My reading list from 2025

2025-12-31

2025 was a tough year for many folks for many reasons. I’m grateful to have read (and listened to) so many good things. Good books are truly a balm for the morale during trying times.

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

“Model Home” was for me a horror story surrounding decades of gaslighting targeting the Maxwells, a Black family in a wealty Texas suburb. Solomon lays bare the characters’ heartache and terror alongside their deep and complicated love for one another.

El Ghourabaa Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch and Samia Marshy editors

I loved this “Queer and Trans collection of Oddities.” The editors have assembled a fine set of poems and stories by Arab queer folk. I could stand to reread the whole collection, but I especially loved Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s story “The Spa” which wonderfully captures the fear, desire, and potential joys of the locker room.

Ghost Roots by Pemi Aguda

I must admit being drawn to the striking, at first cute, then noticably shocking cover of this book. The stories that haunt me from this collection are “24, Alhaji Williams Street” and “The Dusk Market.” In the former, boys are dying of a mysterious fever throught the neighborhood and the narrator must decide what to do. The latter concerns an enchanted market. An enjoyable collection.

The Forgetters by Greg Sarris

The Forgetters is a masterclass in storytelling. Sarris sets up a wonderful frame of two crow women talking about telling stories interwoven with the stories themselves. The folk tales themselves are wonderfully rich. The forgetters takes a high place in my list of favorite books and on my personal fairytale/fabulist canon. Highly recommended.

Hooking UP by M. J. Arcangelini

This is a great chapbook of poems that explore queer cruising culture in vivid detail with aching tenderness.

Perpetual Law by Mario Bellatin translated by Stephen Beachy

Stephen Beachy, who translated Perpetual Law, was my major poject advisor for my MFA program ath the Universtiy of San Francisco and he remains a good friend. He also introduced me to Mario Bellatin. This mini novel is strange and unsettling; a creepy fever dream. I’d like to see folks adding this to their “novels to read in one sitting list” alongside Bellatin’s Beauty Salon.

If you’re not familiar with Stephen’s own work, I encourage you to check him out. His novellas “Some Phantom and No Time Flat” are brilliant and I can’t get enough of his Amish sci-fi/horror series “Zeke Yoder vs. the Singularity” and its follow-ups.

Chinese Checkers by Mario Bellatin translated by Cooper Renner

Stephen Beachy recommended this book, not only because it is by Bellatin, but also because the story “Hero Dogs” concerns a immobile man who has 30 Belgian Malinois Shepherds. My sister fosters and trains rescue Malinois in rural Tennessee.

I enjoyed the stories, but also noted the foreward by Ken Sparling which is a wonderful essay on the art of translation.

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou

Sour Cherry is a mesmerising riff on the tale of Bluebeard. Theodoridou exprlores the family dynamics that evolve into a lifetime of destruction for a man/monster and the women and family attached to him.

What A Fish Looks Like by Syr Hyati Beker

For me What a Fish Looks Like is a love letter to queer community, queer spaces, and the potentiality of transformation. The world as we know it is ending, more quickly in the story than IRL, but who knows when we’ll catch up?

The recently-split Seb and Jay pass a book of fairy tales back and forth. It accumulates their notes and ephemera from events their daily lives navigating the apocalypse and making their plans for remaining and/or for escape. The places and characters invade the stories in the book just as the stories invade their lives. Seriously, watch out for the encroaching carnivorous vines!

I was struck by the necessity of collectivity for survival, and of an undoing of narratives that have not served us as a species. Transformation is inevitable. You really see, feel, and experience what an anti-colonial “happily ever after” can be.

Open Throat Henry Hoke

The rich language and the point of view of the mountain lion make this novel work for me. You really get a sense of the mountain lion’s isolation in what should be its native habitat. It is both fun and sad to be a voyeur from this perspective. The fire in the canyon really presages the terror that happened in LA in January 2025. If I had one minor critique is that it takes punches at an highly visible and easily mocked segment of the LA population.

Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland

I read this collection of essays by Jenn Shapland for an essay worskhop with Alexander Chee. In it, Shapland shines her light into the darkest caverns of America’s heart. She addresses the colonization and poisoning the native lands now called New Mexico, the insidous impacts of whiteness and whte supremacy, the appeal of “woo,” the endless war on women’s bodies, and more.

The topics are challeging and the essays are long, but Shapland uses section breaks, interspliced interviews, and other formal elements to keep the pace moving. I related to her attraction to Pema Chodron and the practice of tonglen: it gives a sense of hope to her testimony regarding so much horror.

Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez

What I loved most about this book, which I also read for Alexander Chee’s class, was the lesbian, queer, and punk history of the 1990s and early 2000s. In this era of queer erasure, it remains a remarkable document. The tension between the butch lesbians and the trans men, the politics of the softball leagues in East LA, the performance art in San Antonio: all of it seethes with drama. Gutiérrez’s toughness is tempered by her vulnerablility. She lets us hear the voice of her self-doubt, to witness her awe for the desert southwest, and feel her profound love for those close to her.

Daydreamers by Alvin Lu

I found Daydreamers to be wildly different from Lu’s first novel, The Hell Screens. Like a daydream, I found myself pleasntly lost between the present day of the narrative and the timelines of the various manuscripts woven into the story. There are secret (or not-so-secret) affairs, arcane Chinese literary societies, immigrant history, femmes fatales, and battles for coroporate succession all set in against a Bay Area and Los Angeles rendered in a “shot-through-gauze” haze that seems uniquely Californian.

One Hundred! Demons by Lynda Barry

I am a huge Lynda Barry fan and have especially found her Syllabus to be a huge inspriation in my creative practice. Since I chose to draw a demon a day for 2025, I couldn’t end the year without re-reading her demons. The artwork in this book is exquisite and the stories are heartbraking and funny at the same time. “The Aswang,” which I knew from her CD “The Lynda Barry Experience” is particularly wonderful. She has the uncanniest ability to capture the innocence of childhood alongside the remnants left when the innocence has been stripped away.

The Week of Colors by Elena Garro translated by Megan McDowell

I really enjoy fabulist Latin American litture, so when I received a marketing message that Two Lines Press was publishing a translation of “the cursed mother of magical realism,” I punched the buy button without hesitation. For me, I think “the cursed mother of magical realism” mis-set my expectation a bit.

Luckily, I was able to get past that and enjoy the stories. For example, “The Tree” read to me like straightforward psycological class horror. The title story seemd the most magically realistic – where a mysterious devil figure has imprisoned personfiied days of the week.

“The Tiztla Theft” has one of the best settings as introductions ever:

Tiztla is a small town located in the south of the Republic of Mexico. Its inhabitants are small and silent. Its nights are deep, and when the sun sets, man is afraid. The summer months are as hot and dry as the heart of a stone set out in the sun. People go through life drowsy and hot-headed…

And it goes on from there. There’s some wonderful lampooning of the local police in that story too.

Also of note is the introduction by Alvaro Enrigue that shines some light on Garro’s life and career and the situation around her literary exile. In the end I enjoyed the collection and will look back to it.

Audiobooks

I’ve listening to more audiobooks, so want to share those here, too:

Babel by R. F. Kuang

This was a wonderful story and well read. I loved magical aspect of the story set against the colonialist history of a sacred learning institution. The characters are complex and the struggle between comfort and battling against colonialism is brilliantly told.

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

I loved Atkinson’s “The Normal Rules Don’t Apply,” and so decided to dive into the Jackson Brody series. I love how she sets up and intertwines the various msyteries of art theft while lampooning mystery stories in general. I also love that, even though she is poking fun, she treats all her characters with wonderful kindness.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

This is the first Jackson Brody story, and such a good one. Listening to the first chapter, I thought I was in for a family drama instad of a mystery. And we do get the family drama, but the mystery takes over when the family’s youngest daughter disappears. Kate Atkinson masterfully ties in other stories of disappearance and loss beautifully while keeping us turning pages to figure out the mystery.

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

This follow up to “Case Histories” is set during the Edinburgh film festival. For me, it was a lot more suspenseful and tense than the other Brody stories I’d listened to. A fun story for sure.

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