The 5 Books of 2025 That Most Shaped Me
I missed last year, but I intend to make this a yearly thing. Here are the five books that most shaped my thinking and decisions this year.
This is deliberately not called my “favorite” books of 2025. If it were just that, I would have Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York at the top. (This book, it seems, was written specifically for my pleasure.)
Instead, I’m thinking about something Zadie Smith said, that books, like social media or TV, cause behavior modification.
In the case of social media, we may see this as a bad thing. But the right book often catalyzes some of our most inspiring work. To me, it feels like when you’re on a walk in familiar woods, when you discover a gem of a trail you hadn’t noticed before.
Those are the books that made this list. I am somewhat embarrassed that four out of five of these are non-fiction. So it goes. These are in chronological order when I read them, not in order of what my favorite books are.
1) Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
When I read Emergent Strategy, which I did for a book club here in the South Bronx, it hit me that it was self-help. But it wasn’t about the self. It was about society. It was society-help.
The book has some lines like “What we put our attention on grows” and questions like “How can my real-time actions contribute to transforming this situation?” which sound like they’re from a Dale Carnegie book.
This self-help writing style is my guilty pleasure. But what was refreshing about Emergent Strategy was that instead of focusing on how to see myself differently, it helped me imagine the world differently.
She writes, “Right now we are living inside the results of other people’s imaginations.”
During our book club meeting at the community garden next to a highway, I brought up this line. For the sake of a thought exercise, I asked, what could we imagine here instead of a highway?
“What if we had a light rail?” one person said.
“Just make it all an urban farm!” said another.
How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material.
Many people see the highway as an enduring symbol of the modern world, a highway that cars and trucks zip past day and night, poisoning our air, yes, but providing the transportation to power the mighty economy, at which we all must bow at the altar of.
The next question maree brown offers us to ponder is how.
As a teenager, I was drawn to “self-help,” to this idea of improving myself. As I change and extend roots into other areas, I’m more drawn to the idea of what role I play in supporting the world around me.
2) The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex (Essay Collection)
I saw this book at my local library, and the title is so good that I made a double-take and checked it out.
When I moved back to New York and started volunteering at Maria Sola, I met lots of people who, somewhat to my surprise, fought for green space and clean air for a living.
They worked at non-profits and had official titles with the words “activist,” “advocate,” or “organizer” in them.
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded helped me learn about the pros and cons of this.
This book helped me see that there are other paths, too. It is critical of non-profits, as the title implies, but I think its true point is that non-profits are not enough.
If you care about an issue and want to be involved, there is no “right” or “best” way to go about it. This book helped me ponder on what my role is in the issues I care about.
Along the way, this book of essays, written in 2007, was prophetic about the rise of “non-profits,” like The Heritage Foundation, which funded and created Project 2025. One essay writes, “Right wing foundations pour millions of dollars into funding think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation to help craft an ideological package that has fundamentally reshaped the consciousness of the public.”
In the past year, Project 2025 has been in the headlines, something part of the mainstream cultural consciousness. But until reading this book, I never thought about how the group behind the document built so much power.
3) Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
This Hunger Games prequel takes us back to the adolescence of Haymitch Abernathy.
I don’t want to give any spoilers, so I’ll link to the newsletter I wrote about it.
Even if you haven’t read it, you know that Haymitch lives and that the Hunger Games continue.
Even if Haymitch doesn’t take down the Capitol in his games, it makes me ask whether his attempts were worth it. What was his role? Why do we even try to make society better? What is my role? What does it mean to fail or succeed?
As is often the case, non-fiction books attempt to provide answers, but fiction helps us ask the right questions.
4) The Young Lords: A Radical History by Johanna Fernandez
This book also got its own newsletter this year.
In my neighborhood, the Young Lords invoke myth and heroism. Reading this book and understanding the Lords, has added a new dimension to the understanding of my neighborhood and its long history.
