To say that 2025 was a busy year for me would be an understatement of literary proportion. I published my book Loving Lincoln, a project into which I poured my entire heart and spent six months promoting, giving book talks and lectures, book signings, online interviews and podcasts, and spending a magical week at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. I finished editing The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, Volume 4, Moving Beyond Hull-House, which will be published by University of Illinois Press in spring 2026. I also was busy doing preliminary work on a new creative project, picking a little at a novel I’ve been writing (it’s up to sixty-eight mostly dreadful pages), publishing nineteen essays on my personal and work blogs, and submitting an illustrated letter to a cool Substack publication called Letters to Dead Authors and Artists, which will be published in March.

It has been a productive, fulfilling, thrilling, and wonderfully exhausting year. Yet no matter how busy I was throughout the year, I was never too busy for reading or listening to an audio book. A friend of mine recently sent me a pair of socks that says “This Bitch Reads.”

I am guilty as charged. This bitch reads.

On top of all the daily reading I did for my day job as associate editor of the Jane Addams Papers, for a yoga teacher training course I started in August and will conclude in February, and all the political reading I do each week, I met my 2025 leisure reading goal. With more than a day to spare, I read fifty-two books (one book a week is my reading sweet spot), finishing the last book on December 30 at 2:35 p.m. I started 2025 with a book of poetry by Kate Baer, which was a 2024 Christmas gift from a favorite reading friend of mine; and I ended the year with a book of poetry by Kate Baer, a 2025 birthday gift from the same friend. This year I read thirty-seven novels, six memoirs, four works of nonfiction, three poetry collections, and two biographies. Eleven of the novels were historical fiction, my favorite genre. Five books had one-word titles, seven books made me sob, and nine books made me laugh out loud. Three of the books are going on my all-time favorite books list (numbers 1, 2 & 3 below), and I read two clunkers; however, the vast majority of the books I read this year were great or very good, a better reading pool overall than the past couple of years.

In my leisure reading this year, I learned about the writing rituals of two of my favorite writers, the gendered construct of time, a wee bit about radium, and way more than I needed to know (but loved learning) about hares in the English countryside. I got inside the head of a middle-aged woman hiding away in a convent, went on an explorer’s adventure with an old woman looking for a rare beetle, traveled on a train through France, and got lost in another twisty plot in a delightfully dark Liane Moriarty novel. In my year of reading there was friendship, grief, love, women in the present, women in history, a scholar in the future, octopuses, dogs, and poems about women losing their damned minds but finding, always with great surprise, that they are resilient.

Here are my 52 books of 2025. And special thanks to my dogs Lady Bug and Dorothy Parker for starring in two of the book pictures that follow.

#1 Loving Lincoln by Stacy Lynn (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Shameless to put my book first? No. Not really. Because it’s true, Loving Lincoln IS my favorite book of the year. It it representative of my soul, I live and breathe on so many of its pages, and it is some of the very best writing I have ever done. It may, in fact, be my favorite book of all time. At least for now, I do not want to tamper down my pride of it.

#2 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
The Correspondent is breathtaking. On every page, this beautiful epistolary novel is pulsating with life, love and heartbreak, grit and grace. I have no adequate words to convey the perfection of this novel, at every level, the writing, the pace, the tone, the characters (oh my goddess, the characters!), and that patient, gentle unraveling of a mother’s grief, as the letters she writes over the years reveal all the layers of her heart. I first listened to the audio book, brilliantly produced with a large cast of great readers. When I finished well in advance of the fourteen days of my library loan of it, I immediately began listening to it again. I then purchased a hard copy of the book and read it a third time, this time reading slowly to bask in its radiant literary light. Yes. Instead of reading two different books, I read this book two extra times. The Correspondent is that damned good.

#3 There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
There are easy buoyant novels that carry us away. There is great literature that commands our attention and respect. And then there are those rare books of gorgeous words and grand imaginings that from the pen of a gifted writer become elemental. There are Rivers in the Sky is the latter, reaching far beyond the stories it tells of three human beings in three distinct historical settings, whose lives and histories are lost and found by the water. In this poetic, magical novel, the water is watching. A dispassionate observer, it holds all memory and knows all truth across the vast distances between beauty and cruelty, friend and foe, passion and power, right and wrong, past and present and future. History flows through time and space like water. History is water. Water is history. Always, no matter the form, the water is ever present. A raindrop on the head of an ancient king. A snowflake on the tongue of a swaddled baby in the gutter. A London rain drenching a young woman hesitant to be who she is in her heart. A flood. Water from a tap. A mighty river that never ceases to flow.

