My 2025 Reading Year: The One Question Every Book Was Asking
I didn't set out to read around a theme this year.
There was no reading challenge, no colour-coded spreadsheet, no goal pinned above my desk. I just picked up whatever called to me — something healing when I needed comfort, something heavy when I could hold it, something completely unexpected when I was restless. And then December came.
I sat with the stack — Japanese & Korean healing fiction, Chinese literary fiction, Western contemporary novels, non-fiction books— and something clicked. Not because they were similar. They couldn't be more different. But they had all been asking me the same thing, in different voices, from different directions.
How are you supposed to live?
Not in the philosophical, abstract sense. In the everyday sense. The way you spend a Tuesday. The job you stay in. The relationships you hold onto. The version of yourself you keep performing for people who never asked you to.
Every book I read in 2025 circled that question. This is what I found.
Why Do So Many Books Ask the Same Question?
The books that stay with us rarely answer anything directly. What they do is sit beside the question with you — long enough that you stop trying to answer it quickly and start actually living with it.
In 2025, I read across five distinct literary traditions. Japanese fiction that moved slowly and held grief quietly. Korean fiction that named the invisible weight women carry. Chinese literary fiction that asked what happens to an individual life under the weight of history. Western contemporary fiction that stripped love and identity down to their most uncomfortable parts. And non-fiction that forced me to look at the world more clearly.
Every single one of them was, underneath the surface story, asking: Are you living the life you chose, or the one that was chosen for you?
The Books I Read in 2025, Grouped by the Question They Asked
What Does It Mean to Live Outside the Script?
Some of the most quietly radical books I read this year were about people who simply... stopped performing.
Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto is, on the surface, about a man who rents himself out to do absolutely nothing — just show up and exist beside you. It sounds absurd. It reads like an act of profound rebellion against a culture that equates worth with productivity. By the end, I found myself wondering who I perform for and what would happen if I stopped.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata introduced me to Keiko — a woman who finds complete fulfilment in the perfect routine of a convenience store (but her family and friends think she should get a better job) — and dares you to call her broken. Society does. You slowly start to wonder if society is the one that's broken.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang takes this further into something darker and more physical. When a woman in Seoul decides to stop eating meat, it reads as a quiet refusal (her family criticize her)— the body as the last place she has sovereignty. It is not a comfortable book. It is not meant to be.
There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura asks a gentler version of the same thing: what if you just wanted work that didn't consume you? What would that even look like?
Together, these four books made me ask: What are the things I do because I genuinely want to — and what am I doing because I'm afraid of what people will think if I stop?
What Is the Cost of Becoming Who Everyone Expects You to Be?
This group of books didn't let me look away.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo reads like a case file. It is precise, unadorned, and absolutely devastating in its documentation of a life shaped by other people's expectations before the woman living it had any say. I finished it and sat quietly for a long time.
Pachinko by Lee Min-Jin spans generations, following a Korean family whose identity is shaped by forces larger than any individual choice. It is about inheritance — not just of blood or money, but of expectation, sacrifice, and the stories a family needs you to carry. Reading it in 2025 felt urgent.
Normal People and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, read in the same year, were interesting together. Both are about people who love each other and still struggle to close the distance between who they are and who they think they should be. Rooney writes the unsaid thing with precision.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang asks the question in a completely different register — who gets to tell what story, whose voice is centred, and what we're willing to do to be heard. It's sharp and uncomfortable and necessary.
Where Does Healing Actually Happen?
A significant part of my 2025 reading year took place in small spaces — coffee shops, bookshops, kitchens, food stalls. Not by coincidence.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is set in a Tokyo coffee shop where you can travel back in time, but only under strict rules. The real question it asks is: If you could go back, what would you actually change? Most characters discover the answer is not what they expected.
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama became one of my three most-thought-about books of the year (more on that below).
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa is a quiet, gentle book about a young woman who retreats to her uncle's secondhand bookshop after her life falls apart. Books become the medium through which she begins to piece herself back together. I read it slowly on purpose.
The Chibineko Kitchen, The Full Moon Coffee Shop, and The Kamogawa Food Detectives all do something similar — they use food, memory, and small intimate spaces as the site of emotional reckoning. Japanese healing fiction has a specific kind of warmth: it doesn't demand you process your grief on a timeline. It just puts something good in front of you and waits.
What Does One Individual Life Look Like Under History's Weight?
Serve the People by Yan Lianke and The Seventh Day by Yu Hua ask questions that can only be asked through fiction — what does it do to a person when the society around them requires constant performance of belief they don't hold? The Seventh Day in particular stayed with me: a man wanders through the afterlife, piecing together the story of his own life. It is bleak, surreal, and unexpectedly moving.
