The Reading Wish List: 2025
While it’s certainly too late to wish you all a Happy New Year, it might not be too late to lay out what I’m thinking of reading in 2025. The list below is certainly aspirational, representing a palette of books from which I might paint my next twelve months. Certainly, not everything on this list will be read but it should give you a sense of the general literary, philosophical, theological, and even linguistic worlds I’ll be spending most of my time in during 2025.
A general theme I came across as I was laying these out was revisiting old favorites. Some of them are classics to everyone, some of them are classics to me.
If you see any that interest you, do let me know in the comments below. And of course, let me know what you’re looking forward to reading.
Russians
This year I’m going to attempt (yet again) to reach a basic level of conversation and reading comprehension in Russian. Several of my friends are native speakers who have recently offered to tutor me in exchange for vodka and pickles in my hot tub. (Thankfully, I negotiated them down from cognac and caviar.)
Russian novels are may mainstays whenever there’s snow on the ground, so you’ll be hearing about these reads mostly in the beginning and end of the year.
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: My first book finished this year
Vodolazkin: Currently rereading Laurus and interested in works of his that have been more recently translated
Sorokin, Day of Oprichnik & Telluria
Bely, St Petersburg
Platonov, Chevengur
Poems from Anna Akhmatova & Marina Tsvetaeva
Germans
While I’m a fluent German speaker who attends a regular Stammtisch and speaks it with my family, I must confess I’ve never read a German book cover-to-cover. To remedy this, one of my goals this year is to read one of these books fully in the original German:
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet: This may be cheating since I have the Norton translation practically memorized at this point.
Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust, East-West Divan: It amazes me how influential Goethe was back in the day, and how utterly unread he is today.
Nietzsche: Maybe I’ll read the whole Kaufmann’s Portable Nietzsche and single out one of the major works to read auf Deutsch.
Byung-Chul Han, Non-things, etc: A contemporary philosopher who thankfully writes short books.
Hesse, Siddartha: Read it in high school. Again, a short one short.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: The same cannot be said here.
Stories
Tolkien, Silmarillion, Hobbit & Lord of the Rings: The more I think about it, the more I think Tolkien is the greatest writer of the 20th Century—and he deserves to be considered a canonical author. I’m going to test that theory.
Banffy, Transylvanian Trilogy: I’ve never heard anyone mention him before, but since the moment I stumbled upon this book, I’ve been drawn to it.
Moby Dick: Thinking this will be my epic beach read during the summer.
Sherlock Holmes: Currently, my wife and I are rewatching all of the Jeremy Brett episodes put out by BBC Granada. I’m also thoroughly enjoying an incredible podcast devoted to this series and Brett’s masterful portrayal.
Picture of Dorian Gray: Not only was this one of my favorite books in high school, but I also recently discovered it became a movie—featuring Jeremy Brett.
Borges, Collected Fictions
Gabriel García Marquéz, 100 Years of Solitude: I hear there’s a Netflix movie coming out and I only got halfway through the last time I read it.
Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See: For the same reasons as 100 Years.
Joyce, Ulysses: Never actually read it. Is it as good as many say?
Fermor’s travel trilogy, A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, The Broken Road
Richard Powers, Playground: I remember enjoying The Overstory and I recently watched a great interview with him about the craft of writing.
Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid & Blinding: been hearing a lot of good things about this Romanian. Have you read him yet?
Proust: which would also give me a reason to revisit Bergson
Dickens: Many people have been recommending Bleak House lately, but I’m open to hearing other suggestions.
Japanese: Reading Mishima last year and Nitobe the year before gave me an appetite for more Japanese literature—Lafcadio Hearn’s collection of ghost stories, something from Kawabata, Chômei & Kendo, maybe just some haikus.
Philosophy, Theology, Creativity, etc.
Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty: I took this class with Dr Tim before it was a book and I still have yet to finish it. In any case, the class changed my life and I heartily recommend the book.
Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, Nature of Order, etc: On that note, Dr Tim introduced me to Alexander. These are unquestionably desert island books for me.
David Bentley Hart, All Things are Full of Gods: Pre-ordered it last year and it’s been starting at me ever since. Maybe also revisiting The Experience of God and You are Gods to spot some themes.
Bernard Lonergan, Insight: Looking forward to revisiting all the fond memories of my Lonergan Fellowship in these pages.
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
Robert McKee, Story
St John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent
Some Hindu-Vedic literature: Mahabharata, Ramayana, Rig Veda, Upanishads, or maybe just reread the Bhagavad Gita.
Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Christian Meditation
Fr Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar & Ground of Truth
Poetry
Along with my German goal, I’d also like to read at least one poet’s collected works cover-to-cover this year. While I suppose I could do two birds with one stone by reading Rilke in German, I was thinking of some of my other favorites:
The Big Three
Plato: It’s been too long, so I’m going back to basics—Apology, Phaedo, Timaeus, Phaedrus, Symposium, Euthyphro, Republic, etc.
The Bible: Currently I’m reading through the whole Bible in this order—Gospels, Epistles, Psalter, then Old Testament.
Shakespeare: Macbeth, King Leer, Romeo and Juliet (to follow my Anna Karenina)
Nice list! I’ll have to check some of those books out. I read All The Light We Cannot See. It’s a good one. If you like that one, you should also add The Last Green Valley, Beneath the Scarlet Sky, and All The Glimmering Stars. I just finished the last one I mentioned. It's an excellent book.
Haha, I have that same exact lineup of the Ascetical Homilies, Divine Ladder, and the Ambigua on my shelf 😄