#4 Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
I am drawn to memoirs of grief, compelled to know how grieving people put suffering to words. Memorial Days is wise and journalistic, as excepted from Brooks, a former war correspondent; but it is also tender and vulnerable in its simplicity and its depth of feeling. While it is a wonderful grief memoir, inviting the reader into a broken heart, I enjoyed it even more for its invitation into the brain of a writer I have long admired. Brooks’ brilliance here is twofold—she opens a window to her thoughts as a gifted giver of words, and she bravely shares her story as a grieving widow. In the afterword, Brooks offers several observations about how American society makes loss and grief (a natural part of life) even harder by working to render it silent. In my own experience with grief and my hard-won acceptance of my melancholy, I know how true it is. “Our culture is averse to sad,” Brooks writes. “We want people to be happy. We are chagrined and slightly offended when they’re not. There is desire to cheer them up. And then, later, there will be a glancing at the wristwatch, a tapping of the foot if they cannot be cheered, if their grief is perceived to go on too long. I wish we could resist those things.” I, too, wish we could resist those things. And you can start by reading this memoir and I challenge you to let your tears flow freely as you turn every page.

#5 The Names by Florence Knapp (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
This gorgeous, richly textured novel considers the question of the power of a name to determine the course of our lives. Cora is powerless, trapped in an abusive marriage, her light nearly extinguished. But what if she found the courage to defy her husband by choosing her own name for their infant son and giving him a chance to escape the tyranny of his father? Three names, three stories, three divergent futures. Across the thirty-five years of each imagining emerge the uncomfortable knots of family, the intergenerational trauma of domestic violence, and the ability of even the most broken spirits to find love and acceptance. Original, lyrical, laced with heartbreak and redemption, this novel offers some of the most beautiful writing I read all year.

#6 Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce (2020) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
This is the story of two broken women, Margery and Enid, who go on an impossible expedition to New Caledonia to find a gold beetle and who forge an unlikely friendship along the way. I am sorry I missed this book when it came out during the COVID pandemic. I could have then benefited from its quiet wit, matter-of-fact commentary on hardship and hope, and its nuggets of wisdom about life. “It occurred to Margery that this was how it was that, there was always darkness, and in this darkness was unspeakable suffering, and yet there were also the daily things—there was even the search for a gold beetle—and while they could not cancel the appalling horror they were as real.” This novel is full of adventure, laughter, dignity and indignity, courage, fear, resilience, suspense, sorrow, joy, and beetles. I laughed, I cried, I held my heart and danced with pompoms on my sandals and a pith helmet upon my head. Recommended by the brilliant writer Barbara Kingsolver on her Instagram, and now I recommend it to you!

#7 Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Would that I could take leave of my life and hide myself away in reflection of all I cannot hold. But I am not the kind of person who could do the letting go required for such a journey. The protagonist checking out her life inspires both my envy and my disdain. What stories would you tell if there was only quiet and plagues of mice and stories of your past to haunt you? I am not sure what to think and to feel about this novel of grief and a woman who cannot cope unless she locks herself away in a convent, away from a life that most would be happy to live. But the writing here is poetry, the emotion is rain and sunshine, and the healing light of quiet is provocative and lonely and a fire in the hearth on a dark, cold night. Beautiful. Awful. And true.

#8 The River We Remember by William Kent Kruger (2023) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
This engaging novel is set in 1958 in rural Minnesota when World War II is well past but not done wreaking its terrible havoc. It is a novel about secrets and love, racism and community, and the choice human beings always have to do right by others, no matter the cruelties they themselves have endured. “We are all broken,” opines one of the characters in the novel; but how we choose to live with the broken pieces of ourselves and help others pick up their own shattered selves is the only thing, in the end, that truly matters. Kruger (a prolific writer I only discovered two years ago when I read This Tender Land) is a great writer who weaves stories that make you laugh and cry and catch your breath. This novel broke my heart; and I always appreciate a novel that makes me cry for compelling characters, a well-told story, and beautiful prose. “Our lives and the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end. Because we are only one part of the whole, the river each of us remembers is different, and there are many versions of the stories we tell about the past. In all of them there is truth, and in all of them a good deal of innocent misremembering.”

#9 The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
It is 1895. The historical setting and the novel are thrilling and textured. A train full of fascinating characters, richly detailed and representing all classes and qualities of people—among them a seasoned railroad engineer, an elderly Russian woman, a boy traveling alone who misses his stop, a Black American artist, a brilliant young medical student, a cabaret performer who refuses to remove her voluminous hat, an ambitious secretary traveling with her boss, and an anti-government radical with a mysterious lunchbox, still unopened way past noon. Suspense. Humanity. A train speeding toward Paris. A propulsive story speeding toward disaster. What more could any reader ever need or want?