Chip War by Chris Miller was my one deep non-fiction read and it reoriented how I think about the world I live in. It is not a book about feelings. It is a book about power and supply chains and the semiconductor beneath every screen you've ever touched. Reading it alongside literary fiction gave 2025 an interesting texture — the personal and the geopolitical in conversation.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak I came to late, and I'm glad. Death as narrator. A girl who steals books to survive. Words as the most important thing a person can own. It asked its questions at full volume.
Strange Houses by Uketsu was the wildest departure of the year — an unsettling, surreal horror-adjacent read that I am still not entirely sure what to do with. Sometimes a book asks questions you can't yet articulate.
The Three Books I'm Still Thinking About
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library — Michiko Aoyama
This book asks its central question in the title and then spends 200 pages showing you that the answer is almost always closer than you think.
A librarian named Sayuri Komachi works at a community library and gives each visitor not just a bookr ecommendation, but somehow the exact right one — the book that reflects something they haven't been able to name yet. The stories follow different people at turning points: a woman considering a career change, a man who has lost his direction, a young person unsure what they want from life.
What stayed with me was not the premise. It was the quiet insistence that the thing you're searching for isn't somewhere else — it's in the process of paying attention to what you already know you love. Sayuri doesn't give answers. She gives books. And the books do the rest.
I read this at a point in the year when I was asking a lot of questions about direction. I didn't find answers in it either. But I found something better — a permission to trust that the searching itself is meaningful.
Tuesdays with Morrie — Mitch Albom
I had been meaning to read this for years. The year I finally did, I understood why people hold onto it.
Mitch Albom revisits his old professor, Morrie Schwartz, who is dying on every Tuesday. What unfolds is not a conversation about death — it's a conversation about how to be alive while you still are. Morrie has opinions. About love, about work, about the culture that tells us to accumulate and achieve and perform success, and what all of that costs.
The line I keep returning to: the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. Morrie says this without bitterness, which somehow makes it land harder.
I read it at a comfortable pace, which felt wrong for about 30 pages and then started to feel exactly right. Some books need to be read slowly. Some conversations need to be had on a Tuesday, week after week, until you've actually heard what's being said.
What it left me with was not sadness. It was a specific kind of clarity about what I want to be doing with the time I have.
The Next Conversation — Jefferson Fisher
This was the most unexpected book on my list — a practical guide to communication from a trial lawyer that ended up asking the same questions as everything else I read this year.
Jefferson Fisher's central argument is that most conflict in our lives comes not from what we disagree about, but from how we talk about it. The words we choose, the pace we speak at, the degree to which we listen to respond versus listen to understand — these things shape relationships more than most of us realise.
What I didn't expect was how much of the book was actually about self-respect. About knowing what you're not willing to say. About the things we half-communicate and then feel wounded when the other person misunderstands. About taking responsibility for the conversations we've been avoiding.
Sandwiched between books about identity, grief, and quiet rebellion, The Next Conversation felt like a practical companion piece. All that reflection — and then: so what are you going to say?
What a Year of Reading Actually Does to You
Here is what I've come to understand about reading and travel — they are, fundamentally, the same activity.
Travel takes you somewhere external and reflects you back to yourself differently. Books take you somewhere internal and do the same. Both require willingness to be uncomfortable. Both require you to stay present with something unfamiliar. Both, if you let them, change the shape of the questions you're asking.
In 2025, I didn't set out to read about how to live. But that is what every book — in its own language, its own tone, its own genre — came back to.
The quiet radical refusing to perform. The woman carrying a script written before she was born. The grief sitting in a coffee shop that smells like the past. The professor dying on a Tuesday with things left to say. The librarian who already knows what you're looking for.
I didn't find the answer. I don't think that was the point.
What I found was a better understanding of the question — and maybe that's what a reading year is supposed to give you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What books should I read if I want Japanese healing fiction? Start with Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, or Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa. These are gentle, contemplative reads centred on small spaces and emotional processing.
What is the best book to read if you're at a crossroads in life? Based on my 2025 reading year, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama and Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom are both particularly resonant for people in transitional moments. Both ask quiet but powerful questions about what we actually want from our lives.
What's the common thread in literary fiction about identity and belonging? Many of the most compelling literary novels — from Pachinko to The Vegetarian to Normal People — explore the tension between who we are and who we're expected to be. The common thread is the cost of external expectation on the internal self.
Is The Next Conversation worth reading for non-lawyers? Yes. Jefferson Fisher's book is fundamentally about communication and self-respect, not legal strategy. It's practical, readable, and asks questions about how we show up in relationships that apply to everyone.
What was the common thread in your reading year? I'd love to know in the comments.