2025: A Year of Reading + 2026: A Year of Literacy
As mentioned in my Christmas newsletter, I set the intention of 2025 being a year of reading. Maybe it was the re-election of Chump in November 2024 that took air out of my balloon but I chose to avoid making musical playlists and obsessively spending time on Spotify. What started as a beloved Swedish music platform soon became just another distasteful platform that was subject to what Cory Doctorow terms “enshittification” so I joined the Death to Spotify campaign for their many hideous ethical practices like shortchanging artists and promoting the actions of ICE. Seeing all the oligarchs at Chump’s inauguration also left a sour taste in my mouth so I’m trying to deplatform as much as possible. My last hold-outs to be honest are Reddit, YouTube, Apple Podcasts and the bevy of Google products (for my writing and spreadsheet formats). And of course What’s App, owned by Meta, is a necessary evil but at least it keeps me in close communication with my friends and family.
So at the start of the year, I decided to follow Michael Stipes’ advice to “Stand in the place where you live.” As a public librarian, this entails taking advantage of all the free and socialist knowledge at my fingertips. So in lieu of podcasts and music and exploitative platforms and existing in my bubble of isolating headphones, 2025 has been a year of sublime reading. I aimed to finish twenty-five titles but am pushing twenty-eight by new year’s eve. Check out my reading list below arranged chronologically. Not a bad collection, eh?
My Top Three Titles
My favorite of the year has to be the sleeper masterpiece, Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. This gothic tale, majestically presented in a 1940 film with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is a riveting read where du Maurier gives us a masterclass in setting and suspense. 10 out of 10. Best to save for the autumn season. 🇬🇧
One unexpected title that was beyond my comfort zone is from the Nigerian/British author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie entitled Americanah. It is a romantic yarn of two heterosexual emigrants from Nigeria who end up in different countries and circumstances and who have to navigate the trickeries of race and culture in both the UK and America. Adichie writes as if she is taking you down a smooth river, pointing out all these observations on the horizon. Her characters are tough and scrappy but also vulnerable at times. 9 out of 10. 🇳🇬
For my non-fiction selection, I’m currently in deep with the opus of historian Mark Peterson called “The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865,” published in 2019 by Princeton University Press. It’s an account of how my hometown has had to constantly be nimble and reinvent itself in order to stay afloat. It’s approachable and insightful and showed how Boston always had an elitist vision of itself when it came to being a center of republic values and as a nexus for what Peterson calls “The Protestant International.” 8 out of 10.
The State of Reading and Hope for 2026
Unless you have been living under a rock, you can surmise that leisure reading for adults has fallen precipitously and is in a dire situation. America is suffering in particular. According to the National Center for the Arts: “Last fall, the NEA reported how, according to its 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, 48.5 percent of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year, compared with 52.7 percent five years earlier, and 54.6 percent ten years earlier.” The UK’s Reading Agency provides a slightly brighter picture, stating: “The annual ‘State of the Nation’ study finds that 53% of UK adults now describe themselves as regular readers – up from 50% last year. The sharpest rise is among 25–34-year-olds, where engagement has jumped from 42% to 55% in just twelve months.” Indeed, the only country in Europe who continues to shine in literacy rankings is Finland. My hunch is that their state-of-the-art Oodi flagship library in library may be providing a comfy third space for adults and teenagers alike, something I wrote about in one of my master’s essays.
Ninaras, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>,
via Wikimedia Commons
We all know the culprit: screens galore. But is anyone else over how lame the hyperfocus on our personal smartphones? To pat myself on the back this year, I have to boast that my determination to read library books has truly changed the architecture of my brain. It has calmed me and elongated my focus and it has stretched my empathy. Reading has made me a more patient and responsible person.
2026, fortuitously, is going to be the year of literacy, at least in the UK. My big boss has given me the green light to spearhead a public display called “Go All In” to advocate that non-reading adults return (or start out) on a habit of reading. We don’t have to accept living in a post-literate society. Reading has so many benefits but the most salient signal is that it is a cool and radical act that eschews dopamine-capturing capitalist platforms. Long live literature!
