2025 WIRAWIGI wrap-up

At one level, it's obviously premature to do a wrap-up post as the fourth post of the blog, but 2025 was a big year both for my reading and for my exploration of local, indie bookstore scenes, mostly around the U.S. The individual titles and stores will continue to unfold over the course of upcoming posts, but I wanted to account for a few things in summary at the turn of the year from 2025 to 2026.

I'm a little later than I wanted to be in posting this--partly because of the length, partly because the beginning of 2026 in the U.S. has been exhausting.

Poetry favorites from 2025 (see list below)

WIR: 175 books

I didn't set out with a numerical goal for the year, but had different goals in mind. More on that in a second. I managed to finish a book at an average pace of about once every 52 hours. A few factors contributed to this rate of completion--including that my work (paid and unpaid) involves ongoing research, and that I read at least 3 books simultaneously. I usually have one fiction book, one poetry collection, and one or two non-fiction books going at the same time. This year, I finished 79 novels (or short story collections), 39 poetry collections, 43 non-fiction titles, and 14 books that blurred the boundaries across those categories. 

My main reading goal for the year was to organize most if not all of my reading around "immersion" months--specifically, Black History Month, Women's History Month, National Poetry Month, Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, and Native American Heritage Month. In July, I read all Icelandic fiction, mostly by Icelandic authors. In December, I focused all my recreational reading on books recommended to me by friends and booksellers. During National Poetry Month, I focused on epic poetry to the exclusion of prose fiction. January, August, and parts of September and October were free-form. I read all the poetry aloud, with the exception of three of the epics, which I read on planes and trains. 

The point of the monthly focus for me was to read with awareness that my various layers of privilege mean that I'm usually an "expected reader." We operate in a world that doesn't always acknowledge explicitly the way it's set up to view white, male, cisgender, heterosexual as "norms." I'm not going to call the exchange even, to be sure, but the goal was to create month-long micro-immersions in the perspectives of those enduring macro-immersions in a world not always or even often optimized to validate, honor, or respect their experiences.

 

For me, this is partly a continuing effort to improve my understanding of two insights: "there is no them; there's only us," and "what you can separate, you can violate." The former expression is commonly linked with Fr. Gregory Boyle of Homeboy Industries; the latter was used by my college Religious Studies professor, the late Ira G. Zepp, Jr. 

I'll write elsewhere about the "windows/mirrors" dimension of engaging in stories--that literature gives us perspective on others' experiences and reflections back on our own. The metaphor works to do some important work in ensuring all folks have access to both (something the publishing industry on its own doesn't always do well), but the metaphor also breaks down when pushed. Windows become mirrors and vice-versa.

A couple of my recent reads have developed this point for me in helpful ways. First, Elaine Castillo's How to Read Now: Essays (AWIGI: 27th Letter Books, h/t to Drew for the recommendation), wherein she writes:

"[N]one of this work is meant to be done alone. Reparatively critical reading is not meant to be work performed solely by readers and writers of color. But the logic of empathy would have us believe so; it would have us believe that other people tell stories, which are there to make us feel things, the line between the two neatly delineated. The logic of empathy says 'I feel your pain'--but the logic of inheritance knows this transaction has always been corrupt at its core. The story I'm telling is not just something for you to feel sympathy for, rage against, be educated by: it's a story about you, too. This work has left a will, and we are all of us named in it: the inheritances therein belong to every reader, every writer, every citizen. So, too, the world we get to make from it." (p. 74, emphasis in original)

I didn't have Castillo's insights when I started my 2025 reading journey, and I'm not sure that my particular intent meets her criteria of doing something more than reading for empathy. I will qualify my assessment, though, by observing that my exercise was not oriented primarily toward empathizing with the stories told, but rather to come up with a way to destabilize white supremacy in my reading environment as much as possible for an extended period. Castillo's point, to my mind, reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates's rebuttal of the late Saul Bellow's racist dismissal of people and cultures of the global south, in which Coates affirms that Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. 

