My goal this year was to read 250 books, because I only (only XD) read 192 books in 2024, which disappointed me. WELL...I ended up reading 289 books this year! It was a great reading year (partially due to lots of audiobooks at work) and hovering around the 250 books mark seems to be good for my reading life and mental health. :) Of those 289 books, 93 were rereads...which was nearly 2/5 of my original reading goal! Kind of crazy.
Without futher ado...a slice of the books! If you're new here, quick recap: there are three tiers (Good, Better, Best) of books, which don't necessarily reflect my enjoyment level, just my assessment of quality. This is a post that I will not be sad if you skim...because it's LONG!!
Enjoy!
GOOD
Laura Martin is a perennial favorite of my siblings and mine, and while I wouldn’t say this one is as good as her Edge of Extinction series, it was very enjoyable! It’s about two brothers who have the ability to jump into board games—which is all fun and games (ha! ...sorry, that was really bad) until their mom gets captured in one and they have to save her. I will say, I wished there had been more “real board game” cameos—because as it was, the board games felt more like a way to allow the boys to travel into different genres (e.g. pirates, dragons/fantasy, &c) but it was a fun romp regardless.
This was one that I felt like fell a little short of its premise. Basically, Eva, who is visiting her grandmother in England for a summer, discovers that her grandmother was once a queen in another world, and is still haunted by those recollections. It’s almost a Susan-of-Narnia type plot…but the plot hints that it’s going to go one way and then doesn’t quite live up to those hints. The other world remains remote and mysterious. The grandmother doesn’t heal. Nothing gets resolved quite in the way I was hoping. But it is still a beautiful book in its own way, and involves an English manor house, so I didn’t dislike it!
This book wasn’t quite what I was expecting it to be—a humorous book about Spinster Church Ladies—but I quite liked what it ended up being, which is a story about one spinster (who is not quite the level of Comedically Spinsterish) and her observations of human nature in her erratic neighbors. Quite, surprising, and thought-provoking.
I loved the first book in this series (Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone) and this one was a delightful jaunt, too, in the same vein of comedic mystery, with very self-aware main character. This sequel makes the unreliability of the main character more obvious and problematic (for him and everyone else) and I enjoyed that, along with the setting on an Australian train, and the cast of characters which was made up almost entirely of quirky authors, together on a book tour of sorts.
I knew nothing about K-Pop culture and how K-Pop stars are trained, and for the interest of that alone, I enjoyed this book. The plot was relatively predictable, but sweet, and the love story wasn’t over the top. (I know that sounds like damning with faint praise, but that’s really all I can give to most YA love stories at this point. It was fun and fluffy and nice for a day when I didn’t want to think too hard. XD)
This was a wild one, about fantasy worlds, imagination, friendship, and evil. It was quite creepy for a children’s book, and went in multiple directions that I wasn’t expecting. I would say it’s kind of like Wildwood and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship of Her Own Making although I didn’t like it quite as much as either of the other two.
I expected to be Absolutely Blown Away by this one—based on the blurb and first few chapters, I thought it was going to be like A Man Called Ove. And in some ways it was—unreliable, super lonely, inadvertently amusing narrator, for one—but it had more reveals than Ove does, and ended up being A LOT darker at the end. (Not necessarily in a bad way—it ends hopefully—but in a way I wasn’t expecting.) I would still recommend it, but with the caveat that one should read it when in a good mental health state.
This is a rare example of a book with a completely despicable narrator that is still entirely readable. It’s also a unique premise: a white author steals a manuscript from a dead Asian author that she has always resented and resells it as her own...after edits to make it more "palatable" to a mainstream audience. It’s a unique kind of entertainment (and cautionary tale!) to watch the main character, June, spiral deeper and deeper into a hole of lies and deceit. It’s also written from June’s perspective, so it challenges the reader to read between the lines of what she’s saying to see all of the bad decisions she’s making, and horrible things she’s doing. Riveting.
