In 2024, I read 45 books — an average of just under a book per week.
In the heady days of early 2025, I took a modest victory lap and wrote a blog post about how I effectively doubled the number of books I read, year over year.
I figured that, with similarly rigid usage of my time this year, I’d be able to double — yet again — the number of books I read in 2024.
Well, dear reader, it didn’t pan out at all. I clocked in at 27 books for the year.
Although I limited my time on social media and Netflix even further, things came up in my life that limited the amount of time I could spend reading: We bought a house and moved; I made more of an effort to do Daf Yomi (daily Talmud study) at 5:30am; I started coaching my son’s baseball team; My one year-old turned into a very active two year-old. None of these are bad — in fact, all of them are the best. It just left less time for reading. Which is fine — it’s a trade I’d make every day of the week and then once more.
In my blog post from last year, I mentioned a quote from a Rabbi of mine, who said: “it’s not how you use the hours in your day, it’s how you use the minutes in your hour.”
This quote came from Rabbi Dovid Ebner, zt”l, who was one of my Roshei Yeshiva (head of school) when I attended Eretz HaTzvi, and who passed away a few months ago. His quote — the minutes in each hour — ring stronger for me now than they did in the past; I’m pretty sure they resonate more strongly with each year I age.
I’ve redoubled my efforts to wring the maximum — Torah study, quality time with family, reading — out of a minimum of time, since, well, we don’t really have much of it at all. I think, sometimes, that we’re all kind of like turbochargers in a car engine: we take the excess air — which is to say, time — and desperately force it back into the engine in order to increase performance.
I’ve always thought new years resolutions to be sort of silly — you can wake up on any morning of the year and decide to start that diet or write that novel — but I’m nonetheless using the new calendar year as a springboard into better, more thoughtful uses of my time.
Also, here’s what I read in 2025:
- Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Scott Anderson
- The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron
- The Devil’s Flute Murders, Seishi Yokomizo
- How to Dodge a Cannonball, Dennard Dayle
- Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, Yossi Klein Halevi
- Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, Russell Shorto
- Pagan Babies, Elmore Leonard
- Glitz, Elmore Leonard
- The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
- Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon
- Abundance, Ezra Klein
- Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, Chris Miller
- On Beauty, Zadie Smith
- Close to Death, Anthony Horowitz
- The Twist of a Knife, Anthony Horowitz
- Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, Candice Millard
- A Line to Kill, Anthony Horowitz
- To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, Adam Hochschild
- Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, Adam Hochschild
- Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
- Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky
- When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, Peter Godwin
- Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, Oliver Burkeman
- The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson
- Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, Adam Hochschild
- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
- The Lost Shtetl, Max Gross
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