every book i read in 2025: part 1

A comprehensive list of every book I finished in the first six months of 2025

I didn’t have any lofty reading goals for 2025, but I did have a list. Of the nine books on that list, so far, I’ve read two: Simon Critchley’s Mysticism (reviewed here) and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. I’m confident I’ll get to Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power and Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis before the year's end because I’m working on some long term projects I hope to anchor on my learnings from these texts. (Question: Is Psychic Life of Power a not-ideal book to read as my first Butler?)

I am fairly new to keeping track of my reading and I have to admit that it’s done wonders for my habits: I will always be motivated by a list of items I can check-off or cross-off. The list that follows will show that I like to batch my reading lists into themes and that I am currently working through a self-guided studies into the history of feminized labor, affect theory, technology, and mysticism. What for? You’ll have to stick around to find out.

Touching Feeling (2002) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

My first Eve Sedgwick and wow, just wow. I had originally picked it up because I was doing research for essay 005: Hypnagogic Media for this newsletter and I was curious about affect theory. The introduction was dense and intimidating, a highly-concentrated dose of theory that takes getting used to. I re-read the first 30 pages three time, slower each time. But it soon became one of those books that broke me wide open by connecting the dots I didn’t know needed connecting. “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” was the most impactful. It helped me make more meaningful use of my past studies of Wilden’s theories about analog and digital communications while also offering some soul-stirring insights on shame and subjectivity. I often don’t find a connection to a book until after I write with and against it, and my work on mysticism for essay 007: Debased + Exalted fully bonded me to Touching Feeling:

But we didn’t always see ourselves as completely separate and disconnected from the world around us: “This dualism of subject and object, mind and nature, has come to be seen as definitional of what philosophers call with great confidence, ‘modernity’” Simon Critchley writes. “It leads to the dogma that reduces philosophy to epistemology. The most important question is assumed to be how a subject can have knowledge of objects.”¹ Knowing is, can be, and has long been more than a process of translation, assimilation or recognition between distinct entities. In Touching Feeling (2002), Eve Sedgdwick and Adam Frank write that “Any theory, to be a theory, requires or produces figure/ground relations.”² They compare this to how shame itself introduces “a particular boundary or frame” into an otherwise continuous mass. Despite requiring a separation between knowing subject and knowable object, writing as knowledge-production ostensibly aims to dissolve that line.

TechGnosis: myth, magic, mysticism in the age of information (1998) by Erik Davis

If you’ve read any of the texts named above, you’ll see how my studies of technology and mysticism have found each other. And this book’s title promised to articulate key connections I thought would enlighten my thinking. It did and it didn't. I was expecting criticism and analysis, but instead, Davis pursues a written-for-magazine type of history that employs very little historiographic thinking or Marxist awareness, which is what I look for in “histories.” It reads like a series of summaries, a conversational history where events are linked together through simple causations and systemic factors are barely considered. I can’t say it offered meaningful conclusions or uniquely rigorous research, but it did give me a list of movements and events to follow up on. Plus, it’s wonderful snapshot of the kind of rhetoric and thinking that dominated late 90s discourse. And it deserves credit for how ambitious and expansive it tries to be. While I wouldn’t cite it as an authority on any of the topics it discusses, it deserves credit for how ambitious and expansive it aims to be.¹

4 books in Spanish

Three from Puerto Rico: Barra China by Manolo Nuñez Negrón is dark and humid, a moody take of immigration as told through the eyes of a Chinese immigrant living and working in Santurce. It was short and enjoyable. Nothing earth-shattering but I’d still recommend if you’re curious about contemporary Puerto Rican fiction.

One I would not recommend: Antología de la Ciencia Ficción de Puerto Rico. As an anthology of Puerto Rican science fiction, it’s worth looking into for hard-to-find and out-of-print texts from the late 18th century. But as it progresses through the decades, it leans on a greater percentage of unedited and unpublished texts from authors who are friendly with or actively working at the publisher, as if a lack of 21st century contributions to Puerto Rican sci-fi writing necessitated these filler pieces. At the risk of making uncharitable assumptions, it was even more confusing to reach the end of the 339-page book without having read a single entry by Eiric R. Durandal Stormcrow, an absurdly prolific queer poet, himself the publisher of several Puerto Rican/Diasporican sci-fi writing anthologies. Now I know better.

Book three: Este es nuestro paraíso by Luz Ivón Ochart. Delectable, bite sized, impactful. A stroll through Old San Juan in book form, with dedicated poems for iconic streets, distinct textures, and collective memory.

