The book list 2025

I used the library for most of these. Yay, libraries!

1. The Drowning Game - Barbara Nickless. Secrets between sisters, spies, defectors, and luxury yachts. Meh.
2. The Autumn of Ruth Winters - Marshall Fine. Relationships, family, and how we navigate them.
3. Reader, Come Home - Maryanne Wolf. How the brain works when we read and how this relates to electronic reading.
4. Pests - Bethany Brookshire. How humans create animal villains. The author used “global north” instead of “in the West”. I like that.
5. Of Time and Turtles - Sy Montgomery. Yay, turtles! Makes me want to set up a home for another.
6. Flight Patterns - Rebecca Heisman. The history and technology of bird banding and tracking.
7. Into the Fall - Tamara Miller. Undramatic ending, which is much more life-like. While some of the emotions were well worked out, others were flat. A lot of details are not dealt with.
8. The Blue Machine - Helen Czerski. How the ocean works. Basic.
9. A Wilder Shore - Camille Peri. The story of Fanny and her husband, Robert Louis Stevenson 
10. Inferno's Heir - Tiffany Wang. Really nice world-building. In the end, I didn’t like any of the characters particularly.
11. Unmasked - Paul Holes. His life solving cold cases. 
12. Bitch - Lucy Cooke. On the female of the species. Lots of good animal stories.
13. There Is (No) Such Thing as a Stupid Question - Leah Elson. Fun facts galore. Based on a podcast.
14. Many Things Under a Rock - David Scheel. The mysteries of octopuses. Some good Indigenous tales.
15. A Ghostly Undertaking - Toyna Kappes. It is one of those tiny town tales where everyone is white. Average mystery 
16. The Cure for Women - Lydia Reeder. Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the challenge to Victorian medicine that changed women's lives forever. A little rambling to cover the entire history of medicine from before the US civil war forward.
17. The Rules of Fortune - Danielle Prescod. Family secrets. Meh.
18. A Most Efficient Murder - Anthony Slayton. A fun British mystery.
19. The Black Angels - Maria Smilios. The untold story of the nurses who helped cure tuberculosis.
20. Chaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop - Emmeline Duncan. Too many useless details. Set near Portland tho.
21. A Most Unusual Demise - Katherine Black. Weird British mystery.
22. Trouble in Queenstown - Delia Pitts. Mystery with a Black female detective. Big emphasis on community and family.
23. Leslie F*cking Jones - Leslie Jones. She reads her work; it is hilarious that way 
24. Lessons from Plants - Beronda Montgomery. Basic plant physiology.
25. How to Stay Productive When the World is Ending - Reductress. It claims to be funny. Meh
26. A Killer in Kings Cove - Iona Wishaw. Weird British spy mystery set in Canada.
27. The Warbler - Sarah Bety Durst. A woman with a curse who moves every 10 months so that she doesn’t turn into a tree.
28. The Lake of Lost Girls - Katherine Greene. Podcasters bring attention to girls gone missing in a small town. I read some characters correctly, but did not see the ending 
29. On Looking - Alexandra Horowitz. Taking walks with people of different specialties
30. There's No Murder Like Show Murder - MS Greene. Costume director turned detective in fictional off-Broadway Connecticut.
31. Bad Tourists - Caro Carver. A suspense thriller about murder, survivors, and betrayal.
32. The Crash - Frieda McFadden. The narrator’s paranoid anxiety ruined the story for me.
33. Broughtupsy - Christina Cooke. The protagonist moves back to Jamaica after growing up abroad. Lots of memories, dealing with family deaths, and being queer. 
34. Airman - Eoin Colfer. A little goofy, but an easy read before bed. More like the fairy tales I used to read under the covers.
35. The City of Laughter - Temim Fruchter. Queer Jewish folk tales and family stories.
36. Recipe for a Charmed Life - Rachel Linden. Needed a better editor. The repetition was frustrating. Saying the same thing three times technically makes a paragraph, but it's not good reading.
37. The Happiness Trap - Russ Harris. My therapist recommended it 
38. Briefly Perfectly Human - Alua Arthur. Stories from a death doula.
39. The Nutmeg Curse - Amitav Ghosh. A book that actually uses genocide to describe the colonial eras, putting the Europeanization of colonies at the heart of environmental disaster.
40. The Lost Flock - Jane Cooper. A woman from Newcastle, England, moves to a remote Scottish island to raise an endangered sheep breed. 
41.  Trail of the Lost - Andrea Lankford. Told by an ex-nps search and rescue ranger about finding 3 different lost hikers on the Pacific Coast Trail 
42. Crossings - Ben Goldfarb. How roads are shaping the future of our planet. Lots of roadkill.
43. The Last One Left - Riley Sager. Decades after the murder of a family, the lone survivor tells the tale of her medical career.
44. Memento Mori - Joanna Ebenstein. Contemplating death to live a better life.
45. Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire - Peter Stark. So many boring men and their destruction of so much.
46. Forever Home - Graham Norton. Good. Odd. Never quite went where I thought it would.
47. What an Owl Knows - Jennifer Ackerman. Because owls.
48. The Fourth Girl - Wendy Corsi Staub. Despite how all girls have very different names, I kept getting them mixed up during all of the back and forth through time.
49. Thus Spoke the Plant - Monica Gagliano. I am intrigued by her scientific research and not at all into her mysticism.
50. George: A Magpie Memoir - Frieda Hughes. A well-intentioned gardener raises a magpie. (By the daughter of Sylvia Plath)
51. The Case of the Missing Maid - Rob Osler. A young woman takes a job as a junior investigator during the mid-1800s. Meh.
52. Holmes, Marple, & Poe - James Patterson and Brian Sitts. Fast-moving. Decent mysteries. I was mad that the main Black character was the one addicted to heroin.
53. The Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie. Fun mystery.
54. When the Sahara Was Green - Martin Williams. A geological view of the African continent. A little dry.
55. The Red House Mystery - A.A. Milne. Weird British mystery that spends too much time musing about random shit and less about the murder.
56. Nature Underfoot - John Hainze. Always nice to have someone babble about beetles and dandelions for a whole book.
57. Agatha Webb - Anna Katherine Green. Green created the first female detective many years before Ms. Marple appeared, though she has not appeared by chapter XX. Hmmm
58. Natural Rivals - John Layton. John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America's Public Lands. More about politics than nature.
59. Canopy of Titans - Paul Koberstein & Jessica Applegate. The life and times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest. Covers Marin to Alaska. It made me feel at home.
60. No Less Strange or Wonderful - A. Kendra Greene. Essays vaguely related to the natural world.
61. Gator Country - Rebecca Renner. Alligators and poachers in the Everglades.
62. Neuromancer - William Gibson. Made an impression on a friend, so I thought I’d see why.
63. Calling All Minds - Temple Grandin. How to think and create like an inventor. The author is autistic. Lots of recipes for fun play.
64. The Artist of Blackberry Grange - Paulette Kennedy. An old house, ghosts, and paintings that take the protagonist into the past. Shit like that.
65. Patient H.M. - Luke Dittrich. Interesting tale by the grandson of the doctor who lobotomized HM
66. Return of the Bison - Roger Di Silvestro. A nature book that focuses on hope. Wacky 
67. Tegami Bachi Letter Bee - Hiroyuki Asada. An anime about a postal person recommended by a coworker.
68. Birdgirl - Mya-Rose Craig. A family of birders, see adventures, and the mental illnesses they had to navigate 
69. A Keeper - Graham Norton. Weird tale of family secrets.
70. The Case of Jennie Brice - Mary Rinehart. Old mystery with a missing body, a boarding house, and a flood. Did not really like it.
71. Moving to Higher Ground - Wynton Marsalis. A book about jazz recommended by a friend.
72. The Paradise Mystery - JS Fletcher. The protagonist is an asshole, and I may not finish.
73. When You Find My Body - D. Dauphinee. The disappearance of Geraldine Largay on the Appalachian Trail.
74. Devil’s Teeth - Susan Casey. A true story of obsession and survival among America's Great White Sharks. The Farallon Islands. Weird to remember helping the author contact the scientists featured in the book, well before the book’s events happened.
