One thing that will never cease to amaze me is when I articulate an intention and then actually follow through with it. To wit, while looking back on the 5 December Reports I’ve written, as part of my now traditional reflection on my year in reading, I found that just last December I expressed a desire for recapturing the part of my youth where things felt new. And while looking back on the 2025 Book Reports to find the books I most enjoyed this year, I found that I really did experience that feeling of newness much more than I was able to imagine when I was writing the 2024 December Report. What a lovely and unexpected gift!

Something I realized in reviewing past December Reports: my journey away from quantification continues apace. Roughly between 2018 and 2021, I set and met reading goals pretty exclusively around numbers—total number of books read and the gender breakdown for the authors of books I’d read. Between 2022 and 2023, I stopped focusing on reaching a specific number of books read, having come to understand that quantification alone is meaningless—perhaps even spiritually corrosive!—to me and my “hobby.” That said, counting in order to avoid unconsciously following structural biases perpetuated by publishers is still meaningful and essential, for me.

I see now that my shift away from quantified goals ultimately helped me, in 2024 and 2025, to reshape my relationship with reading, to develop a different way of relating to books that centers on unquantifiable things (duh!). I’m talking about how I now chase a continually evolving concept of “quality,” not unlike the way my man Ahab fixated on a singular elusive whale. I’m actually literally the opposite of him, because as we know I am not motivated to read by a monomaniacal thirst for revenge, though maybe my distaste for the practice of counting/reading almost competitively is felt with an intensity that Ahab would recognize.

Without further ado, here’s the list of books that really resonated with me this year, which is, I see, a list of books about women using writing to figure out themselves and the world they live in (I can’t relate! 😂):

Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)¹—It’s always a fun surprise reading a book for the third time in my life.² I know that river I step in is definitely not going to be the same one I stepped in before, but I don’t know anything else beyond that. What I learned this time around is that just like the people who perpetuated certain narratives of westward expansion, I had built up a mythology in my mind about Cather’s novel and how much I loved it.

To be clear! I didn’t not love it when I read it this month, but I had such a different experience than I expected. That might be because I had remembered literally zero plot, and instead only had in mind how much I lOoOoOoOoOoOved Cather’s way of writing about the land and climate of the west. It was a small relief to find that I had correctly remembered how genuinely beautiful her prose was.

But wow, I did not remember how sad (???) this novel is, how her clear-eyed account of the kinds of people who went out west and tried to build lives on land stolen from Native Americans means that there are as many bleak moments as there are moments of connection and community. It is sad! And beautiful, still. And simply so not like anything that people were writing at the time about the prairie, about women, or immigrants (this is a little bit of a stretch because actually there were at least a couple authors writing in a not fully problematic way about immigrant experiences at the time).

I think another thing that made my third reading of O Pioneers! feel so much more fraught than my other reads is that my previous encounters with the novel were during less explicitly fascist times? Like, yes, America was absolutely being violently imperialist all over the world in 2007 and 2012 or 2013, but now feels different! Part of that is me having a stronger grasp on privilege than I did nearly 20 years ago, but another part is thinking about what a different world we live in from the one at the start of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Or maybe the world really isn’t that different and it’s just me who has changed!

Solvej Balle, tr. Barbara Haveland, On the Calculation of Volume (Book II) (2020/2024)—I am still on my time and its passage bs, obviously, and the second volume of Balle’s seven-book opus on time and space is only enabling my ruminations.

That it took me nearly 3 weeks to read a short novel that I was deeply invested in is interesting to me—typically I race through such a book, shutting out the world until I reach the end. But this narrative’s subject matter, plus my knowledge that after reading Book III, I’ll have to wait until April for Book IV, prompted me to read slowly and to pursue the various avenues of thought that On the Calculation of Volume sent me down.