The non-Puerto Rican book: Prosa Completa de Alejandra Pizarnik.² A compilation of Pizarnik’s prose works, including “La Condesa Sangrienta,”³ dozens of humor pieces, plays, some personal writing (Relatos), reviews, and one very good interview. I rarely read anything that is not nonfiction (and I’m working to fix that), which means I instinctually reach for a writer’s prose work before I read anything else they’ve done. This is how I introduced myself to Pizarnik: The Relatos were ecstatic, they mostly told stories of her time in Spain and Paris and it was shocking to read such small flashes of text that could burn as hot as these did. This made the humor section that much harder to endure. These passages are dense with wordplay and linguistic gymnastics, humor where language itself is the butt of the joke. But I’m tempted to say that later sections, especially her poetry reviews, reward the endurance when they articulate Pizarnik’s ideas of what poetry should aspire to be and how humor plays an essential role. I’m definitely looking into her poetry next.

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004) by Silvia Federici

Now this is a history book. Specifically, it is a “history of the body in the transition to capitalism,” written by Marxist-feminist theorist and teacher Silvia Federici.⁴ I’m compelled to say this book is an essential read for anyone who cares about gender and labor. (I am, however, looking for texts that expand or dispute Federici’s arguments from a gender perspective that goes beyond the binary.) I sense that not enough people write under the shadow of rigorous historical thinking and feel way too comfortable making sweeping declarations on vibes and algorithm feeds alone. Do yourself a favor and join Tia Glista’s and Akosua T. Adasi’s book club for Caliban and the Witch. And may we never write baseless takes about feminism or labor again.

That being said, I can’t offer any kind of quippy summary of why this book is now so important to me. It is already sinking into my psyche so you’ll have to wait for it to come through my future writing. I’ll leave you with a selection of passages:

The thesis…

Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist society cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation… Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity, and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies (emphasis my own) it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, while profiting from the ageless condition of the labor involved.

On the female body in the age of the computer…

…for in the age of the computer, the conquest of the female body is still a precondition for the accumulation of labor and wealth, as demonstrated by the institutional investment in the development of new reproductive technologies that, more than ever, reduce women to wombs.

On the entwined histories of gender and technology…

Also from the point of view of the abstraction process that the individual underwent in the transition to capitalism, we can see that the development of the ‘human machine’ was the main technological leap…We can see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism.”

On capitalism and reproductive rights:

It is my contention that it was the population crisis of the 16th and 17th centuries, not the end of famine in Europe in the 18th (as Foucault has argued) that turned reproduction and population growth into state matters, as well as primary objects of intellectual discourse… As Eli Hecksher noted, ‘an almost fanatical desire to increase population prevailed in all countries during the period…’ Laws were passed that put a premium on marriage and penalized celibacy, modeled on those adopted by the late Roman Empire for this purpose… When in the Middle Ages women had been able to use various forms of contraceptives, and had exercised an undisputed control over the birthing process, from now on their wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation.”

Cute Accelerationism (2024) by Amy Ireland + Maya B. Kronic

A tiny little thing, heavy with Deleuzian slime and Guattarian bite. The book-object itself is annoyingly small in the best possible way. The core text makes up less than a tenth of the text block’s actual page volume. And the rest of the book is footnotes, a class of text typically marked by a tiny superscript number and small text at the bottom of the page, here presented in the dominant position. While the essay-proper reads as a powerful manifesto, the footnotes are where Ireland and Kronic’s show off their theoretical prowess. In one powerful passage — footnote 111 — they pick apart the misogynist undertones in Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of a Young-Girl:

As unbearably oppressive as it is prescient, Tiqqun’s Theory of a Young-Girl brings to a near-climax the aptitude of the Marxist Left for peevish stealth misogyny. Despite its many insights it is a text haunted by phantoms of lost immediacy and innate value, fever-visions of contamination and the loss of ‘the most precious and the most common […] human production… It reads as one of the most insidiously poisonous tracts in the long history of masculine gerontocratic resentment. Whatever good intentions a reader may begin with, they cannot help ending up wondering about the zeal with which the Young-Girl is repeatedly and vehemently condemned, and speculating on the provenance of the author’s fervor for stripping and exposing, showing her what she’s really worth, demonstrating to the Young-Girl that she has no autonomy over herself or her body…

Little interest in why one might want to prefer ‘to become a commodity, rather than passively suffer its tyranny’ (75) and what that might produce; no interest in those who are ‘taking things that are meant to be consumed and going beyond […] lifting something made for consumption and embracing that distortion of rebellion against our forms.’

And in footnote 78, the authors probe the Cuvier-Geoffroy debate, an early nineteenth century media event in which French naturalists argued over the meaning of animal structure: Cuvier argued that form followed function while Geoffroy claimed that function followed form, which is itself a transformed variation of a great transcendental animal. Ireland and Kronic map these arguments onto contemporary discourse on human morphology:

While we don not seek to apply Geoffroy’s biological thinking directly to the cuteness of the contemporary situation, its transcendental orientation is crucial when considering the relation between the virtualities of Cute and biological actuality… The visionary Geoffroy sees not the containing lines of Nature’s forms, but a morphing array of involutions and eversions, infoldings and outpouchings, a calculus of virtual operations. Folding girls into boys is after all just a matter of ‘relative sizes and inversions.’… The immovable Cuvier incarnates the alliance between finalism, functionalism, presentism, obsession with scientific fact as final arbiter of Reality, reactionary fear of unnatural speculation, and a gerontocratic conservatism that does not wish to hear about becomings.

