My Favorite Books of 2025

A nursing poet, and a sojourn with Augustine

Very delighted to be on Tsh Oxenreider’s best of the year list for The Dignity of Dependence! And lovely to see all the copies in my local library checked out <3

Meanwhile, it’s time for my own best books of the years list!

These are the best books I read this year; they don’t have to have been published in 2025. I bend the rules of “year” a little, so I can go from December to December (and publish the list early enough for you to find a Christmas present for a friend).

I have a writeup over here, and I’ll pull out two particularly Other Feminisms titles for a little more discussion here. But first, a teaser of the whole list.

My favorite books of 2025 were about:

1. Jimmy Carter

2. the Iranian revolution

3. the Panama Canal

4. the Edmund Fitzgerald

5. poetry instruction

6. sanctions

7. a translator’s philosophy

8. Indonesian independence

9. Texan Zionism

10. lighthouses

11. Augustine

12. Irish lament

13. paint drying

(the others are on kindle)

Now for the two that feel most relevant to this substack…

A Ghost in the Throat

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

A Ghost in the Throat is Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s mixed memoir of her maternity and her work as a translator. She pumps milk (first for vulnerable local babies, then for her own) and is researching a lament by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.

As you might expect, a good poet’s prose is also lovely.

Here’s one passage I dogeared:

For years, my sleep is broken by milk. Occasionally, as I’m tugged awake, I take comfort in imagining how often this precise moment has been enacted not only by my own body, but by other mothers, again and again and again, each a mirroring of the same elements — the milk, the mother, the baby, the dark, the milk, the mother, the baby, the dark, the milk, the milk, the milk — and in such moments, I am excruciatingly tired, yes, and yet, contentment hovers here too, shimmering in the peripheries, regardless of how tired I am. I am excruciatingly tired, yes, so tired that I frequently repeat myself, so very, very tired — and yet, I still procrastinate over whether to wean. To lure this child away from my body and train her hungers elsewhere would be to pull myself from my comfortable burrow of service. I can’t do it, the ritual of giving of myself to another is so exquisite. I have made an invisibility of myself, neatly concealed in rooms made by female labour and repetition and milk.

Intimacy and Intelligibility: Word and Life in Augustine’s “De magistro”

by Erika Kidd

Intimacy and Intelligibility is a slim, lovely book exploring St. Augustine’s De Magistro (On the Teacher). De Magistro is a dialoge between St. Augustine and his son, Adeodatus, as they wrestle with the question of whether is is possible to teach anyone anything.

Many parents, perhaps, have wondered this in a moment of frustration. But Augustine and Adeodatus (and Kidd) are deeply interested how an idea can be communicated from person to person, and how conversation knits us together.

Here’s a particularly Other Feminisms-y passage:

We return now to Augustine’s metaphor of parturition that occurs midway through the dialogue. Augustine suggests Adeodatus may be wondering whether their discussion is bringing forth (parturire) something great or worthy. The metaphor rewards careful attention: parturire means to be in labor or to be pregnant with, as in the English word parturition. Augustine tells Adeodatus that they, father and son, are involved in a kind of birth… Augustine’s words evoke the moment of a newborn’s first gasps. This is the language of birth, of deliverance. Augustine hopes he and his son will not merely get a squinting glimpse of that dazzling realm, but will learn to love what gives light to the blessed life. It is a poignant image, but a strange one too…

The metaphor of birth is the heart of the dialogue’s logic. Something or someone is being born. But what? On the one hand, the conversation gives birth to deeper insight about why they talk with one another. Father and son’s developing view of language that is, we speak primarily to inform--will soon show its deficiencies, when they come to agree that Christ is the teacher of all. On the other hand, and much more fundamentally, the conversation gives birth to them, father and son. Recently baptized, they know their pilgrim lives are not their true end, and they look forward to the life of the blessed in heaven. They are not yet fully born into the life of Christ that they share. They are still being formed, not yet ready to withstand the heat and light of that most blessed realm. Yet they are moving toward the blessed life, from darkness to light, as they speak together about speaking. Augustine’s metaphor of parturition implies that the conversation in De magistro is not merely instrumental and informative, but generative. Augustine’s speaking does not serve a narrowly instrumental purpose of informing Adeodatus about the nature of the beata vita. No human being could give a comprehensive account of that life. More importantly, no one reaches the beata vita through simply being informed about it. Augustines own biography makes this painfully clear. Like every other form of human life, the beata vita is reached only through birth, which is hardly a process one can engineer or manage for oneself. What do we want in speaking together? Augustine’s metaphor hints at an answer: We want to birth each other into the beata vita.

What’s on your personal list of the best books you read in 2025?

What do you think about the metaphor of midwifery for teaching?