2025 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
2025 was a year of upheaval for me. Virtually everything changed: my job, my relationship, and even my country. Strangely, this has been true for many of the people I know (my theory is that the stability we cobbled together during the pandemic is finally unwinding). In any case, this didn’t leave as much room for reading, which is a pity. Even so, the books I did read provided comfort and guidance in these strange times, for which I’m grateful.
New York City was a major topic of my reading. I kicked off the year with The Works, an excellent book about how the city gets its electricity and water, how it gets rid of its garbage, how it controls traffic and moves its citizens. Even more revelatory was Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, by Samuel R. Delaney, which explores the ways that cities promote or discourage genuine human contact. Ottessa Moshfegh’s superlative novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, manages to shed just as much light on what it is like to live in this strange place.
Apart from this, my reading was kind of a mixed bag. Esther Perel’s two major books on long-term relationships were extremely interesting for her wide and somewhat unconventional perspective. Vicky Hayward’s translation of an 18th century Spanish cookbook managed to be one of the most fascinating works of history that I’ve encountered in a long while. David Grann’s books—on the Osage murders and Percy Fawcett’s quest to discover the Lost City of Z—were both thrilling; and I continued my slow exploration of Murakami’s fiction.
But the most significant event of my year in books was the publication of my novella, Don Bigote. Thanks to the editors at Ybernia, Enda and María, I even had my first book event, and got to talk about my writing in public for the first time in my life. To top it off, I contributed two chapters to a book about living in Madrid, Stray Cats—ironically, just in time to decide to move away from that lovely city. In a year in which I often felt low and lost, these accomplishments helped to get me through.
Yet perhaps my favorite moment was being able to meet and interview Warwick Wise, whose writing I greatly admire, and whom I met through Goodreads. Even after all these years, then, this site continues to enrich my life.
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Lotz in Translation 