I love Ally Carter, and I hadn’t realized she had a new MG series out, but when this did cross my desk, I made haste to acquire a copy. And it’s a good one! It’s definitely simpler than her YA books (and I’m not sure it needs to be quite as simple as it is) but it’s about a group of children who are all living in a massive old mansion and trying to figure out the hidden secrets of the place and the family who once lived there. Featuring the sweetest found mom and grumpiest found dad EVER. I love them.
I had read another book by Ashley Elston before and listened to this audiobook while at work this summer. It was an entrancing double-layered story (in two time periods) about a family in a small town, and a lost young man discovering his history. The main character, Owen, finds out that his dad has been embezzling for years, and has just skipped town. He has to return from boarding school to the small town where he’s originally from, where starts working on a farm…only to find that the owner of the farm knew his father, and watched over the love story between his father and mother. But he can’t quite square the stories he hears about his parents with the character of his dad… I loved the layering of the story, and I loved grumpy Gus, the farmer. This was a slower burn but beautiful book, and I think I’d like to revisit it at some point.
My siblings had to read this one for homeschool, and I picked it up randomly from a bookstore while I was home this summer. It’s short, but sweet, and would be a good one to recommend to kids in your life. It follows a young Ojibwe girl who lives with her family on an island in Lake Superior. Mostly, it shows the adventures of their day-to-day, from their trained bird to the scraping of animal hides to the storage of food for the winter, in almost a Little House-y way, but it also incorporates some of the issues of the time that touch Omakakiins and her family.
I picked this one up at the library randomly, not knowing what to expect…and found a fascinating book that feels like a mix between Spinning Silver and a biography of Clara Schumann. The Goblin King comes to Liesl’s family looking for his bride, and when Liesl won’t go with him, takes Liesl’s sister Kathe. Liesl’s journey to rescue Kathe involves the music she secretly composes, hidden memories from her childhood, and her complicated relationship with her brother. It’s a beautiful, dark fairytale set in 1800s Germany, and I enjoyed it greatly.
I was recommended this one by a few different people, and picked it up after I read the other Princes in the Tower book that I’m going to talk about later. I disagree with the conclusions about the Princes in the Tower that this book draws, but I did enjoy the premise—someone who is in the hospital and can’t do anything else decides to try to solve the mystery of the Princes in the Tower. A very satisfying armchair academia book.
I’ve really enjoyed Blue Balliett’s other (art and Chicago-focused) books, and liked this one as well, although I was not expected the direction in which it went! It’s focused on a small Nantucket town, where the ghosts of the past are being stirred by new construction and destruction of old buildings. A group of kids, who can see the ghosts, have to try to stop the destruction before the power of the ghosts burst out and it’s too late. It was beautiful, creepy, and luminous, and I liked it a good deal, although I’m not normally a ghost book enjoyer.
I did a massive reread of the Little House books this summer, because I realized that they are a very appropriate literary summary of the Midwest to read now that I’ve moved here. This book is an annotated edition of Laura’s first manuscript for the Little House books—for when she thought they would be a story for adults. It’s got a lot of the anecdotes included in the final books, and the beginnings of Laura’s distinctive voice, but also quite a few incidents that didn’t make it into the Little House books, some of which are quite dark. I found it fascinating.
As I may have mentioned a few times, I try to read one Russian novel every year, because I love Russian novels, but I also find them intimidating, and if I didn’t have a goal, I’m not sure I’d pick them up regularly. The last four years I read The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, War & Peace, and Anna Karenina and loved them all. This one…sadly I loved less. I did like it, but I found it hard to get through—it didn’t pull me in in the same way that the others have done. And I guess maybe I knew from the beginning that there wouldn’t be a happy ending for Prince Myshkin? I like Prince Myshkin a great deal, and it upset me, the way he was exploited by the other characters. It was, though, like most other Russian novels of my acquaintance, extremely immersive (one of the things I love about Russian novels) and takes human nature seriously (another thing I love). I also loved the Ipanchin family, especially the girls.
