Hi, loves. 📚🌿

It's 2025 book time!

As most of you know, I am not big on gift guides (Edan Lepucki nailed it on this front), but I am big on books and I am big on books as gifts, even if you fail utterly in buying the right ones. Go to your local bookstore and browse! Get a gift receipt! Easy peasy! Is there a better activity on earth? Seriously, try me. There isn’t.

As I’ve written before, my friend Michelle and I have the best birthday ritual: we attempt to buy each other two or three perfect books. This sounds simple enough but we like totally different things so we usually fail sort of magnificently. This year, however, she nailed it. Nailed it so well I’d actually already read the two beautiful hardbacks she chose. So the best day of my life so far this month was when I got to go to the Village Well and trade them in! The moral of this story is: be the Michelle in your life.

Anyway. Below is my 2025 list. It feels weird and disjointed and brings back few memories, weirdly, unlike when I did my 2023 list. (And here’s the 2024 list and the 2022 one.) I leave this here with minimal commentary — and without links, please don’t buy books, of all things, on Amazon! — because I don’t know what you like! And also, guess what? It is so hard to write a book. The fact that any of these end up in the world and that people can buy them and read them is such a miracle. If you want more intel on any of them, just write me back and I’ll give you all the dirt.

Banger from 2025

I started off the year with Elin Hildebrand’s The Castaways and I can tell you now that I have zero recollection of what that was about. Then I reread Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld for the third time, followed by Jessica Soffer’s This is a Love Story. I tore through Molly Jong-Fast’s How to Lose Your Mother while waiting at Hebrew School pickup. Also devoured Dream State by Eric Puchler, which I loved until the apocalyptic ending. God, did I love Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, which I reread often. I think this is the perfect gift for basically anyone. There’s my gift guide!

I read Amy Griffin’s The Tell, now full of controversy, but I taught Amy yoga one million years ago in New York so I had to. I read First Born by Lauren Christenson and Piglet by Lottie Hazell. On a trip to Santa Barbara I bought Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett at Godmothers. I read Lynn Steger Strong’s The Float Test, then reread Flight (which I love) and did my yearly reread of Joanna Hershon’s wonderful St. Ivo. At some point Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting took over my life.

Tova Mirvis’ We Would Never came next, followed by Curtis Sittenfeld’s short stories, Show Don’t Tell, which were perfect. The debut Favorite Daughter by Morgan Dick was wonderful, as was Domenica Ruta’s All the Mothers. Don’t even ask me about Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the River. I got a galley.

Maybe my favorite book of the year.

God, did I love Florence Knapp’s The Names. I was soothed by Annabel Monaghan’s This is a Love Story on a hard trip to New York over the summer, then I read Jenny Han’s whole Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy with my kid while we watched the TV show. In Montreal I read Leila Lalami’s The Other Americans followed by Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (finally), both of which were gorgeous.

Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability blew me away. I found my own words from an essay echoed back to me (unattributed) in Chloe Caldwell’s Trying. Everyone was right about Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed: beautiful. I finally finished an Emily Henry book and it was Great Big Beautiful Life, followed by the utterly delighted The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett. I absolutely loved the expat novel, Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley, which I also got at Godmothers.

On yet another trip to Montreal I read Jen Hatmaker’s Awake and then Lily King’s Heart the Lover. For class, I reread Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea and Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of the Figment of my Imagination (both perfect). Of course I had to read Catherine Newman’s Wreck and Erin Somer’s The Ten Year Affair.

I just finished Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick A Color and am deep into All That Life Can Afford by Emily Everett, which is a great expat novel, which has been what I’ve been trying to write forever.

I’m sure I missed so many great ones. Tell me which ones!

I also read one million poems, but — if you want a tiny taste of something — my favorites were: “Before Lunar New Year, Our Mothers Go Missing” by Uyen Phuong Dang; “Tea” by Leila Chatti; “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo; Ada Limón’s “While Everything Else Was Falling Apart”; “Telling my Father” by James Crews.

So, that’s it! Tell me what you read so that I can start a 2026 list.

Last thing! We’ve had such a ball in Breakfast Club, we are going to keep at it, writing from January to May. No writing experience required, and I’d love to have you. I’m running an early-bird special now that ends December 17 (next Wed!) — so forget about everyone else for a second, and give yourself the gift of ONE HOUR A WEEK TO WRITE in a community of brilliant women. Or, hell, ask someone to gift it to you! You can sign up here.

Sending love,

Abs ox