What I Read in the First Quadrimester* of 2025

* also known as the first four months of this year since I can't seem to get it together to write monthly bookish recaps

Photo by Anastasia Zhenina on Unsplash

Here we are, at the unofficial start of summer in the United States with Memorial Day Weekend, and already there’s been at least one official published “Best Books of the Year So Far” list, courtesy of The New York Times. (I will admit to silently screaming when I saw this because it feels way too early for this. Then again, time is bonkers.)

But maybe it’s good that someone out there is writing such things because I sure as hell haven’t been. So much for my eternal aspirations to write monthly reading recaps for you—not to mention writing anything for you here on a consistent-ish basis.

It’s not like I haven’t been reading. I have. Like a fiend. Because reading continues to be my escape from this batshit crazy world, as evidenced by the 26 books I’ve finished thus far this year. And nine of them have been 5 stars!

So, in case you need another title or two for your summer reading stack, I thought I’d try and remedy my lack of reviews by giving you some thoughts, musings, hot takes, whatever of those stellar reads from the first third, or quadrimester, of this year, or from January through April.

In this post we’ve talked about three of them: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, Live Through This by Kristen McGuiness, and Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit by Nadine Sander-Green.)

Some thoughts, then, on the rest.

The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes (Penguin Press, 2025, 336 pages)

I started this on audio while on a flight, assuming that it would cover similar ground as books like Stolen Focus by Johann Hari—also a 5-star read for me—and because I like Chris Hayes. (Yes, he’s the same one from MSNBC and he narrates.) This was a fascinating, thoughtful, well-researched exploration of attention. It’s not preachy, like “the reason you can’t focus is because you’re on your damn phone all the time” but instead blends the Greek mythology of The Sirens + “the sirens of the urban streetscape” + the sirens of the online world with the psychology of attention and persuasion, the various forms of attention, how and why our relationship to the internet changed from the early days of searching for information to instantly having everything within one click, and more. I enjoyed the audio but also found myself reaching for the print version to take what turned out to be nine pages of notes in my book journal.

Everything in This Country Must by Colum McCann (Random House, 2000, 160 pages)

This slim volume of two short stories and a novella centers the experience of children during The Troubles. In “Everything in This Country Must,” a Catholic family’s horse is rescued by British soldiers, causing conflict between a teenage girl and her father. It’s in this story that McCann answers the question in the title (“must what?”) in a way that feels like a punch to the gut. In “Wood,” a young boy defies his blind father by supporting the Protestant marches. And in the novella “Hunger Strike,” a poor mother becomes even more desperate when her young son begins his own hunger strike in solidarity with his uncle, an IRA prisoner. Compelling, heart-wrenching, and utterly gorgeous writing—in other words, all the hallmarks one expects from Colum McCann.

Twist by Colum McCann (Random House, 2025, 239 pages)

Oh, look, it’s my book boyfriend Colum McCann again, working his magic by spinning an absolute riveting tale about…underwater cables and the people who repair them.

You may think, as I initially did, that this doesn’t sound like something you’d enjoy. But then you remember this is Colum freakin’ McCann and you are immediately proven wrong because this is a novel about rupture and repair, about the fragility of our connections. It’s the type of book that says so much in short, staccato sentence fragments (perhaps a nod to Morse code?) and it’s not a particularly lengthy novel, either, which makes it even more of an unforgettable, absolute timely and powerful story. I loved this and it deserves so much more attention than it has received. Seriously, WHERE IS THE BUZZ AND HYPE FOR THIS GLORIOUS MASTERPIECE?!

At the literal bottom of the ocean is a vast network of thin tubes that carry all of the world’s electronic information. (Did you know this? Like I seriously had no freakin’ idea. None whatsoever.) And every so often, these fragile tubes break. In McCann’s story, Anthony Fennell is an Irish journalist traveling aboard a ship with the crew responsible for repairing the ruptures in this integral yet delicate system. He’s carrying his own emotional baggage, as is the ship’s captain, the elusive John Conway. As the publisher’s description says, “at sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?”

The Things by Jeff Oaks (Lily Poetry Review, 2022, 90 pages)

It breaks my goddamn heart that this is the last poetry collection we will have from Pittsburgh’s own Jeff Oaks, who passed away in December 2023 at age 59, less than two years after this was published. An artist (the cover is one of Jeff’s paintings), accomplished poet, and educator (he was director of the undergraduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh), Jeff was beloved by so many in this city’s literary community. I don’t claim to have known him well, but I had the chance to read with him at an event once and felt ridiculously out of my league. I think Jeff sensed that because he was so genuinely kind and supportive.