For instance, in this volume, which covers years 2 and 3 of the protagonist/narrator, Tara, being stuck in time on a perpetual November 18, Tara tries several methods for getting herself unstuck. Reading Tara’s reflections on the course of each attempt, from inception to implementation to failure, and on her general outlook toward her situation, thoughts of what this series “is about” would float to the surface of my mind—a metaphor for functional depression, for living through the climate crisis; at first a prescient account of a kind of life during the first months of a global pandemic, then later a near-contemporary interpretation of reemerging into physical society; an illustration of the development of consciousness and sense of self and world; an homage to Kafka and Camus, a literary/literal pursuit of existentialist questions for the twenty-first century;³ all of the above and more.

I had to overcome a personal revulsion to mentions of the concept of time as a container in order to read through to the end, to reframe my previous associations of the concept with bloviating grad students by instead recalling an association with an earlier moment in my scholastic journey, when my initial study of modernism led me to learning about Henri Bergson and durée. Imagine my delight when Tara abandons her experiment in “constructing” seasons by traveling to locations with climates approximating spring, summer, fall, and winter, and stumbles into a new fixation—the Roman empire. Amusing in its own right,⁴ but even more so for the way she pursues thought on this topic: as if she is in grad school, writing a dissertation, lmao!

The more that people in our world insist upon product over process, on speed over quality, on appearance over substance, the more I become recalcitrant⁵ toward these positions, certain that if we lose process, quality, and substance that we do, in fact, become cooked, chat. Existentially. So naturally, I love Balle’s depiction of developing curiosity, of learning while not knowing toward what end the learning is being done, of being open to following ideas but also applying reason and evidence when weighing competing or only overlapping ideas against one another. In this part of Book II, when Tara goes wherever her research on the Roman empire leads her, Balle is playing out a thought experiment of what might happen if a person’s physical needs—food, water, shelter—were assured and thus what might happen if a person did not have to spend the majority of their waking hours selling their labor in order to secure those necessities. She shows a kind of labor (intellectual) that is also essential, and shows (at least to this reader!) how lovely it could be to spend one’s days in study, specifically without the stress of making enough money to pay rent or eat.

Now, would I have had this last paragraph’s insight if I had finished my write-up of Book II before beginning and finishing Book III? We’ll never know! Spoiler alert: I finished Book II and the first four paragraphs of this post on Christmas morning, and by noon on the 26th, I’d finished Book III. But more on that below!

Solvej Balle, tr. Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell, On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) (2022/2025)—Any self control I had with Book II went straight out the window by the time I was like 40 pages into Book III. I would not be savoring this one because in addition to the philosophical questions being too good, the plot was really heating UP! Things are HAPPENING in Book III, happening too much for me to set the book aside to ponder pages at a time, though I did heavily mark up the margins with my thoughts. I won’t say too much about what happens, in case any of you would like to read On the Calculation of Volume and experience it with as little knowledge of plot as possible. Now I sit in what Tara identifies as “waiting time” which is “different from days going by [because t]here’s something to look forward to” (69), for the April publication in English of Book IV.

One thing I can expound upon, right here and now? The pHiLoSoPhy of these books!! There is something about Balle’s illustrations of the desire to learn and the mechanics of learning combined with her heavy allusions to key philosophical concepts and the thinkers who first articulated them that is sending me back in time to when I had the capacity to learn and remember things, specifically things I learned in my undergrad philosophy courses. Book III also made me realize how much this series reminds me of a novel I read when I was seventeen years old: Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, tr., Paulette Møller (1991/1994), which is a history of western philosophy delivered through the fictional framework of a girl solving a mystery that begins when she receives two anonymous notes in the mail that say “Who are you?” and “Where does the world come from?” Tara Selter, Balle’s protagonist/narrator, is very much indirectly seeking answers to these questions—and others! And I simply cannot wait to see what happens next!! In the meantime, I’ll probably try rereading Sophie’s World or at the very least I’ll be enrolled at the University of Wikipedia, brushing up on Kant.

Kate Riley, Ruth (2025)

Paulette Jiles, News of the World (2016)⁶

Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025)

????????????????? I really might reread Sophie’s World 🤷🏻‍♀️