#10 Writing Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd (2025)  ❤️❤️❤️❤️
I admit that I am predisposed to love a book about writing written by a writer I admire. Writing Creativity and Soul was both a window to Kidd’s writing life and a bursting fountain of ideas, such as the inspiration of writing rituals, the value of creative loitering, and learning to have constructive conversations with self-doubt. The book left me with much to ponder, as I seek in 2026 to live a more creative and soulful life, focused on writing and art and telling stories. “When we are lost, when our world is full of brokenness,” Kidd writes, “it is stories that will re-create us.” Kidd offers insight on the crafting of stories and evidence from her life and in her writing of the power of stories to heal, to inspire, to lessen our burdens, and to tap into the collective heart. In the beginning of the book, Kidd defines “soul” as heart plus imagination. She offers a vivid description of the magic of that equation, which reminded me of the way I felt when I wrote my book Loving Lincoln. I felt the magic of writing with my soul, my unique blend of heart and imagination. This book—a memoir of writing—is written primarily for writers, but I suspect readers who love great writing will gain insight about the craft as well as the magic.

#11 Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Who knew a book about death and grief and terrifying prognosticating could be so funny and sweet, light and dark, and fun?! This is Moriarty’s best work. The writing is so good and the original storytelling style makes for a crazy-good ride. Cherry, the daughter of a fortune teller, is a wonderfully imagined protagonist, and Moriarty is a master storyteller, unfolding Cherry’s life story among the stories of the people whose lives she upends when she predicts their deaths on a fateful flight from Hobart to Sydney. And peppered throughout this hefty, hearty novel are memorable nuggets about love and loss, family and friendships, life and death, chance and choices, and the truth that what we make of all of it is always within our own power to foretell.

#12 The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Currently, as I enter my own dotage, I tend to gravitate toward novels with mature female characters; and the prickly Augusta Stern is a good example of the literary women I love. She’s smart and ahead of her time but also vulnerable despite all the hard edges she constructed to protect herself from disappointment. Set in a Jewish neighborhood in 1920s Brooklyn and a southern Florida retirement community in the late 1980s, the novel tells the life story of a woman who lived a long and full professional life as a pharmacist but who spent sixty-two years missing the only man she ever loved. When Augusta is reunited with her lost love, the mystery of their parting unfolds, and she learns that age doesn’t change who you are in your heart and it is never too late to begin again. I am not a lover of romance novels, but this one was not sappy. It is an enjoyable human story with fascinating historical context—Jewish food and folk remedies, old fashioned drugstores, gangsters, and women breaking the rules.

The rest of the books I LOVED and highly recommend (but not in any particular order)

What Kind of Woman by Kate Baer (2020) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
The first book I read in 2025 was this collection of poetry. This visceral, sensible book of poetry is all about being a sensitive and strong woman in a crazy world. I could rant and rave, rage, and rattle on about what it is to be a woman. I could do it with drama and a tad of style and be, perhaps, somewhat persuasive about what this life gives women to carry. But nothing I could say in an hour of rambling could say better than what one of the quiet little poems in this collection says about the life of a woman. Poetry is power to carry us forward toward light and wisdom. Daughter, mother, sister, wife, lover, caregiver, brilliant and fucked up all in one fell swoop. We are women. We are life and death, fury and love, says Kate Baer. And we are here, dammit. And from the best author’s note ever: “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is either purely coincidental or an act of deep-seated revenge.”

How About Now by Kate Baer (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
The last book I read in 2025 was Baer’s latest collection of poetry. As visceral and sensible as the collection above, but more nuanced and more soothing. In the five years between the two collections, the poet has not so much mellowed as she has wizened to the myth of women’s inferiority and is now matter-of-fact standing in her female power. Baer is less enraged, more accepting of the truth that we can control little in our lives and that we can (and should) let go of the ropes that bloody our palms holding on too tight. “The problem is the new life costs you the old one,” Baer opines. “How long it’s taken you to understand the difference between letting go and cutting through the rind.”

Lula Dean’s Little Free Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Belly laughing hilarious but also drop dead serious, this novel tells the story of a small southern town in the grips of a book-banning controversy. Archenemies since high school, Lula Dean (the town crank) and Beverly Underwood (a member of the school board), face off and all hell breaks loose. And when Beverly’s college student daughter returns to town and puts banned books in the covers of Lula’s “wholesome” books in her little free library, the town residents start reading and choosing sides. Miller is so clever in her use of well-known banned books—like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret and The Hemingses of Monticello—and she takes delicious digs at the circus of book banning in Florida and Senator Josh Hawley’s ridiculous book Manhood. The novel deals with issues of race and racism, sexuality, slavery and history, friendship and family, community, and the power of books and reading to enlighten us, bring us together, and set us fucking free.

