Top 25 of 25: Book Look Back

I enjoy reading, a lot. I do not care if it is physical, digital, or audio, books are a constant companion in my life. To the point where I have averaged reading about 73 a year since I started tracking them in 2020.

I just love the concept of them, how words can contain multitudes of worlds. The smell of them, the thrill of finding one you’ve been looking for. This is not always a relationship I have had with them. Growing up I also liked the idea of them, I would read almost any of the Great Illustrated Classics I could get a hold of. As someone with a reading disorder, that was incredibly embarrassing, those classics were perfect for me. Every other page was an illustration, and it helped immerse me in the story.

The only books I remember reading that was required in high school were A Tale of Two Cities (which I love) and A Catcher in the Rye (which I hate). When I joined the navy, I spent time out to sea reading in the tower I worked in, and would get through maybe a book a month. Then I found out about audio books, which started my practice of purchasing two copies, one to listen to, one to mark up and use for rereading/bettering comprehension.

As my interest in theology deepened so did my insistence on reading physical copies of books. This allowed me to destroy whatever book was in my path; underlining, writing in the margins, dog-earing, whatever. I still do this, then pull out whatever half filled moleskin I thought would fix me to start writing the ideas and thoughts that came with whatever I had just read.

During the pandemic, my wife encouraged me to try out more fiction, which was something I did not really want to do. Do not get me wrong, I was not taking an elitist position, it was just that fiction wasn’t something I liked outside of my comic books or graphic novels. At the time I just preferred to read non-fiction or theology if I was going to dedicate the time to picking up a book. I wanted to learn something true about the universe/world/life/whatever, if I was giving up anywhere from 5-12 hours of my time. It was when I started back to school to finish my bachelors degree, and after we had our kid that I took her advice.

I was so wrong for waiting so long.

With all of that in mind, please enjoy the top 25 books I read in 2025. These are listed in no particular order, and over the next year I will be posting about each one individually. Some posts may be long, some will be short, but in the dark time we find ourselves in where Americans are being abducted by masked police, a white kid who has no business podcasting are trying to break into daycare’s, and abducting a leader of a foreign country, sometimes a book recommendation will help provide some balm to the soul.

1. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen
2. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé
3. We Uyghurs Have No Voice: An Imprisoned Writer Speaks by Ilham Tohti
4. Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
5. The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy by J. Russell Hawkins
6. Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica 
7. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning
8. Monk and Robot: A Psalm for the Wild Built and A Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers
9. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
10. Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobs
11. The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness by Gregory Boyle
12. Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
13. Ring Shout by P. Djéli Clark
14. The Trees by Percival Everette
15. The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers & the Struggle for Equality by Anna-Lisa Cox
16. The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 by Tim Madigan
17. The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby 
18. The Black Wolf by Louise Penny
19. Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert B. Reich
20. Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery by BROM
21. Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley  
22. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
23. King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby
24. Bringing the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew 
25. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum

Grace and peace my friends, and happy new year.