the books I read in 2025

The books I read in 2025 are listed here, in chronological reading order. The date may not be the original date of publishing and may, rather, represent the copy I happened to read.

• Demon copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)
• Architect, verb: the new language of building, by Reinier de Graaf (2023)
• The city we became, by N.K. Jemisin (2020) - thanks to Daniel who recommended this one; quite a fantasy and very New Yorky
• The wisdom of donkeys: finding tranquility in a chaotic world, by Andy Merrifield (2008)
• Family meal, by Bryan Washington (2023)
• Plagued by fire: the dreams and furies of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Paul Hendrickson (2019) - it occasionally made me furious
• Peaces: a novel, by Helen Oyeyemi (2021)
• The marriage portrait, by Maggie O'Farrell (2022) - from Renaissance Florence ...
• The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner (2018) - ... to 21st century California (the Mars Room is a bar)
• Saint Sebastian's abyss, by Mark Haber (2022)
• I left it on the mountain: a memoir, by Kevin Sessums (2015)
• Let the record show: a political history of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, by Sarah Schulman (2021)
• Tramps like us, by Joe Westmoreland (2001, new edition 2025 with introduction by Eileen Myles)
• The midnight library, by Matt Haig (2020)
• Dead end: suburban sprawl and the rebirth of American urbanism, by Benjamin Ross (2014)
• One last stop, by Casey McQuiston (2021) - another very New Yorky book, plenty of subway
• The world in a selfie: an inquiry into the tourist age, by Marco D'Eramo (2017)
• Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett (2023)
• The march, by E.L. Doctorow (2005)
• The dawn of everything: a new history of humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021)
• The fraud, by Zadie Smith (2023)
• Love junkie, by Robert Plunket (1992, new edition 2024)

Twenty-two books again this year. It's rather weird that it's been 22 books the last couple-three years, usually split about evenly between fiction and nonfiction. This year was a bit lopsided, with fourteen fiction and eight nonfiction.

For a visual compilation of my year's reading, Goodreads provides some statistics with pictures of the covers linked to the description and whatnot. Let the record show was the longest book I read and also the highest rated. It is important and interesting and well-written.

Goodreads is part of the Amazon empire but I recommend buying your books from an independent bookstore or at Bookshop or, gosh, maybe reading a library copy.

more Gehry memories

Another (re)post on Frank Gehry after his recent death -- 2016 road trip report by Aaron Betsky -- reminded me about the Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories in Iowa City from 1992.

Three cheers for road trips and for reports of road trips as well as for interesting buildings.

Frank Gehry, rest in peace

Frank Gehry died yesterday, just a week or so after Robert A.M. Stern. You would not generally mistake the work of one architect for the other but they both designed some really fine buildings. I may get to Bilbao and Arles someday to see probably the most famous of Gehry's museums but I have seen the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi ...

as well as the University of Toledo Center for Visual Arts which is attached to the Toledo Museum of Art.

I also remember seeing a couple of Gehry's projects in Los Angeles: the Loyola University School of Law which I walked over to see maybe forty years ago, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall where I was lucky enough to hear an organ concert with Steve Ong probably a dozen years ago.

I was particularly reminded of these buildings as I indexed a house in Ocean Springs, just up the coast from Biloxi. But that was more Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown than Gehry or Stern.

yellow stairs and brutalist buildings

Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London

Monte Amiata housing, Gallaratese, Milan

(Carlo Aymonino, archt.)

separated at birth: rows of circles, in a grid

quilt on view at

Chapman Museum,

Glens Falls, N.Y.

October 2024

Nadia Gould

Because I am Young, Beautiful & Talented 2

1964

in exhibition at dieFirma (gallery)

October 2025-January 2026

Endeavor and Voyager

NVIDIA's new campus, designed by Gensler, consists of a triangular and a hexagonal building. It is featured in an article in Metropolis that I'm indexing for Avery. The names of the buildings are Endeavor and Voyager. Call out to the library vendor Endeavor and its Voyager system?

If Caillebotte were a photographer ...

Randy Tarampi, from Flickr

https://www.flickr.com/photos/randytarampi/32046695624/

 

funnels

For thirty years and a bit more, I have been involved with the Art NACO funnel of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. It enables us art catalogers to participate in authority control more fully than we might be able to do individually. I coordinate the efforts of a dozen or so art libraries that create or revise name records that are included in the LC/NAF international authority file. There's also an Art SACO funnel that allows us to propose subject headings to add to the Library of Congress Subject Headings file. So "funnels" has been a (good) trigger word for me for a long time.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email announcement from the SS United States Conservancy today that announced that the "second SS United States funnel [was] to be preserved." They use the word "funnel" to describe the smokestacks that were so prominent on the ship.

This illustration is a rendering of the proposed SS United States Museum and Visitor Experience designed by Thinc, LMN Architects, and Buro Happold. More information here.

Milan: changing skyline

When we were in Milan in spring 2018 and stayed near the Bosco Verticale, this was the view toward the Porta Nuova development.

Last week when I was indexing the May 2025 issue of Architectural Record with its Building Type Study of tall buildings, one of the featured buildings was the new Unipol Tower designed by Mario Cucinella Architects.

Edmund White

When I review the books that I've read over the course of a year, the titles are generally split about equally between fiction and non-fiction. I am reading Edmund White's obituary (Times) and the author notes that Edmund White's more than 30 books are almost equally divided between fiction and non-fiction.

There is also a wonderful essay on White in the Times: The very gay life of Edmund White by Aaron Hicklin who is working on a documentary about White. Hicklin writes about how influential the cover of A boy's own story, as well as the story, was in his life.