Go As a River by Shelley Read (2023) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
It is rare that I enjoy a coming of age story. I simply do not find the mistakes and naivety of youth compelling (maybe because I’m entering my dotage). But the protagonist here is a woman, not a man, which is relatively novel, and the historical landscape is intriguing. Set in rural Colorado after WWII, the story bends along side a river, forbidden love, peaches, and a dam project that destroys a town and makes a flood of memories and mistakes and grief. I cannot relate to most of the choices Victoria makes, but I admire this protagonist’s strength, resilience, and inspirational effort to save her grandfather’s famous peach trees. A great story, good writing, and deft sensitivity overcome an awkward detour toward the end of the novel to leave the reader pondering the meanings of family, racism, war, the power of secrets to drown us, and the remedy of time to see us safely to the shore.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
A tale of two brothers, separated by ten years, misunderstandings, and profound grief. Both are struggling to cope with the death of their father and to find their footing in the world. They need each other, but neither knows how to traverse the chasm between them. Written with heart and melody, this story is about the space between a great loss and the beginning of a new life that must be charted out of sorrow. Intermezzo is hauntingly beautiful music about love and family, loss, meaning, the terror of loneliness, and the healing gift of forgiveness.

Three Days in June by Anne Tyler (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Classic Anne Tyler. Absolutely nothing happens and you’re not disappointed. Because most days in our lives absolutely nothing happens. We are just ordinary folks doing the best we can, just like Tyler’s human characters. Simple weddings go off without a hitch. The routes of Sunday walks never vary. And maybe we adopt a cat. Not my favorite Anne Tyler, but solid writing, as always. She is an American literary treasure, and I LOVE her!

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
The God of the Woods is a brilliantly crafted novel. Quietly suspenseful, less the monsters of nightmares and more the horrors of our waking hours when we fear the world we know might swallow us whole. The parents at the heart of this horrifying story are loathsome. The father is cruel, and the mother is pathetic in her acceptance of her husband’s cruelty. But the stories of their lost children are compelling, heartbreaking, brutal. The stories of all the adults in the lives of the children who fail them offer a layered answer to the question: is it ever too late to do what is right? And, more to point of the god in the woods that haunts us, what price would we be willing to pay to free ourselves from the darkness?

The Bright Forever by Lee Martin (2006) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
A gripping, devastating tale about the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl in a small Indiana town, The Bright Forever is brilliant storytelling that unfolds from several perspectives, each stabbing you in the heart. Lee Martin is tender in his telling but also demanding, as his readers must turn every page with eyes wide open to the sometimes horrifying complexities of human character. Martin is a beautiful writer I greatly admire. I first read this book in 2018 after I met him at a book talk in St. Louis; and I reread it to prepare for his sequel to it, which was released in 2025 (The Evening Shades, below). I loved the novel at both readings, but this time around I appreciated its lovely crafting even more.

The Evening Shades by Lee Martin (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Lee Martin has an unassuming, quiet way with words. He writes like he is telling you a story on the front porch in the cooling evening hours of summer. But by the end of his telling, your heart is breaking and something in your soul has shifted. I love that genius in a writer. I admire that calm belief in the whisper of words by a writer who refuses to shout. Sneaky brilliant bastards—and I mean that in the bestest way! I envy this talent in great writers. Lee Martin is one of those writers, and The Evening Shades, a sequel to The Bright Forever (above), will quietly break your heart and shift something deep within your soul. It is a story about loneliness, the sometimes devastating consequences of our human failings, and the truth that love may come late and change everything.

