Books! Books! Books!
A 2025 Review of Reading
Dear Ones,
A recent NYT article started this way, In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading, and I almost had a heart attack.
While I do my fair share of worrying about environmental policy, food insecurity and the immigration nightmare that is alive in our country, what really makes my blood boil is the system-sanctioned decline in reading and learning expectations, in critical and imaginative thought development among our youth. If adults want to sit around scrolling and skimming and letting their brains flatten like just another form of dead-butt syndrome, then so be it. But to train our children in the same behavior?! Well, I’ve been known to call our education system legalized child abuse on more than one occasion.
Rather than stew in my grief and rage about it – thank you to my practices of meditation and prayer! - I’ve decided to write an annual post called Books! Books! Books! My friend Abby Rasminsky gave me the idea in her wonderful newsletter People + Bodies, and since there’s almost nothing I like more than reading – I once cited it as my most notable addiction during a job interview… and I got the job - I figured it’s time to offer an end-of-the-year reading round up.
I’d love to hear from you, too…. What titles have fine-tuned your imagination this year? What narrative wonders have kept your nose buried in the ink-sweet actual pages of books, wonderful books? Put your thoughts in the comments so we can all benefit!
While I won’t be linking to the books I mention, do please check them out from the library if they sound intriguing or order them from your local bookstore. I repeat: please support your local libraries and bookstores! These places are some of the most endangered and important refuges available today.
Circa 1985. Reading always makes sense, even above the basketball backboard.
Book Club Fiction and More
As many of you know, I was a high school English teacher for fifteen years. I stopped teaching in 2014, just before I had my son Freddi, but I’ve missed the buzzy camaraderie and irreverent literary humor of my English department colleagues. These people are some of the kindest, weirdest, most accomplished, quick witted and curious breed of humanity I’ve ever encountered. Seriously, make an English teacher friend immediately!
Anyway, my creative, doctor friend Emily and I started a book club last fall, and it has been a total blast to devote a few hours every six weeks or so to talk books with these amazing women, women who read with pencils in their hands, who hold down fascinating jobs (private zoo designer! Women’s rights activist! EAL teacher! Awarding winning photojournalist!) while also raising children. They remind me how much good is happening in individual households everywhere. At first we chose our books based on what was notable at the moment, but soon we just followed our hearts.
While this was technically late 2024, it would be a shame not to mention our first book Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. You don’t have to be a chess lover to read this, but if you are, check this out. It had me sobbing for the last several pages and blown away at how Rooney created wildly different voices and inner lives for her two main characters, grieving brothers struggling to connect, feel and move through loss. A true masterpiece.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, now a movie starring Amy Adams, kicked off 2025, and while it was not always an enjoyable read – the magical realist exploration of motherhood and creativity was, at times, deeply uncomfortable (annoying?) - it was also wildly inventive and weirdly true. This may hit super close to home for any mother trying to navigate her changing identity and whose animal body must somehow uphold appearances in an animal-averse world. That image of Mother, our main character, ripping a steak apart with her teeth at a respectable restaurant? It will stay with me forever.
We combined into one meeting the galactically gorgeous and philosophically poetic Booker Prize winning Orbital by Samantha Harvey with the bizarre, irreverent and super fun All Fours by Miranda July… and somehow we found plenty of intersecting themes! These books can not be more different, and yet, they prove the old truth that the deeply personal and subjective view can always be found in the zoomed-out and expansive universal perspective… and vice versa.
From there we moved on to some older books – The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. Both explore the concept of parallel lives and invite a philosophical study of What if? What if I’d chosen that job or did that action? What if I’d not kissed him but instead kicked him in the balls? What if I had shot Hitler or pursued my rock star ambitions? How would all of history be different? Stuff like that. The reading itself was nothing special, but the resulting conversations were fascinating.
