My Top 5 (Mandorla) Books of 2025

Completed 19 entries this year. All bangers.

Book Nook.

In February, 2018, I started a creative project called the Mandorla 200.

First, Mandorla is Italian for almond, and almond is the shape that two circles make when they overlap. A Venn Diagram of sorts, but also a shape depicted across world religions, and Jung, as a middle zone, an individuated location of nondual expression where opposites meet, blur, integrate, and find themselves swimming in some third thing.

Fancy, right?

I set off to read 200 books, closely, and look for the mandorla, then write a 200-word prose-poem-seed-packet that best expresses the signature of this individuated almond—the book’s deepest yearning. I also take (way too much) time to arrange each photo that, to my estimation, best reflects the book, and I post on social media. And now…here.

Every Mandorla selection is highly curated, already established as the best books I’ve read of the year. These aren’t reviews; if a book makes it on the Mandorla, it receives my highest vote of confidence.

The theme originally established: “200 necessary books on ecology, justice, and place-belonging for our times. 200 words or less.”

The goal was simple: to read better, to read with bigger eyes and an even bigger heart, which perhaps leads to this nerdy project’s largest offering: I tag each author, each publisher, and each “tip” who tipped me to the book. It’s become a ritualized way for me to say thanks, to celebrate good art, and to make this whole reading-writing enterprise something shared, a community, a gratitude web.

Mandorla. Italian. Seed intelligence. Gratitude web spinning. Collective learning, resource sharing. Liberation together, never alone.

Here’s Brian Eno:

“Although great new ideas are usually articulated by individuals, they are nearly always generated by communities. And I think what I see is a waste, the waste we make of that possibility of cooperative intelligence.”

A Quick Dashboard of Stats:

• 8 - # of years I’ve been doing the Mandorla 200

• 130 – total Mandorla entries to date

• ~26,000 - # words written

• 65% - to goal

• 25 – highest cadence of posting in one year (2018)

• 10 – lowest cadence of posting in one year (2021)

• 19 – # of Mandorla posts this year.

• 89 – nonfiction books (68%)

• 38 – fiction books (29%)

• 3 – poetry collections (2%)

• 12/31/26 – estimated date of finishing

• 70 – # needed to reach 200 by 12/31/26 (one book every 5.2 days)

• .005% - probability I will reach that goal

My Top 5 (Mandorla) Books in 2025

This year might have been the hardest year to settle on five books.

So much richness. So many connections, too, including what I consider the best book on highlighting the magic of BLM, The Enduring Wild, by the great Josh Jackson, The Salt Stones by friend and fellow Milkweed author, Helen Whybrow, and the late Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest.

If that doesn’t highlight a true depth of field here, I don’t know what does.

Also, I read far more books than ends up on the Mandorla, so anything on this list is a must-read. And finally, I never thought my own book would end up on the Mandorla 200 (entry 120!), but here we are.

OK, here’s what I’ve got, with each 200-word entry included. Thank you again for the support all these years. I love you.

Book 115. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

Are you practicing or posturing? Do you act from a place of ferocious compassion or self-interest? Empire thrums along on empty words while keeping its barbarism far from view to remain comfortable, but know that the difference between refusal now and refusal later, after missiles hit their targets, is the difference between a breathing child and a dead one, memorialized in four cold syllables: collateral. To condemn long after bankrolling genocide doesn’t put brain matter back into broken skulls: 14,000 Gazan children dead, one every half hour. Are we practicing resistance in the material, or are we tidy liberals too ensconced in a culture of self-worship and tepid scripts of civility—oh, poor oppressed! oh, poor children!—just as we turn away, a turning that requires us to unfeel? Every missing limb is now also a severed piece of my colonized soul. Look, rage over bombing hospitals isn’t complicated. Rage over systematic butchering isn’t complicated. What is complicated is a complete deprogramming from the insidious tang of American showmanship, theatrics of a free world, the say-one-thing-do-another, only-here-if-I-get-something-in-return scheme. So again: are we posturing or are we practicing? Is my love unconditional? Do my actions align with collective struggle, or is my bite all nub no fang?

