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 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.