(Belated) Year in Reading & Writing

What a long year 2025 was. We don’t need to get into it. I will just say that I had to stay away from the news until the end of the day, otherwise I got totally derailed. I spent a lot of time this year trying to take back my attention span, which was seriously damaged by the Covid era. I tried to read more, listen to more music, and I divested from most political podcasts and punditry.

I also started a new habit of writing by hand in the mornings. It has been the most grounding thing, a practice that brings me into a flow state almost immediately. I recommend it to all writers, especially if you, like me, wrote your first stories and essays by hand. It takes you back into your body and your memories when you write by hand—and apparently there is some neurological evidence for this feeling. In a recent article by Hua Hsu about the rising use of A.I. among college students, Hsu reports on professors who have decided to return to blue books:

“The return of blue-book exams might disadvantage students who were encouraged to master typing at a young age. Once you’ve grown accustomed to the smooth rhythms of typing, reverting to a pen and paper can feel stifling. But neuroscientists have found that the “embodied experience” of writing by hand taps into parts of the brain that typing does not.”

I read a lot of articles about A.I. this year—ironic, because when I was working on my last novel We Were Pretending I also read a lot of articles about A.I. and thought that I’d had my fill of the subject. (Obligatory plug for We Were Pretending: it’s on sale on Kindle for $2.99—and only until the end of the month, so act now.) When I was doing my research for WWP, there was no ChatGPT, no Claude, no ads where people ask A.I. agents to plan meals and write last-minute anniversary cards. I thought then that future applications of A.I. might include communication with animals and plants; it never occurred to me that anyone would want to use it to do things humans can already do quite well and, presumably, enjoy doing. I guess that was naïve of me. (I did, however, guess that people would enjoy talking to chatbots so much that they would lose touch with reality. I even wrote a short story about it in 2019. I couldn’t get anyone to publish it; editors felt it was implausible.)

I also found myself reading about the Bible this year because the novel I’m working on has a lot to do with Christianity. Going into this book, I didn’t know I’d be writing about Christianity and that surprised me, a little. But in some ways, it makes sense. Although I’m not particularly religious, I’ve always been curious about how spiritual belief shapes people. Some of you may know I was raised Protestant, attending a variety of churches throughout my childhood. The one I liked most was the Unitarian Universalist church but I also spent a lot of Sundays in a small Methodist church, where I learned to sing and read quite a bit of the Bible—sometimes out of sheer boredom. I don’t really think of the Bible as one of my influences and yet it was the book I encountered every week in childhood. It’s been interesting to revisit stories I haven’t read since my teens. The most intriguing one, to me, is the Book of Job. I read a wonderfully poetic translation by Stephen Mitchell while on vacation. (I didn’t bring the Book of Job with me as vacation reading, btw, it just happened to be in our cottage.)

For six months I made my way through Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower Than Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. This is a very long book that describes the founding and evolution of Christianity in a lot of detail. Sometimes it was a little too thorough; I would read it for several days in a row and only get through half a century in a history that covers two thousand years. While reading it, I became interested in the gnostic gospels, so I read Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels, and then I read her autobiography, Why Religion? about how she came to study Christianity—a religion she wasn’t raised in—and how its rituals and myths helped her to process the unspeakably tragic deaths of her child and husband. I also read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living With a Wild God, a very unusual spiritual memoir because Ehrenreich is a staunch atheist. But she had a series of mystical experiences in her youth, which set her on a quest to find the meaning of life—one that led her to study physics at a very high level. She abandoned that course of study to become the author of books such as Nickel and Dimed and the feminist classic Witches, Midwives & Nurses.

I got into audiobooks this year. It took a while to figure out what I like to listen to. I discovered I like memoirs, read by the author. My favorite was Griffin Dunne’s The Friday Afternoon Club. He is such a natural raconteur, I felt like we were hanging out and he was telling me stories from his life. I also listened to Hua Hsu’s Stay True, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay collection, The Message, Kara Swisher’s Burn Book, and Beth Macy’s Paper Girl. I wish I had listened to E. Jean Carroll read her memoir, Not My Type, but I read it before I figured out that I like to listen to memoirs.

Let’s talk about music. I have an 8-year-old daughter, so I listened to the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack and endless amounts of Taylor Swift. I managed to convince my daughter to like Jensen McRae’s 2025 album, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! which contains the highly sing-alongable “Let Me Be Wrong.” We also enjoyed Haim’s I Quit. (So many good songs on that one, but my personal favorites are “Take Me Back” and “Crying.”) Another 2025 album I liked a lot was Craig Finn’s Always Been. His songs are like short stories. (Try “Luke & Leanna” if you’re curious.) And when the kids weren’t in the car, I played Lily Allen’s novelistic and shockingly raw West End Girl.

I didn’t publish much this year, just one essay in The Sun, “Missing.” This is an autobiographical essay about my first job at the New York City Parks Department, which I started a few days before 9/11. I was grieving my mother, who had died a few months earlier, and tasked with writing letters to mourning New Yorkers who were upset that the Parks Department was cleaning up the memorials left in Union Square Park. It was a strange time in my life, and I found myself thinking of it during the Covid years. I wrote a draft of the essay then but couldn’t find the right ending, so I put it away for a few years. And then I finally figured it out. I’m happy it found a home in The Sun, because I’ve been reading that magazine since I was a teenager. I love its low-key spirituality and beautiful photography.

I also hand-published a little book of banned words to hand out at No Kings protests. This a book that contains all the words the Trump administration has banned from government documents. If you’d like to print your own copies, drop me a line and I’ll send you a link to a PDF. I’d also be happy to send a hard copy if you don’t have a printer. Just reply to this email.

That’s all for now. Happy 2026!

-Hannah