Not everything I read this year was about invented worlds. A significant portion of my reading life was spent with books that insist on the realness of reality: bodies, illnesses, narratives, institutions, uncertainties. These are not books I raced through, and to be honest a lot of them were article-adjacent. Still, these are the books that asked me for attention in some way, and each of them repaid my time spent. (Note: this is not my monastic reading list, which I keep separately. That reading was also rich and rewarding, but felt a bit too niche even for a cheerfully quirky blog. This is my curated should-appeal-to-all list. Message me if you want the professional version.)
John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis
This is a book about tuberculosis, but it is also a book about inequality, attention, and the moral frameworks we use to decide what kinds of suffering matter. Green is very clear about his own positionality, and I especially like that he never pretends to be neutral. What makes the book effective is precisely that combination: careful research paired with an insistence that facts alone are not enough. I came away thinking less about TB as a disease of the past and more about how we decide which diseases – and sufferers thereof – we choose to discuss, and which we don’t.
Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe and The Wounded Storyteller
Arthur Frank has long been central to thinking about illness narratives, and returning to these books (even if under deadline!) felt to me a bit like revisiting a conversation rather than encountering something new. The Wounded Storyteller, grounded in Frank’s own experiences of heart attack and cancer, remains a careful meditation on what it means to tell stories from illness rather than about it. Letting Stories Breathe extends his work, asking what ethical obligations listeners, scholars, and institutions have toward stories once they are told. I found myself dwelling when I needed to be skimming; his books are so engaging and thoughtful that they resist instrumental reading.
Herman Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body
Roodenburg’s study of gesture, particularly through figures such as Constantijn Huygens, treats bodily expression not as spontaneous overflow but as a learned and practiced habit. Roodenburg’s insight is that gesture is cultural knowledge and cultural capital: acquired, refined, and socially legible. I found this book especially useful as a reminder that bodies do not merely express meaning; they are trained to produce it. Also, this book quietly reshapes how one watches people speak. I was naughty and read chapters that weren’t directly applicable to the work I was doing. Shhhh, don’t tell my family.
Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
This is a cheat, since it’s fiction, but I chose it here deliberately. To me, Godden’s novel about Dominican nuns captures the texture of monastic life in ways that most non-fiction accounts struggle to do. She brings to life the rhythms of prayer, frictions of communal living, and the mix of discipline and intimacy. All are rendered with an attentiveness that feels ethnographic, even though it remains clearly imagined. Sometimes fiction is simply better at conveying lived experience than analysis can be. And yes, I’ve blogged about it before: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/04/postulant-novice-professed-initiation.html
Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead
Campbell writes about people whose work is death-adjacent: gravediggers, embalmers, executioners, forensic specialists. The book is notable for its restraint. Rather than sensationalizing these professions, she speaks to their ordinariness. It’s a job, even if it’s a job with a body involved. What emerges is not a meditation on death itself so much as on how societies distribute the labor of dealing with it, and how those who do that labor understand their roles.
Jamie Holmes, Nonsense
Holmes explores ambiguity and uncertainty, not as problems to be solved but as conditions that shape perception, decision-making, and belief. The book ranges from psychology to politics to everyday cognition but remains grounded in the idea that humans are deeply uncomfortable with not knowing, often to our detriment. I found it useful less for its individual examples than for the framework it offers: ambiguity doesn’t just confuse us, it actively changes how we see.
So pause, he argues, and look again. Holmes’s central recommendation is not the cultivation of better answers, but, importantly, of building better tolerances: for ambiguity, for incomplete information, for meanings that do not resolve on first encounter. Wherever uncertainty makes us anxious, he tells us, we tend to rush toward coherence – any coherence. We grasp at patterns, explanations, or stories that soothe us rather than clarify what we’re looking at. Holmes urges us to deliberately slow down that meaning-making reflex. Sit with the discomfort long enough to notice what your mind is doing. What shortcuts does your mind take? What assumptions does it accept? What narratives do we prefer for their stability rather than their coherence? As we pause, alternative interpretations have room to surface. What initially looked like nonsense may reveal itself as complexity, or at least as a problem improperly framed.
For Holmes, this is not a call to relativism or indecision, but to intellectual humility. He wants us to be willing to revise, to hold competing possibilities in mind, and to recognize that understanding often emerges not from closing down ambiguity, but from staying with it a little longer than feels comfortable.
Not a bad set of action items as we head into a New Year...
