My Bibliography of 2025

Books and essays that have impressed me in 2025, with notes and resources. Previously: Bibliography of 2024.

>> Books

Arendt, Hannah. What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt. Edited and translated by Samantha Rose Hill. Liveright, 2024. [See listings on Goodreads and Douban; my excerpts; and the review on LARB.]

Drawn to the melancholic gaze on the cover, I purchased this book as my first physical copy in a year. I possessed only a cursory knowledge of Arendt’s political theory, which made these intense, sensory poems all the more startling. Instead of the austere voice commonly associated with her, one meets here a poet preoccupied with longing and displacement: a bond that breaks into “the voice in the poem,” a heart that “burns and glows, without catching fire,” God speaking only to “the destitute,” and dusk consoling by repeating itself. I have since read more of Arendt’s works, and these poems continue to provide a humanizing vantage point on her formidable intellect.

See also Hannah Arendt, “Shadows,” in Letters, 1925–1975 (Harcourt, 2004) [full text] (tracing, in third-person narration, Arendt’s own “shadows” as a choice between unmasking herself into patient organic growth and worldly freedom or retreating into inauthentic, fear-laced power-seeking, while also articulating her sense of vulnerability and distance from reality as a Jewish woman).

Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. New Directions, 1995. [See listings on Goodreads and Douban.]

I was led to this book, after being impressed by Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet last year, by a personal and touching review in The Yale Review (see below). The collection, moving between long poems and prose that behaves like poetry, reads like the work of an intelligence refusing to settle into a single form. Its signature piece, “The Glass Essay,” turns a breakup into an inquiry into what desire feels like when it is pathologized. I found my favorite line in “The Book of Isaiah” — “while prophets sleep, the asters in the garden unload their red thunder into the dark” — which persuaded me to loosen my grip on rationalism and accept that sense and emotion can be valid ways of knowing. The final piece, “The Gender of Sound,” is a sobering return to feminist critique, tracing how sophrosyne (self-control) functions as a cultural technology for censoring female voices and policing the boundary between inside and outside.

See also Sarah Chihaya, “A Glass Essay: Reading Anne Carson post-breakup,” The Yale Review, June 6, 2022 (recounting a post-breakup month spent rereading Carson’s “The Glass Essay” each morning, leading to the realization that “reading as mirror” can be a criticism-inflected form of watching that holds grief both intimately and at a humane distance).

Harpman, Jacqueline. I Who Have Never Known Men. Translated by Ros Schwartz. Transit Books, 2022. [See listings on Goodreads and Douban; my excerpts; and the review on NYMag.]

I discovered this 1995 dystopian novel through a magazine article regarding the viral resurgence of “BookTok.” Despite low initial expectations and a suspicion of yet another overhyped genre trend, I was quickly won over by the book’s literary quality and philosophical depth within a dozen pages. The novel unfolds as a stark thought experiment: forty women held in an underground cage eventually escape into a sterile, alien wilderness. The atmosphere oscillates between the ecstatic physical sensation of freedom — the wild joy of climbing stairs for the first time — and the crushing realization that they have “merely moved to a new prison.” The narrator’s distinct voice is compelling as she observes her own biology shut down in a world without men, yet defiantly asserts that her story is as vital as King Lear’s. It is a haunting meditation on memory, community, and the insistence on making meaning within a “futile succession of empty days.”

Li, Yiyun. The Book of Goose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. [See listings on Goodreads and Douban; my excerpts; and the review on The Atlantic.]

Having read Yiyun Li for years but never her long fiction, it was a pleasure to find The Book of Goose a successful departure from her usual semi-autobiographical material, proving her capacity to evoke the postwar French countryside as vividly as her familiar settings. The novel follows Agnès as she looks back on an intense, asymmetrical girlhood bond with Fabienne, a relationship that becomes entangled with authorship, invention, and the machinery of literary recognition. While reviewers rightly hear an echo of the Neapolitan Novels in the “two girls” dyad, Li’s emphasis here is on how and why stories are manufactured and consumed. Also significant is its intense exploration of how we are “constantly engaged in the process of mythmaking in an attempt to understand […] the motivations and desires of those who are dear to us” (The Atlantic). I admire how Li’s prose remains unadorned, yet capable of sudden, crushing weight: “Time corrupts. And we pay a price for everything corruptible.”

Li, Yiyun. Things in Nature Merely Grow. HarperCollins Publishers, 2025. [See listings on Goodreads and Douban; and my excerpts.]

This new memoir recounts the suicide of Li’s younger son, James, years after the loss of her first son, Vincent. Li draws a sharp distinction between her children: Vincent died from an excess of feeling, while James died from “thinking,” concluding that a “livable” life was not necessarily one worth living. Eschewing the magic word of love and the false comfort of redemption narratives, she instead elects to inhabit the “abyss” as a permanent dwelling. Many on the Chinese internet mistake Li’s austerity for coldness, but I suspect anyone who has experienced the passing of relatives can attest that grief is rarely linear; it can be delayed, contradictory, and stubbornly nonstandard. Also, how can the act of writing not be a dignified and enduring memorial for the dead (cf. Hamnet)?