Every time I read a W. R. Gingell Between series, I tell myself that I’m not going to read another one, because she messes up her endings horrendously and doesn’t have good subplots, and never really achieves thematic resolution. And yet, every time, I end up back, at least in part because the audiobook narration is so good. I have the same complaints about this book that I have about every other Between book, but I like the characters more here. It’s super entertaining to see someone who knows nothing about Between try to navigate that world (Viv), and the murderer (Luca) is a more interesting character to me than Athelas ever was (sorry, Sarah). Plus, I’m intrigued by the little girl who keeps invading Viv’s rooms…
Legolas’s roommate recommended this one to me, although I’ve seen it all over the blogosphere in my time, too, so I picked it up and gave it a shot. I am mostly over the whole YA thing just generally (I try to demand a bit more from my books these days than mere entertainment value, although I do relapse from time to time lol) but this was excellent for its genre. I enjoyed the multi-format storytelling, which worked quite a bit better than that usually does in fiction, and the situation was vivid and believable. If you like YA murder mysteries, I would recommend it.
As I’ve written about before on this blog, I have food allergies. I came across this book at random at the library and checked it out. I have never done a lot of research on food allergies (preferring to just accept them as part of how God created me), so this was really my first exposure to allergy research. And it was fascinating! I had no idea how little scientists know about allergies, and how many factors may be involved. The book covers food allergies & sensitivities, eczema, and hay fever, and discusses similarities and dissimilarities, what we know, what treatments are available, and how much further we still have to go. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a good “popular science” read or if you have allergies.
So, I’m going to be entirely honest and say that this was neither as good nor as memorable as The Penderwicks. However, it was fun and sweet, and there was nothing wrong with it, I just love the Penderwicks too much. XD It’s about a girl who is seemingly wanted by no one, only to find that her great uncle and cousin do want her, very much, because there is a race of invisible-to-adults magical creatures that will find themselves in a terrible dilemma without her help. Somehow, even with the fantasy element, Birdsall manages to keep the sweet and realistic human interactions that are so appealing in The Penderwicks (I am OBSESSED with the great uncle, he is so sweet) and imbue the whole thing with a down-to-earth feeling.
My mom randomly picked this one up at Half-Price Books because she knows I love books about bees (thanks Mom!) and this one did not disappoint. It’s about a family who goes out into the rural southwest desert to help their grandfather (who has dementia) pack up his stuff and move into assisted living. (That hit close to home for me—my grandmother is struggling with dementia currently.) On arrival, one of the daughters of the family, Carol, discovers that her grandfather’s ramblings about the bees and the rain may not be quite as crazy as they sound…and so begins a beautiful magical-realism tale about what home means and especially the beauty of having your own place.
BETTER
This was the first book I read this year—a Christmas gift from last year! I had read other Michael Crichton before (namely, The Andromeda Strain) and enjoyed it, but I was still surprised at how much I liked this! It was well written and plotted, and I have to say that having watched the first movie this year as well, the book tells the story better. No one is surprised. :)
Eomer is a big fan of Ruta Sepetys, but this was the first time I had picked up one of her books. This was a beautiful story about a very little-known part of history, and a family struggling to survive and be together. I have to say, given that it’s nearly a year since I read it, I remember very little about the plot, but I do remember how sharply drawn the scenes and characters are, and how impactful their hope is within their horrible situation. I would definitely read it again!
This book blew me away! It’s the story of a couple who—by the grace of God, and with a lot of struggles—heals from the wife’s infidelity. Key really bares his heart and the whole story (with his wife’s permission) and it’s harrowing. But his persistence and their ultimate healing is so beautiful.
I am perennially interested in anything that has to do with the Vatican, and this incredible story of the search for—and finding of!—Peter’s bones was wilder than I could have imagined. I had no idea there were so many Vatican politics going on, nor that we came so close to displaying the wrong bones for Peter! This book provided a balanced look at the events and people involved in the search for Peter’s bones, and I would recommend it.