A Bit Much by Lyndsay Rush (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Funny and light but brimming with wisdom, this laugh-out-loud and cry-every-20-poems collection is simply delightful. It is a diverting playlist of songs for women moving along imperfectly, juggling joy and madness, and being more than enough (and sometimes a bit much) though constantly undermined and undervalued by American society. “I’m going off the deep end/anyone want anything?…If anyone needs me for the next 2 hours/I’ll be just down the road/losing my mind.” I enjoyed losing my mind in this creative collection of poems, many to which I will return often.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Stuck in a dead-end job as an adjunct professor of English literature, reeling from her husband’s infidelity and her recent divorce, and still devastated by her failed attempts to get pregnant, Phoebe Stone is depressed and desperate. She has no parents or close friends to lean on, and when her cat dies she loses all faith in her ability to move forward. So she books a flight to Newport, Rhode Island, and a room in a swanky seaside hotel, where she has long dreamed of staying. She arrives at the hotel wearing a fancy green dress she’s had for years but has never worn, and she carries no luggage, her only needs at this point are the room service menu and the three remaining pills of her dead cat’s cancer meds she has tucked up in her purse. Although she’s not supposed to be there at all, the entire hotel having been reserved for a week-long wedding, she’s given the unoccupied penthouse room for one night. But as soon as she steps into the elevator with Lila, the force-of-nature bride, her suicide plan begins to unravel. What happens next is an extravagant wedding whirlwind, Phoebe swept up in Lila’s own personal drama as the two women strike up a quick, mutually fortuitous friendship. Phoebe endures awkward activities and hilarious interactions with the wedding people, and there is a deep and dark psychological dive into Phoebe’s life. It may sound crazy but it doesn’t read crazy at all that Lila and the wedding people will save Phoebe’s life (no spoiler here, because it’s clear early on that the pills Phoebe brought are hilariously insufficient, and she quickly admits to herself she wants to live but just doesn’t know how). Good pace, decent writing, and many tender moments as Phoebe faces her demons and leans into the oddly soothing company of strangers.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
During the pandemic lockdown, Chloe Dalton raised a hare and learned everything there is to know about hares, in biology and literature and art; and then she let that hare teach her things about life she didn’t know she needed to learn. I bet you didn’t know you needed to know a thing or two about hares. But you do. And you also need a chance to learn what Dalton learned, that a relationship with one animal might be a good start for changing your perspective on the world.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2019) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a novel more poetry than prose, is … well … gorgeous. Words whisper and scream the cruelty and beauty of love and being made separate for difference, though that difference is the lovely texture of your soul. I had read Vuong’s poetry but missed this haunting immigrant story until a friend sent me a copy. Told in the form of a letter to a mother this novel paints the depths of longing and hurt, Vietnam, the war inside a son, and light that glimmers in the darkness.

Skinfolk by Matthew Pratt Guterl (2023) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Skinfolk is fine memoir, punching the reader in the heart while eschewing the sentimental. Guterl, a historian of race, writes frankly about his racially diverse family—white and black and brown, close and loving, bonded by kinship and shaped by the jagged edges of racism, from which their picket-fence, middle-class suburban upbringing cannot keep them safe. Without being a treatise on the privilege of whiteness, it exposes the depressing reality of a persistent racism in American society that cannot even be softened by liberal parents with all the best intentions in the world.

The World of Juliette Kinzie: Chicago before the Fire by Ann Durkin Keating (2019) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
This biography of Juliette Kinzie, an early white Chicago settler and historian of the city and the region, is a stellar example of the form. Keating not only makes the life of a woman mostly forgotten by history come to life, but she also uses biography as a lens to answer wider questions. Particularly fascinating is the erasure of Kinzie’s histories (not to mention her personal story), replaced by histories focused less on the family and community relationship of society and more on an individualistic, industrial, capitalist, male story that privileged politics and business and deemphasized women and the family. As the Great Chicago Fire became the before and after marker in the city’s history, so too the relevance of one woman. Who it is that writes our history is consequential, and within the ashes are stories told and retold, untold and rewritten. Juliette Kinzie understood this truth in 1844 when she published her first work, and it is no less true today, 181 years later. I don’t read many biographies, and when I select one to read I set a very high standard. The World of Juliette Kinzie ticks all of my persnickety boxes.

The Thursday Murder Club Series
This year I read all five books in the Thursday Murder Club series, thanks to an old Springfield friend who thought I would like them. In fact, I loved them all. They are funny and fun and deeply human. The heroes are old people I want to be when I get old, and the stories of friendship and vulnerability and resilience are heartwarming as well as instructive. I recommend all of them, and here they are in the order in which I read them.

The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman (2023) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Hard to believe murder, drug dealing, and antiques fraud can be adorable. But when the people cracking the case are four quirky pensioners at a retirement village it cannot help itself, I suppose. This fourth installment of the Thursday Murder Mystery Club series is funny and surprisingly poignant in places and I adored the characters. It’s Murder She Wrote x 4 + a British accent, which my daughter Mack always said makes everything better. I wish I could have read the series in order, but that’s the way the page turns when you want to read popular books from the library. I’d rather take them as they become available than wait for them one by one.

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman (2021) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
The second installment of the Thursday Murder Club Mystery series is a hoot, same as the fourth installment. Long waiting times for library loans of these popular books forced me to be flexible in reading them. But I get why people love these Osman novels, and I am happy to share and wait my turn. They are murder mysteries, yes, cozies as amateur sleuthing novels are called; but I rather think their primary goal is to offer evidence that adventure and purpose are possible in our golden years, especially when we have great friends with whom to share them. The septuagenarian characters themselves are the point, not the murders they solve. I adore these old geezers (Ron’s term, not mine) who are grappling with all of the frailties and sorrows of old age but who are also, still, very much alive and kicking. I am especially fond of Joyce who says things like: “Blowing a man’s head off from four feet away probably doesn’t suit everyone. It wouldn’t suit me… Actually, perhaps it would suit me. You never know until you try, do you? I never thought I would like dark chocolate, for example.”

