Bingo 2025

Some people make News Year’s resolutions. I, a chronic overachiever, made a whole bingo card’s worth of goals. Naturally, because the universe is not without a sense of humour, I hardly accomplished any of them.

In a normal year reading 95 books or cycling several thousand kilometres is well within reach. 2025, however, was a weird year after a string of abnormal years. I moved to a new city, left a job that was a poor fit, and disappointed a lot of people by telling them no, walking away, and holding that line. I had to set aside some routines in order to push through a lot of uncertainty to literally move to a better place. This year did not look at all like I imagined it would.

And yet! So many things checked off! I read 54 books, started this fine website, wrote a 34,000 word draft of a novel, and accomplished a modest but satisfying amount of cycling despite moving and injuries. I submitted several fiction pieces that were rejected, but the rejections are improving, so I will continue to harass the editors of the world until they either train a firehose on me to drive me off or take the work.

The 2026 Bingo card and theme will appear tomorrow. Until then, here are the books I read and the music I enjoyed this year.

The Music

I make several playlists to act as audio diaries every year. These are the songs and albums I had on repeat for 2025. A special shout out for “anything (live)” by Adrianne Lenker, a gorgeous example of how to do something beautiful and unusual with a live recording and analog gear.

The Books

Each year I aim to read 95 books. This year was 54/95, but I found myself spending more time re-reading and savouring each book this year, perhaps because I had less time than usual to spend reading.

Here’s the list.

1. One In A Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In - Kate Kennedy
2. Small Rain - Garth Greenwell
3. Careless People - Sarah Wynn-Williams
4. Immemorial - Lauren Markham
5. Bread and Milk - Karolina Ramqvist
6. Knife - Salman Rushdie
7. Killing Commendatore - Haruki Murakami
8. Harlequin Butterfly - Toh Enjoe
9. Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel
10. Muybridge - Guy Delisle
11. The Architecture of Modern Empire - Arundhati Roy
12. Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
13. Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet - Tim Hwang
14. The Deserters - Mathias Énard
15. A Perfect Day to Be Alone - Nanae Aoyama
16. Territory of Light - Yuko Tsushima
17. Woman Running in the Mountains - Yuko Tsushima
18. The Mirror and the Light - Hilary Mantel
19. Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock - Chistoph Dallach
20. The Queen of the Night - Alexander Chee
21. No Bad Parts - Richard Schwartz
22. She’s a Lamb! - Meredith Hambrock
23. The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman - Niko Stratis
24. Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue - Yoko Tawada
25. Vera, or Faith - Gary Shteyngart
26. The Society of the Spectacle - Guy Debord
27. Blockchain Chicken Farm and Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside - Xiaowei Wang
28. The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings - Geoff Dyer
29. Pass Me By: Lily - Kat Simmers and Ryan Danny Owen
30. Vesper Flights - Helen Macdonald
31. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis
32. Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon - Michael Lewis
33. Killing Stella - Marlen Haushofer
34. Liar’s Poker - Michael Lewis
35. The Noise of Time - Julian Barnes
36. Night Train: Very Short Stories - A.J. Snijders
37. The Samurai - Shusaku Endo
38. Where the Wild Ladies Are - Aoko Matsuda
39. On Translating Myself and Others - Jhumpa Lahiri
40. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
41. A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami
42. Dance Dance Dance - Haruki Murakami
43. Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese - Byung-Chul Han
44. The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald
45. No Depression in Heaven - ryan fitzpatrick
46. Revenge - Yoko Ogawa
47. Freeman’s: Conclusions - John Freeman, Ed.
48. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask - Gabe Durham
49. The City and Its Uncertain Walls - Haruki Murakami
50. A Different Kind of Tension - Jonathan Lethem
51. There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension - Hanif Abdurraqib
52. The Toll House - W.W. Jacobs
53. The Morgan Trust - R. Bridgeman
54. Flashlight - Susan Choi