What Have I Been Reading in 2025?

For the past couple of years, I’ve been tracking my reading habits with the Story Graph app. I like Story Graph because it easily allows me to track what Ive read, what I’m reading, and my to be read list. As well, it gives me a detailed breakdown of my reading habits, including genres, pages numbers, and more. This year, I’ve read 75 books and about 18,000 pages. When I read, I switch between genres, moving from fiction to memoir to history to graphic novel and more. I read drama and occasionally I read poetry. The only poetry collection I’ve read so far this year is Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Today, I want to share with you some of what I’ve read.

During May, I found myself reading multiple Nobel Prize winners in literature. I didn’t realize this when I chose the books, but after I picked them up at the library I saw the connection and sought out some more. I read Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person, J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft, Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, and two books by Annie Ernaux, The Years and Shame. I enjoyed each of these books, for different reasons, but Ernaux’s works, Coetzee, and Gurnah engaged me the most, for various reasons. Ernaux’s style, which I really see in relation to something like Lillian Smith’s The Journey, uses memoir and introspection to have us think about our own existence and the ways that we live…