This year has been filled with its tender moments and quiet delights. 2025 has also been grindingly awful. Every day’s news packed with official lies, cruel slurs, new atrocities, more bridges to a bright future burned. Still, I am grateful for fervent and often playful resistance, brilliant science, awe-inspiring art, nature’s constant teachings, compassionate people everywhere. And of course for the way books help hold me together even when so much is falling apart. Thank goodness for the restorative, mind-stretching, soul-rejuvenating power of books. Here’s a nod to a few of the most memorable books I read this year.

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IMMERSIVE AND AMAZING NONFICTION

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Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. I deliberately read this book slowly, a chapter or two a month, letting it reawaken me to the deep place of joy and meaning accessed via the arts. It is not remotely a self-help book, but it got me back to dancing in the kitchen when I cook, doing a little sketch each morning, and taking more time to savor small beauties I encounter in daily life. If you love science-rich inspiration, this is a book for you. 

 “Art and play are like two sides of the same coin, with play being a part of artistic expression, imagination, creativity, and curiosity.”  

“When you make art and you don’t know what’s going to happen, you’re involved in the mystery that life really is.”    

“When you tap into the arts to foster a meditative state, the places in your brain responsible for judgment and personal criticism are quieted in your prefrontal cortex, and you can assess a more generous, perspective-taking point of view.”

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I love everything Kimmerer writes but this small and beautifully illustrated book is a perfect reminder for fans and a perfect introduction for those who may not be familiar with her work or the concepts she enumerates so beautifully. Here’s a favorite quote:

“In the Anishinaabe worldview, it’s not just fruits that are understood as gifts, rather all of the sustenance that the land provides, from fish to firewood. Everything that makes our lives possible—the splints for baskets, roots for medicines, the trees whose bodies make our homes, and the pages of our books—is provided by the lives of more-than-human beings. This is always true whether it’s harvested directly from the forest or whether it’s mediated by commerce and harvested from the shelves of a store—it all comes from the Earth. When we speak of these not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes.”

Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki. This may well be my favorite read of the year. I’m convinced it’s not just my current lifeboat but essential reading for anyone in these hope-challenging times. Jamil Zaki, a recovering cynic himself, shows how our competitive culture overvalues cynicism. Most of us think cynics are more responsible, better able to assess people, make more considered decisions, become better managers and leaders. Instead, they are much worse than hopeful people at all these things. They are also more prone to prop up their own self-worth through putting others down. They are typically zero-sum thinkers, believing they can only gain if others lose. This makes neighbors, coworkers, strangers, even loved ones into rivals. Instead, the author gives us a pathway to embracing what hope can do for our mental health, relationships, community, and world. I’m buying a few copies to spread some hope.   

“Optimism is idealistic; hope is practical. It gives people a glimpse of a better world and pushes them to fight for it.”       

“Beliefs reflect what you think of the world; values reveal more about yourself. Confusing these two can be dangerous business. When someone attaches their self-worth to a belief—political, personal, or otherwise—they desperately need to be right. Challenges to what they think feel like threats to how they think—evidence they aren’t smart or good enough. The person screaming loudest is often most fearful of being wrong.”   

“I have discovered that most people value compassion over selfishness, that donating money activates similar parts of your brain as eating chocolate, and that helping others through their stress soothes our own. The message of our work is simple: There is good in us, and it does good for us.”

Painting the Cosmos: How Art and Science Intersect to Reveal the Secrets of the Universe by Nia Imara. Imara offers a primer on the many unrecognized ways art and cosmology intersect. Painting The Cosmos is illuminated not only with gorgeous images but also the author’s insight and wisdom.

Once and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in Modern Times by Phil Cousineau.   An engagingly insightful look at the impact of myth in our times. Cousineau writes about his own stringent upbringing as well as joys and sorrows in each stage of his life. He moves effortlessly from cultural critique to discussing how Bushmen recognize two hungers—for food and for meaning. “Myths are the original soul stories, showing us, as my mentor Joseph Campbell used to say, how to live ‘with joyous participation in the sorrows of the world.'”   

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel. This is quite a story—impeccably researched and told well. The author brings in just the right amount of information on hermit traditions in history, about what might be a genetic basis for extreme introversion, and from his own conversations with Christopher Knight. I found it particularly interesting how people in the surrounding community reacted to several decades of “their” mysterious thieving hermit.   

“Carl Jung said that only an introvert could see “the unfathomable stupidity of man.”    