I have to say I felt kind of grumpy about having to read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith – I mean, I was the one who suggested a classic, but I was jonesing for something sweeping and European that I haven’t yet read, something like Middlemarch or War and Peace, but, holy cow, people, there is a reason this book is required reading! It is so gorgeous, so detailed, so nostalgic, and wildly transporting. It is a love story about story-telling, about the power of imagination, about the riches of family connection, about the origins of human resilience. And, having spent several years living near the very Brooklyn neighborhood where the story is set, it was a delight to picture the setting, to have walked those very streets.
We’re closing our year with Steven King’s The Dead Zone because – how weird is this? – not one of us had read him! Well, except his amazing memoirish book on craft On Writing, but the fiction? Nah. I hate horror! But this was more thriller than horror, and I devoured it on the 11-hour drive home from the Catskills announcing to my bleary-eyed travel companions that now I know why he is considered a modern master of the page-turner.
Books, King writes, are a uniquely portable magic. Indeed.
Outside of the book club, I read lots of other fiction, too. Heart the Lover by Lily King had me sobbing and wondering how anyone could capture so perfectly an intense literary college love affair that featured a repressed but intelligent conservative Christian guy… I mean, had she read my journals?!
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong was a heart-burner as well, but not as transcendent for me as his first novel, On Life We’re Briefly Gorgeous. That’s the one to start with, and please do yourself a favor and listen to any of his interviews. His voice alone will make you happy to be alive on this planet with someone so truly tender, intelligent and embodied at the same time.
God of the Woods by Liz Moore is an enthralling Adirondack summer camp murder mystery, and I’m just finishing Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, a gorgeously strange thriller (sort of?) set on an island near Antarctica, populated by thousands of seals and penguins, an abandoned research site that stores the world’s largest collection of seeds, and a motherless family with many secrets. Very windswept! And perfect for these gray days! Thanks to my friend and yoga student Fara for bringing both books to class one day and passing them on to me.
Thanks to my sister for gifting an autographed copy of her friend Nicola Kraus’s wonderful book The Best We Could Hope For, a poignant, funny and smart family epic about sisters and mothering and devotional sacrifice and love. I deeply enjoyed Hello, Beautiful by Ann Napolitano - a great gift for moms and sisters everywhere - and was totally compelled and weirded out by The Hare by Melanie Finn - thank you to my friend for pushing this into my hands - a dark anti-hero story about a poor, naive artist duped by a wealthy con artist who takes her on their first date to tea - and then a room - at The Plaza before eventually depositing her in a shack in Vermont. This crazy tale is, among other things, a love story about the harsh and unforgiving beauty of the Northeast Kingdom (if you know, you know) and the people who choose to live and survive there.
Speaking of books passed on, my friend Ricarda often sends books in the mail when she’s done with them – how great is that?! – and she recently sent Miriam Toew’s memoir A Truce that Is Not Peace. Well, I love just about anything by her – I read Irma Voth this summer, too – and I devoured this one in two days. The author of Women Talking – please read it immediately and then see the movie! –Toews is a Canadian ex-Mennonite bohemian grappling with why she writes and what that has to do with the fact that both her father and her sister killed themselves after months-long periods of total silence. Damn. There’s no real peace to be found here, as she promises, but there is a human ache that is real and relatable, and that kind of transparent writing can save a person.
Finally, I got into a wonderful Elizabeth Strout streak this year, too. I read Lucy by the Sea and Olive Kittredge (plus she has several more books with overlapping characters set in a small Maine town). I also hit up Curtis Sittenfeld’s book of short stories Show, Don’t Tell as well as American Wife, her page-turning fictionalized account of Laura Bush’s life with George. As with her book Rodham, based on Hilary Clinton, I just kept shaking my head and wondering, how is she doing this?! How can she breathe such real, believable life into these tired old political figures? What an empathy! What an imagination!
Note to our education system: reading books builds better people.