New favorite MG novel alert! I loved this one, and as I think about it, the thing that comes back to me most clearly is the images of the bamboo weavings that the main character Grover creates…with the beautiful navigation of a “dead mom” story a close second. Really, this had just about everything I look for in an MG novel: quirky characters, sibling relationships, complicated parents, a beautifully drawn setting, and unlikely friendships.
As you may be aware, I am obsessed with Naomi Novik. This collection of short stories did nothing at all to change that. Even as I’m writing about it, I’m realizing that I need to reread it, because once is in no way enough. But GUYS. These were SO GOOD. The original Spinning Silver story? Beautiful & fascinating. Pride & Prejudice with dragons? Fantastic. The story about the potter???? I AM FREAKING OBSESSED OKAY? And on top of all that, we get another Scholomance story? It’s too much, y’all. It’s too much. (Also the physical hardback of this book is so beautiful?? And clothbound? GUYS.)
This was a beautiful, quiet, heart-wrenching book about an Episcopalian minister who has been assigned to a tiny little Native American village in the Pacific Northwest. I’m not sure exactly when it’s supposed to take place, but this minister, Mark, watches as the traditional culture of these people is impoverished more and more, and the young people ebb steadily away from the village. His grief and understanding are beautiful, and so are the pieces of culture that are left.
This is an exhaustively researched, meticulously written, and engaging exploration of the story of the Princes in the Tower. She surveys all possible sources, considers the whole family story (which was CRAZY—I had no idea about the drama with the princes’ sister), and comes to the conclusion that Richard either killed them or (probably) had them killed. And I agree.
This was an excellent audiobook! The author’s thesis is that the loss of the ability to make things with our hands, with craeft (cleverness, wisdom, cunning, handiness) has impoverished our culture. So, he talks about his efforts to learn to do traditional crafts (or craefts?) from beekeeping to stone wall building to hedging in the traditional way, with traditional tools, and what he learns from the process. It made me want to learn to dry stack a stone wall. :)
I’m going to be honest, I find a lot of Katherine Reay’s new historical fiction (well-written though it undoubtably is) kind of forgettable, compared to her earlier, way more hard-hitting, stories. And that may be because I haven’t reread any of her newer things, whereas I’ve read her first six books or so a zillion times, so it may not all be on her. All that to say, I had to look up the synopsis for this one, BUT once I did I remembered that I really liked it! The layering of story and perspective was really well done, I found both Diana and Lily compelling characters to follow, and I always love a good art forgery story. :) Plus, London. I’m always in if London is involved.
Sharon Cameron was a new favorite this year that a friend from college who shares my love of WWII fiction introduced me to! And speaking of art forgery stories, Artifice is another one—this one set in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, and involving forged Rembrandts, complicated parent-child relationships, baby-smuggling, and double-crossing undercover agents. It was a rich book, full to the brim with description and plot, and I loved it.
I love Fredrik Backman dearly. I do not love his propensity to add LGBT characters to everything he writes. However, I still loved this book, which felt like looking at an optical illusion the wrong way around and then slowly shifting your eyes to see it “properly.” His writing is so impressive in the way that it toys with the reader’s expectations! I also loved the marriages showcased in the book (again, minus the LGBT stuff) and the line “you don’t marry a person, you marry an idiot, and then you love them forever.” [I paraphrase. But I do think about that fairly regularly. XD] It was also, in a way, a locked-room mystery, but with a whole bunch more interpersonal relationships than most locked-room mysteries. Fabulous.
When I was on my Laura Ingalls Wilder kick, I found this book while I was looking for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s original manuscript, also published as Pioneer Girl. This one explores the possibility that Rose Wilder Lane gave a piece of Little House memorabilia to a family in Vietnam while she was there during the war. The family does not know the significance of the object (no spoilers!) until they move to the US and one of the daughters (an academic, working in the family’s restaurant, and feeling resentful about it) figures out the connection and goes on an epic academia investigation. I love epic academic investigations in fiction, and that plus Little House was an automatic win for me. Plus, the main character has a wildly different set of life experiences than I’ve had, which is a quality I always enjoy in an MC.