“He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.”    

“Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.”

Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive by Eliot Stein. A respectful, heart-filling chronicle of people from ten countries who are the last few practitioners of disappearing arts. These include Indian mirror makers, Inca grass weaving bridge-builders, Sardinian pasta makers, cigar factory readers, a 27^th generation West African griot, and the last night watchman in Ystad, Sweden. “In an age when everything has seemingly been explored and explained, and where cynicism so often overshadows curiosity and wonder, these cultural custodians remind us how much there still is to discover, and invite us to fall back in love with the world.”    

The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine by Barbara Tedlock. The author discusses the shamanic powers women have long expressed in healing, body wisdom, trance and vision questing, as well as the spiritual energy in body cycles and childbirth, and much more– using evidence from prehistoric to modern times.  Here’s a quick walk through her words.

“Despite the proof of language and artifacts, despite pictorial representations, ethnographic narratives, and eyewitness accounts, the important—no, the primacy—of women in shamanic traditions has been obscured and denied. That women’s bodies and minds are particularly suited to tap into the power of the transcendental has been ignored. The roles that women have played in healing and prophecy throughout human history have been denigrated… All too often women who enter medicine or the ministry still believe they’re stepping into a strictly men’s field; in fact, these are historically women’s fields that men have since entered…. It’s time to take another look at the evidence of millennia and of cultures around the globe. It’s time to reclaim the woman in the shaman’s body.”

Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia edited by Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray. This is a powerful anthology. I was particularly drawn to works by Silas House, Ann Pancake, Mary Crockett Hill, and Tennessee Jones. In particular, I kept rereading passages by Jones. What a voice. He writes about handling what we’d now call trauma: “The people I loved and who loved me had stabbed me in the heart for as long as I could remember to try to prepare me for the hardness of the world. From this I learned to stab myself, again and again, just to see if I could stand it… I did not realize, then, that self-hate is perhaps the highest form of selfishness we can re-create. It is the oil that allows the wheels of the big evils to turn.” He writes about class divides: “I slowly began to realize I was not the same color white as my middle-class friends.” I could easily quote from every one of his paragraphs.

How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi. It’s hard to imagine a lively approach to this dire subject but, despite some repetition, this is that. I listened to the audio version, delightfully narrated by the authors. Since I only listened for about 30 minutes a day the hideous and deadly subjugation of women wasn’t as overwhelming as it could have been. A few apt quotes:

“When the going gets tough in any society, it is the most vulnerable who are accused of causing the damage.”

“Discovering that we both had a ridiculously detailed knowledge of real-life murders, we came up with a theory about why women in particular love true crime. In our view, it was down to a combination of the pragmatism of learning how not to get abducted and murdered (always useful), coupled with an element of bearing witness to all the women who were not so lucky.”

“No matter how terrible, history must be learned from and remembered.”

Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does by Philip Ball. This may look like one of those coffee table books, likely because at features 250 color photographs showing the patterns shared in what seem to be distinctly different parts of the natural world including honeycomb, seashell spirals, soundwaves, forests, coastlines, galaxies. They are not only beautiful, they point to underlying unity around us. The accompanying text is minimal, making this very accessible, but no less profound.  

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IMMERSIVE AND AMAZING MEMOIRS

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Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging by Tara Roberts. The author brings us into her widening life after encountering Diving With A Purpose, a group of scuba divers dedicated to documenting the undersea wrecks of ships carrying enslaved people. She pulls together little-known histories, long-silent stories, ocean-based beliefs, and more. I had no idea one out of ten ships carrying enslaved people experienced coordinated resistance. I’d never heard of public archaeology: involving the community’s people as the center of scientific work. I’d learned the trauma of enslavement is carried through generations of descendants but never knew the Transatlantic Slave Trade left a legacy of ecological trauma as well. I knew about the Underground Railroad, but learned here there was also a very successful Maritime Underground Railroad. Throughout the book Roberts searches for her own sense of home, identity, and purpose.

She writes about a photo of her great-great grandparents. “I always thought both of them were really handsome people. I mean Grandpa Jack has on a suit—it looks like brown corduroy. And Grandma Mary, she wears a stiff white button-down shirt with a bow tie. A bow tie! She looks formidable but also soft. And they look like equals… I saw this kindness in both their eyes that just made me want to know them, you know? Like I would have liked to lean against Jack’s knee and hold his hand and hear his stories. And I feel like Mary would have swatted me on the butt affectionately and shared her lessons on how to live powerfully as a woman in the world.”

