An Illicit Word Wars, My 2025 Reading List & a Hot Tip for Making the Most of Your SMEs
Reading is super personal, isn’t it? What floats my boat may put a big, fat hole in yours. But in hopes there might be some kind of serendipitous overlap, I’m sharing a mix of fiction and non-fiction I’m planning to dip into this year. Also, test your vocab power in today’s Word Wars, find Tip #2 in the SME series and scroll to the bottom for a sweet little postscript featuring a good friend of Pink Pineapple Post.
Illicit vs. Elicit
2025 Reading List
In full transparency, I reserve the right to replace every single title on this list with something else, should the mood strike me. Most times, I have a small stack of books on my bedside table, because you never really know what exactly you’ll feel like reading next. But as of now, I do have all best intentions to read this 70-40 mix of fiction/non-fiction. Having a list and sharing it is all part of reaching my goal to read more this year, mostly by increasing my word intake outside of bed. #winning
Fiction
Novels are my home, so I’ll definitely be spending most of my reading energy in unreal worlds peopled by very real people living important Truths.
A motley collection of the novels I’m planning to read this year.
by Chris Whitaker
Recommended by my reading kindred spirit, and it’s apparently simultaneously a thriller and a love story. Say less.
by Marjan Kamali
This one keeps popping up in different places, including on my goodreads feed.
by Percival Everett
Recommended by several reading friends, I’m intrigued to dip into this retelling of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn from the perspective of Huck’s runaway enslaved companion.
by John Boyne
One of my favorite authors. His other novel The Heart’s Invisible Furies, left an indelible mark on my heart.
A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes #1
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Recommended to me by a Sherlock Holmes-obsessed friend. The only other Sherlock Holmes book I’ve read so far was The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is so fantastic. As someone whose true first exposure to Sherlock was through the Robert Downey Jr. movies, it’s been a lovely way to round out my appreciation of this character.
by Alexandre Dumas
This one has been on my list for nearing two decades now, and I think this will be the year I really do read it.
by Elif Shafuak
I stumbled on this one poring over “best of” lists on goodreads, first caught by its rating of 4.45 which is super high. The scope feels impressively ambitious, spanning decades and geographies, with a through line of rivers (Tigris and Thames), and somehow in the shadow of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Seriously, how does a human even write something like this?
The Life Impossible or The Humans
by Matt Haig
This girl is a big fan of Matt Haig, so anything he’s written automatically gets a spot on my list. I’ve no idea yet what these two books are even about, but I’m totally in.
by Xóchitl González
Are you, by chance, a fellow stacks browser? I fear there are few of us left, those who wander the library aisles, aimlessly trailing fingers over spines to see what catches our interest. These days, most (99.5%?) library trips are with kids in tow, so the best I can usually manage is to stand in front of the new in fiction and new in large print (newly minted readers-wearer, here!) showcase shelves conveniently adjacent to the kids’ section and flip, touch and stack on a nearby table. Lately, I picked up this title that way, the author’s name sparking my penchant for Latino writers and the graphic orange and pink cover sealing the deal.
Non-Fiction
Over the last few years, and especially last year, I’ve been reading more non-fiction. Surprisingly (to me), some of my top favorite reads in 2024 were from this category.
By Sandra Matz
I heard the author interviewed on NPR, and I was captivated with the premise that sometimes we might be unreliable narrators of our own wants and needs—and that perhaps a better picture can be reflected back to us via a collection of outside sources. Now, I’m not sure how I feel about the outside sources in this case being the detritus of social media. I liked her own personal story better, in which the neighbors and friends in her extremely close-knit small German village were able to advise her as a young woman about the possibilities of her future in a more clear-eyed and fitting way than she was able to see for herself. Alas, the majority of us will never, ever have access to such an encircled life (and if we did, would we welcome or reject it? I bristle in retrospect to think of getting unsolicited advice on my life from some nosy, know-it-all neighbor when I was a tender 18). I’m intrigued at using this plethora of interactive choices, piled up like snowflakes, for social good.
Proust & The Squid or Reader, Come Home
By Maryanne Wolf
Did you know there are scholars of reading? I guess I never really thought of it that way until I heard Maryanne Wolf interviewed on NPR late last year. It was so fascinating to hear from her what is happening in our brains on a neuroscience level when we’re deeply engrossed in reading. As more and more of our time is sucked away by screens (what Jonathan Haidt describes as the opportunity cost of screens in his book The Anxious Generation), will we evolve away from being deep readers? This is one thing Maryanne worries about, and I do, too.
By Daniel Stone
I’m currently reading this fascinating, in-depth examination of shipwrecks by someone I’m so pleased to call my friend over the past year and a half. You likely know quite a lot about the Titanic, but as far as ocean disasters go, this book shows that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
White Poverty
By William Barker
This guy came on The Daily Show and said some really eye-opening things. Homelessness and poverty horrify me, and seem like problems that we should be able to solve or at least greatly reduce in the wealthiest country in the world. So why is it so bad and getting worse?
Smart Tip #2 for Leveraging Your SMES: Don’t Make Your SMEs Write (unless they want to).
While I have seen experts who are wonderful writers, it’s most often more beneficial to have a writer do the writing and treat the SME like a journalist treats a source. Asking an expert to write their own article can be a big stumbling block, and you want to remove as much resistance as possible to showcase their unique knowledge as part of your content marketing strategy. Plus, writing is often a totally separate skill. Just because someone knows a ton about something doesn’t mean they’ll be able to write compellingly about it.
PS: Pink Pineapple Postcard!
Content creators, writers and editors are hiding in plain sight everywhere—in this little postscript section, I’m bringing in friends and connections who I admire to get a peek inside their “write brains” and also find out what book is currently showing up on their bedside table. Today, special thanks to Elisabeth Andrews of Hearts & Sciences, who’s quickly becoming my personal journaling guru, as well as a sounding board I often turn to when I want to think out loud with a like-minded soul.
Let me know if you’d like to be featured! We’d love to have you!