The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman (2022) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
The third installment of the Thursday Murder Club is more complex murder mystery plot and a bit darker than the other two I have read, but no less enjoyable. Great pace and punch and wonderful supporting characters—Viktor the ex-KGB spy is hilarious! But, of course, the four Thursday Murder Club members are the stars (Joyce is still my fave). I hope I am as sharp and as game for adventure when I’m eighty as this glorious gang of geezers—“each and every one…barking mad!”

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (2020) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Because of Richard Osman, I now want to live in a sleepy (wink wink) retirement community when I grow up. What a romp, this series, delightful and witty, tender and jolly good fun. I mean, who wouldn’t want to hang out with these four quirky septuagenarians, eating lemon drizzle cake and solving murders? “We are around death here a lot,” says Joyce, “but even so, not everyone is bludgeoned, are they?” I’ve now read all four books in the series and anxiously await the movie this summer and the next book this fall. (P.S. I enjoyed the movie, brilliantly cast, but it wasn’t as good as the book).

The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Installment number 5 of the Thursday Murder Club is delightful, as expected. It is charmed with all the same qualities I love about the series: humor, fierce friendship, and old folks living life to the fullest. And, oh Joyce, you are still my favorite; although Ron is hobbling close behind you.

My three-heart books I enjoyed and recommend (in rough rank order)

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (2025) ❤️❤️❤️
Reading this book was a bit like looking down on myself as a historian. In this enjoyable novel, the protagonist Thomas Metcalfe is an English scholar in 2119 hunting a lost poem written in 2014. The historical empathy he feels for the poet and his wife Vivien, for whom the poem was written, is similar to the empathy I feel for the historical figures I study. Matcalfe’s work is set in the future, in the context of catastrophic rising seas and destroyed and endangered archives, which I suppose helps the author see scholarly research as a treasure hunt. I have news for him, scholarly research by a passionate scholar in any decade is a treasure hunt. I found myself cheering for Metcalfe and finding my own empathy for the flawed Vivien, although the poet himself possessed few redeeming qualities. In the end, I liked the novel as well as I am capable of liking a novel set in the future. I would have been happy to give the story an extra heart if it was set in the present or the past.

The London Séance Society by Sarah Penner (2023) ❤️❤️❤️
“May mercy be upon the man who finds himself the enemy of a vengeful medium.” Well, indeed, Mr. Morley, men who prey on women deserve their ghostly purgatory. Penner’s follow-up to the delightfully twisted The Lost Apothecary gives another woman, this time an apprentice of the occult in Victorian London, the power to dispense her unique form of justice. Given all the bad men currently in power, I could use a healthy dose of these stories, Sarah Penner, pretty please!

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig (2024) ❤️❤️❤️
Whether you give into the fantasy or read the protagonist’s story as embellished by her to give one young man, her former student, hope, The Life Impossible is a story of second chances. No matter how old we are or how much we have suffered, we can always find a way to see the world as new. Grace, a retired math teacher, is heartbroken and lost to herself, her life given up for dead, but on the island of Ibiza off the coast of Spain, she embarks on a magical (and ordinary) adventure.

The Switch by Beth O’Leary (2020) ❤️❤️❤️
Leena Cotton, 29, is a mess. She’s struggling to cope with the death of her younger sister, and she just blew a big meeting at work and has been put on a forced leave of absence to get her head on straight. Eileen Cotton, 79, is not only grieving the death of her granddaughter but she’s reeling from her husband’s desertion for a younger woman. The struggling Cotton women hatch a hail-Mary plan to save themselves by swapping places. Leena moves into her grandmother’s folksy Yorkshire cottage, and Eileen moves into her granddaughter’s hip London flat. What happens next is hilarious and heartwarming, as these two lovely and brave women go all in to make new friends, search for healing, and find new love as well as themselves.

Knife by Salman Rushdie (2024) ❤️❤️❤️
Rushdie’s tale of the knife attack at Chautauqua Institution in 2022 that nearly killed him and cost him an eye, seeks no pity. It is a matter-of-fact telling, a writer using his talent to try to make sense of a horrifying human experience (if that is even possible). It is a brave exploration of trauma and what happens when we lose our sense of security. Rushdie also weighs in on freedom of expression, the power of family, one-eyed characters in literature, and the dangers of religious fanaticism. I read this book right before going to Chautauqua, which was super freaky. But I can report that was not attacked when I delivered my lecture there, thank goodness. But then again, I do Abraham Lincoln and Rushdie does religious fanaticism.