75.  What a Mushroom Lives For - Michael Hathaway. Interesting audiobook that malfunctioned partway through
76. Please See Us - Caitlin Mullen. A depressing book about call girls in Atlantic City
77. The Cask - Freeman Wills Croft. An exceedingly polite murder mystery whose female characters are either char women or the corpse.
78. The Highly Sensitive Person—Elaine Aron. I understand her academic thinking about organization, but find it almost too thick to read.
79. The Little Old Lady Who Broke All of the Rules - Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg. Silly escape/robbery book with retired pensioners as protagonists.
80. Scythe and Pen - AC Hobbs. Vampires, werewolves, politics, and murder.
81.  The Secret Life of Fungi: Discoveries from a Hidden World - Aliya Whiteley. Nothing I didn't know, but it passed the time well.
82. The Great Derangement - Amitav Ghosh. More on climate change, but with more of an Asian/African standpoint 
83. The Dragon Behind the Glass - Emily Voigt. All about the arowana.
84. In Search of Mycotopia - Doug Bierand. Another fun shroom book.
85. Mind of the Raven - Bernd Heinrich. I've been wanting to reread this for a while. Listening to it at work made a slow day go faster 
86. As Long As Grass Grows - Dina Gilio-Whttaker. Environmental Justice and Native living.
87. Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert - Bob the Drag Queen. Funny, makes one think. 
88. Wake of Vultures - Lila Bowen. Reread.
89. Family & Other Calamities - Leslie Gray Streeter. Fictional Black journalist dealing with family and professional disasters.
90. Good Fairies of New York - Martin Millar. Reread.
91. Split - Alida Bremmer. 1936 Dalmatia, communists, fascists, socialists, spies, and murder.
92. Being Mortal - Atul Gawande. Medicine and what matters in the end. Lots to think about.
93. White Cat, Black Dog - Kelly Link. More fabulous shorts from a master.
94. A Matter of Death and Life - Irving and Marilyn Yalom. Two old people writing about their inevitable death.
95. The Golden Age of Magic - Leanne G. Smith. The last fairy godmother goes to 1930s Hollywood to grant wishes. Meh.
96. Conspiracy of Ravens - Lila Bowman. Reread
97. How We Talk - NJ Enfield. The inner workings of conversation
98. Houseplant HortOCCULTure - Devin Hunter. Green magic for indoor spaces
99. Turning to Stone - Marcia Bjornerud. Discovering the subtle wisdom of rocks.
100.  Animal Magnetism- Rita Mae Brown. I connected with her writing once, but now I find her preachy.
101. The Mushroom at the End of the World - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Also, matsutake mushrooms. 
102. How to Be a Good Creature - Sy Montgomery.  Animal tales to keep me company at work.
103. Storm Waters - Kat Richardson. Took a bit to figure out what was happening, but worth it: 1930s slang, dark magic, mystery, and ghosts.
104. Funny Farm - Laurie Zalinski. Her life with 700 rescue animals.
105. Wild Souls - Emma Marris. Freedom and flourishing in the non-human world.
106. Who Is the Liar - Laura Lee Rahr. Everyone is an unreliable narrator.
107. The Nature Principle - Richard Louv. Alternating between negative and positive. The former dominates.
108. The Earth Moved - Amy Stewart. On the remarkable achievement of earthworms.
109. Sing Like a Fish - Amorina Kingdon. How sound Rules life underwater. 
110. Rambunctious Garden - Emma Marris. Saving nature in a post-wild world.
111. H is for Hawk - Helen MacDonald. Goshawks, TH White, and isolationism.
112. Aquaponics for Beginners - howtoaquaponic.com. There is information here, but the book is so poorly written I don't know if I have the patience to parse it out.
113. Brilliant Green - Stefano Mancuso & Alessandro Viola. A discussion of plant intelligence. Susan Simard and Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote about it in a better, more accessible way.
114. Fence, Bog, and Swamp - Annie Proulx. A short history of peatland destruction and its role in the climate crisis.
115. Aquaponic Gardening - Sylvia Bernstein. A step-by-step guide to raising vegetables and fish together. Much more readable/useful than the last one.
116. Blight - Emily Monosson. Fungi and the coming pandemic. 
117. Dancing Fish and Ammonites - Penelope Lively. The author's attitudes remind me very much of Alice. Lots of good questions, no answers though.
