While the podcast has been quiet since March 2024, I haven’t stopped reading books; I just haven’t been talking about them. One of my goals for 2026 is to get my podcast studio back up and running, so I’d like to start sharing what I’m reading as I go, rather than wait months (or years) between updates.

To date, I finished 15 books this year; I don’t anticipate finishing anything else in the next 37 hours (give or take a few minutes), so this is it: my year in books. The books make up a mix of new reads and re-reads, fiction and nonfiction. There are no themes to find here, but I picked out a few “headlines” to cover. The full list, ordered by most recent read, will be at the end of the post.

Links to the books are ideally to the original publisher’s listing, but where I couldn’t find it, I substituted for the profile as listed on The Storygraph.

Perfect books

I determined a “perfect book” to be one I’ve rated 5 stars. My star rating is internal, as I don’t post to Goodreads or The Storygraph anymore, but it’s still fun for me to assign a rating. Sometimes it’s nice to look back on what I enjoyed (or hated), and having a star rating to pull up makes it easy to say, “here, try this book, I really liked it.”

All that said, I’m defining my perfect books as those rated 5 stars. The list is short, because I try to hold books to high standards to avoid giving everything 5 stars. In short, if I gave it 5 stars, not only does it mean it stays on my shelf, I will likely re-read the book at some point and would definitely recommend them to someone else to read (or even loan it).

• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (William Zinsser, 1976)
• A Commonplace Book (Alec Guinness, 2001)
• Bad Cree (Jessica Johns, 2023)

Interesting that 2 thirds of this list is nonfiction. The first on the list (On Writing Well) is more of a reference book and is permanently on my desk and littered with post-it flags.

Fiction-to-nonfiction ratio

Fiction: 6

Nonfiction: 9

After the two five-star books above, the next most helpful book to me this year was Rising Strong (Brené Brown, 2015).

The least favourite book

I almost called this heading the worst book, but I don’t feel that’s fair to the author. “Worst” is too negative, and as I look back at the notes in my entry, despite being one of the lowest rated, I enjoyed it enough to finish reading it. How could that be the worst book?

• Die Trying (Lee Child, 2006)

Books that just didn’t “hit”

Tangentially related to the last category, these are books that I enjoyed, but they didn’t work for me. I included the reasoning in the list here.

• The Best Laid Plans (Terry Fallis, 2007): The humour in this book was enough for it to win the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and CBC’s annual Canada Reads contest, but it didn’t land with me. It might have been specifics such as the dated references, or poorly-chosen comparisons (I particularly didn’t appreciate these lines: “… You’re halfway to a seizure.” “Well, then, I’d die happy …”), but overall I felt it was trying too hard to be funny and I rolled my eyes too much. But the saving grace was that the premise was funny.
  • I started reading the sequel, The High Road (2010), and it’s much the same. The first book in the series I read was the third, Operation Angus; I don’t remember the humour being so forced. We’ll see, as I will re-read that after finishing The High Road.
• Lost Ballparks: A Celebration of Baseball’s Legendary Fields (Lawrence S. Ritter, 1992): Truth be told, I didn’t read the entire book. Some of the tidbits were interesting and I was drawn to the chapter on the Expos’ old home, Jarry Park, but it felt a lot more like somebody ranting about how “they just don’t make them like they used to.”
• The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity (Phil Stutz, Barry Michels, 2012): Parts of this book were useful but overall I found the methods too “hokey” and too much along the lines of “use this one trick to improve your life!”.
• The Creative Act (Rick Rubin, 2023): I wanted to love this book. It’s a manifesto and reads like Rubin narrated a stream of consciousness rant about the creative process, but it turned out to be repetitive. I wrote a brief review of it in July.

The complete list

The complete list of finished books in 2025, ordered by most recent. Entries with asterisks indicate previously read books at some point in the past.

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J.K. Rowling, 2005)* fiction
• The Best Laid Plans (Terry Fallis, 2007) fiction
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix* (J.K. Rowling, 2003)* fiction
• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (William Zinsser, 1976) nonfiction
• The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity (Phil Stutz, Barry Michels, 2012) nonfiction
• Rising Strong (Brené Brown, 2015) nonfiction
• Lost Ballparks: A Celebration of Baseball’s Legendary Fields (Lawrence S. Ritter, 1992) nonfiction
• Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953) fiction
  • Aside: apparently I found a rare first edition? This link shows a listing for the edition I bought at $99…I did NOT pay that much.
• Die Trying (Lee Child, 2006) fiction
• A Commonplace Book (Alec Guinness, 2001) nonfiction
  • Aside: this book led me to try to find more of his books; I found A Positively Final Appearance (2001) in a thrift store by chance, which I will be reading in 2026.
• The Wake (Linden MacIntyre, 2019) nonfiction
• The Creative Act (Rick Rubin, 2023) nonfiction
• Bad Cree (Jessica Johns, 2023) fiction
• Cinema Speculation (Quentin Tarantino, 2022) nonfiction
• Swing Kings: The Inside Story of Baseball’s Home Run Revolution (Jared Diamond, 2020) nonfiction