To be clear, I don't suppose any of this is close to sufficient work in the face of the enormity of the imbalance, but it is an attempt to push the balance at least a little, in this one area. As Josh Cook writes in The Art of Libromancy: Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century (AWIGI: Biblioasis):

"...this specific issue--the mistaken belief in the universality of white dude experience--is a direct source of the unbearable whiteness of publishing and one of the buttresses of white supremacy in our society. Or, to put this another way, white dudes need to read books that make them feel excluded so they can feel the fact of other valid human perspectives." (p. 206)

I also didn't have Cook's book in hand when I started this. I have a sense that human progress depends on constantly refining the insight that we, whoever "we" are, are not the center of the universe. I think Castillo and Cook's insights play well together in this space. 

I'll pop some additional data on highs and lows of the WIR side of the occasion at the end of this post, but move now to the...

Exterior of West Side Book Shop, Ann Arbor, Michigan

AWIGI: 184 independent bookshops

Starting from a few of my local neighborhood shops in Chicago in January 2025 to ending with a half-dozen or so out in the western suburbs of Chicago at the end of the year, I managed to visit a different bookshop about once every 48 hours, on average, over the year. This doesn't count return visits to a few favorites here and there. It also brings my two-year total to 264 (de-duped). 

I did some significant road-tripping over the course of the year, and added indie bookshops as side trips along the way. As a result, 2025 involved 26 states, the District, and lower Ontario. I participated in the official indie bookstore crawls in the Twin Cities and Chicago, and an "anytime" crawl in the downtown mall area of Charlottesville, Virginia (6 stores, on Insta). Everything else was DIY. I found one handy way of doing this was to past a Google Map driving route into an AI engine, and ask it to identify bookstores within 5 or 10 miles of my route.

It feels like I have too many highlights to name over the course of the year, from sharing the "crawl" experience with family and friends in various locales, to several kinds of "bookendipity." 

At Just Book-ish in South Boston, I asked about finding a poetry volume by the current or immediate past Poet Laureate of Boston . The bookseller found both for me, and handed me one by the latter, saying, "by the way, that's me." You can guess which one I bought. 

I told the booksellers at Gibson's in Concord, New Hampshire what I was up to, and they sent me to the Old Number Six Book Depot (Insta) in Henniker, New Hampshire (which was a wonderland), and to Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, New Hampshire. At Toadstool, I mentioned what I was doing while chatting with Nadia, a bookseller there, who had recently returned from her own DIY bookshop crawl in Montreal.

The most common question I get when I tell people about this ongoing, and indeed endless, quest is impossible to answer: "What is your favorite?".  As my friend, Pat, pointed out, this is like asking somebody to name their favorite song from their favorite band. No one bookstore can capture everything you might be looking for in that moment, and the best bookstores offer distinctive surprises that only their booksellers and their community culture can offer.

One bookseller/barrista at Inkwell Booksellers Company in Minneapolis asked me if I ever encountered a bookstore I just hated. The quick answer was, "No," at least at that point. To be sure, "hate" is a strong word, so I wouldn't be inclined to go there. I mentioned to her that I often encountered bookstores that didn't feel especially curated toward my interests (e.g. Romantasy or Gothic-themed stores aren't really my wheelhouse), but that this didn't prompt dislike. It just made it less likely that I'd return. I learned what I needed to for the moment.

Regarding "at least at that point": It's my impression, or at least my hope, that one enters a bookstore in something of the same spirit that one enters a book--with curiosity and humility. It always feels to me like an expanding outward--mentally and spiritually. A month or two after that conversation in Minneapolis, I went to a used bookstore in a small city within an otherwise mostly rural section of an East Coast state, and was welcomed by a chalkboard at the door that offered a derisive and misspelled definition of the word "woke." Inside, the bookstore was chockfull of mass-market paperback thrillers, detective novels, etc. It didn't feel ripe for serendipity, even in a specially-designated section of "Women Writers." Sliding somewhere between sorting and segregation...

