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He was motionless, he never changed, he had stood on that same point for a thousand years, always in his place, in the exact middle of the inordinately secure, gilded, wooden box, he stood imperturbably, always in the same robes, always frozen in the noblest of gestures, and during that one thousand years nothing had changed in the carriage of his head, in the beautiful, famous gaze: in its sadness, there was something heartbreakingly refined, something unspeakably noble, his head turned away from the world most decisively. It was said about him that he turned his head away because he was looking backward, to the back, toward a monk known as Eikan, whose speech was so beautiful, that he, the Buddha, wished to know who was speaking. The truth, however, was radically different, and whoever saw him immediately knew: the Buddha turned his beautiful gaze away so that he would not have to look, so he would not have to see, so he would not have to be aware of what was in front of himself, in the three directions--this wretched world.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai, A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East.

My Year in Reading: 2025

Here is every book I read over the last year, listed in the order I read them. These are the books I read cover-to-cover and completed. Books I particularly enjoyed are in boldface. Books I’ve read multiple times are marked with an asterisk.

Robert J. Sawyer - The Downloaded

Alex Van Halen - Brothers

Black Panther by John Ridley, Vol. 1: The Long Shadow

Paul Lynch - Prophet Song

Star Wars, Vol. 10: The Escape

Avengers by Jason Aaron, Vol. 8: Enter the Phoenix

Layla Martinez - Woodworm

Jillian & Mariko Tamaki - Roaming

Black Panther by John Ridley, Vol. 2: Range Wars

Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon - Preacher: Salvation

Chris Gooch - Under-Earth

Fantastic Four, Vol. 6: Empyre

Val McDermid - Queen Macbeth

Kathleen Hanna - Rebel Girl: My Life As a Feminist Punk

Michael Connelly - The Dark Hours

Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Message

Emily Carroll - A Guest in the House

Black Panther by John Ridley, Vol. 3: All This and the World, Too

Adrian Tomine - Shortcomings*

C Pam Zhang - Land of Milk and Honey

The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You*

Spider-Verse: Spider-Zero

Fables: Wolves

Harlan Ellison - All the Lies That Are My Life*

Mr. and Mrs. X, Vol. 1: Love and Marriage

Ice Cream Man, Vol. 1: Rainbow Sprinkles

Martin Amis - The Pregnant Widow

Megan E. O'Keefe - The Blighted Stars

Adventureman, Vol. 1: The End and Everything After

Tommy Orange - Wandering Stars

Ram V & Filipe Andrade - The Many Deaths of Laila Starr

Batman, Vol. 13: City of Bane, Part 2

Edge of Spider-Verse

Immortal Hulk, Vol. 7: Hulk Is Hulk

Michael Reynolds - The Young Hemingway

Mr. and Mrs. X, Vol. 2: Gambit and Rogue Forever

Avengers by Jason Aaron, Vol. 9: World War She-Hulk

William Kent Krueger - Iron Lake

Adventureman, Vol. 3: Ghost Lights

Julian Barnes - Changing My Mind

Stephen King - Holly

Nicola Yoon - One of Our Kind

Preacher, Vol. 8: All Hell's A-Coming

X-Men Legacy, Vol. 3: Revenants

Avengers: The Legacy of Thanos

Stephen King - You Like It Darker

Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli - Batman: Year One*

Jane Smiley - Lucky

Paul Gallico - The Snow Goose and the Small Miracle

Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman - The Wasteland

Lulu Miller - Why Fish Don't Exist

Elif Batuman - The Idiot

Avengers by Jason Aaron, Vol. 10: The Death Hunters

Uncanny X-Men by Gail Simone, Vol. 1: Red Wave

John Scalzi - The Collapsing Empire

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera

Ava Glass - Alias Emma

G. Willow Wilson & M.K. Perker - Cairo

Jessica Jones: Blind Spot

Mario Vargas Llosa - Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

Sarah Pinsker - A Song for a New Day

George Orwell - Burmese Days

X-Men by Jed MacKay, Vol. 1: Homecoming

Avengers vs. X-Men

Miriam Toews - Women Talking

Ice Cream Man, Vol. 2: Strange Neapolitan

Star Wars, Vol. 11: The Scourging of Shu-Torun

Avengers by Jason Aaron, Vol. 11: History's Mightiest Heroes

Nathan Hill - Wellness

Jessica Jones: Purple Daughter

X-Men by Jed MacKay, Vol. 2: Hostile Takeover

Star Wars, Vol. 12: Rebels and Rogues

Exceptional X-Men by Eve L. Ewing, Vol. 1: Duty Calls

Luke Cage: Everyman

Batman, Vol. 1: Their Dark Designs

Greil Marcus - What Nails It

Jeffrey Brown - Sulk, Vol. 1: Bighead & Friends

Those who knew Lennon and McCartney marveled at how close they were. . . People were drawn to them, and also wary of them, for both were capable of shriveling outsiders with wit. Together, they had an aura of unbreachable self-assurance. This was partly the arrogance of the damaged. The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk observes: 'After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don't.'

Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

"No superman ever said 'I want,' because 'I want' must lead to the questions 'Who am I?' and so to Pity and to Justice. He only says 'want.' 'Want Europe,' if he's Napoleon; 'want wives,' if he's Bluebeard; 'want Botticelli,' if he's Pierpont Morgan. Never the 'I'; and if you could pierce through him, you'd find panic and emptiness in the middle." --E. M. Forster, Howard's End

[The Leaning Tower of Pisa] illusion only works when you're standing in exactly the right spot to observe it. If you move one step left or right, the illusion falls apart. And I think people do this all the time, in life. They find a view of the world that agrees with them, a spot that feels safe and secure, and they plant themselves on that spot and don't move. Because if they did move, their certainty and security and safety in the world would fall apart, and that's too scary and painful to contemplate. So people prefer their illusions--that the world is definitely a simulation, or that acupuncture is a thing, or the juice cleanses work, or that Ebola was created by the government. It's a little assertion of sovereignty amid the chaos. In the face of insurmountable threats and distressing precarity and pain, the body longs, more than anything, for certainty. You could say that certainty is, in fact, the flip side of pain--it's what pain looks like reflected off the fun-house mirror.

Nathan Hill, Wellness

It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual . . . Kisses, tears and embraces are not in themselves evidence of homosexuality . . . On a broad historical view it is, of course, not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step.

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

How did Hitler come to power in Germany? Hitler's policy, at home and abroad, has always been to reveal his plans. Hyper-suspicion of propaganda, however, led many people to doubt what he said. The Nazis boasted that they would rule Germany, and Hitler painted a picture of his future game. "Heads will roll," he said. He would destroy democracy. Yet democracy tolerated him and helped him take office in order to destroy democracy. This peaceful death of German democracy is one of the strangest chapters in history. German democracy marched to its grave with eyes wide open, and singing, "Beware of Adolph Hitler." Democracy is temperate. Its foe is extremism. In Germany, extremism was the thermometer of a sick social system and an ailing economy.

Louis Fischer, "The Road to Hitler," 1944.

Long before he became President of the RCC, Florentino Ariza had received alarming reports on the state of the river, but he barely read them. He would calm his associates: "Don't worry, by the time the wood is gone there will be boats fueled by oil." With his mind clouded by his passion for Fermina Daza, he never took the trouble to think about it, and by the time he realized the truth, there was nothing anyone could do except bring in a new river. . . An English traveler at the beginning of the nineteenth century, referring to the journey by canoe and mule that could last as long as fifty days, had written: "This is one of the most miserable and uncomfortable pilgrimages that a human being can make." This had no longer been true during the first eighty years of steam navigation, and then it became true again forever when the alligators ate the last butterfly and the maternal manatees were gone, the parrots, the monkeys, the villages were gone: everything was gone.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

I was troubled by the Beatles, by the contradiction between their jaunty, harmoniously innocent warbling, and the calculating cynical worldview that seemed to underlie it. All the time they had been pleasing that girl, the Beatles had been keeping tally, resenting her for making them show her the way, waiting to be pleased in return. They went on about how they worked like a dog to make money to buy her things, and in exchange she had to give them everything. What if she didn't? What if she didn't know how?

Elif Batuman, The Idiot

To be alone is to be all yourself, because you are free to develop, not according to others' constrictions. Being alone is a special thing, and being able to be alone is even rarer. I have always envied people who have interior resources, because they give you an independence--a freedom people say they want, but are in reality so afraid of. People are more afraid of being alone than of anything else in life. If they are left alone for even a few minutes, they look for someone, anyone, to fill the void. They are afraid of silence; the silence when you are alone with your own thoughts, with the endless interior monologue. Then, you have to like your own company very much. The advantage is you don't have to misshape yourself to conform to other people's ideas, or only to please.

