Some books I read in 2025

Ulysses - James Joyce

This book took quite a bit of effort in every sense of word. I finally finished Ulysses in 2025, seventeen years after buying it at Dublin airport for €13.50. What started as entertainment for a 36-hour layover became a decade-long companion on distant trips, abandoned mid-Circe around 2012 and picked back up on a plane to London. To help myself follow the story after such a long gap, I created an abridged version that extracts only the dialogue and essential settings—reducing Joyce's 265,000 words to about 15,000. The stream of consciousness is undoubtedly the best part of the original, but stripping it down to conversation helped me understand the characters in a new way and ultimately deepened my appreciation for the full text.

Broken Money - Lyn Alden

Broken Money is a solid cartography of monetary decay, the kind of thing that would rewire your brain if you'd never traced the lineage from commodity money to the current fiat hallucination. Alden writes with clarity and without the zealotry that plagues the genre, which alone makes it worth recommending. Problem is my research had already dragged me through these territories, so the map arrived after I'd walked the terrain. Familiar concepts, no matter how well-articulated, land with the weight of a reminder rather than a revelation. I wish more people wrote like Lyn Alden though, her voice is rather neutral and that is increasingly uncommon in the space.

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

Twenty years ago this book utterly bored me. I now think it was more like a locked door. Woolf doesn't wait for you. The narrative jumps skulls mid-sentence, no warning, no hand-holding, threading a single London day through the interior weather of a dozen minds. You either sync to the frequency or you don't. At twenty I didn't. At forty, something had recalibrated. The sentences that once felt like fog now moved like music. Loved it.

Long Distance Cycling Handbook - Simon Doughty

I read this about 20 years ago and re-read it in preparation for LEL 2025—1,500 kilometres from London to Edinburgh and back, the kind of event where you either learn the logistics or the logistics eat you alive. Doughty's book is a manual, not literature, and that's exactly what it needed to be. How to eat. How to sleep. How to not destroy your knees. I absorbed it all, implemented most of it, then proceeded to ride 700 kilometres on a torn tendon anyway because apparently reading about proper preparation and actually being prepared are different skills. The book did its job. I just didn't do mine.

With The Grain - Christian Becksvoort

A birthday gift from myself. Becksvoort spent nearly four decades building furniture and doing restoration work for the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. The book is what it says: a craftsman's guide to understanding wood. How it moves, why it cracks, how to calculate seasonal expansion and design around it. There's even a chapter on managing a small forest which I found amusing, from care to harvest to drying. No fluff, no philosophy, just decades of hard won knowledge compressed into something you can actually use at the bench. Published by Lost Art Press, a small outfit that makes beautifully bound books about craft for people who still care about making things with their hands.

Life at the Extremes - Frances Ashcroft

Like the Long Distance Cycling Handbook, a re-read. Ashcroft is an Oxford physiologist, and this book maps what happens to the human body when you drag it to places it wasn't designed for: altitude, ocean depth, heat, cold, speed, space. Why you can summit Everest without oxygen but die if a plane depressurises at the same altitude. Why divers get the bends but sperm whales don't. I first read it years ago and returned to it before LEL to reconnect with the science of endurance, to build a bridge between what I was asking my body to do and what bodies are actually capable of. The book is warm, clear, and quietly terrifying. Useful preparation for riding 700 kilometres on a torn tendon although I was nowhere near the extremes mentioned in this book. There's a chapter here on Daedalus, a human powered aircraft that flew from Crete to Santorini in 1988 with a cyclist pedalling a plane across the Aegean. An absurd cycling feat that really put into context my effort at LEL.

Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein

The book I reached for when things got difficult or stressful. In previous years I'd used Marcus Aurelius as stoic instructions on enduring what must be endured. But Meditations tells you how to think. Stein doesn't tell you anything. Tender Buttons is language untethered from meaning, words arranged for rhythm and texture rather than sense. "The settling of stationing cleaning is one way not to shatter scatter and scattering." You can't argue with it, can't resist it, can't even fully parse it. When you need to think, this is precisely the point. Sometimes you need something that short-circuits your brain. Stein worked. My edition is from City Lights, the San Francisco bookstore founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a sanctuary if there ever was one and one of my must visits whenever I'm in the city.

The Universe in a Nutshell - Stephen Hawking

A gift from my days studying astronomical instrumentation, finally revisited. Hawking walks through relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, the shape of time and the full cosmological buffet, illustrated and accessible. I didn't need it for work anymore, but that was the point. Physics content refreshed, sense of scale recalibrated. Sometimes you want a book that makes your problems feel appropriately small against the backdrop of eleven dimensional spacetime.

The Notebooks - Jean-Michel Basquiat

Facsimile reproductions of eight working notebooks Basquiat kept between 1980 and 1987. Crowns, teepees, hatch-marked hearts, fragments of text—notes, observations, poems touching on race, class, New York, whatever passed through his mind. I wonder if some of these notes would've ended up in Basquiat's social media if he had lived in a different time. Like social media, this is not a book you read so much as one you sit with. I bought it after visiting the Basquiat exhibit in Montreal in 2022 and it became a ritual: a drink, Blood Orange or Jazz playing (did you know Basquiat was in an experimental band called Gray?) and off you go. You don't consume it linearly. You land somewhere, absorb what's there, move on. Another book for when inspiration without instruction was sought.