118. The Open Air Life - Linda Åkenson McGurk. The Swedish practice of going outside no matter the weather.
119. To Speak for the Trees - Diana Beresford-Kroeger. Less about trees and science than about the author's life. Not bad, just not quite what I was expecting.
120. Out of the Woods - Gregg Olsen. Not great. Writing was fine, but the characters did things that made them less and less credible to me. 
121. Unmask Alice - Rick Emerson. I read Go Ask Alice when I was 13. Nice to know the history behind the scenes.
122. Midnight in Chernobyl - Adam Higgenbotham. The bureaucracy behind the disaster. 
123. Goodbye Hello - Adam Berry. A super-eager investigator of the paranormal talking about ghosts. 
124. The Mind of Plants - ed. By John Ryan, Patricia Viera & Monica Gagliano. Narratives of plant intelligence.
125. Orwell's Roses - Rebecca Solnit. The contrast between searing political essays and planting roses & trees that will live longer than you.
126. This Is Chance! - Jones Moallem. Anchorage, Alaska, the 9.2 earthquake in 1964, and the woman who helped hold them all together (Genie Chance).
127. The Sinners All Bow - Kate Winkler Dawson. Two authors, one murder, and the real Hester Prynne.
128. The Eight Master Lessons of Nature - Gary Ferguson. What nature tells us about living well in the world.
129. The Reality Bubble - Ziya Tong. Things humans can't see, hear, etc.
130. Gory Details - Erika Engelhaupt. Adventures from the dark side of science.
131. Two Trees Make a Forest - Jessica J Lee. In search of her family's past among Taiwan's mountains and coasts.
132. The Mountain In the Sea - Ray Nayler. Odd. Compelling.
133. Biomimicry - Janine M Beynus. Learning from nature, though the book is 25 years old, and everything sounded more than familiar
134. Squid Empire - Danna Staff. The rise and fall of the cephalopods. I still can't wrap my brain around geological time.
135. Cold Island - Peter Colt. Police novel reminiscent of the BBC miniseries, The Dublin Murders.
136. The Silverberg Business - Robert Freeman Wexler. Weird. More surreal fever dream than a cowboy tale from the 1880s.
137. The Hour of the Land - Terry Tempest Williams.  Essays about national parks. Soothing.
138. How to Be Animal - Melanie Challenger. A new history of what it means to be human.
139. The Truth About Animals - Lucy Cooke. Fun animal facts.
140. The Social Instinct - Nicola Raihani. How cooperation formed the world.
141. Pure, White, and Deadly - John Yudkin. All about the evils of sugar. Originally published in the 1970s. 
142. Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat - Hal Herzog. Why it is so hard to think straight about animals.
143. Tremors In the Blood - Amit Katwala. Murder, obsession, and the birth of the lie detector. I have heard some of the stories before. 
144. Dead Mountain - Donnie Eichar. The untold true story of what happened at Dyaltov Pass. 
145. The Map of Knowledge - Violet Moller. That period between the Greeks/Romans and the Renaissance, and the scholars and libraries that kept scientific knowledge.
146. Playing With Reality - Kelley Clancy. How games helped to shape the world.
147. The Prince Without Sorrow - Maithree Wijesekara. Book one of the Obsidian Throne. A prince born into violence seeking peace. A witch shackled by pacifism seeking revenge.
148. The Slow Moon Climbs - Susan P. Matters. The science, history, and meaning of menopause.
149. The Gifts of Imperfection - Brené Brown. Good. I wanted to slow the audiobook down and create pauses for contemplation. 
150. A Taste for Poison - Neil Bradbury. Eleven deadly molecules and the killers who used them. Nothing much i didn't already know.
151. Islands of Abandonment - Cal Flyn. Nature rebounding in the post-human landscape. Slow tog et to the point, but nicely positive in focus.
152. Albert and the Whale - Philip Hoare. Albrecht Dürer and how art imagines our world. Weirdly poetic. Not as much about Dürer as I had hoped.
153. The Fossil Hunter - Shelley Emling. About Mary Anning and the dinosaur fossils she found. Too much about the men she had to deal with.
