2025 was supposed to be my year of independent study. After my spring course, I had the summer and fall to work on my thesis–and choose my own books, so reading for pleasure and reading for research were blurred.
But truth be told, 2025 was not a great year for reading–at least for me. I spent so much of the year feeling devastated, stretched thin, distracted. I spent too many nights staying up too late, scrolling. I spent too many other nights watching TV and movies I barely even remember. For a long stretch of summer, I hardly read at all.
I finally found my way back to reading for pleasure after I reread a few old favorites. I don’t believe that there is any moral imperative to read new books all the time. It’s just that I don’t feel quite like myself unless I do.
Storygraph thinks I finished 59 books in 2029. Let’s go with that, since otherwise I’d need to count them individually from my monthly blog posts. 28 of these titles were environmental books I chose to fulfill categories in my personal reading challenge for 2025. These 13 are the ones I loved best.
Dismal climate future that is nonetheless enjoyable to read
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Delicious historical fiction
The Original by Nell Stevens
View of the great blue marble from space, literally or figuratively
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
Somehow both emotionally and intellectually devastating
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood
Nonfiction that I couldn’t stop talking about
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
American Bulk by Emily Mester
Books that I found especially inspiring and productive to think about for my own thesis:
Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris
Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk
The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard
May 2026 bring books that excite, delight, and ignite us. May we celebrate reading the work of creative humans and spurn the output produced by machines trained on stolen work and fed on resources drawn away from our communities. May we each experience joy and discovery in reading even and especially in dark times.
Sara Davis 