See also Yiyun Li, “Any Human Heart,” The New Yorker, June 15, 2025 [archived copy] (describing a lunch between a grieving woman and a cynical elderly academic who reveals that she tormented her ex-husband by sending annual “sympathy” flowers on the birthday of his deceased child, thereby illustrating the enduring complexity and potential cruelty of the human heart).

Mod, Craig. Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir. Random House, 2025. [See listings on Goodreads and Douban; and my excerpts.]

I have followed Craig Mod’s newsletters on walking through the Japanese countryside for a long time, and this book builds on that familiar voice of travelogue to offer a dual excavation of the Kii Peninsula and an autobiographical reckoning with adoption, scarcity, and the ache of learning to accept care. I love his ability to shift seamlessly between the banter of a casual observer and the gravity of a survivor. By grounding abstract trauma in the physical rhythm of the walk, Mod demonstrates how the “patina of time” allows the past to settle, proving that things — and people — do indeed become other things.

Rose, Phyllis. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Vintage, 1984. [See listings on Goodreads and Douban; and the review on NYT.]

I approached this book skeptically, led there by a critique of contemporary “divorce memoirs,” only to find an examination of human connection that remains startlingly relevant. Through five Victorian unions, the book reframes marriage as a “political experience” — a negotiated narrative where two imaginations construct often conflicting stories. Particularly moving is John Stuart Mill’s pre-nuptial waiver (please do read it in full), in which he formally renounces the “odious powers” afforded to husbands by Victorian law. I appreciate how the book elevates gossip into moral inquiry and proves that the domestic struggle for autonomy is timeless, and that anxieties regarding validation and control are not unique to modernity.

See also Haley Mlotek, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce (Viking, 2025) (tracing a 13-month marriage’s quiet unraveling alongside the legal history of no-fault divorce and the cultural “divorce plot”).

Wong, Sampson. Urban Strollology: Learning From Hong Kong [城市散步學：以香港作為起點]. Breakthrough, 2023. [See listings on Goodreads and Douban.]

I have been visiting Hong Kong almost weekly since late 2025, utilizing the city’s density as a vessel for exploration and affective regulation. This book offers a method for that intuition. It structures “seeing the city” through six lenses — buildings, paths, spaces, objects, information, and urban nature — so that walking becomes an intentional practice rather than a landmark chase. It argues that by shifting focus to “acquired tastes,” i.e., the trained appreciation of everydayness such as public utility infrastructure, the semiotics of signage, and the improvised publicness of leftover spaces, the streetscape can be transformed into a decodable text.

See also Sampson Wong, Hong Kong Strollology [香港散步學] (White Paper Publishing, 2022) (recommending ten strolling routes around Hong Kong that demonstrate the diversity, vividness, and the interweaving of the everyday and the sublime); and Ian Lambot and Greg Girard, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City [黑暗之城：九龍城寨的日與夜] (Watermark, 1999) (documenting through photographs and interviews the lives, spaces, and myths of residents inside the hyper-dense, largely ungoverned Kowloon Walled City before its demolition, portraying a paradoxical community of crime, industry, and mutual aid).

>> Essays

Aftab, Awais. “You Aren’t In The DSM.” Asterisk. November 21, 2025.

Aftab’s critique of the DSM resonates with my skepticism toward the proliferation of amateur diagnosis and identity-based pop-psychology. It explains how a manual designed for bureaucratic and clinical utility has been misappropriated as a tool for “existential self-definition.” Despite the lack of biological validation — Thomas Insel famously noted that “biology never read that book” — the DSM’s accessible language seduces laypeople into mistaking fluid symptom clusters for fixed internal essences. This friction explains the modern impulse to embrace expanding categories like autism as totalizing identities; it offers a “relief from the Sisyphean burden” of understanding our own complexity. Yet, as Aftab argues, this results in a “categorical self-confinement” where individuals view themselves as passive hosts to diagnostic entities rather than agents.

See also Niklas Serning, “Psychodynamic nonsense,” Aeon, January 21, 2025 (arguing that the traditional psychotherapeutic emphasis on childhood trauma and attachment theory is scientifically unfounded and potentially iatrogenic, advocating instead for a present-focused practice grounded in philosophical wisdom rather than clinical dogma); and Paul Holdengräber, “Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7,” The Paris Review, March 20, 2024 [archived copy] (redescribing the aim of psychoanalysis not as a scientific progression toward a cure for intractable human suffering but as an artistic practice of conversation that, by curing patients of their static self-knowledge and allowing them to risk being “fallible,” breaks the frozen, repetitive loops of the solitary mind to recover the vital, inarticulate appetites previously deadened by the anxiety of control).

Saltzman, Robert. “The Self That Never Was.” The Hedgehog Review. June 17, 2025 [my translation].

Last year I was struck enough by the article’s eloquence to translate it. The essay asks us to treat our reflex to infer a self from fluent language as an ancient projection, and shows how conversational AI amplifies that habit by offering “fluency without understanding” and, more seductively, the performance of intimacy without mutuality. Thus, the risk is less that machines become persons than that we outsource attention and care to simulations, letting incoherent, fragile, or inarticulate humans go unheard. However, I do not share its deterministic, poststructuralist drift toward dissolving the self into mere “process” and “pattern.” When machines learn to say “I,” the better response is sustained scrutiny, using the encounter to interrogate what “I” refers to, not to chase a final answer.

