The following list is compiled from readers of my 2024 Year in Books list, which you can read here, and from members of the Eye of the Heart Center for Creative Contemplation’s Writing Community. If you’re looking for fellow readers and writers, I’d love to see you there.
Reading means to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the convention of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say.
–Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler
We need books as emissaries from the realm of the unsaid. Thanks to the many responses to my January newsletter, The Year in Books, I now have a reading list for 2025! I thought I’d share folks’ suggestions, along with links to Bookshop, an online bookstore that supports independent booksellers and authors. If you don’t have a local shop, this year please consider buying your books in a way that creates a healthy literary ecosystem.
Little Miseries by Kimberly Olson Fakih is a woefully under-appreciated novel. It stunned me in the best way. –Amy Rea
Time of the Child by Niall Williams. I LOVED this book because of all the love on these pages. Quirky love. Unrequited love. Returned love. Love with hope. Love just because… –Nancy Agneberg
Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything. – I love pretty much everything she’s written precisely because she loves her characters and lets them speak. This book has a really interesting, compassionate voice.
My other top reads for this year are Question 7 by Richard Flanagan – a book he confesses was hard to write (always a good sign). And I discovered Clare Keegan and her short novellas, Small Things Like These being my top pick. –Cath James
Two books I read somewhat recently and loved Elizabeth Strout’s latest: Lucy by the Sea and Tell me Everything. I love everything by Elizabeth Strout. –Meck Groot
Two books I have found un-put-downable lately are:
1. The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel. Mister Rogers always said that in difficult times, we should “look for the helpers.” So heartening to read this book and see so many brave people resisting oppression in creative ways.
2. Never Caught: The Washington’s Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Dunbar is a distinguished professor of Black Studies and History at the University of Delaware; she also wrote a young reader’s edition of this book for middle grade. –Nancy Sinsheimer
Did you try The Sentence or Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich? What about The Salt Path by Raynor Wynn? Spiritually speaking, there’s nothing like No Mud, No Lotus or No Death, No Fear, by Thich Nhat Hanh and David Michie presents an accessible version of the ancient Santedeva’s would-be Boddhissatva’s Guide. And while maybe not literary quality, his book Instant Karma I found to be fascinating and inspirational just for its lessons into human behavior. –Lisa Dietz
One is Virginia’s Apple: Selected Memoirs by Judith Barrington. The other is Broken Open: Essays by Martha Gies. Both writers turned 80 this last year, and lost one or both parents while older teenagers. Barrington’s journey starts in the UK and ends in the Pacific Northwest, where she and her partner were involved in second wave Lesbian Feminist activism and the development of Flight of the Mind Summer Writing Workshops for Women stretching over 17 years, and spawning a women’s literary community and herstory that will outlive them both. I published a review in Calyx Journal.
Martha Gies’s memoir charts her unusual childhood in rural Oregon, her lifelong search for love from a childhood religious rebellion to a mature understanding and embrace of spirituality through liberal Catholicism, admitting that she worshipped “at the temple of sexual love” while finding her way to “right livelihood” as a writer, teacher, and beloved mentor. Without ever stooping to gossip, she describes her personal fascination with “pillow talk” as being one of the “few greater treasures to pursue than the understanding of the human heart.” –Mimi Wheatwind
Some favorites of mine this year:
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig
Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
The Puppets of Spelhorst by Kate DiCamillo
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
–Tom Glaser
The 100 Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin. Also love Margaret Renkl nature stuff. –Barbara Hassing
Have you read The Wisdom Way of Knowing by Cynthia Bourgeault? or The Power of Now by Ekhert Tolle? Both are slim but powerful volumes.
On a lighter note: my other book group really enjoyed the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese and authors Claire Keegan and Niall Williams. –Barbara Hassing
Memoir by Reggie Harris, Searching For Solid Ground. –Pat Evans
Happy reading!
—Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew