In 2025, I read 27 books— exactly the same as last year1 (this was not intentional). Unfortunately, I read a lot of bad books2 this year; my average rating went from 3.6 (2024) down to 2.8 (2025). That’s almost a full point difference! A 3/5 is “I liked it”, and my average rating didn’t even cross that threshold. There’s no single cause for this, but I did notice that I rated most of the “widely acclaimed, classic literature” pretty low, like Animal Farm (3/5), The Crown of Individuality (2/5), The Master and Margarita (1/5), East of Eden (3/5), 1984 (4/5), The Trial (1/5), and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1/5). I enjoyed some of these, but as a group, I was disappointed.
In this yearly post, I try to highlight some of my favorite books from the previous year. There’s no hard-and-fast rules, but I consider things like:
- Books I still think about
- Books that changed my perspective on something
- Books that have impacted my life in some significant way
- Books I think more people should read
Only two books met the bar this year.
A High View of Scripture? review
Recently, I’ve been really interested in the history of the Bible, and asking questions like: who wrote the books, what are they really about, why did they get picked, and how do they still apply to my life today? Specifically, A High View of Scripture? by Craig D. Allert did a great job opening the door to my research in Christian canon formation. I still think about Allert’s main point, that most Protestants maintain a willful ignorance of the early church tradition that decided on the Christian canon; we owe a lot to those early Christians, and we should consider them more often!
A Fortunate Universe review
This year, I picked up an interest in philosophy and arguments for/against the existence of God. If you participate in modern discourse surrounding this debate, you’ll quickly see how important the Fine Tuning Argument is, as one of the best arguments for God’s existence. A Fortunate Universe by Luke Barnes (Christian) and Geraint Lewis (atheist) was a fantastic introduction to the Fine Tuning Argument and the surrounding concepts. Reading the book also forced me to go teach myself some elementary quantum mechanics, which was really fascinating, and I ended up writing about my findings.