Hello Everyone!
I’m writing to you from Maine, where I have been listening to books, needlepointing, taking long walks and soaking up this one precious life! Usually I listen to 150 audiobooks a year (last year was 196) but so far this year I’m only at 64, but this week I’ve finished a few:
So today I thought I’d do a roundup of books that I’ve talked about on the Substack this year and that some of you have recommended to me!!
My book club has a group chat and we are always recommending books to each other; it’s one of my favorite things.
→ COMMENT with the best book YOU’VE read this year and I will send the winner a book I think you’ll love!!!
→ I’m also building my fall list from your recommendations, so this giveaway is selfish!!
Best I’ve Read this Year: The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden. Thought-provoking and challenging, it tests themes of love, home, and survival. → Bookshop | Amazon
Book Club Final Boss: Strangers, Belle Burden. → Bookshop | Amazon
Summer Mystery: The God of the Woods, Liz Moore. I’m late on this, but a great summer read. → Bookshop | Amazon
Surprise of the Year: Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams. I loved this more than I thought I would. I know I’m late to reading it, but I recommend you read it if you haven’t. → Bookshop | Amazon
Best Memoir: Backtalker, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. The woman who coined intersectionality telling her own story. → Bookshop | Amazon
The One I’m Starting Tonight: Kin, Tayari Jones. I’ve been WAITING for this on my Libby, so many people’s fave book of the year. → Bookshop | Amazon
Best Book of 2025: Sunburn, Chloe Michelle Howarth. First love in a small Irish town, and the blissful ache of it. → Bookshop | Amazon
Additional favorites from last year (I went on a UK- author binge as part of my trip to Ireland): The Compound, Aisling Rawle (Bookshop | Amazon) and Penance, Eliza Clark (Bookshop | Amazon).
Animal, Lisa Taddeo. Messy lady fiction, which I love. → Bookshop | Amazon
Heart the Lover, Lily King. Feels like sitting next to a woman at a bar who tells you her whole life story without taking a breath. → Bookshop | Amazon
Sisters in Yellow, Mieko Kawakami. Women, money, and the schemes they run to survive in Tokyo. Dark and funny. → Bookshop | Amazon
Furious Violet, Sarai Walker. From the author of Dietland. → Bookshop | Amazon
L.A. Women, Ella Berman. I read the whole thing because it’s so evocative of a time, but I struggled to care about the characters’ choices, though this is very much based on real people. → Bookshop | Amazon
Girl’s Girl, Sonia Feldman. A novel about the glories and knife-edges of female friendship. → Bookshop | Amazon
I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman. I loved this. A great book club book. → Bookshop | Amazon
The Frozen River, Ariel Lawhon. I feel like this is the perfect book club with your mom book. → Bookshop | Amazon
Dolly All the Time, Annabel Monaghan. I had some feminist misgivings with the concept, but my book club all loved it and it’s well written. → Bookshop | Amazon
The Favorites, Layne Fargo. Wuthering Heights with ice dancing. Not for me, but lots of you have recommended it! → Bookshop | Amazon
Take What You Can, Naima Coster. Two friends who reunite to raise their daughters together; a GMA Book Club pick. → Bookshop | Amazon
With Friends Like You, Amy Chozick. A friendship novel with teeth from the journalist who covered Hillary. → Bookshop | Amazon
My Person, Téa Mutonji. A twenty-year friendship reaching its reckoning. → Bookshop | Amazon
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell. One of the best books of the decade. → Bookshop | Amazon
Cool Machine, Colson Whitehead. The third in the Harlem trilogy. → Bookshop | Amazon
Beginning Middle End, Valeria Luiselli. The Lost Children Archive author’s new one, and the literary read of the summer. → Bookshop | Amazon
Hum, Helen Phillips. Not the best read if you have young children and are sensitive, but an interesting exploration of the surveillance state in a way I haven’t seen anywhere else. → Bookshop | Amazon
Culpability, Bruce Holsinger. An exploration of AI in a way that feels new. → Bookshop | Amazon
Easy Money, Ben McKenzie. Crypto fuckery somehow giving good plot. → Bookshop | Amazon
Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke. Already sold over a million copies, tradwives, ballerina farm fanfic IMO. Review posted this week → Bookshop | Amazon
Wifehouse, Sonya Walger. A marriage novel that examines the millennial discontent. → Bookshop | Amazon
Wife Shaped Bodies, Laura Cranehill. A strange, sharp novel about what marriage does to a body. → Bookshop | Amazon
Lady Tremaine, Rachel Hochhauser. The wicked stepmother finally gets her say; a Reese’s Book Club pick. → Bookshop | Amazon
Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid. TJR knows how to write a page turner that makes you feel. → Bookshop | Amazon
Northern Spy, Flynn Berry. Irish mystery, I love all the Flynn Berry books. (A good read if you love Tana French!) → Bookshop | Amazon
The Parisian Heist, Jo Piazza. A summer caper in Paris. → Bookshop | Amazon
Daughters of the Sun and Moon, Lisa See. A sweeping new historical novel about three chinese women in post-civil war LA. → Bookshop | Amazon
They All Fall in Love at the End, Haili Blassingame. A polyamorous woman falls for two people she absolutely shouldn’t. Very hot-girl-summer. → Bookshop | Amazon
The Shampoo Effect, Jenny Jackson. Nepo-baby New Yorker moves to a small Massachusetts town to write her novel and blows up an old friend group. Juicy, funny, towel-on-the-beach reading. → Bookshop | Amazon
The Missed Connection, Tia Williams. A woman hires an investigator to track down the mysterious man from her flight. → Bookshop | Amazon
Our Perfect Storm, Carley Fortune. Best friends since they were eight, both stubborn, both too good at pushing each other’s buttons. → Bookshop | Amazon
The Tapestry of Fate, Shannon Chakraborty. Book two of the Amina al-Sirafi pirate adventures, for when you need to leave this century entirely. → Bookshop | Amazon
Crash Into Me, Robinne Lee. A photographer’s accident throws her back together with the model from her past. → Bookshop | Amazon
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood. Evocative, meditative, a forced mindful moment. → Bookshop | Amazon
Whidbey, T Kira Madden. Three women, one abusive man, one murder on a Pacific Northwest island. → Bookshop | Amazon
Somewhere Soft to Land, kai alonté. A debut about finding home and softness in a world that doesn’t always offer it. → Bookshop | Amazon
The Memory Museum, M Lin. Short stories. → Bookshop | Amazon
Heap Earth Upon It, Chloe Michelle Howarth. CMH’s new one, spookier, but not sufficiently sapphic for me to love it as much as Sunburn. → Bookshop | Amazon
Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy. Roy’s memoir of her ferocious, complicated mother. → Bookshop | Amazon
You with the Sad Eyes, Christina Applegate. Her memoir; funny and devastating in the same breath. → Bookshop | Amazon
Judy Blume: A Life, Mark Oppenheimer. A biography of the patron saint of girlhood. → Bookshop | Amazon
The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit. A hopefull way to look at our challenging wold. → Bookshop | Amazon
How to Be a Dissident, Gal Beckerman. Lesson’s from history’s dissidents. → Bookshop | Amazon
Get Home Safe, Rana Abdelhamid. A self-defense that is also about building our collective power. → Bookshop | Amazon
Stealing America, Linford D. Fisher. The hidden history of Indigenous slavery in America. → Bookshop | Amazon
Migrant Heart, Reyna Grande. On migration, family, and belonging. → Bookshop | Amazon
Transcendent, Laverne Cox. A raw and vulnerable memoir → Bookshop | Amazon
Good Morning Means I Love You, Kendra Allen. Essays on love, family, and language. → Bookshop | Amazon
Liberation Summer, Micki McElya. A historian’s account of a movement summer. → Bookshop | Amazon
→ COMMENT with the best book YOU’VE read this year and I will send the winner a book I think you’ll love!!!
→ I’m also building my fall list from your recommendations, so this giveaway is selfish!!
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.