Reading about the places I am has always been a habit of mine, as I wrote about back in 2022 about my favorite novels set in Barcelona. As I walk around, I ask myself, how this or that building, business, or garden got there.
I turn to books like these for some segment of the answers.
While the neighborhoods chatter of the Lords is always positive, this book includes the parts of their history that people don’t talk about as much. Why did the Young Lords disband within three years of a meteoric rise?
They were a bright flame that burned out. Part of it, as Fernandez wrote, was their attempt to send many of their New York-born Puerto Ricans to do work in Puerto Rico itself.
In New York, the Lords had an intuitive feel for the political moment and for how their people felt, because they were the people. But in Puerto Rico, Fernandez writes, “the Young Lords had transplanted a method of organizing that had been effective in politicizing an isolated racialized group on the mainland but didn’t work in the island context.”
Second, they were targeted by the F.B.I’s “Counterintelligence Program,” often simply known as COINTELPRO because that’s what FBI files called it.
The F.B.I. spied on them and sent in undercover agents to create arguments or draw them into time-wasting tasks. The vast resources of an expanded federal government after World War II went to putting halting the work (and sometimes killing the members) of groups like the Young Lords and the Black Panthers.
When I finished this book, I looked at my shelf at a big, daunting biography I’ve had for two years and hadn’t read, about the man at the top of the F.B.I who doomed the Young Lords.
5) G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage
I knew the name J. Edgar Hoover. I had a vague sense of him as a law enforcement man who wore a suit in black and white photos.
In G-Man, I learned his story, of the first director of the FBI, even before it was called the FBI. He kept his appointed job through Republican and Democratic administrations.
Today, it’s safe to say he’s hated by the left, the villain in the story of the downfall of the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. (He had it out for MLK most of all.)
But his story, to me is much more nuanced.
After reading G-Man, my main takeaway was not that Hoover was some uniformly great or bad man. My main takeaway is that Hoover lived in a world that allowed him so much unchecked, secretive power.
From the structure of the post-New Deal government, to the culture of anti-communism, to the public image Hoover created for himself, the bottom line is he got to do what he wanted without much questioning.
Gage writes, “Though many people would later profess to be outraged about what the FBI was doing, in the late 1950s nobody in Congress or the Justice Department seemed inclined to interfere or ask too many questions.”
This went all directions. After decades of limited action by the FBI against lynchings in the Jim Crow South, public opinion and outrage pushed Hoover to take action against the Klu Klux Klan. He successfully stomped them, using the same tactics he used against the Panthers. But he might not have if the American public hadn’t forced his hand to take them on.
To blame Hoover for stomping out much of the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement and to applaud him for stopping the KK is the same mistake we make often: to blame the individual instead of the world that formed that individual, the internal and external factors that led to their decisions.
In the epilogue, Gage writes, “And yet there is a certain loss in this image of Hoover as a one-dimensional villian, the embodiment of all that is worst in the American political tradition. For one thing, this makes him a too-easy scapegoat; his guilt restores everyone’s innocence…”
It is easy to critique Hoover as a racist who fought against Civil Rights. But the harder work is seeing how a man like Hoover was so popular and so powerful.
I’m working on some longer writing right now about my work in the community gardens. (I’m hesitant to call it a book, but that’s what it’s shaping up to be.)
It is time to debunk, to wash from our ways of speaking, this idea of the “great man” theory of history. We all respond to forces and constraints, ideas and cultures around us. In G-Man, I reflect on those more than on the man who carried out the orders.
If there’s a through-line in these books, it’s this: none of us acts in a vacuum.
Haymitch makes choices inside a contained arena. The Young Lords acted inside a neighborhood shaped by abandonment and mass migration. Hoover accumulated power only possible in an era of the Red Scare and more executive power.
We are always responding to the histories around us.
I think that’s part of what I love about reading. It widens the frame. It interrupts the stories we inherit from the present place and time. It reminds us that history, that life, is never clean, never neat, never fully understood, and that reflects on us.
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