And she writes, “What if our displacement and enslavement—our unique ancestry and our very rootlessness—as African-descended people throughout the diaspora puts us on the leading edge of thought and creation? What if, through us, a new way of understanding identity can be articulated and lived—one that can help point a way forward for humanity.”

Holler Rat: A Memoir by Anya Liftig. Thoroughly engaging, thoughtfully written memoir by a woman whose early memories inform her performance art and whose experiences with classism reflect this country. Here’s a snippet: “On my mother’s side, identity was not only tied to the land, it was the land. Year after year, the place where your family had settled become more and more associated with your name and your people… To leave the land was to betray it. And by betraying it, you were also betraying yourself.”

Desert Flower by Waris Dirie. The book begins on a broiling hot day when Dirie faces down a lion with the same equanimity she displays by fleeing toward ever-greater freedom. She writes vividly of growing up in a nomadic Somalian family. There was hunger and danger, but also beauty. She describes a rare gathering with other herding families. “The people celebrate with our traditional dancing: the women clapping their hands and chanting, their low sweet voices humming across the desert night, and the men leaping high into the air. Everyone contributes food, and we eat.” She moves ever farther from her early life after fleeing an arranged marriage at age 13, eventually on to a modeling career and activism against the horrific practice of FGM. This memoir nearly vibrates with the author’s unshakeable belief in herself.

Toil & Trouble by Augusten Burroughs.  A delight of a memoir about a witty but anxious gay man who has inherited the family gift of witchery. He uses second sight and the occasional spell to steer ahead as he moves from NYC to the country with his partner—what’s not to love? Burroughs is a masterful writer, making all his books flow with a storyteller’s ease, but in Toil & Trouble he also educates us as he was educated on the uses of magic. I’m happy to see witchcraft explained not as the glitter eyeshadow and fussy wand crap some reduce it to, but a real art known throughout human history. A few snippets:

“What I am certain of is that there’s something wonky going on beneath the surface of what we call reality. Things are not as they appear. They are much, much more.”

“We live in a physical world where the mere act of observation alone is enough to alter that which is observed, to change it from one form of matter into another. What is that if not magick?”

“I know that under the best, lowest-stress circumstances I am an absolute horror to live with, a halogen-illuminated fountain of anxiety, control, and catastrophe. Mental health would be nice, but there’s not time for that, so I do the next best thing: on a walk along the Hudson to loosen the phlegm in my chest, I stop at a deli and pick up a sack of twelve oversized butter cookies with multicolored sprinkles.”

The Perils of Girlhood: A Memoir in Essays by Melissa Fraterrigo.  These are fine essays, some of them excellent hybrid pieces. Each is infused with quotidian details that bring small and large traumas into sharp focus. Fraterrigo writes about coming of age with struggles relevant to every woman I know while at the same time writing about marriage, motherhood, and what she wants for her girls. It’s hard to pick an excerpt because this book goes so many places, but here’s a sample:

“’Can you tell me what’s wrong? I can’t help you unless I know.’

After what seemed like days, she spoke. ‘I just don’t like myself.’

How to let her know I had sometimes felt this way at twelves and twenty-two and now, in my late forties?’

‘Just because you think something, doesn’t mean it’s true.’ Eva blinked and something rippled through me. It was what I wish I had been told. Eva hugged me hard and fast. It felt powerful all the same.
Maybe in order for her to understand her own feelings, she needs to see me grappling with things that even now confuse and embarrass me.”

Life Is So Good: One Man’s Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98 by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman. A journey through the life of an observant, intelligent, hardworking, deeply principled man. George Dawson brings history, social studies, and a philosophy of living alive. Life Is So Good would be an excellent addition to a middle school or high school reading list. “People forget that a picture ain’t made from just one color. Life ain’t all good or all bad. It’s full of everything.”

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for our Future by Maria Ressa. The author’s courage and integrity led her to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Her experience also forms a timely warning for those of us anywhere in the world where authoritarianism is taking over.

She writes, from experience, about surveillance capitalism’s algorithms affecting not only behavior but democracy itself. “Lies that are repeated over and over,” she writes, “exponentially change the public’s perception of an issue, something world powers have always known about propaganda but that gained new meaning and pitch in the age of social media… What happened in the Philippines in 2016 is a microcosm of every information operation launched in democratic countries around the world. The combination of bots, fake accounts, and content creators… infected real people like a virus, but often those unsuspecting citizens didn’t even know they had been infected.”

