Running Results, 2025

Running Results, 2025:

Miles: 632.12
Max distance: 13.31 mi
Total activity time: 153:39:35 h:m:s
Calories burned: 76,762

Favorite Books of 2025

2025 Favorite Books

Finished 64 books this year. 

Breakdown: 60 audiobooks; 4 print books; 0 e-books.

This year I'm listing books in 3 categories: 1) Overall favorites & enthusiastic recommendations; 2) Top 10 2025 books; 3) Top 10 books from Previous years.

Overall favorites & enthusiastic recommendations

These "sparked joy" in me, and I enthusiastically recommend these audiobooks from the 2 "Top 10" categories below (in order):

1. How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future (2022) - Maria Ressa (narrated by the author)
2. Personal History (1997) - Katharine Graham (narrated by Carrington MacDuffie)
3. Battle of the Linguist Mages (2022) - Scotto Moore (narrated by Justis Bolding)
4. The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science (2024) - Kate McKinnon (narrated by the author)
5. Secrets of the Purple Pearl (2025) - Kate McKinnon (narrated by the author)
6. Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America (2024) - Talia Lavin
7. Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics (2024) - Elle Reeve
8. The Covid Safety Handbook: Staying Safe In An Unsafe World (2024) - Violet Blue
9. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost ldealism - A Memoir (2025) - Sarah Wynn-Williams (narrated by the author)
10. The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen: A Novel (2025) - Yuta Takahashi

 

Top 10 2025 books

My Top 10 audiobooks I listened to from the 2025 publishing year (in order, with #1 as my favorite):

1. Secrets of the Purple Pearl (2025) - Kate McKinnon
2. Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company (2025) - Patrick McGee, narrated by Fred Sanders
3. Finding My Way: A Memoir (2025) - Malala Yousafzai
4. Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (2025) - Dan Wang
5. The Book Of Records (2025) - Madeleine Thien
6. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost ldealism - A Memoir (2025) - Sarah Wynn-Williams
7. The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen: A Novel (2025) - Yuta Takahashi
8. The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary (2025) - Susannah Cahalan
9. King Of Ashes (2025) - S. A. Cosby
10. Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up (2025) - Dave Barry

Note: not many of these made my overall list...I think I hesitated to recommend some because they might represent a technical slog, narrow interest of counter-culture, or rather tough-to-parse (e.g., The Book of Records).... 🤷🏻

Top 10 books from previous years

My Top 10 new-to-me audiobooks I listened to from previous publishing years (in order, with #1 as my favorite):

1. How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future (2022) - Maria Ressa
2. Personal History (1997) - Katharine Graham, Narrated by Carrington MacDuffie
3. Battle of the Linguist Mages (2022) - Scotto Moore
4. The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science (2024) - Kate McKinnon
5. Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America (2024) - Talia Lavin
6. The Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead―The Lost Manuscript of Robert Hunter (2024) - by Robert Hunter (Author), Dennis McNally (Introduction), Brigid Meier (Afterword), John Mayer (Foreword) 
7. The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook (2024) - Hampton Sides
8. Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories (2023) - Mike Rothschild
9. Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics (2024) - Elle Reeve
10. The Covid Safety Handbook: Staying Safe In An Unsafe World (2024) - Violet Blue

Honorable mentions: 

• Connie: A Memoir (2024) - Connie Chung
• Patriot: A Memoir (2024) - Alexei Navalny
• Sonny Boy: A Memoir (2024) - Al Pacino
• Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (2024) - Kara Swisher
• Martyr! (2024) - Kaveh Akbar
• Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church (2024) -  Gareth Gore 

2025 Audiobook Sound Engineering Favorites

I love it when audiobooks use the medium to enhance understanding of the written text. 

Hearing the author read the text can sometimes help (e.g., Malala Yousafzai, Al Pacino) but it can sometimes lead to a mediocre result (nothing really noticeable this year).

The best moments:

Having an "aha" moment when hearing word pronunciations exactly as the author intended

Hearing emotion in the author's voice

Hearing audio-only portions (e.g., song performances)

Regrettably, this year did not have many moments like this for me.😝

The audiobooks I chose seemed mostly basic.

However, two did seem to stand out:

1. The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science (2024) - Kate McKinnon (narrated by the author)
2. Secrets of the Purple Pearl (2025) - Kate McKinnon (narrated by the author)

Kate McKinnon brings her full intensity and nuance to narration. The audiobooks also...have sound effects and music! This represents such an oversight I can only imagine most productions skip this solely to save money.