Bedtime with Freddi: Books with my Tween
My grandmother read to my mom, my mom read to me, and now I read to Freddi. Every single night. Reading begets reading. Trips to the library beget trips to the library, and if you’ve had this experience, you know: stories and snuggling together with the scent of book pages create a powerful cocktail for enduring love.
February, 2015. Freddi is sufficiently amazed by Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton.
Freddi is doing most reading on his own now, but I try to pick books to read to him that might be a little out of his comfort zone or that I know he’ll nix on his own. A fairly average pre-teen boy, he prefers the graphic novel series Diary of a Wimpy Kid over The Odyssey, which I would rather see him reading, but I’m grateful that this year he found Louis Sachar’s book Holes and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, both which have captured his attention like nothing else. Last night, deep in the Hatchet series, he gave me the cold shoulder when I made him turn off his light. The joy I felt at his anger towards me is beyond words. The right kind of addiction is settling in!
This year I read most of The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe series to him - so many great conversations about the amazing Aslan! - and we went down a rabbit hole with dog books. Old Yeller by Fred Gipson was as good as I remember it - and the movie made us both cry - and we’re halfway through Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. So far, we love it and agree that we have never worked as hard or as long for anything as Billy did to save $50 for his hunting dogs. Even his grandfather’s eyes became “moist” when he saw the money that Billy had saved, secretly, all on his own. Love, obsession and dogs. Can’t go wrong!
I also read him The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and was glad for a book that allowed me to character-act some voices - somehow, Freddi is still allowing me to do that! Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll also offered character opportunities, but mostly they had Freddi scratching his head and saying, Well, that was super weird. I liked it!
Freddi has always loved an emotionally exploratory, relational story, so in honor of Banned Books week I read him Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. He actually could not figure out why it was banned, which I take as a sign of good parenting and a sad invitation to break the news to him about how narrow-minded and scared much of the world is.
Currently, we are reading a little bit of our Advent Storybook about a Little Bear who follows a star and learns about love and miracles - this is pure nostalgia and sweetness and has been a ritual for the last 7 years. We’ve added to the ritual this year by also reading All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings by Gayle Boss. The beautifully illustrated entries spotlight different animals, poetically detailing how they navigate and survive winter, and what we’ve learned is that each creature is designed to almost-die and then return to life again several months later. All of them trust the process, and that’s making us think a lot.
Freddi, engrossed on a snowy Saturday afternoon.
Nonfiction for the Morning
I generally reserve my non-fiction reading for 6-7 AM when my mind is fresh(est). Included in my rotation of re-reading are Pema Chodron’s Start Where You Are, Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness, Joseph Goldstein’s Mindfulness, and many other Buddhist classics. The Bible stays near my morning sit-spot, and I also read or -re-read a Richard Rohr book every six months. A Franciscan priest and founder of The Center for Action and Contemplation, he has been instrumental in opening up the door for me to return home to my Christian roots in a new way. I highly recommend his weekly newsletter where he features interfaith leaders and scholars of contemplative theology. I loved his latest book this year The Tears of Things which explores the prophet’s role in Christianity and society, positing that the mature prophet always begins his or her mission from a place of outrage… but through the allowance of grief he or she will always end up in compassion.
Felt reality, he writes, is invariably wept reality, and wept reality is soon compassion and kindness. Decisive and harsh judgments slip away in the tracks of tears.
As I’ve grappled quite a bit with my own place in religion and faith this year, I coupled that with a few other reorientations towards the man who was Jesus. Theologian Marcus Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time helps place Jesus in a historical and religious context that he calls “Pre-Easter” and “Post-Easter.” So fascinating. The Wisdom Jesus by Cynthia Bourgeault, a modern day mystic and Episcopal priest, begins by calling Jesus “a recognition event,” one that, when it is authentic, results in unity consciousness and an inner peaceableness that flows into the outer world as harmony and compassion.
Makes me wonder how many self-labeled Christians have actually met this Jesus. And how many who would never choose that label actually have.