154. The Knife Man - Wendy Moore. John Hunter and the birth of modern surgery. The guy was a jerk so a book idolizing him was hard to focus on.
155. A House Between Sea and Sky - Beth Cato. Weird.  Sentient sourdough. And a house as a narrator.
156. The Last Man - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 
157. A Sorceress Comes to Call - T. Kingfisher. An evil sorceress who can possess people and the havoc that causes.
158. The Vindication of Monsters - ed. Lucy Sussex, Nancy Holder, Sara Karloff. Essays about Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.
159. Misterioso - Arne Dahl. Swedish cop drama. Weird. Not sure I like any of the characters. The mystery is decent.
160. Brain Lock - Jeffrey Schwartz. Recommended. Some good tips, though I don't have OCD
161. Dickens and Prince - Nick Hornby. A comparison of work ethics. Oddly satisfying.
162. Broad Strokes - Bridget Quinn. 15 woman artists. I requested a digital copy of the book (after listening to the audio) so that I can reread one chapter and also learn to spell the names.
163. Eat the Ones You Love - Sarah Maria Griffin. Creepy, weird, and kind of sexy.
164. The Black-Eyed Blonde - Dashiel Hammett. Typical Marlowe mystery. 
165. Eating Stone - Ellen Meloy. Reread.
166. The Globemakers - Peter Bellerby. The art of making global maps by hand. Lots of cool map history.
167. The Art of Rivalry - Sebastian Smee. Four specific artistic rivalries. Too much drama, not enough art.
168. In the Valley of the Noble Beyond - John Zada. Billed as being about the Great Bear Forest in British Columbia.  About Bigfoot. 
169. Forest Euphoria - Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian. On the abounding queerness of nature. 
170. Who Cooked the Last Supper? - Rosalind Miles. Finding the (mostly nameless) women throughout history. 
171. I Hate You, Don't Leave Me - Jerold Kirschman & Hal Strauss. About borderline personality disorder.
172. Leviathan - Eric Jay Dolin. The history of whaling in  America. 
173. The Moor Witch - Jessica Khoury. Pretty awful.
174. The Second Son - Simon Gervais & Ryan Steck. Telling me the exact make and model of watches, guns, helicopters, etc., is simultaneously very specific and tells me nothing at all.
175. Gathering Moss - Robin Wall Kimmerer.  Relistening to this lovely book.
176. Double or Nothing - Kim Sherwood. It would probably be better if I'd seen all of the Bond films.
177. Slade House - David Mitchell. Really good. Abrupt ending though.
178. Carthage - Joyce Carol Oates. Didn't like the way the narration changed from 1st person to omniscient to 3rd person constantly, even in the same paragraph 
179. Mai Tais for the Lost - Mia V. Moss. The world-building was better than the mystery 
180. The Outcasts of Time - Ian Mortimer.  I would have enjoyed researching the historical details more than I liked this particular story.
181. Ephemera: a Memoir- Briana Loewinsohn. Enjoyed the images.
182. The Returned - Seth Patrick. Very well written. I stopped reading it because I don't like horror stories, and it was more of that than a mystery (the section I found it in at the library).
183. Smart Change - Art Markman. Nothing earth-shattering. 
184. Pandora's Lab - Paul A. Offit. Some of science's great mistakes.
185. Life on the Rocks - Juli Berwald. Corals. The prose was a tad too dramatic for me.
186. Tea & Alchemy - Sharon Lynn Fisher. Predictable and way too hetero.
187. The Songs of Trees - David George Haskell. Tree ecology. Fun!
188. The Family Tree - Sherri S. Tepper. I only liked one of the two intertwined stories.
189. Threshold - Denver Marshall Lane. Horrible.
190. Daughters of the Dust - Julie Dash. Very good. A fictional look at the Gullah who lived on the islands off South Carolina.
191. Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer. Reread.
192. Last of the Crazy People - Timothy Findley. Set very much in 1967.
193. Murder by Degrees - Ritu Mukerji. A decent mystery despite the 2000s morals in an 1800s Pennsylvania.
194. Crosstalk - Connie Willis. Reread
195. The Circumference of the World - Lavie Tidhar. The story is captivating. The timeline is fluid, which can lead to rereading sections for clarity.