I won't give that place any more words here, but suffice it to say one of the joys of visiting all these bookstores is finding a spirit of discovery and community, a recognition that we all have more to learn and lots of different things to learn about.

I will say, though, that comparing bookstore communities across municipalities and regions, I can propose groups that can fit what you're most interested in discovering.

Looking for the deepest stacks in town? Off the top of my head: Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis, Strand in NYC (Manhattan), Politics and Prose (flagship in NW) in DC, Parnassus Books in Nashville,  The Bookworm in Omaha, probably Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago (it used to be the Seminary Co-op, but I don't think it currently is). I haven't done much comparison in Columbus, Ohio, but it's difficult for me to imagine any other store there has deeper stacks than the 32 or so rooms of The Book Loft of German Village. If I'm wrong about that, please point me in the direction of the one that surpasses it. Powell's City of Books is obvious for Portland (although I visited there shortly before I started my formal count). 

On the other hand, if you're looking for expert curation and making the most magic with the least space, perhaps Wild Rumpus Books in Minneapolis (mostly for kids books), Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul (also kids), Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, Lost City Books in DC, The Book Shop in Nashville, The Next Chapter in Omaha. There are too many to name, and lifting up some of these here is not meant to say that others fall short. Indeed, trying to account for the distinctive communities and bookseller curation in these stores is part of why I wanted to start this blog--so there will be more to come. As you can imagine, it's particularly difficult for me to play favorites in general, and especially in Chicago, where I live.

I've only minimally accounted for used bookstores, which can have their own distinctive characters. Some deep, magical, and well-organized; others "optimized for serendipity."

We'll also have an opportunity to dig into the stores offering special points of focus for their curation--Black owned, women owned, LGBTQ+ owned, Asian-American owned. To use Josh Cook's typology in The Art of Libromancy, bookstores generally fall into one of three categories: radical, conservative, and progressive.

Here's how Cook defines them:
    - Radical: "overtly and explicitly support specifically articulated ideologies and itendities with their programs and stock."

    - Conservative: "[understand] bookselling to be amoral, displacing all of the moral aspects of books onto the writers for what is written, publishers for what is published, and readers for what is purchased."

    - Progressive: "[acknowledge] the inherent political nature of bookselling, that booksellers' decisions influence and are influenced by systems of power that surround them, that bookselling exists in a political and historical context, and that booksellers' systems, techniques, policies, procedures, traditions, and 'common sense' grew within and reflect that context." (pp. 61-62)

I'll dig into some of these in other posts. This one is already too long. I'll finish with an appendix listing my favorite reads by category for 2025.

Appendix

Some of these books are recent, many are not. They are listed in no particular order. I hope to explore some of them more deeply in other posts, and will add the "AWIGI" at that point.

Fiction

-Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor

-A Different Drummer, William Melvin Kelley

-The She-Devil in the Mirror, Horacio Castellanos Moya

-My Friends, Hisham Matar

-The Round House, Louise Erdrich

-The Chaneysville Incident, David Bradley

-The Good Lord Bird, James McBride

-How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu

-América del Norte, Nicolás Medina Mora

-Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki

-Animal Life, Auður Ave Ólafsdóttir

-Your Absence is Darkness, Jón Kalman Stefánsson

-People Like Us, Jason Mott

Non-fiction

-The Art of Libromancy: Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century, Josh Cook

-The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, Kerri K. Greenidge

-An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America, Matthew Stewart

-The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy, Matthew Stewart

-The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, Wendell Berry

-These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore

-Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Agnes Callard

-The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer

Poetry

-The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka

-Dirt Songs, Kari Gunter-Seymour

-Dead Dad Jokes, Ollie Schminkey

-Information Desk, Robin Schiff

-Kin, Margaret Britton Vaughn

-Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz

Memoirs, Missives, Mixed Genre, and Miscellany

Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg

Walk through Walls, Marina Abramović

My Life in Seventeen Books, Jon M. Sweeney

(Most of) my favorite fiction reads in 2025