By the same author as Adventures With Waffles aka Waffle Hearts, this was a wonderful jaunt of a MG read, with a fiery protagonist who acts before she thinks—constantly! Astrid is a wonderfully entertaining protagonist, with her many escapades, and the overarching story with its Heidi overtones was lovely.
This is one of the quietest dystopian novels I’ve ever read. It’s more about the protagonists’ relationships and coming of age than it is about the dystopia that is constantly lurking in the background of the perfect English countryside. Even though I would have preferred a little more explanation about the dystopia itself, I was totally riveted by the relationships and personalities that Ishiguro draws with such a deft brush.
I picked this book up on a whim at the library, not expecting it to be good, and had my expectations blown out of the water! It’s about a mother, daughter, and grandmother living in the Bay Area, who have extremely complicated relationships with each other that don’t simplify when a dead body is found near their house. The daughter is a kayak trip leader, and the story explores the wildlife & biology of the area (really grounding it in California) along with the complex relationships among the characters. There’s no big romance subplot (although some small developments along those lines), no inappropriate scenes, and an excellent murder mystery. Highly recommend!
For some reason I had no idea this Gary D. Schmidt book existed, but I loved it and can’t wait to read it again. You can tell it’s one of his earlier books—the themes are a little more muddled and less drawn out than they are in later books—but he has the trademark Gary D. Schmidt writing style, clarity of what he wants the reader to know, and sensitivity to his characters. It’s about a town with a lot of racial tension, a boy who gets wrapped up in the complexity, and a brother who may not have been as perfect as he seems. All in small-town Maine. I loved it!
I wasn’t sure what I was going to think of this book—which is a very honest memoir of the author’s time as a Jesuit, and his subsequent discernment out of the order. But I ended up really enjoying it and getting a lot out of it. I loved the writing style—which felt very quiet and appropriate to the themes of the book—as well as all of the stories he had to tell, his process of discernment and figuring out where God was calling him, and how he lived out prayer in his life. It was really beautiful, and I would recommend it.
My aunt recommended this one to me, with the caveat that she didn’t think it was it as good as some of the other Maggie Stiefvaters. It definitely wasn’t as impactful to me as, say, All the Crooked Saints, but I still thought it was excellent. It follows the manager of an hotel in the Appalachias that is famous for its “sweet water,” something that seems innocuous at the beginning of the book, and gradually gets more and more sinister. The hotel has been requisitioned for high-profile political prisoners during WWII, each of whom comes with their own secrets, threatening to upset the fragile balance of life at the hotel. It was balanced as perfectly as a stack of smooth river rocks, and as rich as a chocolate cake. I enjoyed it greatly!
Fiorella De Maria is one of my favorite modern Catholic writers, and this book was a hard-hitter! It’s about a Catholic girl at a boarding school in England during WWII who is ¼ Jewish ethnically (like me!) and heavily identifies with her Jewish heritage, to make a point about the treatment of the Jews in Mainland Europe. She begins to suspect that her headmistress is a Nazi, and goes to great (and socially problematic) lengths to prove it, much to the despair of her unofficial adoptive parents who work at the school. It’s not super long, but it’s crisp, realistic, and beautiful.
This was an excellent collection of essays about writing by a Catholic (or at least Catholic-ish) author. Essays about writing are one of my favorite genres, and she has a lot of great insights about what makes writing actually good. Also about poetry, and what writing poetry looks like for people who also do other things. Which I do. The audiobook of it was excellent, if that’s your sort of thing.
I was on a teenage-pregnancy-books jag (what? I have weird reading jags sometimes!) and this was by far the best one I read. The parallel storylines follows a pregnant teenager in a boarding school for pregnant teenagers (not a bad one—she likes it there) and her daughter as she turns eighteen and begins searching for her birth mom. Realistic, beautiful, and rich, with beautiful family relationships (at least, for the daughter) and friendships (for both of them). And extremely well-written!
