Book, Yeah!: The Books of 2025 (So Far)

Well, thinking about how much reading I have awaiting me peaked my curiosity about how many new books I’ve got since the New Year, heightened by the thought that the year is already more than half over. So I embarked on one of those pointless but (to me) endlessly fascinating tasks that grab my compulsive attention now and then and went back over the Niche in quest of the answer.

I’ve been thinking lately (since the flood) about how risky it is to have so much of my equity bound up in ‘paper ephemera’, if it can be put that way. One’s imagination leaps immediately (thanks to the fabled end of the Library of Alexandria) to fire as the enemy of such an archive, but water could be equally disastrous; I remember how a roof leak at Loop Drive during another flood almost drove me to despair. Fortunately, I lost nothing then, but ‘the horror of the moment I shall never forget.’ Even if not completely dissolved into a mushy brick, a book could possibly be warped into a useless, corrugated relic.

A heap of books is a pain to care for: onerous to transport, tedious to dust, difficult to organize, voluminous (tee-hee) in their space-taking capacity. “But I love ‘em; I LOVE ‘em; I LOVE ‘EM!” “Thank you, ma’am, I’ll have another!” “I'm sorry. But I love [books] ... I've always wanted [books]. To handle. To touch. T[o] smell.” And to read, of course. But I feel for books, all books, whether I want to read their contents or no. A sloppy shelf or a tumbled heap of books invokes my sympathy, and I feel the urge to re-arrange and sort them. I always have the sneaking suspicion that there will always be at least one book there that will elicit my cupidity.

Anyway, here is a list of the books of 2025 so far. There are 33 of them. They go from the most recent to the first one of January. Now that I’ve finished with the list, I can go and read one.

2025 Book List

The Anatomy of Puck by K. M. (Katharine) Briggs

Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings

The Invisible Woman by James P. Blaylock

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

In Search of Dracula, by Florescu & McNally

The Romance of the Rose, tr. Frances Horgan

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

Egyptian Myth and Legend by Donald A. Mackenzie

Myths of China and Japan by DonaldA. Mackenzie

Myths of Greece and Rome by H. A. Guerber

East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon by George Webbe Dasent

The Ring of the Nibelung by Richard Wagner

The Saga of the Volsungs, tr. Jesse L. Byock

The Tain, tr. Ciaran Carson

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The Latin Letters of C. S. Lewis

Arthurian Romances by Chretien de Troyes

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

The History of the Church by Eusebius

The Shakespeare Apocrypha by ‘William Shakespeare’

The Life of Sir John Falstaff by Robert Barnabas Brough

Early Christian Writings, tr. Maxwell Staniforth

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen

Lysistrata/The Archarnians/The Clouds by Aristophanes

The Last Days of Socrates by Plato

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Huckleberry Finn, Classics Illustrated

Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald

The Best of Jules Verne

Selected Works of H. G. Wells

The Obesity Code by Timothy Noakes

The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke