I'm admittedly a bit late in publishing my list of 2025 reads, but I really have not been in a hurry in any regard since the new year started. More time spent reading, less time posting. More time writing fresh drafts, less time spent editing, so here we are, finally.

I came in at 54 books in 2025, barely crossing my goal of one book a week (this is probably why I contributed so few pieces to Medium in the past year — but I'm sure there are those among us who can read 100 books a year and still publish weekly, so I suppose it all is relative to the individual).

I copied the whole list of books I read down at the bottom of this article, but I will go into a little more detail on my favorite writers I have read in 2025.

I attended a Zoom call recently that featured writer Paul Theroux as part of the Travel Book Club Substack, and he mentioned his preference to hone in on the writers he loves most, and consume every last book of theirs, then conclude with the writer's biography.

Which was funny to hear him say that, as I have read perhaps half of his 50-something titles, and had, without knowing it, subscribed to his philosophy of studying the writers I admire most, and getting an intimate idea of what it is in their lives that moves them and their work.

He also mentioned the British writer Rebecca West, whose magnum opus Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (which comes in at 1100+ pages, a perfect companion for the slow traveler/reader), which inspired a lot of my travels in the Republics of the former Yugoslavia.

Themes

Almost everything I read is travel-adjacent. While I don't read as many travel books as I used to, the fiction I read nearly always has some element of travel throughout, almost to the point of being travel books as well.

W.G. Sebald

My favorite writer I discovered in 2025 is the German writer, W.G. Sebald. I wrote about him a little bit in this story I wrote about a DIY writer's residency I did in Iowa City this past month, but he came to me as a recommendation from one of my photography mentors. And after devouring The Rings of Saturn (which I have read twice in less than a year), I then found and finished all of his other books, and a collection of essays about, and conversations with, the man himself.

Born Winfried Georg, he went by the nickname Max, and had a brief moment of international literary fame before his death of a sudden heart attack while behind the wheel of his car while driving through rural England with his daughter, which robbed the world of a bright new star in German literature.

His writings deal with memory, and the interconnectedness of all things, as well as the hauntingly transient nature of all things human. His books are written in an older prose style, and he interestingly invented his own literary genre that he refers to as prose fiction, but that other writers have called "long-distance, mental travel" (in the case of Saturn).

That book deals with his walk through the English countryside, and his mental digressions into the widest variety of topics, such as herring fishing, the life of Joseph Conrad, silk worm production, the "odyssey of Thomas Browne's skull," the Temple of Jerusalem, and the memoirs of Chateaubriand, and brings them all together in the most brilliant of ways that the leave the reader queatsioning the limits of what literature can do. A great documentary about this book and writer is available to stream on YouTube, titled Patience: After Sebald.

His novel Vertigo deals with the lives and travels of Stendahl, Kafka, Casanova, and the author himself, and the coincidences experienced retracing their footsteps across time.

And I was stunned during his final "novel," Austerlitz, to find myself walking the same streets by accident that the titular character mentions when recounting the mysterious life of his father.

Teju Cole

Aside from Sebald, I fell in love with the writings of Nigerian American writer and photographer (and now Harvard lecturer) Teju Cole, who was recommended to me by a different photography mentor, and who also was greatly influenced by Sebald, strangely enough. And so both of his novels, Open City and Tremor, greatly reminded me of Sebald's own writing but from the perspective of a photographer who spent much of his youth in Nigeria.

Henry Miller

Thirdly, I will mention Henry Miller, whom I had read before, but I had somehow never known how brilliant of a travel writer he was, until I stumbled upon his Colossus of Maroussi, a travel account of pre-WWII Greece, and The Air Conditioned Nightmare, an incredible travelogue through the United States that I resonated with at every turn.

I admire the spiritual nature of Miller's writing, and always laugh on the many occasions when he goes into his astrological chart (which makes sense when you look at his titles), and am now working my way through his Tropic of Capricorn, finding myself so confused as to how I had made it so long without reading this profound work.

I also loved one of his collections of essays about Writing, and found it deeply inspirational, particularly one of the copies of his writing regimens, which I will include below.

For purposes of keeping this short, I'll stop here with my favorite writers of 2025.

Biography

The only biography I read in 2025 was True Nature, the pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, which was absolutely illuminating, and drew me to the fiction of this writer, particularly Shadow Country, which made him the first author to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction. His nonfiction Book Award winner was The Snow Leopard, and it is among my all-time favorite books.

As I go into 2026, I'm going to keep Theroux's advice in mind and continue to delve further into the works of Miller and Matthiessen, and whoever else I may stumble upon.

Who are you reading this year, and how do you choose what your next book will be?

My 2025 shelf:

Creativity (Transcribed discourses by Osho) *To a Mountain in Tibet (Colin Thubron) Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu) Medium Raw (Bourdain) Mastery (Robert Greene) Wake Up (Jack Kerouac) An Area of Darkness (VS Naipaul) The Garden Eternal (Matt Desmond) The Art of Travel (Alain de Botton) *Narrow Road to the Deep North (Matsuo Basho) The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Yukio Mishima) In Praise of Shadows (Tanazaki) A Moveable Feast (Lonely Planet Food Writing Anthology) *Greek Lessons (Han Kang) The Creative Act (Rick Rubin) *A Russian Journal (John Steinbeck with the photographs of Robert Capa) Night of Fire (Thubron) *The Rings of Saturn (Sebald) *Istanbul (Orhan Pamuk) Spring Snow (Mishima) Goodbye to Berlin (Christopher Isherwood) Strange and Known Things (Teju Cole) The New Life (Pamuk) My Cat Yugoslavia (Statovci) Vertigo (Sebald) *The Colossus of Maroussi (Henry Miller) Quiet Days in Clichy (Miller) Star (Mishima) Sex and Super Consciousness (Osho) Atlas of Fantastical Realism (Artrit Bytyqi) Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin) The Crack-up and other stories (F. Scott Fitzgerald) My Name is Red (Pamuk) Open City (Cole) *The Travel Writing Tribe (Tim Hannigan) Blind Spot (Cole) Danziger's Britain A Journey to the Edge (Nick Danziger) *The Air Conditioned Nightmare (Miller) The City and it's Uncertain Walls (Murakami) *Tremor (Cole) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Thompson) Every Day is for the Thief (Cole) The Emigrants (Sebald) Journey to the End of the Night (Céline) *True Nature, the Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen (Richardson) *Austerlitz (Sebald) On Photography (Susan Sontag) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson) The Great Enigma (Tomas Transtromer) After Nature (W.G. Sebald) Inspector Imanishi Investigates (Seicho Matsumoto) The Emergence of Memory Conversations with Sebald On Writing (Henry Miller) Peter Hujar's Day (Linda Rosencrantz)

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