Then book’s afterlife is equally delicious: For a better sense of cute/acc’s place in the world, read McKenzie Wark’s review for Frieze or listen to the authors’ talk for Machine Unconscious Happy Hour.

Poetics of Relation (1990) by Édouard Glissant

A note on theory: As this list has so far shown (and as evidenced by last year’s list), I read a lot of dense, theory-heavy books. And I often get comments from people eager to engage with these kinds of texts who report having a hard time getting through the introductions before getting completely demoralized. (Tips in the footnotes!⁵) And I get it, it’s frustrating to read something and not understand it. But I also think a lot of people read thinking they will fully dominate (or “get” or “understand”) a book’s subject by the time they finish. And I want to warn against this information-download approach to reading.

As far as I know, nobody ever picks up these kinds of books without stumbling their way through them. That is the point. I don’t turn to these books for question-answering ends to a a specific line of inquiry. Instead, I look to them for language and frameworks that can both anchor and catapult me through my research. These works are often challenging because they do more than present readers with new information or novel ideas, they embody the effects of incorporating their own insights. They lead by example, projecting themselves into a future where the information they offer and the ideas they advance have already taken effect. Doing the work of reading through them requires that we make room in our minds and bodies for a given book’s version of the world and the versions of ourselves that can exist in their virtuality. It requires an openness to restructure your thinking — if only for a moment — and a well-exercised imagination. You have to struggle through them.

In other words, a good book that is hard to read only discourages the type of reader who thinks of knowledge as something to be conquered. In Poetics of Relation, Glissant exalts a form of knowledge (and knowledge-making) that “distances itself entirely from the thought of conquest,” and favors a “science of inquiry.” Knowledge isn’t something sitting inside a box waiting to be discovered. This attitude limits itself to what it’s able to summarize and reduce, and the hard-to-read is dismissed as useless. Glissant:

If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is the requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons, and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.

[…]

In this version of understanding, the verb to grasp⁶ contains the movement of hands that grab their surroundings and bring them back to themselves. A gesture of enclosure, if not appropriation.

In this book, Glissant describes Baroque art as a “reaction against the rationalist pretense of penetrating the mysteries of the known with one uniform and conclusive move.” He called it a “new heroism in the approach to knowledge, a stubborn renouncement of any ambition to summarize the world’s matter in sets of imitative harmonies that would approach some essense” and thus “flouted the alleged unctity of the thing known and the knowing of it.” Knowledge happens upon contact.

The book has been made famous by its “For Opacity” essay (although I’m partial to Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World, cited above), where Glissant proclaims: “We demand the right to opacity.” Opacity, he’d written earlier, is a “force” that works to protect the diverse from '“reductive transparency.” Through transparency, “I admit you to existence, within my system” but “I create you afresh,” within the terms I can understand. But if you can’t focus on “the texture of the weave and not the nature of its components,” Glissant suggests you “perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures.” 🌊

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📝 Updates: I went long on the state of contemporary art in Santurce, one of San Juan’s “Brooklinized” neighborhoods. It includes a brief history of street art and hipsterdom, my high school days, the last five years of living in NYC and PR, and, most importantly, a sampling of the best artists and galleries working out of that neighborhood today. Available to read on ArtReview.

1. It’s free to read on the Internet Archive.

2. Also free to read on the Internet Archive.

3. Isabelle Huppert will star in a film based on the life and myth of the titular Blood Countess and I’m vibrating in anticipation.

4. Free, at the Internet Archive.

5. To read is to study, which means you should be consulting secondary sources, reading the bibliography, circling words or concepts you don’t understand, checking in with yourself periodically to verify if you are understanding the text on its own terms. To do this last one, tune into how the author uses key words, what the main theses is, how the text is structured, where are the assertions of fact (the sky is blue…) versus the proposal of new arguments (…but what if it was yellow?).

For Poetics of Relation, the sentence structure was very French and it often read as if words were missing or the subject-verb-agreement was out of whack. So I had to read like a copy editor: Circle the action verb, then rebuild the sentence from there. The verb should lead you to the subject (the entity enacting the verb). From there, make note of the phrases. Rewrite the sentence so that the subject(s) and the verb(s) as close together as possible, and so that all the modifiers are adjacent to their objects. This should feel like solving a puzzle, and it might take several tries. Nothing trips me up like a sentence so unwieldy that objects and their modifiers end up too scattered to read coherently.

But sentence-level comprehension is often where things get confusing, and if you have a clear idea of what these elements are, you have better chances of making sense of everything else. This is also a lesson for writers: Take care of how your sentence structures enhance or muddy your message and take risks with intention. Reading and writing are highly technical and complex skills.

6. Glissant wrote in French and the verb comprendre is typically translated to English as to understand, but can likewise be translated into to comprehend or to grasp, as in, “to lay hold of with the mind.”