After many years of not being much of a book reader and feeling bad about it, I decided this year I would stop self-flagellating and just read some damn books. Last December I set the arbitrary goal of reading 30 in 2025. The only rules are that I have to read the entire book and I have to actually READ it. Audiobooks don’t count. To be clear, I love audiobooks and don’t look down on them as inferior or anything. But actually reading a book is a very different experience from listening, and I am painfully out of practice.

The books also don’t have to be of any particular renown. I can read genre fiction or best-sellers or Stephen King and those count. But a defect of mine is that I seldom take pleasure in guilty pleasures, be they books or movies or TV. Except for music. I do have some bad taste in music.

I’m now six months in and still on track, but I’m slowing down and in danger of having to speed-read my way through fall. Hmmm… perhaps if I document my progress in a blog I will be rewarded with little dopamine hits each time I knock off another book and this will motivate me. Because the joy and privilege of sampling from our species’ greatest written works is inadequate motivation and I need little hits of dopamine to actually do it.

Here’s what I’ve read so far, in rough chronological order. I won’t include substantive reflections on each book at this time. I may do for future reads. Probably I will.

1. The Road, Cormac McCarthy – I was afraid to read this book. If you’ve read it or have heard anything about it you’ll know why. I can’t say I loved it or that I even liked it. It’s not that kind of book. What I can say is that it lingered with me for days and made me contemplate some things for the first time ever. And that’s probably the single greatest reason to read a book. Also, the vocabulary.
2. Beloved, Toni Morrison – Some people struggle with the supernatural elements and try to interpret them out of the book. I don’t understand why. The story works better if the ghosts are actual ghosts, IMO.
3. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell – I would have liked this one more had I not seen the movie first. I really enjoyed it up until the second half of An Orison of Sonmi~451, which was my least favorite of the embedded stories and the point at which I started skimming to the end.
4. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante – I picked this one because it’s at the top of many “best books” lists. Probably the hype set me up for disappointment because I didn’t love it. I found the casual, incessant violence in the book exhausting.
5. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson – Some books you just have to return to later because it wasn’t the right season in your life the first time you read it. For me, I can tell this is one of those books.
6. Moby-Dick; or The Whale, Herman Melville – I have finally, FINALLY! made it to the end. If you’re among the 0.999 of people who’ve never tried to read it or tried reading it and stopped at “The Whiteness of the Whale, I understand you entirely. Everything you’ve heard about it is true. It is dense and digressive and difficult. And it drags. It’s absolutely worth the month it’ll likely take you to read it through (maybe I’m just a SLOW reader?). It’s a masterpiece and contains some of the most beautiful prose in the English language. It’s also very touching in places and contains some stunning wisdom. Even the long, encyclopedic chapters that are all about the anatomy of whales, the types of whales, the types of paintings people make of whales… At some point you realize the book is simulating the experience of being on a tedious, yearslong whaling expedition where there’s little to do for days and days on end but peer out over the monotonous horizon and think about your life. It’s quite immersive. My favorite chapter is “Brit,”” located at the dead center of the book, but if you just jump to that chapter you won’t understand why. For this book there are no shortcuts. You have to get there.
7. The Epic of Gilgamesh – I picked this one because in Cloud Atlas Somni~451 is discovered to have downloaded it from a library database, and this is seen as evidence of her individuality. In truth I enjoyed reading about The Epic of Gilgamesh more than I enjoyed reading it. I sometimes have a difficult time enjoying a thing merely for its cultural significance, which is the value Gilgamesh held for me personally.
8. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway – Can you believe I had never read any Hemingway? It’s kind of embarrassing considering I have a degree in English. To be fair, the degree was technically in created writing, not literature. Anyway, I LOVED this short novel so much! It’s definitely one of my favorite reads so far this year. It’s just so lovely and touching and full of wisdom that’s hard to articulate because it’s more beautiful than rational. I think this is one of those books often assigned to students, and I think that’s a shame. I can’t imagine many young people would appreciate the story.
9. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway – Obviously because I was so enamored with The Old Man and the Sea I picked another Hemingway. So glad I didn’t start with this one because it probably would have put me off Hemingway for good. Similar to how I felt about Gilgamesh, I appreciated this book for its cultural significance but little else. It’s a distinctly modern book, marked by Hemingway’s terse, minimalist narrative style. It’s easy to take such writing for granted now, but Hemingway was ahead of his time and clearly very influential in helping shape literary modernism. However, I found the characters and their lives dull and pointless, which I realize was basically the whole point. But I just didn’t care what happened to any of them. I also found the anti-Semitism too overt for my generally tolerant mind to dismiss. But I made it all the way to the famous final sentence, which was so anti-climatic I’m sad to say. Maybe it just wasn’t the season for me to read this book, but I doubt I’ll return to it in the future.
10. Auto-da-Fé, Elias Canetti – I would be raving about this book were it 200 pages shorter. It’s the only novel by Elias Canetti, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. It’s a story about a scholarly recluse who lives in a four-room library in Vienna and marries his housekeeper thinking she’ll cherish his books, but she turns out to be illiterate and manipulative. It’s a surreal, insane novel that is sometimes compared to Kafka works. The main characters are all deranged by some personal psychological hangup. This works for a while, but the book draws the surrealism out for more than 400 pages, and the insanity becomes extremely repetitive and tedious. It’s also quite violent and full of over-the-top misogyny, which is clearly meant to be part of the insanity, but at some point it’s like, OK, I get it, why are we still doing this? It’s still worth the read, though. You might just skim the second half until the climatic end.
11. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf – I don’t have much to say about Mrs Dalloway except that I greatly admire Virginia Woolf’s writing, her treatment of mental health in the novella is intriguing, but I didn’t find the story compelling. I get a gold star for reading it, but it didn’t change my life.
12. Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes – So good. Even though I’m still only halfway through it, Don Quixote gets a pass for being too long. I give several reasons for this: 1) Cervantes wrote and published it in installments over years, so it wasn’t meant to be read all at once. 2) It was written circa 1600 and reads like a modern novel, including a self-aware, unreliable narrator. It is arguably the greatest novel ever written and the single most influential. 3) It’s just so funny and charmingly absurd, and you have to respect that. This does, of course, depend on which English translation you read. I’m reading the Rutherford (2000) translation, and to me the humor has an almost contemporary feel, probably due to the translator’s deliberate choice to cast it that way. There’s a really good discussion in the forward to the Rutherford edition about the decisions the translator had to make. A novel as old and big as Don Quixote is difficult because you’re not just translating across language and culture but also time. A strictly literal translation would fail because the modern reader would be unfamiliar with the humor and cultural references. A good translator must understand how a reader in Cervantes’ time would have reacted to a passage and transform the experience for readers today. It gave me a new respect for the expertise and creativity to pull off a good translation. Now I’m interested in collecting English translations of Don Quixote to compare them. My understanding is some of the older ones are quite different from today’s.
13. The Odyssey, Homer – Well, I can now say I’ve read it. But was I supposed to like it? Perhaps it’s a problem of reading a text primarily to get through it. Perhaps that’s the downside to setting a reading goal: you read in part so you can make lists like this.
14. Paradise Lost, John Milton – I wanted another epic poem after The Odyssey but definitely didn’t have the appetite for The Iliad. This was a re-read from many years ago, and my impressions were largely unchanged. Satan is the most interesting character by far. The first two books–which take place in Hell immediately after Satan and his angels are expelled from Heaven–are the most engaging. Milton’s cosmos seems so small and quaint in contrast to our 21st century Hubble–James Webb universe. The forever astronomer in me delights in trying to make sense of a cosmos with definite directionality, with Heaven on top, Hell on bottom, and a finite universe in the center, all surrounded by endless Chaos and Night.
15. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky – This was an audiobook but I’m counting it because I’ve always thought I would hate it but I loved it, and by Kellie logic, it counts.

That’s it so far for 2025. As I consider blogging about future books, I expect I will read them more carefully so I can say something substantive about them afterward. Maybe that will make me a better reader. Maybe it will spoil the spontaneity and authenticity of the experience.