Mind-blowing
I come to one of my favorite things to do as the year winds down. Which is to see all the different ways in which my mind has been kept occupied and shaped by writers who tirelessly work and put out the good stuff for people like us to just sit back, relax, and read. What was it that Carl Sagan said, “Books really are the best inventions of mankind” or something like that, and was he right?
“What an astonishing thing a book is. … one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
I saw this beautiful hotel building on a recent trip to Hawaii, and every front-facing wall had some sort of cuneiform inscriptions on them. Very becoming. Some were stick figures – some assorted sea creature shapes. They probably told a story, but I couldn’t stop to find it all out because I was being dragged across the street and being yanked up by my forearm to keep from tripping and falling (again). What I am trying to say with this rather meandering and pointless story is that the Hawaiian hotel may well have had the legend of Humuhumunukunukuapua’a there, and there was no way I would get to read it. (Humuhumunukunukuapua’a is a reef triggerfish and Hawaii’s official state fish)
Books, on the other hand, I got my dose of humor, facts, science, fantasy and history. I romped through the annals of British aristocracy, World History, US History, types of flora and how marvelous their cell walls are, all without stepping out of the comfort of my own bedroom. What can be better?
So, let’s see shall we? Every year, my classifications and categories of the books I read over the year changes, and that is just as it should be, for I don’t follow a particular pattern. Sometimes, the libraries make the choice for me and I am grateful. There are simply too many authors with too many interesting things to say.
Still there is a sort of quiet happiness – the cave of quietude as Keats so elegantly puts it, a rather meditative sort of space where the soul expands. It is truly astonishing. Then, you read something that not only expanded the writer’s soul, but now the readers’ too, and before you know it, you are thoroughly entranced. Books have managed to work their magic through ‘the shackles of time’ as Carl Sagan so niftly put it.
Anyway, all this to say that I did my spot of reading in 2025 and now, I get to look back on them and make sense of the lists.
Let’s go, shall we?
Banish ennui: Children’s books
- If you come to Earth – by Sophie Blackall
- Can we please give the Police Department to the Grandmothers? – By Junauda Petrus Illustrated by : Kristen Uroda –
- Sweet Dreamers – by Isabelle Simler
- If you run out of words – by Felicita Sala
- A Little Bit Super – With Small Powers Come Big Problems – Compiled by Leah Henderson & Gary D Schmidt
- The Losers Club – by Andrew Clements
Facts are Facts!
- Build the Life You Want – by Arthur C Brooks, Oprah Winfrey
- The Sea Chart – The Illustrated History of Nautical Maps & Navigational Charts – By John Blake
- Science in the Soul – By Richard Dawkins
- Anthropocene – Essays by John Green
Good old stories
- The Place in Us – Fatima Farheen Mirza
- Remarkably Bright Creatures – Shelby Van Pelt
- In the Time of Five Pumpkins – No ! Ladies Detective Agency – By Alexander McCall Smith
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
- Katabasis – R K Kuang
Science Fiction
- Martian – By Andy Weir
- Hail Mary – Andy Weir
- Exhalation – Ted Chiang (been meaning to write about it, but haven’t got around to doing so. Excellent short stories if you like the genre)
Under The Sea
- A Whale’s World – By Ian MacAllister & Nicholas Read
- The Dumbo Octopus – A graphic guide to cephalopods by Annie Lambert
- Narwhal – The Arctic Unicorn – By Justin Anderson Illustrated by Jo Weaver – Candlewick Press
- From Shore to Ocean Floor – The Human Journey to the Deep – By Gill Arbuthnott Illustrated by Christopher Nielsen
- Do Penguins Have Emotions – World Book answers your questions about the oceans and whats in them
- In my tsundoku shelf: Playground – By Richard Powers, How Sound Travels, Life in the Oceans – By David Attenborough
Call it brain fog or a lack of forethought – but there were a few books that I had only a vague recollection of. I didn’t write little witty notes against their name, and I now have a bit of difficulty remembering the good bits. I suppose it happens – but I am happy that I read them all the same. I usually am.
- https://nourishncherish.org/2025/03/06/10579/ : How Reading Changes Our Understanding of the World
- https://nourishncherish.org/2024/12/27/books-the-truest-brilliance-of-humankind-captured/ – Books – The Truest Brilliance of Humankind Captured
- https://nourishncherish.org/2024/04/11/the-cave-of-quietude/ – Keats says it is when nothing happens that the soul expands.
Please share your lists of recommended books for the year. As you can see – there are loads to be written about, but I suppose I shall just have to chip at them as best as I can.
Here is to a marvelous year of reading for all of you in the coming year! May the force be with you!
Nourish-n-Cherish 