One of my delights in December is reading booklists compiled by readers of their favorite books from this year of reading. I’ve read Emily P. Freeman’s and Lore Wilbert’s and Anne Bogel’s and other lists from bookstore newsletters, Insta accounts, and Substack. It’s fun to see the same titles popping up on numerous lists. Particularly when they are books I’ve read or added to my TBR.
Here’s my list for 2025. At first, I wasn’t sure if I had a list to share. When I began to scroll through Libby, Spotify audios, Audible and my Google doc list, I realized, yes I did! They are loosely in the order I read the books.
I’ll share the book blurb {or a bit of it} from the publisher for most of the titles. It is in quotes and italicized.
Links to Amazon are mostly my affiliate link.
Let’s see? Any other housekeeping tidbits I need to tell you?
All opinions are my own and come from my reading taste, interests, and experience. 🙂

1. And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman

“From the New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, and Anxious People comes an exquisitely moving portrait of an elderly man’s struggle to hold on to his most precious memories, and his family’s efforts to care for him even as they must find a way to let go.

With all the same charm of his bestselling full-length novels, here Fredrik Backman once again reveals his unrivaled understanding of human nature and deep compassion for people in difficult circumstances. This is a tiny gem with a message you’ll treasure for a lifetime.”

I loved this little book. It made me laugh. It made me cry. Let me clarify. It made me SOB. This book was a completely delightful read on a cold, January evening in our cozy basement. I wrote about it here.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

2. The UnderStory by Lore Wilbeert

The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor ~

“Walk in the woods with me.”

That’s the invitation award-winning author Lore Ferguson Wilbert extends to readers in The Understory.

On this journey, Wilbert shares her story of alienation and disorientation after years of religious and political unrest in the evangelical church. In doing so, she looks to an unlikely place–the forest–to learn how to live and even thrive when everything seems to be falling apart. What can we learn from eroding soil, the decomposition process, the time it takes to grow lichen, the beauty of fiddlehead ferns, the regeneration of self-sowing seeds, and walking through the mud? Here, among the understory of the forest, Wilbert discovers rich metaphors for living a rooted and flourishing life within the complex ecosystems of our world. Her tenderness and honesty will help readers grieve, remember, hope, and press on with resilience.“

I started writing a short essay about The Understory. I never finished it, and it waits quietly in a Google doc. I’ll lift a quote from it to share here.

I find these words on page 198 and they sit with me. 
“It is said that St. Augustine coined the phrase solvitur ambulando, meaning “it is solved by walking.” Today I endeavor not to solve or resolve but simply to move from here to here to here. My endeavor, at its basest, is honesty, to notice what I notice and not to pretend to notice more or less.” ~ Lore Ferguson Wilbert

“It is solved by walking.” I am taken by the term. Wooed by the invitation.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

3. Dear Writer by Maggie Smith

“Drawing from her twenty years of teaching experience and her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life, Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential elements: attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. Each element is explored through short, inspiring, and craft-focused essays, followed by generative writing prompts. Dear Writer provides tools that artists of all experience levels can apply to their own creative practices and carry with them into all genres and all areas of life.”

I loved Maggie Smith’s memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful. I found Dear Writer to be in-all-the-ways delightful. Different genres. Both fantastic books that found a way into my favorites. I have a shelf of books about writing and the creative life. Whether you dabble in poetry or are well accomplished at the craft, Dear Writer is a friend to accompany you in your journey of words.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

4. Ordinary Time by Annie B. Jones

Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put – A Memoir of Humor and Hope in a Small-Town Life
“Annie B. Jones, the popular From the Front Porch podcast host and independent bookstore owner challenges the idea that loud lives are the ones that matter most, reminding us that we don’t have to leave the lives we have in order to have the lives of which we’ve always dreamed.
Can life be an adventure, even when it’s just . . . ordinary?
Listen as Annie shares how she always assumed adulthood would mean adventure: a high-powered career; life in a big, bustling city; and travels to far-flung places she’d longed to see. But her reality turned out differently. As the years passed, Annie was still in the same small town running an independent bookstore —the kind of life Nora Ephron dreamed.”

As the saying goes, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” However. The cover alone speaks to me on this book. I do love a good bookcover. I love beautiful books. I love the details of books. My secret dream would be to curate a bookstore. THUS. A book with a lovely cover, about a bookstore owner, a memoir – favorite genre, set in embracing life in ordinary time????? Sign me up. For years now, I’ve sought to delight in the daily details and I still find it challenging some days. I loved this gentle, beautiful book paying homage to the extravagance of ordinary days and lives.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

5. My Friends by Fredrik Backman

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anxious People returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger’s life twenty-five years later.

“Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.”

Friendship and art and creativity and support and unexpected journeys along the way. No one can tell a story the way Fredrik Backman does it. He never shies away from the real and the gritty. Neither does he use language we can’t decipher. No one can plunge to the depths in the simplest sentence the way Fredrik Backman does it. The weight of emotion he can string together in a six-word sentence leaves me amazed every time. Every single book I’ve read by him has grown me and widened my capacity for compassion and empathy.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

6. Awake by Jen Hatmaker

“From Jen Hatmaker—beloved New York Times bestselling author and host of the For the Love podcast—a brutally honest, funny, and revealing memoir about the traumatic end of her twenty-six-year-long marriage, and the beginning of a different kind of love story.

At 2:30 a.m. on July 11, 2020, Jen Hatmaker woke up to her husband of twenty-six years whispering in his phone to another woman from their bed. It was the end of life as she knew it. In the months that followed, she went from being a shiny, funny, popular leader to a divorced wreck on antidepressants and antianxiety meds, parenting five kids alone with no clue about the functioning of her own bank accounts. Having led millions of women for over a decade—urging them to embrace authenticity, find radical agency, and create healthy relationship—she felt like a catastrophic failure.”

Listen to the audiobook if you choose to read this one. It’s read by the author. Sidenote: One of my favorites is listening to audiobooks narrated by the author. Jen Hatmaker does a fantastic job narrating, AND, BONUS, she adds some asides to her own writing and book as she reads the audio version. You get content not in the printed book! 🙂 This book touched something deep in me. Yes, the book talks about her marriage ending, but the macro and micro views are focused on questions about the systems and beliefs and teaching that might not have been as firm of a foundation as we were guaranteed. I personally thought Jen did a fantastic job of telling a very hard story with care and grace and consideration. She shared real feelings of anger and hurt and also her recognition of waiting to share this story until she’d sat with self-examination and introspection instead of throwing all the blame in the opposite direction. I thought it was all-around well-done.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

7. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

“NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why… His name is Theo. And he asks a lot more questions than he answers. Theo visits the local coffeehouse, where ninety-two pencil portraits hang on the walls, portraits of the people of Golden done by a local artist. He begins purchasing them, one at a time, and putting them back in the hands of their “rightful owners.” With each exchange, a story is told, a friendship born, and a life altered. A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is a beautifully crafted novel about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the invisible threads of kindness that bind us to one another.”

A friend sent me this book for my birthday and I absolutely loved it. Interesting characters, an intriguing premise, kindness and generosity, what’s not to love? It made me laugh and cry. What did I love the best? The moment when the writing gripped me with the recognition of Theo’s ability and deliberate intention to cause people to feel seen deeply.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

8. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE AND THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, She Reads

“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle. . . . Isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”

Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.“

I listened to The Correspondent, and yes, I recommend the audio version. It is narrated by a cast of characters and I found it to be fantastic. A novel feature of this novel ~ it is written entirely as letters or emails. Thus, the title. The main character, Sybil Van Antwerp, is a correspondent. Letter writing has been an important part of her life since she was a child. Another feature I found fun, Sybil writes letters to authors of books she reads. Ann Patchett. Joan Didion. Such a delightful addition to the story.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

9. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

“A suspenseful family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence.
When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret, implicating them all in the tragic accident.
During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI.
Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative.”

This book kept me turning pages. Actually, I listened to it, so not a literal turning. It grapples with ethical questions, weaving together a tale I’m still thinking about. This book asks the questions, “Who are we really when hard things happen? When life takes unexpected turns? When faced with morality and our own culpability? This book revealed the story bit by bit, sharing enough details, and hinting at secrets in a way to keep the reader engaged, curious, and reluctant to put the book down.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

10. The Black Wolf by Louise Penny

The 20th mystery in the #1 New York Times-bestselling Armand Gamache series.
“Somewhere out there, in the darkness, a black wolf is feeding.
Several weeks ago, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his team uncovered and stopped a domestic terrorist attack in Montréal, arresting the person behind it. A man they called the Black Wolf.
But their relief is short-lived. In a sickening turn of events, Gamache has realized that plot, as horrific as it was, was just the beginning. Perhaps even a deliberate misdirection. One he fell into. Something deeper and darker, more damaging, is planned. Did he in fact arrest the Black Wolf, or are they still out there? Armand is appalled to think his mistake has allowed their conspiracy to grow, to gather supporters. To spread lies, manufacture enemies, and feed hatred and division.”