I will read almost any book about Oxford, especially if you reference C. S. Lewis in the title. 😊 This was a great one about one woman’s journey to Christianity (and also her husband!) after moving to Oxford to get her degree. There wasn’t anything spectacular about it, per se, but it was a beautiful memoir, and a great airplane read.
BEST
This has been a unique reading year in that almost every
book on my Best list actively turned my brain inside out, shook it, and
then put it back together again, slightly different. In other words, these are
a bunch of spectacular books that I am obsessed with.
And of course having said the above, I start the list with an incredibly dense book about medieval monastic meditation, prayer, and memorization. A lot of it was about memorization (and how that would have functioned) and creation (the making of images) and super high level, and fascinating. I read it for my thesis (the cloister & cloister garden had a significant role in monastic prayer & memorization) and it was one of the most fascinating, dense, thorough, and impactful books I read in my thesis research. I can’t recommend it for casual reading, but if you have any sort of interest in monasticism, memory, cloisters, prayer, etc. I would recommend it with the caveat that the author is not Catholic and so sometimes goes a little off the rails.
This is a recent dystopian novel written by a Catholic author that takes seriously some of the actual most dystopian elements of our society. To whit: in this novel, in cities, people “conceive” a whole bunch of embryos in vitro and then get to choose from profiles their “favorite” embryo to have brought to term as their baby. Those who have opted out of the system (who resemble a mix between fundamentalists and traditionalist Catholics—I did think that depiction was a little strange) are often forcibly sterilized to keep them from having too-large families. It was a wild reading experience, with a sympathetic main character, and lots of twists and turns along the way. It’s one of the few dystopian novels I’ve read that felt chillingly accurate as opposed to “okay how would we ever get here?” [Not pointing any fingers but *cough* the Hunger Games,*cough cough*]
I picked this book up in the UIUC Children’s Book collection at the SSHEL (Social Sciences, Health & Education Library, my beloved) because it caught my eye as one of the older books on the shelves. I was a bit skeptical about it going in (I was worried it would be boring) but you GUYS I am INSANE about this book. It’s based on Welsh folklore like the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander (most famous one of those is The Black Cauldron) but it’s a little darker and more quest-y. I guess what I’m saying is that The Hobbit is to The Prydain Chronicles as Lord of the Rings is to The Riddle- Master of Hed. The main character, Morgon, Prince of Hed and Riddle-Master, sets out on a journey to find out the meaning of the three stars on his forehead, embarking the reader on an adventure of friends, enemies, shape-shifters, ancient evils, and (by the end of the trilogy) a veiled and possibly unintentional but incredibly deep meditation on God’s providence and love.
You guys it’s so good you must read it.
I picked this one up because I like bees (true story) but was immediately drawn in by how Laurie R. King manages to mimic 19th and 20th century British writing styles. You guys, it is incredibly well-written. It feels especially Sayers-esque, and you all know how I feel about Dorothy Sayers. The premise is that Sherlock Holmes comes across a young woman, Mary Russell, whose brain works in a similar way to his. He takes her under his wing, and they end up close friends and partners in (fighting) crime. I’m just going to say it, I think that Sherlock (and all the other characters) are better written and more sympathetic in this book and its subsequent series than the original. I don’t really like the original Sherlock mysteries by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but I love these, mostly because I actually like the main characters. They have complex emotions and relationships, and I am still not over some of the emotional moments in the book! Also, Russell goes to Oxford and you know how I feel about Oxford, Moriarty comes into it, and Russell & Holmes go to Palestine (complex, because of Russell’s Jewish background). I’m having trouble describing why I love this one so much, but I do and I think you might, too.