Anyway, this collection feels so bitterly ironic as most of these poems center on the anticipatory grief of losing his mother and then in the aftermath of her death, living the little moments like walking his dog along the river. The title references the many things—the material and intangible—given, remembered, lived over the course of their life together. It’s beautiful and occasionally funny and I really wish I’d read this collection sooner so I could have told him how much I loved it.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Flatiron Books, 2025, 393 pages)

The powers-that-be at Meta tried to put the kibosh on this explosive expose, and it’s easy to see why. In the social media platform’s nascent days, Sarah Wynn-Williams quickly realized Facebook’s potential as a leader and positive influence on global politics. She believed in its promise of connecting people and ideas; moreover, she knew that the company needed her background in diplomacy and global relations. After years of lobbying Facebook’s brass to hire her, she was ultimately brought on board.

What follows is a maddening, fascinating, jaw-dropping, mind-blowing account of a clueless, insensitive, and oftentimes emotionally abusive corporate culture. (“The entitlement in the Facebook offices flows as freely as the prosecco from the Prosecco Tap that’s installed in one of the Facebook office kitchens.”) Wynn-Williams skillfully traces Facebook’s ideological beginnings (once upon a time) to what it has become. It’s an insider’s look at the hypocrisy of Sheryl Sandberg’s outward Lean In championing of women in the workplace and their needs as mothers versus Facebook’s expectation of putting work first and the platform’s deliberate “target[ing] [of] young mothers “based on their emotional states.” It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s disbelief that Facebook had a significant role in the outcome of the 2016 election, and his response being to plan his own presidential bid. (“After all, not only does Mark now have T____’s [my abbreviation, because I don’t want that name on my Substack] playbook, he owns the tools and sets the rules. And he has something no one else has, the ability to control the algorithm with zero transparency or oversight. The power to control what Facebook users see.”)

If this were fiction, it would be completely unbelievable. And speaking of fiction, the title comes from, of course, the famous quote from The Great Gatsby:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Marry that with this, from Wynn-Williams, about Facebook and its leaders:

“Instead of fixing these things, this ongoing suffering they caused, they seem indifferent. They’re happy to get richer and they just don’t care. It feels crude to put it that way, but it’s true. They profit from the callous and odious things they do. Which seems so crazy. They could’ve tried to fix these things and still been insanely rich and powerful. They were in the rare situation where the money was there in abundance. They could have afforded to do the right thing. They could have told the truth. They could have exercised basic human decency. It was all within their power.”

And to catch you fully up on my reading, I also finished (in order they were read):

• I Love Hearing Your Dreams by Matthew Zapruder - Poetry collection. 4 stars

• World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil - Nature writing blended with memoir. 2.5 stars

• Orlando by Virginia Woolf - Classic fiction, LGBTQ themes. 2.5 stars

• Body Friend by Katherine Brabon - An Australian woman suffering from a chronic illness meets two others coping with the same condition—but in very different ways. Fiction (but reads like a memoir). 4 stars.

• The Lemon Table by Julian Barnes - Short story collection. 4 stars

• This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals about Your Waking Life by Rahul Jandial - Somewhat of a basic overview of sleep and dreaming. 3.0 stars

• Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman by Brooke Shields - Pretty much what the title says. 3.5 stars

• Getting to Know Death: A Meditation by Gail Godwin - Memoir. 2.5 stars

• Suddenly by Isabelle Autissier, translated by Gretchen Schmid - Fiction. A young adventure-seeking couple set sail for a trip around Cape Horn and, after getting shipwrecked on a desolate island, need to fight for months to survive. 4.0 stars

• Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez - Second in the “Part of Your World” series. One of my favorite romance tropes: the pretend boyfriend/girlfriend who (of course) fall in love. 4.0 stars

• Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us by Jennifer Finney Boylan - Memoir of gender identity and the author’s experience growing up, coming out 20 years ago, falling in love and living as a transgender American in these volatile times. 4.0 stars

• Murder by Cheesecake: A Golden Girls Cozy Mystery by Rachel Ekstrom Courage - A zany fanfic mystery involving the ladies of the Lanai, a wedding, a date gone wrong, and a ruined cheesecake. 2.5 stars

• The Midnight Club by Margot Harrison - Fiction. College friends reunite after 25 years to try and piece together, with the help of a strange elixir with time-travel powers, what happened the night one of their friends supposedly drowned. 3.0 stars

• Pathemata: Or, the Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson - Very short (82 pages) memoir of coping with chronic mouth pain in the midst of the pandemic. 3.5 stars

Hoping now that I’m up to date on reviews I’ll be able to stay more current! That’s the goal, anyway. Thanks for reading!