4 Books That Helped Me Write in 2025

I have always been a writer. Not a technical one—I couldn’t pick a participle in a police lineup and am still learning how to craft a story—but I do have a natural instinct for how words work together to clarify ideas. When I got my first typewriter at age ten, it was off to the races.

Always a writer, but curiously, never a reader. Before 2020, I could count on one hand the literary works I read voluntarily, without threat of pop quiz or book report. Late that year, though, everything changed.

That’s when reading became central to a self-constructed sobriety program. My habit started with so-called “quit lit,” and grew to include Eastern thought that fed new mindfulness practices, and athlete stories that coaxed my inner runner back to its battered body.

These days, I devour books like it’s my job. I crave them. Reading is a feeding trough of inspiration that informs my work, my running, and my thinking. And, boy howdy, do books nourish my writing.

You can tell what I’m reading by what I write. Running Lightly is my Kindle Library, filtered through a laptop keyboard.

I sometimes cringe at the disparate concepts that make their way to these pages. Taken together, you might think, “Dude. Pick a philosophical lane.” But that’s the contract. You agree to witness my epiphanies and contradictions as they come, then be nice in the comments.

With that in mind, here are four reads that helped me write, run, and write about running more as myself this year. It’s not a “Best New Books” list. I’m still catching up from decades of, you know… not reading.

The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere
Nicholas Triolo

Call it the Strava effect, but I often think about the shapes of my runs. In the fast-dissipating dust of my footsteps, am I at least leaving behind aesthetic lines? The Way Around is an exploration of one shape, the circle, recounted through three adventures. Circular travel—circumambulation—has ancient and multi-faceted significance. It defies our cultural fixations with summits and finish lines, and I found the ideas and the writing magnetic.

What it helped me write:

Widening the Circle
For more expansive running, dislodge from center stage.

Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee
Shannon Lee

I’m closing out 2025 with the fabulous—and at 550 pages, dense—account of Bruce Lee’s remarkable life, Water Mirror Echo. My primer was this more approachable read by the martial artist’s daughter. In it, Shannon Lee relates her father’s teachings through the lens of her own life. At a time when I was overwhelmed with complexity (and with try-hard running tropes), Bruce Lee’s rejection of tradition and style for their own sakes resonated.

What it helped me write:

Forget What You Know
Experience more natural, joyful running by emptying your mind.

This is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience
Alan Watts

Alan Watts is often tagged a “philosopher-entertainer” and in this, my first exposure to his writing, I found the label apt. Published in 1960, This is It packs essential Zen teachings into wild, breathless passages that beg multiple readings, but once grasped are breathtaking in their simplicity. The core idea is this: Nothing separates the spiritual from the material or the wonderful from the ordinary. Everything we seek, we have.

What it helped me write:

What If You’re Not a “Dig Deep” Runner?
Striving vs. surrender, and how acceptance can still lead to breakthroughs.

The Anthropocene Reviewed
John Green

The Anthropocene is a (debated) new geologic era of human domination. It marks a time when people moved from inhabitants of the planet, to agents of geologic change. It sounds depressing, and that’s what kept this bestseller parked in my “to be read” pile for a while. But when I relented, I found Green’s essays on love, loss, and the ludicrousness of life on human-centered Earth to be, above all, hopeful. And 2025 was a year when I needed some hope.

What it helped me write:

Goodbye, Gladys.
Loss and the love we pour in.

Thanks for being here. Happy New Year.

Run lightly,
-mike

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