2025 Reading List

Natalie’s 2025 Reading List

This year, I worked hard to find GREAT books to read. I read a couple I didn’t like in a row, so I strategized on how to make sure I would be reading books I liked. 

Here’s how I approached that:

• If I really loved a book, I’d check out what else that author had written. I often read more than one book by the same author this year.
• I searched “best of…” lists and found some gems. 
• Audible and Hoopla continued to impress me by suggesting books I’d like based on those that I’ve read. I found some real winners this way!
• Finally, I checked all books on Goodreads. I know this is snobby of me and will keep me from reading some great books, but I prioritized reading books rated above 4 stars on Goodreads. 

General observations about my 2025 book choices and authors:

• I started the year off right, with another book by Kristin Hannah, this one is called The Nightengale. It’s my favorite of her books, and she is one of the authors I regularly consume. With all of her books though, I have to be patient. Her heroic female characters are long suffering in every book. 
• Of note, one Hannah book I didn’t rate this year is perhaps her most famous, Firefly Lane. I loved this book, but I loved others more. One of the main characters, Tillly, was hard for me to like, and when I have trouble liking a main character, my overall response to the book takes a hit.
• Fredrik Bachman came out with a book called My Friends. I normally love Bachman books and this one was still good, but it’s my least favorite of his books so far. I really missed the close family dynamics in most of his books. 
• I’m getting near the end of the Louise Penny Inspector Gamache series. I have two left that are unread, so I read many fewer this year, just to save a couple!
• I had a funny experience of finding “Hurricane Season” on The New York Times “Best Books of the 21st Century List”. I was listening to it, liking it, but finding it surprising to have made this list. When I was done, I realized there are two books with the same title! Oops. I was supposed to have read the Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melcore. 
• There were a few absolute knockout authors new to me this year: Jeanine Cummings, Virigina Evans, William Kent Kruger, and Taylor Jenkins Reid.
• My least favorite books were: If Cats Disappeared From the World and Heavy.
• Special Categories: 
  • Quirkiest book award: A Son of Circus, by John Irving and Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts, by Kate Recculla.
  • Most important books that everyone should read award: American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummings (about migrants’ journies) and The Sun Does Shine, by Anthony Ray Hinton (about racially motivated incarceration).

Natalie’s 2025 Reading List

BONUS: STORYTIME

I was buying a couple books for a friend’s birthday. I found one, but not the other. The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton was the 2nd book I wanted to gift.

The book is written by an ex-convict who had been wrongly accused (and framed) for murder in Alabama. It’s the story of his evolution and attitude shift in prison and how he encouraged everyone, black or white, prisoner or guard, to be better versions of themselves. It’s an extraordinary true story. 

I asked the worker at the bookstore for a recommendation since they didn’t have this book. He knew the book and said, “Here is another book that has some similar themes. If you like that one, I think your friend would enjoy this one.” The book was A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. I took his recommendation.

My friend LOVED the book. Later last summer, I was at dinner where another friend asked if I had read A Gentleman in Moscow. He was also singing its praises. I figured it was about time I read the book!

Neither of these books is in my top winning categories this year, but I really, really enjoyed them both. I found this to be a curious recommendation, though.

A Gentleman in Moscow takes place in Russia, and Count Alexander Rostov, an aristocrat is sentenced to house arrest in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel in 1922 by a Bolshevik tribuna. The book tracks his life as a prisoner in the hotel. 

Reading the two short italicized descriptions, it may be evident that the commonalities between these two books are:

• The main character in each story has lost their freedom;
• In both cases they were either fully or partially wrongly accused; and
• The stories are focused on the mental state and internal world of both men, along with the people they meet and relationships they build while in captivity.

Had I been making a recommendation based on The Sun Does Shine, I believe I would have selected a book focused on one or more of the following themes:

• An African American main character unjustly treated;
• A story that takes place in the South; and/or
• A brutal tale about terrible treatment of poor, underserved minorities. 
  A book like The Nickel Boys, for instance.

What do you think? Was this a creative recommendation? Is it just a difference in how our brains work? Or, is this a subtle, almost hidden example of racism?