Louise Penny’s twentieth, TWENTIETH, book in this series was released in October 2025. I was late in coming to this series. I’d long seen readers and writers I followed talk about the Armand Gamache books. As mysteries, I wasn’t sure they were for me. However, in March of 2023, I listened to Still Life, the first in the series, and haven’t looked back since. I finally saw someone explain the books as a look at the psychology of people and the why behind what they do, rather than murder mysteries. I was instantly interested and intrigued. I’ve fallen for the characters and the writing. It was delightful to listen to this new book even though it does deal with sobering issues. Louise Penny’s books always make me think. They are a delightful mixture of characters, good and bad, books, writing, poems, art, and a good dash of eccentricity and eclectic bents, questions, crackling fires, and croissants and cafe au laits.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

11. Food For Thought by Alton Brown

“This instant New York Times bestseller by Alton Brown, the acclaimed cookbook author, beloved culinary personality, and food science expert, is a “must-read” (Gaby Dalkin, New York Times bestselling author of What’s Gaby Cooking) debut collection of food essays, cooking tips, kitchen stories, and behind-the-scenes insights, all infused with his signature wit and flair.

From cameraman to chef, musician to food scientist, Alton Brown has had a diverse and remarkable career. His work on the Food Network, including creating Good Eats and hosting Iron Chef America and Cutthroat Kitchen, has resonated with countless viewers and home cooks. Now, he shares exactly what’s on his mind, mixing compelling anecdotes from his personal and professional life with in-depth observations on the culinary world, film, personal style, defining meals of his lifetime, and much more.”

I don’t watch Food Network or much of any network. Rather, I tend to watch movies or a series. To say, I was not familiar with Alton Brown. I don’t ExaCtLy remember how I added this book to my TBR. Here’s how I think it happened. I searched for good books about food. Possibly, I included memoir in my search since it’s a favorite genre. This one was available on Libby and I started it. And I kept listening. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Alton Brown talks about his quest for the perfect roasted chicken. His unintentional career as a food show host. What is required for the best ice. And his preferences for the best stirred, not shaken, martini. Alton Brown reads the audio version and, my friends, it makes all the difference.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

12. My Beloved by Jan Karon

“When Father Tim’s wife, Cynthia, asks what he wants for Christmas, he pens the answer in a love letter that bares his most private feelings. Then the letter goes missing and circulates among his astonished neighbors. So much for private.
Can a letter change a life? Ask Helene, the piano teacher who has avoided her feelings for a lifetime. Ask Hope, the village bookseller who desperately needs something that’s impossibly out of reach. Or, if you’d like to know how a brush with death can be the portal to a happy marriage, Cynthia will tell you all about it.
In My Beloved, Harley gets an important letter of his own; a broken heart teaches the Old Mayor, Esther Cunningham, a lesson long in coming; and thanks to Lace and Dooley, readers get what they’ve been waiting for: Sadie.

Poignant, hilarious, and life-affirming, My Beloved sets a generous table for millions of readers who love these characters like family. With Karon’s signature humanity shining through on every page, this is a season of life in Mitford you won’t want to miss.”

It was so fun to spend some time in Mitford again. I adore Father Tim and Cynthia. Mitford is one of those fictional places you long to visit, and it feels like coming home to sit among the pages again. I checked out the e-version of this book from Libby and read it through quickly several evenings in bed.
I bought a Kindle Paperwhite in May. I read a post on the Modern Mrs. Darcy by one of the team. She shared about a handful of e-readers she owns and loves. I decided to give it a try, and voila! Again, I haven’t looked back. Here’s what I love: 1. It is lightweight and easy to hold, 2. It’s larger than my phone, more book size, easier to read, lighter than my phone, 3. No distractions like on my phone 4. It lights up, offers a dark mode, I don’t need a lamp to read in bed at night.
I’ve used the Kindle app for years, but the Kindle Paperwhite has upped my quota of e-books.
For those who want to know, I ordered this clear case for my e-reader. I intended to add some stickers to the case, and I confess I have not yet.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Diving into another year of reading…..2026 here we come….

I decided to give something new a try next year. I did a quick search and found the app Bookmory. I like the features it offers and I’m going to use it as a way to organize the books I read in 2026. It will be an experiment to see if I like it well enough to stick with it all year.

What did you read and love in 2025? What would you read again……..or not read again? What are you reading as 2026 begins?