• The Book: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025)

• The Author: Omar El Akkad

• The Publisher: Knopf

• The Tip: David Naimon, Fact & Fiction Books

Book 118. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

A river rivers, just as you river. Throb and swerve with the milk of the world. Plunge-descend beneath all surface charades. Hold your breath and let it burn and know that this fluid breathes you alive, coauthoring some autobiography where source, self, and confluence meet at once, a remembering of the whole through porosity, through kinship, obscuring self into an “ecology of selves,” while hedging against the industrialized imagination, our creativity otherwise dimmed as puckered, half-dead units. Here is the warrior call: imagine with a river. Surrender to its blood-gush slosh into the heart of the world and let it guide you downstream and upstream and allstream, funneling toward oceanic still. But know this: river song isn’t forever song. They are dying, muted by unreliable maps pouring concrete to obscure the source. Imperial maps misunderstand that rivers are gods, that they ask now for our ears and tongues and fists. This is no intellectual exercise; hydrocurrency only currents between bodies. And our bodies tilt toward water because we, too, are water, longing for ourselves. Now: listen to the river’s enduring song. Attune to its indwelling animacy. Feel the plunder. Let it drown you. And then, from this ferocious love, this pose of riparian guardianship—flow.

• The Book: Is a River Alive? (2025)

• The Author: Robert Macfarlane

• The Publisher: Penguin Books | W.W. Norton

• The Tip: Fact & Fiction

Book 123. Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

Fern-footed pagan gods crawling everywhere, inside and out, and here you are at the crosshairs of the material and the divine, some weird nondual landscape completed by grace too kinetic for nouns. Watch: three horses canter along a rotting bridge at dawn, troughed at the bottom of an ancient lake bed cut in salt, proven light amid unproven vacancy as the Unseen fills the Seen through the interlinear hollow of things. But modernity loves to worship shiny outer solids, stuffing it all down our throats as if forever starved of an inner light. As if. The Absolute laughs, goes on dousing everything with its roaring birdsong, its sexy nerve-endingly chemically atomic in-between sizzlings, hiding there amid each exhale, amid door jams that wink though this interstitial, unnamable exchange. An ultimate wild. To live into this wholeness requires total intimacy with the particular, the firm, while bathing also in an immanence that lights everything, flowing an exchange between the two—love. Love integrated, love a surrender to this dual citizenship, love at once distinct and whole, a no-path riprapped by grace and unending collision, right there, right there in your dumb little wet heart.

• The Book: Holy the Firm (1977)

• The Author: Annie Dillard

• The Publisher: Harper Collins

• The Tip: Simon Critchley and River Arts & Books

Book 124. Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Nibi, water, fugitive. Nibi, punker-fluid body politic, collective flow demanding we stay in undying relationship with this world. Nibi subverts, resists the container, wears down rock in a patient bow to Source, grace in carrying its cyclical song to the sea and back. Snowflakes fall, sinter, bind together to form strength in collectivism; to sinter is to come home to a whole after individual descent. Where, then, might water flood away such settler-colonialist alienations, to find linear take in our own captured minds? Poisoned fish, coral bleaching, unfinning rivers, dams as song-killers, infrastructural dementia. We need water’s non-hierarchy to teach us how to resist, how to leak, how to erode structural exploitation, to irrigate patterns that are forever liminal, which is another way of saying: unconditional love, continuous rebirth, always finding ways out and in as it dreams us anew. Nibi channels beyond immediate needs, blurring time and place into some tongued flow, suggesting that we’re here to bring forth life, not destroy life, that to know water is to know the self as a generative nervous system of selves, a network always on the move, evading authority, crashing together to build new worlds of possibilities. Water, Nibi, sacred fugitive collective.

• The Book: Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (2025)

• The Author: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

• The Publisher: Haymarket Books

• The Tip: David Naimon (Between the Covers)

Book 126. Sun House by David James Duncan

“The fragments are the song.” Life a shape destined for another to confirm some misplaced Whole, singing to its destination a cyclical homecoming through love-noted wandering of thunderous high country. Home is right here, though, shining through all things and no thing. Fragments are the song and the sun endlessly self-immolates in service to Earth’s endless birthing and how unconditional an annihilation! Full allegiance to the enduring unwriteability of it all, the unintellectual thud-joy-beauty piercing all boundaries yet requiring them. Other is a requisite to the Whole, even as a boys-with-toys culture seems intent to clobber every Other for the summit—only delusion at the top. We follow the song instead. We listen to how every fracture embodies its source: heartthrob spooning heartbreak, light spooning dark, wild-haired gods finding home in the crevices between. My body knows your body knows Ocean-Body knows the sounds of which are of home, forever blue, and the task will never not be this: find love in the divine crevices and cohabitate there, coauthor cave art, keep fire on crackle, welcome the dark while warmed by the flame, dance Sophia’s loving song of creativity into this profusive whorl of mystery. May we quiet enough to hear.

• The Book: Sun House (2023)

• The Author: David James Duncan

• The Publisher: Little Brown

• The Tip: Chris Dombrowski

To Deepen:

• Follow the Mandorla 200 on Instagram

• Subscribe to the Jasmine Dialogues where I’ll be posting these as roundups.

• Send me your best book tips of the year in the comments.