, how big God is, and it even challenges my scarcity beliefs because I see how much matter there is out there, and how much energy there is, too. Think about the degree to which we depend on the Sun — plant growth, warmth, even solar energy — and then think about how many more suns there are out there. (Not that those other suns help our crops or our energy resources here on earth… but still! There’s SO MUCH out there!) My mental health plan may not work for you, but if you want to learn about exoplanets, then do a Google search for “Exoplanets book” and you’ll be led to this one, co-written by an astronomer and a physicist. They’ll tell you all sorts of things about exoplanets we know about, and about exoplanets that theoretically could exist. I think about the moons of Jupiter so much more now, after having read this book (and I probably already thought about them enough beforehand).

5: A Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman

You won’t often find me in the Leadership section of a bookstore, but Emily P Freeman quoted A Failure of Nerve in her book, How to Walk Into a Room, and I liked the quote enough that I bought myself a copy. This was one of those books that I really liked but also really disliked at the same time, because some of what he said offended me… but, I think, in a good way. (I felt the same way when I ready Ryan Holiday’s Perennial Seller a few years ago.) Friedman holds no punches when it comes to consensus builders and people pleasers in places of leadership; I am both of those things, and damnit, he’s right. I don’t imagine I’ll venture back to the Leadership section soon, but I am glad I read this book!

4: All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

Remember how I described what types of fiction I’m drawn to? Well, what I love most is the element of time travel or alternate timelines — and this book has both. Mastai did such a great job imagining what the 21st century could have looked like if someone had invented a way to have unlimited clean energy in the 1960s… and what if someone traveled in time and changed it? Loved this one.

3: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I mentioned in my first Substack post that I am working on an album, which has me thinking about AI and its impact on humanity and the environment. To that end, I’ve been reading books here and there to educate myself on the topic (none of which made my top ten list this year). In one such book, AI Ethics (written in 2020, so it has quickly become outdated), author Mark Coeckelbergh draws the connection between our current view of generative AI mirrors the earth 19th century view of electricity, and he suggests that Frankensteininadvertently puts some of those fears of the unknown on display. I’m willing to buy this assertion, because Mary Shelley offers very little explanation as to how running electricity through a hodge podge of corpse pieces could actually bring a Creature to life. She, and I imagine, most of her contemporaries saw electricity as a type of magic. Very few people understood how it actually worked, and therefore most of society had no idea where were the limits of its promise or how great a threat would it pose to humanity.

Related: Were you aware that there was a real scientist who tried to animate a dead body part with electricity? Mmhmm. Giovanni Aldini.

Anyway, I approached Frankenstein with that lens: to see how someone’s imagination makes sense of technological progress in real time, but I get to read it knowing how things turn out (kind of like a form of time traveling, you could say). I wanted to apply those insights to how I might make sense of technological progress with generative AI in my era. So that’s why I came to the novel, but what kept me reading was the beautiful prose. Gorgeous writing. I especially loved volume two, which was written from the Creature’s perspective.

This book convinced me that as a songwriter, it would benefit me greatly to read more literary masterpieces. I don’t mean that in a curmudgeonly, “people don’t write like they used to” kind of way, although that might be the case; it’s more about the fact that very few novels stand the test of time. How many other novels were written in 1818 (and republished in 1831), and how many of them are we still reading? It’s not so much that Frankenstein is old, it’s that it’s really good.

And to answer your question: No, I have not seen the Guillermo del Toro movie.

2: The Three Marriages by David Whyte

I loved this book so much that I immediately bought a second David Whyte book and read that too (The Heart Aroused, which probably should have made onto this list, too). Whyte’s writing is also very beautiful, and his insights always feel so poignant to me. The concept of The Three Marriages is very strong. The book is split into three sections where he focuses on three main relationships we have in our lives: our relationship with work, our relationship with self, and our relationship with a spouse. This quote gives a good taste of what the book is like:

It is a difficult discipline in all three marriages to let a person go, continually, to see if that person comes back, to let a work go so that it can be reimagined or to let a fixed idea about ourselves evaporate and be replaced by something more flexible.

1: Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer

Immediately after I read this book, I told myself that I should re-read it annually; the questions Palmer raises about vocation deserve to be re-examined year after year, as life and work both change and evolve. You might be aware that Parker Palmer has a special place in my heart because he gave me permission to use his poem “Welcome Home” as lyrics for my song of the same name.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the book:

Nature does not always produce abundance, of course. There are summers when flood or drought destroy the crops and threaten the lives and livelihood of those who work the fields. But nature normally takes us through a reliable cycle of scarcity and abundance in which times of deprivation foreshadow an eventual return to the bountiful fields. This fact of nature is in sharp contrast to human nature, which seems to regard perpetual scarcity as the law of life. Daily I am astonished at how readily I believe that something I need is in short supply. If I hoard possessions, it is because I believe that there are not enough to go around. If I struggle with others over power, it is because I believe that power is limited. If I become jealous in relationships, it is because I believe that when you get too much love, I will be shortchanged.