Federico Fellini, I, Fellini

Smokers exist in every kitchen. It kills a tastebud or two but we all die, and no one knows better than those who club the fish, clean the guts from the meat, and serve for your delectation a plate from which all blood has been wiped. We cook despite bad pay and sore backs and inadequate sleeps in apartments we can't afford and we wake up choosing again that most temporary of glories that is made, and then consumed: we know. We all die. Whether it comes after thirty years of hard labor or sixty at a desk, whether we calculate or plan, in the end we have only the choice of what touches the lips before we go: lobster if you like it or cold pizza if you don't, a sip of smoke, a drink, a job, a reckless passion, raw fish, the beguilement of mushrooms, cheese luscious beneath its crown of mold. What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishments can be measured.

C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

The Redeemers of this age look out and see their kingdom besieged by trans Barbies, Muslim mutants, daughters dating daughters, sons trick-or-treating as Wakandan kings. The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for tomorrow--a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced. In this context, the Mom for Liberty shrieking "Think of the children!" must be taken seriously. What she is saying is that her right to the America she knows, her right to the biggest and greenest of lawns, to the most hulking and sturdiest SUVs, to an arsenal of infinite AR-15s, rests on a hierarchy, on an order, helpfully explained and sanctified by her country's ideas, art, and methods of education.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

Chess and maths and music: these were the only spheres, Keith had read, in which you encountered *prodigies.* Human beings, that is to say, who were capable of creative originality before the onset of adolescence. There were no prodigies anywhere else. Because these closed systems did not depend on life: on experience of life. Religion too, maybe, was prodigious, when children dreamt, with all their authentic force, of Father Christmas and his sleigh.

Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow

The children who disappear are the ones whose mothers make scenes and rant and rave in the street and go on TV with unwashed hair, too shattered by grief to even shower and barely able to drag themselves out of bed. And the cameras film their greasy hair and shabby clothes and nails bitten to the quick from stress. They film these women in pieces, broken inside and out and they film their houses full of cheap furniture and old-fashioned curtains because they don't have two three four people taking care of everything for them or a lawyer to set up a press conference, an entire law firm to find a venue and invite the media and advise them on how to speak and how to move and what to say to the journalists circling like vultures for fodder for the endless TV debates. They don't have a lawyer or a maid or anything and everyone can see it and everyone feels sorry for them but everyone also understands that those children do disappear. They don't speak foreign languages and they've never been on a plane but they do disappear. No one wants them to and everyone thinks it's a shame but well maybe a tiny bit less of a shame since the press are quick to forget about them and pretty soon they're just a number within a statistic and everyone knows that's not a shame because no one feels bad about a number, you feel bad about the children with white skin and blonde hair when you know their favorite toy their favorite color and the name of their little doggy.

Layla Martinez, Woodworm

So much of what my generation had been promised disintegrated at our touch. Consider the friend, a painter of seascapes, who dreamed of affording waterfront property. On the day the levees broke, the Gulf flooded her studio and painted her walls with costly oils. Consider the friend who worked for six years at a company he hated on the promise of a sabbatical, only to be let go. The friend who complained about family reunions and lost every relative over the age of fifty to a virus. The friend who saved up to invest in a fund and saw her money dissolve like sugar on the tongues of bankers who barely got a scolding from the SEC. The life we'd been promised was a scam, the world a scam, the whole goddamn play a scam and there seemed nothing to do but burn it down as rioters did in Paris, New York, Nairobi--and then creep back through the embers because what other choice did we have? What other planet?

C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

. . . The prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore. . .

Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

Probably each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. You know? For us, it's gonna be that at, at a certain point, that we're either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn't all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? And if we *don't* do that, then (a) as individuals, we're gonna die, and (b) the culture's gonna grind to a halt. Because we're gonna get so interested in entertainment that we're not gonna want to do the work that generates the income that buys the products that pays for the advertising that disseminates the entertainment. It just seems to me like it's gonna be this very cool thing. Where the country could very well shut down and die, and it won't be anybody else doin' it to us, we will have done it to ourselves.

David Foster Wallace, March 1996, quoted in David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

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