If you’d asked me about my year in reading, I would’ve said I didn’t feel like I’d read that many books this year. Then I looked at my total: 93 books, the most in any year since I started logging books in 2007. Per my Bookshelf site, those 93 books comprised a little over 30,000 pages of reading. I guess it was a busy year.

Because I Feel The Need to do Stats

Fiction: 49
Religion / Theology: 22
Science: 8

That leaves a handful in biography, literature, and history. Not too bad a mix.

Books written by authors who aren’t/weren’t white men: 38. Still not a great split but progress in diversity for me compared to previous years.

Some Favorites

In no particular order, the books I gave 5 stars this year… far too many to be a useful selector, so I have bolded the handful that are particular standouts:

  • The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Into The Unknown by Kelsey Johnson
  • Language for God in Patristic Tradition by Mark Sheridan
  • Reading While Black by Esau McCauley
  • Jesus and the Forces of Death by Matthew Thiessen
  • The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut
  • The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili
  • The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
  • Damascus Station by David McCluskey
  • The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  • Where God Happens by Rowan Williams
  • The Framed Women of Ardemore House by Brandy Schillace
  • Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
  • The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind
  • The Seventh Floor by David McCloskey
  • The Not-Yet God by Ilia Delio
  • The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
  • To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
  • The Transforming Fire of Divine Love by John H. Armstrong
  • Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
  • Beyond Justification by Douglas Campbell
  • The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart
  • Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
  • In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
  • Royal Gambit by Daniel O’Malley
  • Holy Hurt by Hillary L. McBride
  • Inverted World by Christopher Priest
  • On Repentance and Repair by Danya Ruttenberg
  • The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell

About those highlights:

Say Nothing is a harrowing account of The Troubles in Ireland. The author doesn’t try to moralize, but just recounts the facts… an approach which makes the violence even more horrifying somehow.

In The Not-Yet God, Ilia Delio brings her most complete structure so far to her work interpreting Teilhard in light of modern quantum theory. Utterly fascinating to me.

Alternate history in astronaut land. Unabashedly loved this one.

This is what speculative science fiction should look like. So good.

Random Observations

My first and last books of the year were the first and last books in K. B. Wagers’ NeoG series.

My attempts to read some “classic” literature were mixed. Middlemarch: so long. In Cold Blood: as good as advertised.

Here’s to some more good books in 2026!