I listened to this one on audio, which I normally love but might not recommend for this book, especially if you are a visual learner, because all the names sound the same. XD This book reminds me of The Queen’s Thief meets The Vorkosigan Saga and I am in love. The main character, Maia Edrehasivar, is my favorite cinnamon roll of all time, and the way he navigates suddenly becoming emperor is (!!) the best, but also reminds me of Eugenides, and I just love them both so much. Also, Maia’s relationship with his young relatives hits me in the feels every time, the court intrigue is On Point, and while there is maybe a little less romance than I would like, the romance that is there is So Sweet and I just want ten more books about all of these characters. Except for the character that we actually do have more books about. Couldn’t care less about that one. I’m still salty that there are no more Maia books, and so is Eomer. XD
I finally decided to read this one and just pretend that there are no more books after it, because the series isn’t finished, and apparently the second one is, if not an actual cliffhanger, at least cliffhanger-y. And it’s been, like, over a decade since it came out. Not cool, Patrick Rothfuss. Not cool. But the book itself was excellent! Imagine The Secret History meets The Riddle-Master of Hed and that’s the vibe. 11/10. Basically, the main character, Kvothe was born into a life as a travelling performer…until his entire troupe is brutally murdered by a set of mythical magical creatures. Kvothe, who’s been learning magic, then ends up at what is basically a magical Oxford, where he makes few friends and many enemies, and grows in his magical abilities to a point that is alarming to many. It’s dark, brooding, inventive, and beautiful, and I absolutely loved it.
I already talked about enjoying some of Sharon Cameron’s other work earlier in this post, but this was by far and away my favorite book of hers that I read this year! It’s based on a true story of a sixteen-year-old Polish girl and her six-year-old sister who hide thirteen Jews in their tiny house…even when they’re forced to house Germans there as well! It’s what I would describe as an incredibly rich book, packed to the gills with story, emotions, relationships, and struggles, with vivid descriptions that make it easy to visualize the setting and situations. And the main characters (mostly!) retain hope and even a sense of humor in the midst of their crushing circumstances, making it a tough but beautiful read.
Ruta Sepetys is an incredible historical fiction author (I’m actually reading another of hers, I Must Betray You, as I’m writing this post) and here tackles the complexities of Franco’s Spain. It follows a family of native Spaniards who are befriended by an American, Daniel Matheson, who is staying in a fancy hotel in Madrid while his parents are on a business trip. It talks about the stolen babies, the oppression, and the silencing done by the fascist regime, none of which I knew about, but in these peoples’ actual lives. Just like The Light In Hidden Places, is a super rich book, full of easily visualized descriptions, deeply felt emotions, and complicated relationships.
This is a collection of recently translated stories by Shusaku Endo that are all about mothers and specifically his relationship with his mother. Because each story tries to make a different point and describe a different facet of a relationship between a mother and a son (with different details, somewhat different plot (because it’s technically fiction), and different emphasis) it ends up feeling like a kaleidoscopic view of one boy’s complex feelings about his mom. It was quiet, contemplative, and beautiful & ugly by turns. A fascinating read.
I’ve been avoiding the hype about this one for a while, and when I finally gave in, I wished I had done so sooner! The device of a book written by an academic about her experiences studying faeries was absolute catnip to my love of academia—I love the footnotes, Emily’s attitude, and the way that she brings extensive study of folklore to bear on her real-life experiences (which feels like it shouldn’t work but totally does). Wendell, her ridiculous colleague, reminds me of Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle and is a great foil to Emily’s studiousness and studied unconcern for other people. Super well-plotted and well-written. (Sadly, the sequels are less so.)
This is one of the most unique MG books I’ve encountered, and I’m obsessed with it! It’s about a (brilliant and also probably neurodivergent) boy who maps everything in his life. His maps are featured at the Smithsonian (but they don’t know that he’s not an adult) and he’s invited there for a celebration of his work. His family doesn’t know about his Smithsonian fame, so he embarks on a wild solo journey from Nowhere, Montana to Washington D. C. In addition to the lovable main character and well-written story, Spivet’s maps are included in the margins of the pages! It adds such a beautiful and unique aspect to the story, and I loved it.
