What I Read December 2025
I read three books this month. “Only” three, because the page count of one of the books triumphed over my ambition to get cozy and read anywhere between 5 and 43 books. Look, as you already know if you’ve ever wandered even accidentally into my writing, I am extremely busy. Doing what, you ask? Fretting about how busy I am, which is its own full-time job. It’s exhausting and inefficient, but it’s a living. Now, please mind your business (after you finish this piece, thanks.)
One of these books was Don Quixote. A famously long book (900+ pages! In a row!) about a person who reads too much and begins to confuse stories with reality. Any of you who are heavy readers probably relate.
My second read was Cultish, which is about how language creates meaning, belonging, and identity, and how quickly those things can curdle into manipulation.
The third was First Person Singular, a collection of stories in which Haruki Murakami does his thing. Things happen, or don’t. Or maybe they do, but in some weird emotional vapor. The narrators themselves often seem unsure what, if anything, just occurred. Then, more often than not, they decide that if an event did have meaning, it probably wasn’t consequential. And then The End. Sir? Excuse me? And also, this feeling I have at the end of each story isn’t necessarily unpleasant. Whyyyyy?
In all three, things happen, and they happen with juice. Not literal juice, in case any of you folks are in a “well, actually,” mood, although if you’re talking about cults, Kool-Aid will eventually burst in via a non-load-bearing wall.
Which is all just to say, here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (Translated by Edith Grossman)
- Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
- First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (Translated by Edith Grossman)
Oh sure, let me just take on a 900-page canonical, picaresque novel. That’s a reasonable response to insomnia, especially given what all that reading famously does to Don Quixote himself.
Uh oh.
Still. I did it. One must have standards, even while abandoning common sense. I promised myself I would watch Man of La Mancha once I finished, a show I have somehow avoided my entire life, despite being the kind of person who should have already seen it.
Also, I get to use the word picaresque. And now you do, too. Congratulations.
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
Janice from your high school PE class has emailed you. She’s very excited. She wants you to join something, you girlboss, you. Details about that something are murky, but it will change your life. Act fast.
If your gut reaction to this is “ew” and that “ew” is unrelated to Janice serving a volleyball directly into your face during the volleyball unit, you may have good reason.
First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami (Translated by Philip Gabriel)
Recently, I chatted with someone I’d done a show with years ago, and we started talking about rehearsals. At some point I said, “Remember when I got yelled at for moving the chair?”
He did not remember this.
I remembered it very clearly. During a tech rehearsal, I’d moved a chair while trying to clear the stage between scenes because the person assigned to move it hadn’t done it. The director growled, “DON’T MOVE SET PIECES THAT YOU’RE NOT ASSIGNED TO.” It was mortifying. I don’t like being yelled at, even if I have committed some kind of theatrical felony. I may have cried a little backstage, facing a corner and pretending I was absolutely not crying and just liked looking at walls.
According to everyone else, though, this never happened. Or if it did, it was no big deal. No one remembered the chair. Or the yelling. Or my belief that I had ruined everything.
I did not enjoy realizing that a moment so clearly part of my theater experience seemed not to exist anywhere else at all.
Which brings us to First Person Singular.
And there be the December reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?
Pickadilly Project 