She also writes how difficult it is for fact-checked journalism to reach people in the grip of social media. She focuses almost entirely on Facebook but her assertions fit nearly all social media companies. She writes of her media company:

“We had standards and ethics manuals; we upheld freedom of expression…. We didn’t realize that those ‘content creators’ with their crude, sometimes lewd, manipulative posts, now passed as political pundits, even as journalists reports ‘facts.’ Those accounts were at the core of a propaganda machine that bullied and harassed its targets and incited its followers to violence… Facebook didn’t only provide a platform for those propagandists’ speech or even only enable them: in fact, it gave them preferential treatment because anger is the contagious currency of Facebook’s profit machine. Only anger, outrage, and fear led to greater numbers of people using Facebook more times a day. Violence has made Facebook rich.”

And, “Today, an emergent wave of right-wing populist leaders uses social media to question and break down reality, triggering rage and paranoia on a bed of exponential lies. This is how fascism is normalized and where political outrage meets terrorism…”

Although this book isn’t the most personal of memoirs, it offers glimpses of her growth as a person. She reveals, “I began to realize that the work of art you’re creating is your life; that the person you are today has been created by all your past selves… but that your actions today actually change those earlier versions of yourself.”

The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys by Marina Chapman and Lynne Barrett-Lee.  Quite a unique memoir. The chapters of her Chapman’s life in the jungle, where she is slowly accepted by a troupe of monkeys, are so full of nuance that it’s hard to imagine she (as some claim) made any of it up. Specific personalities of the monkeys, the many life-saving things she learned by observing them, and the ways her traumatized little girl self left behind the human world feel authentic to me. As she writes, “I had only two concerns: to satisfy my basic needs and to satisfy my curiosity — the same simple life that the monkeys had.” Chapters after that are grim, but this resilient girl persevered and learned. I was heartened to look the author up and find that she went on to marry and raise a family, as she vowed to do back when she was a despised street child who saw too often what happened when babies were born to trafficked girls. This was a read-in-one-night book for me! 

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IMMERSIVE AND AMAZING NOVELS

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Animal Life by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. Animal Life is a deep, refreshingly different book filled with musings on life, nature, the cosmos, our human responsibility to the earth, and meaning – especially the meaning inherent in birth and in light. The author begins by noting the most beautiful word in the Icelandic language, as voted by its people, is the word for midwife — “ljósmóðir” — variously translated as “lightmother” and “mother of light.”

The main character is a young midwife, one in a long ancestral line of midwives. I began to identify even more strongly with her grand-aunt, who had passed away and whose very full apartment the main character inherited. The grand-aunt had passionate concerns about human impact on the planet, an endless interest in science as well as poetry, and unfinished writing projects that were full of questions and contradictions. Ólafsdóttir writes, “It’s difficult to understand another person. But what is even more difficult to understand, difficult to know, what is most alien of all that is alien, unknown of all that is unknown, is one’s self.”

Wreck by Catherine Newman. I loved Wreck just as much as I loved her novel Sandwich, and for the same reasons–the intelligent wry bittersweetness of it all. Plus how much her kids remind me of my kids, although her offspring are not as annoying brilliant on nearly every topic as mine can be. And passages that simply gleam from the page, like this one about a stage her teenaged daughter went through:

“Back then, every molecule in her body recoiled, in horror, from every molecule of my own. I exhaled carbon dioxide that she was then forced to inhale! I manifested odors and opinions and existence, and all of it was unspeakable, intolerable. I felt, for a year or two, like I was kneeling soundlessly with a palmful of birdseed, hand extended, waiting for the wild animal of my daughter to approach me.”

The Outside Boy by Jeanine Cummins. Gorgeously written coming of age novel that roams across themes of loyalty, nature, Old Ways, compassion, prejudice, literacy, and love. It’s told through eyes of a teenaged boy raised as a Traveller. Here are two snippets:

“My mam and dad had fell in love over books, over sunlight and soil and simplicity, and I was the product of their bold, impossible love. I was the freest, happiest moment of their lives…”   

“In Mass I wanted to talk to God, but I didn’t know if He’d recognize me. I couldn’t think of nothing to say. So instead I pictured my life as a shattered plate, a fine piece of crockery broke and splintered into a thousand tiny pieces. And then I spent the hour collecting up all them bits of colored wreckage, and one by one, I placed them shards into the invisible hands of God. I hoped He would maybe glue them back together for me.”