See also D. Graham Burnett, “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” The New Yorker, April 26, 2025 (arguing that the rapid advancement of AI renders traditional “scientistic” knowledge production obsolete, thereby liberating the humanities to return to their foundational purpose of cultivating human subjectivity and the lived experience of existence); The Editors of n+1, “Large Language Muddle,” n+1, September 10, 2025 (advocating against the posture of resignation found in contemporary literary responses to AI and for a “Luddite” rejection, arguing that intellectual laborers must actively resist the technology to oppose its environmental wastefulness, labor exploitation, and degradation of human thought); and Erik Hoel, “Welcome to the semantic apocalypse,” The Intrinsic Perspective (blog), March 28, 2025 (arguing that the proliferation of AI-generated imitations precipitates a “semantic apocalypse” analogous to the psychological phenomenon of semantic satiation, wherein the relentless repetition of artistic styles strips cultural artifacts of their intrinsic meaning and reduces them to mere syntax).

Beckwith, Sarah. “Returning to the Scene of My Brutal Rape.” The New Yorker. May 26, 2025 [archived copy].

I have always admired the personal essays in The New Yorker for how they transmute individual stories into profound ethical inquiry. Here, the author chronicles her return to the East London towpath where she was raped forty years ago, retrospectively linking her attacker to the notorious Railway Killers. Yet where the essay really shines is its searing, literary critique of the modern discourse around consent. The author critiques the legal definition of rape as merely “sex without consent” or a violation of rights, arguing these terms are too contractual to capture the act’s “desolating wickedness.” Drawing on Simone Weil, she reframes the experience not as a loss of autonomy but as “soul murder” — an encounter with absolute force that renders the victim a thing. It is a cinematic yet devastating piece that provides a crucial, emotional dimension often missing from clinical or academic debates on sexual violence. A great supplemental read for those who also enjoy Prima Facie.

Greenwell, Garth. “Taking Offense: Reading through bad feeling.” The Yale Review. June 9, 2025.

Using examples of fatphobia in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Miranda July’s All Fours, Greenwell argues that while offense is a legitimate reaction, allowing it to shut down our “perceptual apparatus” deprives us of a work’s deeper value. Instead of dismissing art that contains “unbecoming conjunctions,” he suggests a strategy of “dwelling in bad feeling.” That is, by enduring the discomfort of the text, readers can access a moral complexity that lies “on the other side” of offense. I have long been frustrated by the tendency of today’s online discourse to reject or censor art based on perceived disrespect or authors’ flaws, and this essay is a timely reminder that interesting art often demands that we suspend our instinct to judge in favor of a willingness to be open-minded.

See also Kate Wagner, “Bringing Sexy Back,” Lux, October 17, 2025 (decrying the erosion of erotic privacy caused by digital surveillance and the tendency to subject intimate life to public adjudication, advocating for a return to “situational eroticism” that privileges immediate, embodied sensation over performative categorization).

Kim, Hannah H. “The truth about fiction.” Aeon. January 20, 2025.

Transitioning from a diet of technical nonfiction to literature, I often struggled to grasp fiction’s intrinsic value or interpretive logic. This essay helped by exposing the metaphysical baggage behind the label itself and referring to the Chinese literary tradition to which I am accustomed. It argues that whereas Western analytic philosophy, rooted in Platonic mimesis (imitation of the ideal world), posits a rigid dichotomy between “reality” and the “imagined copy,” the Chinese concept of xiaoshuo is backed by a metaphysics that views reality (Dao) as a changing process rather than a static truth. Xiaoshuo isn’t unreal, but merely lacks the interpretive stability of official history. Therefore, nonfiction isn’t purely about objective truth — often just sincere belief organizing knowledge for specific projects — and fiction isn’t merely falsity. Realizing that definitions of fiction depend entirely on the metaphysical framework we project onto them provided the context I needed to finally appreciate literature.

See also Henrik Karlsson, “Poems are prompts,” waste book (blog), Mar 31, 2025 (proposing that poetry be approached as a series of executable prompts, much like running a language model or practicing meditation, thereby urging readers to focus on the visceral cognitive states generated by the text rather than seeking to decipher a specific meaning).

Parete, Dalia. “China’s Liberal Press and its Feminism Gap.” China Media Project. Interview with Li Sipan. September 19, 2025. [Chinese version]

Growing up with a parent in the news industry, I find Li’s account of the storied Nanfang Media Group both relevant and unsettling. There, a crude “brotherhood” culture marginalized female reporters despite their often superior credentials. Also resonant is Li’s critique that censorship has forced journalists into a “creative nonfiction” style that sacrifices hard news elements (the 5Ws) for literary flourish. This survival mechanism often produces bloated, isolated narratives that lack universality and genuine public accountability. Li also discusses the migration of feminist discourse to algorithm-driven platforms, which in her view has hollowed out the movement, replacing organized, face-to-face activism with a performative, neoliberal echo chamber.