The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery (2015) ❤️❤️❤️
A couple of years ago, I fell in love with a fictional talking octopus named Marcellus. After reading his story in the phenomenal Remarkably Bright Creatures (on my all-time favorite book list), a friend recommended this lovely book. I finally got around to reading it, and now I love real octopuses, too! They really are remarkable and bright.

Saving Time by Jenny Odell (2023) ❤️❤️❤️
Hmm. Time. To contemplate it in some ways is to breathe it away with every word of the book and every thought it conjured. It was interesting to learn about the gendered, economic, social, and climate-crisis context of time, so much of which I had never before considered. It was fascinating to think about how time owns us, the ways it is commodified, and how people and jobs and society define it for us. I appreciated the historic context of time the author provided, particularly the background of CPT, a term my Black sister-in-law always used; a term I understood but had never fully comprehended its roots in resistance. And how humbling it was as I read to interrogate my own resistance and compliance and all the energy expended to control time across the decades and changing circumstances of my life. It is a privileged position to spend time thinking about time. Yet I am left wondering if knowledge regarding time is a sad substitute for the naïve mind of the child who believes time is endless and she will never die. As I have far more time behind me than in front of me now, I rather think I will now try to forget about time entirely.

Benevolence by Julie Janson (2022) ❤️❤️❤️
This story of a native Australian woman and the horrific cruelties of British colonialism is hard to take, page after page of violence and injustice. But you keep your heart open, because Muraging’s heart is open, her voice defiant, and her spirit strong.

James by Purcival Everett (2024) ❤️❤️❤️
James is a wonderful compliment to Huckleberry Finn. How obvious, and also how provocative, that two people can be on a journey together, but that one chose the journey and the other was forced to the journey changes everything. The good sense and compassion of James is breathtaking; and the juxtaposition of Huck’s youthful ignorance and James’s quiet intelligence is revealing. But this is an adventure story at its heart, and the relentless disasters—a house floating down river, a stint as a singer in a minstrel show, the explosion of a steamboat, and multiple captures and running away is too much for me. Man stories like this one just don’t float my river boat. However, I do honor Everett’s creativity in offering a brave counter narrative to an iconic story by one of the best American storytellers.

Good Taste by Caroline Scott (2023) ❤️❤️❤️
Stella is a writer working on a history of English food. It’s 1932, and she’s struggling to make ends meet while grieving the death of her mother and helping her father to cope. Despite the dark backdrop, this is a light-hearted novel, full of friendship and food. The history of various English dishes is interesting and the descriptions of food are wonderful (except when they get too British and veer into the offal). Stella’s journey as a writer and a woman finding her footing in an uncertain world is compelling, her collection of recipes and tradition is good fun, and watching her find herself and the spirit of her mother along the way makes for perfect escape reading.

The Artist and the Feast by Lucy Steeds (2025) ❤️❤️❤️
Moody as well as vibrant in its description of art and food and color this is the story of a French painter, the young Englishman who has come to write his story, and a young woman trapped between life and art. Good story, good writing, what more does a reader need? Well, I guess I need a bit more, because something was missing for me—although I don’t have any idea what it was.

Books I enjoyed but might not be for everyone… (In alphabetical order)

Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell (2025) ❤️❤️❤️
A psychopath. A bunch of wronged women. Diabolical deception. Murder. The latest Jewell is dark, twisty, horrifying, and uncomfortably delicious. Note: for the thriller reader.

The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel (2024) ❤️❤️❤️
The publisher called it a “radiant biography” (har har), but I’m not sure the book lived up to the polonium and radium (the two chemical elements Curie discovered), let alone the whole life of the most famous woman ever in the history of science. There is much detail and insight in the book about the chemist and her work, but the biography is not a particularly human portrait. Yet it is a decent, historically grounded biography that reveals much about Curie’s pioneering path in science and offers evidence of her personal integrity, her parenting of two brilliant daughters, and the women she mentored and inspired. And P.S. Did you know Marie Curie died from aplastic anemia, a result of her long exposure to radiation? Goodness sakes, but then again maybe that just makes her ordinary, just another woman in the history of the world broken down by her work. Note: for the science reader or lover of biographies, particularly those of women.

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell (2023) ❤️❤️❤️
There are lies, damned lies, and the lies of Josie Fair. A fast and suspenseful story about birthday twins—Josie, a desperate housewife clad in denim; and Alix Summer, a glamorous podcaster who tells women’s truths. But Josie’s story is full of holes, and when she shows up at Alix’s home bloodied and bruised, it all goes dark and twisty in a hurry. I listened to the audio book, and the readers, music, and sound design made the listen great fun. The story lived up to its billing as a thriller. I probably won’t remember the plot or the characters a year from now, but None of This Is True was a very entertaining, 10.5-hour ride. Note: for the thriller reader.