This story made me want to get a super huge black dog. And I don’t even like dogs that much. Okay but basically what happens is this little girl has an absolute spitfire of a grandmother who, as she’s dying (iirc?) she sends the girl on a quest to basically get to know all of her neighbors in this big building, and all of the neighbors have their own problems, which means then the little girl has to help solve them the best she can. But it’s also all wound up with the stories that her grandmother used to tell her about a fantasy kingdom, concealing lessons about real life peoples’ motives. And when I tell you that it is adorable and beautiful and I’m obsessed with it—yeah. Fredrik Backman does really, really, REALLY good work.
Dude what the heck just happened inside my brain. HALP. This book is absolutely WILD and I’m Still Not Over it. It’s like…it’s like Brideshead Revisited in terms of the weird and slightly toxic relationships plus the writing style meets A Deadly Education in terms of dark academia vibes meets Metamorphoses in terms of [deep dark spoilers]. It’s actually crazy. The social dynamics, the tiny hidden details, the way something that seems so good can actually wreck peoples’ lives… oh my word, I was not okay when I finished this book. It was SO GOOD and SO HORRIFYING. 10/10 would recommend…but try to read it in the summer and not in, say, February.
Okay this book is the book that, of all of the books on this “Best” list that turned my brain inside out and back again, did so the very most, and then shook it, and then put it back in backwards. After doing a two-hundred-page thesis on medieval cloister gardens and spending the better part of a year immersed in primary sources, I can confidently say that this historical fiction novel is the closest I have ever been in my life to being totally immersed in the mind of a medieval monk. It was written by a medieval scholar who put years into its creation, and it shows. I think the moment where I was first pulled into it and realized “this is going to be incredible” was when the narrator stops in front of a stone carving and starts vividly relating what the carving is showing him, bringing to mind, and making him meditate on. That sounds kind of boring, but it was actually the most accurate account I’ve found to date of why churches were filled with carvings, and how they inspired devotion in minds not corrupted by screens and the fast pace of modern life. You do have to fight for it for the first hundred pages or so (and the author admits he did that on purpose, because he wanted to make sure that people who read the whole book were the ones who understood what he was trying to do) but it is so incredibly worth it—at least, if you’ve ever wanted to be inside the mind of a medieval monk. (Oh, and the mystery that the book relates is pretty good, too. 😉)
I almost wanted this book to be more about the titular professor and his house (and I loved the parts of it that were, because it’s a poignant picture of the later part of a marriage and how that can go wrong…but also of how attached a person can grow to a place) but a lot of the book is dedicated to an incredible archeological find in the southwest desert, which is described so vividly that I can still see it in my mind’s eye. The book meditates on place, people, history, and how the past shapes the present, and how greed can shape the past.
Okay. So, I picked this one up because Ginny Sheller is always talking about it, and I didn’t regret it. It’s (incredibly!) written entirely in the second person, the conceit being that the narrator is writing to his young son. The main character is a Protestant minister who is now retired and nearing the end of his life. He married late, and has a younger wife and son, who he dotes on. His best friend, another aging minister, has a prodigal son, so to speak, who comes back to town. The narrator feels responsible for this son, not only because he shares his name, but also because he feels he didn’t bless him properly at his baptism…inspiring a deep meditation on blessing, life, and relationship with God. It is a beautiful book, but what blew me away almost more than this book (which did blow me away) was reading more books in this quartet, each of which tell the story again from a different point of view. The kaleidoscopic picture of the relationships between just five people is intense and unforgettable.
This one is a bit different than the other books on this list, given that it’s a nonfiction devotional-type book, but it’s also about the author’s experience of hiking the Colorado Trail. Basically, he and two of his buddies hiked the entire 600-some mile length of the Trail, joined along the way by different groups of friends, parishioners, etcetera. Each chapter starts and ends with stories from his time on the trail, and the middle is a meditation on some aspect of faith life related to his trail experiences. It’s really beautiful, eminently readable, and funny! (Any priest who will nickname a group of his trail companions “the derping corgis” has my attention.) I would highly recommend it if you like hiking and/or are looking for spiritual reading.
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