Heartwood by Amity Gaige. This is a satisfying novel. Gaige has given us three very intelligent and determined women with distinctive lives. I was most closely drawn to the beautifully written journal entries like this one where Valerie muses on her earliest memories. “The nightly cataclysm: the mother leaves the room.” This compelling and redemptive novel kept me reading on a difficult day when a resounding disaster of a federal budget was passed in Congress. It allowed me to put off the news while I marveled at moss and sighed with gratitude for search/rescue volunteers. I am going to need more Amity Gaige books asap.

The Names by Florence Knapp. Three alternative trajectories explored for the same lives, hinging on which name was given to a baby. Not only well-written and thrumming with possibility, it also evokes our own “what if” thinking. Here are a few glimpses:  

“Cora realizes her daughter has learned what to do. How to soothe, to placate. That just through watching, the first time she’s stepped into this role, she is already accomplished. If it doesn’t stop, Cora thinks, this pattern will repeat unendingly, the destiny of each generation set on the same course.”     

“There’s something about that—when the quietest person, most reserved in their opinions, most reluctant to impose their thoughts on others, finally speaks; you hear. Oh. Oh, and you’re suddenly face to face with the truth.”   

“She was still reading to me—to us—right up until the end. Whatever I chose from the school library. She never judged, never said, Not this one, or, You shouldn’t be reading that. I can still remember it. That feeling of being read to, of being wrapped up in her voice, those words, whatever place the story had taken us to. It sounds stupid, but it was like a magic carpet.”

Happy People Don’t Live Here by Amber Sparks.  A strangely enlivening novel with a whole community of ghosts, neighbors, and what they cherish beyond all bounds. One main character is a magical-thinking child whose attempt at mystery-solving was enough to keep me up half the night reading. All that plus courage, kindness, and the necessity of making art. 

Koan Khmer by Bunkong Tuon. The author’s powerful yet understated prose brings the reader right into the ongoing burdens of war, grief, and displacement as Samnang Sok adapts to a new (often hostile) culture. Koan Khmer is a universal coming-of-age story while also a complex account specific to the author’s experiences. 

Beneficence by Meridith Hall. This novel comes across as a hauntingly sad song with an ongoing refrain made up of a farm’s rituals — milking, plowing, haying, feeding, milking again. It reminds me of older works by writers who describe the loveliness as well as brutal realities of rural life. Written with pathos and deep connection to the land.

The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett. There are plenty of road trip books featuring some version of a curmudgeon who finds himself saddled with kids he doesn’t really know or want to know. Maybe there are plenty because there’s room in the plot for nearly anything. I started and finished The Road To Tender Hearts on a difficult day, which surely colors my assessment, but it was just the book I needed. Heavy topics like grief, addiction, estrangement, and death handled with wryly humorous insight by well-drawn characters including a uniquely gifted cat.

The Doorman by Chris Pavone. Not my usual thing but I found this a truly absorbing read. The doorman of a ritzy apartment building and the rich people who, mostly, care nothing about lives of less opulence than their own. The plot centers not only on these separate lives, but the divisions boiling over in the city around them. As in, “These apartments were more like vaults than residences. One sold for two hundred and twenty million dollars, a figure equivalent to spending nearly a thousand dollars per day, every day, for six hundred years. A scale that proved just how much was wrong with the world.”

Needle Lake by Justine Champine. A neurodivergent girl’s story that dives gradually into ever more alarming situations after her older cousin arrives for an extended visit. Insightful writing, powerful characters, and (for me) several unanticipated twists. I found myself thinking about the story well after I’d finished it. Here’s a moment when the main character Ida calms her entirely valid fears:

“I looked up at the sky and wished a funnel of light would come down, pass through the fog, and beam me up into the quiet vacuum of space. If a rocket full of aliens landed in the parking lot right then, I would’ve hopped right in, no question. I wiped my eyes, then tried to focus my gaze on the bark of the tree that grew in the curb planter in front of me. I tried to follow the patterns in the wood, find shapes in the grain. A rabbit, an apple, a baby’s round face. I leaned closer to the tree, squinting against the dim light. I ran my fingers over the bark.”

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Ratings I left for nearly everything I read this year (191 books, I believe) are on my Goodreads page. I note plenty of 4 star books that almost made this list! No matter where you are, may books take you as far as you want to go. Wishing us all a brighter, more inclusive, more playful, more caring and just world in 2026.