{"id":21853,"date":"2026-01-02T13:26:59","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T21:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=21853"},"modified":"2026-01-02T13:28:45","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T21:28:45","slug":"favorite-books-i-read-in-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2026\/01\/02\/favorite-books-i-read-in-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Favorite books I read in 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I read or skimmed or glanced-at-and-then-gave-up-on only 60 books in 2025, down from around 120 in some recent previous years. I think the reduced number was mostly because I\u2019ve reached the point in my unread-books project where much of what\u2019s left is giant omnibuses and collections, where even if I skim a given book, it takes me a while to get through.<\/p>\r\n<p>As usual, I read very little that was published in 2025.<\/p>\r\n<p>My favorite book that I read in 2025 was a re-read: Joanna Russ\u2019s <cite>The Female Man<\/cite> (1975).<\/p>\r\n<p>Second-favorite, new to me: <cite>Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace<\/cite> (1997, updated in 2016), by Janet H. Murray. Has flaws\u2014areas it leaves out, areas it focuses too much on, ideas that I disagree with Murray about\u2014but overall really interesting. The original version has been sitting on my bookcase waiting to be read for probably 25+ years. I started out reading that, but soon switched to the updated-in-2016 ebook edition.<\/p>\r\n<p>Third tier (all new to me):<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li><cite>Democratic Rules of Order<\/cite> (10th ed., 2019), by Fred Francis & Peg Francis. I read this to discuss with the WSFS Business Meeting discussion group, and spent a while trying to convince people that this system could be a viable replacement for Robert\u2019s Rules of Order.<\/li>\r\n  <li><cite>The Society of Mind<\/cite> (1986), by Marvin Minsky. I found about half of this fascinating, full of interesting and useful insights. A lot of the rest didn\u2019t work for me\u2014it made big assumptions and jumped to conclusions, it seemed too simplistic or too broad. But there\u2019s enough that I liked to counterbalance the aspects I didn\u2019t like.<\/li>\r\n  <li><cite>Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/cite> (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston. I liked this quite a bit\u2014partly for the romance between Janie and Tea Cake, partly for the occasionally lyrical prose of the narration, partly for Janie\u2019s liberation. But I recognize that the criticisms of it are valid.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>\u2026It continues to surprise me that so much nonfiction and non-sf ends up on my favorite-books-I-read-this-year lists. In general, sf is what I\u2019m most interested in reading, and what I read the most of; but my get-through-my-unread-books project has pushed me to read a bunch of nonfiction and non-sf that\u2019s been sitting on my bookshelves for decades, and some of it has ended up appealing to me more than I would\u2019ve expected.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21853"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21857,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21853\/revisions\/21857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}