2025: Books I Can't Wait to Read

A Report on Anticipated Wonder

Having shared my favorite books of 2024, along with a mini-manifesto on why reading is incredibly important for personal wellbeing, human connection, and — really, truly! — the future of freedom, I couldn’t not share a bit about what I am looking forward to reading in 2025. I’ve made a list below — but first, a caveat about reading lists, the threat they can pose to curiosity, and the importance of keeping readerly excitement alive and well.

I. Caveat about reading lists

I don’t have any rules for myself regarding reading. I don’t make reading lists — because as fun as it is, the second I’ve made one, I’m bored by it and even the thought of following the list fills me with existential dread. For the same reason, I don’t assign myself books, put myself on any sort of reading schedule, or seek to “improve” myself with reading choices.

I read with freedom and without constraint: whatever strikes me in the moment as absolutely right is absolutely right. In the rest of my life, I am a planner. I am a maker and follower of lists. I have annual goals and quarterly benchmarks and personal deadlines and a weekly planner and daily to-do lists carved off that planner. I am not exactly an impulsive person. Except for when I read. When it comes to reading, I am pretty much feral and I like it that way.

Whenever it's time to choose a new book, I amble around the house looking at the shelves and the stacks of books that won’t fit on the shelves. I noodle around on my Kindle app, which contains a substantial library in its own right. And I pick a few titles that jump out at me. Then I sit down with the finalists, open each to its first page, and begin reading. The book that strikes me as perfect for now — which is as much a question of style and tone as it is one of subject matter — is the one that gets read. I have done this since I was a small child and it is one of my favorite rituals in life.

That said, I do read steadily, with purpose and consistency, and I do read to educate myself about subjects that are important to me. I'm always reading, for example, toward my own writing projects – right now, I've got a couple of screenplays and a book on the go and I'm planning the book after that, and there's a lot of reading that goes into each project. Over the years I have learned to read systematically while also suiting my mood. It is vital to me that reading never feels like work, and always feels like play.

Pip approves of my current stack, as long as he can sit on me while I read it.

II. My most happily anticipated 2025 books, so far

Because all of the above, I can't say for certain what exactly I will read this year, or when I will read what. But I do have a few books that have been calling loudly to me for some time. These are books that, for superstitious nonsensical reasons that go back to childhood, I won't actually shelve. They are living in stacks around the house so that I can't forget about them or lose them. When a book makes it off the shelf and into the stack, that means I have entered the “I absolutely cannot wait to read this book” stage. From there, it’s just a matter of time.

And so I share a few of the books that live in stacks, that have been calling to me compellingly for some time, and that I absolutely cannot wait to read.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom. This is Fromm’s investigation of how the terror of freedom — which includes the freedom to fail to live our own lives well, and responsibility for same — can not only make people vulnerable to tyranny, but can also make them actually welcome it. Chillingly, he published this book in 1941: He wrote as he was watching the will to flee freedom, the willingness to embrace tyranny, unfold in real time. The premise of Escape from Freedom feels at once intuitively true, and deeply at odds with how Americans think about — are willing to think about — freedom. We celebrate freedom, we defend freedom, we seek to expand our freedoms, and we treat freedom as an uncomplicated, unqualified good, even as we clearly struggle a lot with it in ways we can’t really articulate. I find myself wondering if we might do freedom better if we were better able to talk about how difficult and frightening it really is.

Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power. I have a minor obsession — or possibly a major one — with understanding how power works and, particularly, with why and how people abuse it. This book, improbably presented as a “how to” guide, distills thousands of years of “best practices” into 48 transcendent human laws. I tend to be earnest to a fault, and have failed to spot major manipulators at key times in my life. So I expect this book to offer both insight and armor.

Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler. This memoir about growing up Jewish in Berlin between 1907 and 1933 offers a personal perspective on how it was that Hitler could come to power and do what he went on to do. Right now, as open and unapologetic antisemitism erupts once again, this feels like critically important reading.

Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest. This book covers the five months from Lincoln’s election in November, 1860, to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, a period whose difficulties were, in Lincoln’s words, "so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.” The nation split in two as Lincoln came to office. Our own wildly divided moment feels, in its way, like an echo of that time. It feels right to turn to this book now.

Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears. This is for a project I'm working on, a book that began when I discovered, during routine genealogical research, that I have an ancestor who was locked away in an insane asylum for life — not for being insane, but for crying.

Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light. This is the final novel in Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall trilogy. I tried to read it in the spring of 2020 during lockdown, but my concentration during that time was shot and I had to put it down. I have since regained my capacity to focus, and getting to read this book feels like I’ve won a prize.

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. I am a sucker for good medical history, and have a particular weakness for histories of mind and mental illness. The Noonday Demon was recently recommended to me as a spectacular example of this genre. Somehow, I had never discovered it, even though it was a 2001 National Book Award winner and finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. When I think back to what I was doing back then, that does make some sense. I was a bit distracted by Difficult Life Events. Thrilled to be able to enjoy it now.

George Eliot, Middlemarch. I’ve loved Eliot’s masterpiece since I first encountered it in a college course on the Victorian novel in 1988. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read it, and how many times I’ve taught it. But I do know I haven’t read it since I left academia almost 20 years ago, and I do know that’s been too long. A wise teacher once remarked that one should read Middlemarch every five years — because it is a novel that grows with you, and it’s different every time. I’m looking forward to meeting my new Middlemarch after all these years.

Also, I feel an urge to re-read something by Dickens — perhaps Bleak House. And I’m getting that feeling I get every couple of years, the one that tells me I need a Trollope novel.

Finally, I really, really wish Sarah Waters, Andrea Barrett, Donna Tartt, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Michael Chabon would publish new novels. I pine for their prose!

And there you have it: a Rorschach map of my reading mind at the moment.

III. What are your most happily anticipated 2025 books, so far?

I would love to hear about your own most eagerly anticipated reads in the comments. Please share!

Maybe some of your titles will become mine — and maybe some of mine will become yours.

Regardless, I am wishing you all a year of satisfying reading — reading with wild abandon, fearless curiosity, and great joy.