Stephen Mitchell is one of my favorite translators of spiritual classics and ancient poetry, and this year I read both his Book of Job and The Gospels According to Jesus. I also explored Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms by Buddhist teacher and scholar Norman Fischer. Inter-faith conversation and cross-pollination is one of my favorite things in the world, and on that note, I also re-read parts of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ. Let’s keep finding the places of harmony and connection, People! There are so many!
A few books I keep stacked near my morning sofa.
Some of you know that I became a certified Integrative Hypnotist in May, and I continue to study the brain in all of its fascinating, miraculous neuroplasticity. Ellen Langer’s The Mindful Body and all of Connierae Andreas’s work – Core Transformation, The Wholeness Work, and Heart of the Mind – have provided incredible frameworks for the transformation of my own stuck places while deepening my ability to guide others to places of freedom. Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity and Finding Your Life’s Purpose by Martha Beck was nothing new, but her quirky, chatty way of delivering mind-shifting science about change can be helpful.
After I read Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Power and Use It For Good by the somatic educator Kimberly Ann Johnson I immediately signed up for her course on women, the nervous system and eroticism. Coupling that with her recommended book Women’s Anatomy of Arousal: Secret Maps to Buried Pleasure by Sheri Winston was like getting zapped by a lightening bolt in my first and second chakras. Wowza! Why didn’t anyone teach me this stuff when I was 15?! Or 20?! Or as a new mother?! Well, it’s never too late, that’s for sure. Women, men, all ye who love women… get thyself to these books! Read.. and, more importantly… explore!
I just love good memoir and journalistic creative nonfiction. This year I read Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics by Ernesto Londono. Personal discovery meets deep research, a great combo. I didn’t love Aflame by Pico Iyer, but I love the idea of staying at a Big Sur monastery every year for several weeks and writing my head off. Pastrix by the wonderfully irreverent celebrity Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber - can those descriptors even go together?! - gave me permission to apply for my Masters of Divinity… still considering where I’m going with that one. Private Equity by Carrie Sun was a wild, gossipy dive into the world of hedge funds, gluttony, and burn-out. It was a dense read, but Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure by Maggie Jackson explores the brain - and life - on uncertainty.
Short summary: Certainty stifles and kills. Uncertainty keeps us alive.
That went well with Open Socrates: A Case for the Philosophical Life by the amazing public philosopher Agnes Callard. Another short summary: we learn best in dialogue. Let’s talk to each other and learn to ask the better questions!
This is the year I finally experienced Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way cover-to-cover, doing most of the exercises, and I get it. There is a reason this is a classic, and it re-ignited my relationship to my own creativity like nothing else. This year I also often picked up both Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy and Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act for stabs of inspiration, tiny beautiful pushes towards the inner light of my own creative mind. These books are lovely.
Finally, Sophie Strand’s latest book The Body is a Doorway is a rich ecological exploration of chronic illness and what the animal-plant world can teach us about healing, presence, and wholeness. I just started Patti Smith’s memoir Bread of Angels, and it reads like a punk rock version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Gorgeous, lush, raw, transporting. I don’t know what this world would be without Smith, this poet-punk angel who had the guts to move from NYC to a Michigan suburb at the height of her rock star career to raise her kids, who keeps her chin hairs long and her gray hair braided and reminds us what it means to eat, live, and breathe poetry while also not burning herself out but remaining a more-than-decent human being, a dedicated activist, and a damn good role model. (Read Just Kids for her first awesome memoir.)
And to end with some hope, from the NYT article that had my heart stopping:
“Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books,” said Heather McGuire, a veteran high school English teacher in Albuquerque…. Her students, she said, have told her they much prefer reading print books than reading on a screen.
Amen and Amen and May It Be So.
With love, I am yours in escaping, transporting, imagining, learning, growing, and challenging myself to be a more-than-decent human by burying my nose in a book, whenever possible.
Sara
1984. Happy.
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What a gift this post is, Sara! Thank you.