This Dog Will Save Your Life by Elias Weiss Friedman (2025) ❤️❤️❤️
There might not be anyone in the world who loves dogs more than Friedman. He’s made a career celebrating dogs, making his mark on social media with The Dogist. His easy breezy book of short essays is an ode to our best furry friends, filled with heartwarming (and a few heartbreaking) stories. It’s a real dog treat, better than a whole box of milk bones! Follow the Dogist on Instagram. Note: for the dog lover.

Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic by Darren Main (2010) ❤️❤️❤️
Contrary to the word mystic in the title and the ancient traditions of yoga the author seeks to explain, this book is a readable, down-to-earth, modern interpretation of the eight limbs of yoga. It is one thing to practice the poses and breathing of yoga. It is another to integrate breath and movement and mindfulness on the yoga mat. And it is yet another to bring the totality of yoga and its benefits into a modern, American life. Darren Main offers stories and suggestions to do the latter. You don’t have to cloister yourself away from the world to be a true yogi and, in fact, to be a modern yogi is to take what we learn on the mat about our humanity and be better members of our families, our communities, and the world. I’m doing a lot of reading for my yoga teacher training course and had no intention of reviewing any of the books. But this one is as much about living a wholehearted life as it is about the ancient practice of yoga. And there is the deeply personal and lovely quality of good memoir here, too; it’s about one yogi’s yoga practice and his life journey to peace and wisdom. Note: for the serious yoga practitioner.

And, finally, the books I did not much like at all and do not recommend

The Women by Kristin Hannah (2024) ❤️❤️
Ugh. I hate it when I fail to take my own advice. I said I would not read another of Hannah’s novels, which always give me hope of a great journey and then drive me off the cliff of disappointment. But the audio version of The Women was available and I love historical fiction, so I checked it out of the library while I was waiting for my next requested audio book to be available. The writing is good and the beginning of this novel is solid (thus the two hearts). At first, I really liked the protagonist, a young nurse who volunteers to go to Vietnam. Frankie’s courage to serve, the development of her nursing skills practiced in terrifying conditions, and her tender relationships with other nurses are compelling. And then Frankie comes home from the war, and this book’s journey drives right off the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. Almost everything Frankie does after her return home is exasperating. Her stutters in peace given the courage she showed in war often make no sense whatsoever in the storyline. There are three ridiculous coincidences (a bad habit of Hannah novels) and one bizarre plot choice not worth explaining. Hannah’s point is to give life to the forgotten story of women serving in Vietnam, and that is important and I appreciate it. But by the end of the novel, I really didn’t care what happened to Frankie anymore.

Small World by Laura Zigman (2023) ❤️ ❤️
Joyce and Lydia are the most unlikable sisters I have ever read. Two divorced, childless, middle-aged women, they move in together and try and fail and try and fail to become friends. Though they blame their brokenness on their childhood, they really have only themselves to blame for being the annoying, grumpy grown-up women they are. I kind of hate them for hating their mother for spending so much of her energy on her third child, a severely disabled girl who died at the age of ten. I came around a little in the end, when Joyce and Lydia finally had an honest discussion, the pace of the story was easy, and I wanted to see what happened with their neighbors upstairs. But, meh. This novel is another one for my long list of books the New York Times book reviewers got wrong.

The Mango Tree by Annabelle Tometich (2024) ❤️❤️
If you believe people can remember dialogue from when they were five years old, then by all means, tuck into this memoir about a kid stuck between her Filipino and white identities. It is a decent story, albeit sluggish at the end, and it has some good writing and funny bits set in the Philippines. But crikey, I just didn’t find this memoirist a trustworthy storyteller.

The Woman in Suite 11 by Ruth Ware (2025) ❤️
This sequel to The Woman in Cabin 10 missed the mark by 10, at least, and the child voices the narrator performed in the audio book made the book ten times worse than it had to be. It was my first disappointing Ruth Ware. I wish the heroine Lo Blacklock had never got out of the North Sea alive in the first novel.

The Mysterious Bakery on Rue du Paris by Evie Woods (2025) ❤️
The ingredients of this half-baked pastry are lots of sap, a heaping cup of sleepy-time tea, and a few pinches of bullshit. I like cupcakes but not cupcakes like this female protagonist who goes to Paris to find herself and ends up in the burbs wearing a sexy red dress and high heels for a Frenchman in a Land Rover. Started okay, fell in the middle like an underbaked genoise sponge, and what a disappointing, fake-vanilla finish. Not mysterious at all. Just a damned Disney princess romance set in a French bakery. Yuck. I enjoyed Woods’ previous book, The Lost Bookshop, but this one’s a real claggy clunker unless you like stories where the man saves the day and sweeps the little lady off her feet.