My reading goals this year

From Moby Dick to Olivia Laing

Mar 27, 2025

In 2023, I hit 100 books on my annual Goodreads Reading Challenge—since then, I’ve declined to set an ideal number of books, lowering the threshold to a grossly achievable ‘1’. This is, of course, facetious, but I am more interested in what books I read than in how many, especially as my shelves have become more and more swollen with unread volumes that I have been ignoring in favour of new ones.

Putting together this list—or as I’ve called it “menu”—of books to work through this year is therefore in part like the act of “shopping my closet,” or revisiting my already plentiful bookshelf instead of running out to the store. I am curious what books you all have your eye on for 2025… let me know if we can read any of them together!

American Literature menu

I am specializing in 20th and 21st-century American lit for my PhD and so part of my “pleasure” reading is always a bit infected by things I feel obliged to know, though I also do genuinely want to read these. I’m trying not to let this task overwhelm my entire reading agenda though, so these are the selections I want to accomplish in 2025.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick
James Baldwin, Another Country
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (currently) + The Heart is a Lonely Hunter + Reflections in a Golden Eye
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
Lucille Clifton

Author completionist menu

I used to have a rule where I read at least one book by Virginia Woolf and one by Toni Morrison every year. In the past year or so, I think I have started to slide on this, so I’m re-committing.

Virginia Woolf, Flush or Jacob’s Room
Toni Morrison, Jazz

Genre menu

Diaries: I’ll likely go with the first volume of Sontag’s diaries, spanning the 60s to 80s.
Biography: Sticking with the Sontag theme, I have Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan in my TBR, as well as A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda.
Poetry: I’ll count Lucille Clifton towards this, but I’m also thinking of doing some older Diane Seuss (I adored Modern Poetry).

Classics & tomes menu

Melville, Moby Dick (as above)
Charlotte Brontë, Wuthering Heights (saving for fall/spooky season)

The “you’ve been saying you would read this for years and it’s been sitting on your shelf for so long now” menu

Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds
Marlen Haushofer, The Wall
Sunetra Gupta, The Glassblower’s Breath
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Isabella Hammad, The Parisian
Don Delillo, The Body Artist
Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Dionne Brand, Bread Out of Stone
Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved or A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

New releases

Torrey Peters, Stag Dance
Catherine Lacey, The Möbius Book (June)
Miriam Toews, A Truce That Is Not Peace (August)
Olivia Laing, The Silver Book (November)

What I’m Reading

Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding
Yasmin El-Rifae, Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution

What I’m Writing

Pitching lots of book reviews, crossing my fingers and toes
Maybe a creative essay about the colour blue/puppy blues
Finalising a solid draft of my first dissertation chapter