Getting right down to it, below are the 35* books I read in 2025. I’ve linked to previous Nat’s Nook posts where I’ve discussed those particular reads, but I haven’t linked to any books themselves. Your not-so-subtle nudge to get out there and support your local independent!

1. The Night We Lost Him by Laura Dave

2. The Distance Between Us by Maggie O’Farrell

3. Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

4. First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

5. A Great Marriage by Frances Meyer

6. You Are Here by David Nicholls

7. The God of The Woods by Liz Moore

8. This is a Love Story by Jessica Soffer

9. Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld

10. Lucky Night by Eliza Kennedy

11. Back After This by Linda Holmes

12. The Float Test by Lynn Steger Strong

13. Insignificant Others by Sarah Jio

14. Heartwood by Amity Gaige

15. You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld

16. Mansion Beach by Meg Mitchell Moore

17. Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

18. Sandwich by Catherine Newman

19. The Unwedding by Ally Condie

20. Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

21. Dream State by Eric Puchner

22. Far and Away by Amy Poeppel

23. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

24. Salty by Kate Myers

25. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

26. The Displacements by Bruce Holsinger

27. Happy Wife by Kendall Shores and Meredith Lavender

28. Excavations by Kate Myers

29. The Academy by Elin Hilderbrand

30. The Secret History by Donna Tartt

31. Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

32. The Admissions by Meg Mitchell Moore

33. The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers

34. These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean

35. Heart the Lover by Lily King (*starting this one tonight, Dec. 18th, so it’s likely I will be well into a 36th or even 37th novel by the time the ball drops)

As big of a reader as I am, this is the first time I’ve actually counted and catalogued the books I’ve finished in a given year, and I’m realizing that taking a moment to reflect on everything I’ve read over 365 days is something I need to do more regularly. Seeing all of these titles in one place makes me feel…not accomplished, exactly, but confident in the fact that I filled my brain, heart, and soul with other people’s words and stories. For that, I am surely better off today than I was on January 1, 2025, and if that’s the case, who needs New Year’s resolutions?

Happy Holidays and thank you so much for being here.

P.S. - if you want to hear more of my thoughts on any of the unlinked (or linked, for that matter) books, please consider the comments section our own little book club. Would love to discuss more!

The concept of a “blind date with a book” is actually something I only learned about over the weekend, when I ended a run at our local farmer’s market and noticed a booth advertising this exact notion. The stall featured tables piled high with stacks of books wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string, each with a short scrawl across the front. I curse the fact that I failed to snap a photo at the time, being sweaty and tired and all, but here is one from the internet:

Am I late to the party on this? Is this how some people buy their books now, or is this just a quirky, small-town niche interest? The fact that I found this photo on Reddit tells me that this may be a wider phenomenon.

As much as I am loving the Hallmark “film” that’s playing as I type this, given that it combines my main interests of cozy bookstores and love stories (did I mention it’s set on Nantucket?!), the part where the book covers are wrapped in brown paper is the part I can’t really get behind.

I am a visual person, and I am known to, yes, judge a book by its cover. I love the designs, the blurbs, the author bio, all of it! That’s half the fun of shopping for books—seeing them arranged in their colorful glory, packed tightly into shelves and splayed appealingly on coffee tables, featured on aisle-ends and fighting for your attention.

Having said that, I actually adore the idea of a blind date with a book, and what it does for reading culture in general. I assume (based on the farmer’s market stall and the romcom unfolding before me) that a bookseller is wrapping the books in brown paper before writing the genre and a brief description on the cover, and it’s then up to the reader to decide if that tiny bit of information is enough to take the plunge.

It’s book recommendations with a side of mystery! It’s the trust you’re putting in your local bookshop, and the love you’re demonstrating for reading even when you’re not sure the book will be a hit, or something you otherwise would have selected. It’s faith that you’ll be enriched by the experience all the same, because sometimes the surprise of a book delighting you when you least expected it to is what reading is all about.

As someone who orders the same meal at the same restaurants every weekend, and vacations to the same spots year after year, perhaps I could use more of this uncertainty in my life. Just yesterday I finished A Secret History, which you may remember is a novel I had been putting off for years because I wasn’t 100% sure I would love it. Five-hundred and fifty-nine pages later, my only regret is not starting it sooner.

Let’s rewind to last month, when I was on a family trip to South Africa. In-between game drives at sunrise and sunset, treadmill runs followed by solo reading time are what anchored me to somewhat of a regular routine.

I picked up Happy Wife on our way out of the country, during a long layover at Newark airport, despite already having two books in my carry-on (if you’ve been here long enough, you know that airplanes and travel activate my book scarcity mindset). I had never heard of Happy Wife nor its authors, but its cover and description were exactly what I was looking for: fun, frivolous, not necessarily up for a Pulitzer.

It delivered. The writing was a little lacking, and I definitely tripped over a plot hole or five, but it absolutely provided entertainment and escapism. For those wondering why one would need to escape a luxury vacation in an exotic country, note that I finished Happy Wife as a not-so-happy wife experiencing violent food poisoning in a Cape Town hotel room. Suffice it to say I left that germ-ridden book behind when we departed for our final destination.

Enter Excavations, one of the two books I originally brought on the trip (along with The Displacements, which I wrote about here). I absolutely loved this book, as I suspected I might based on my love of Kate Myers’ newer novel Salty (which I wrote about here!). Myers has quickly risen to the top of my list of favorite authors, and I’m beyond excited to see Peacock’s TV adaptation of Excavations (“Dig”), co-created by Amy Poehler!

As for what’s ahead, I recently picked up two books I’m eager to dive into later this fall: Meg Mitchell Moore’s Admissions (you may remember I loved Mansion Beach) and Alice Feeney’s Beautiful Ugly (I read Rock Paper Scissors last year and wasn’t enamored but this one came highly recommended).

I love nothing more than a lunch date on the downtown mall, since it gives me the best excuse to stop into a bookshop and, well, shop. Happy reading and Halloween-ing!

I should note that it was a perfect fall weekend in central Virginia, and I did make sure to diligently complete all the seasonal outdoor activities - running, farmers market-ing, rooftop bar-ing to peep the gilded foliage down below. But the majority of my Saturday was spent devouring The Academy, which centers on a New England boarding school and its cunning cast of characters. I was sad for it to end, but comforted myself with two things: 1) the knowledge that a sequel is on its way next September, and 2) starting a new book, of course.

This novel has been on my nightstand for years (literally) but I have never before last night picked it up. Knowing that it, too, is set on a school campus in New England, I decided to ride the momentum of The Academy and dive into what is sure to be a much darker and deeper read, not to mention longer—while The Academy clocked in at 413 pages, A Secret History is 576, which of course is practically a leaflet compared to the last Donna Tartt novel I read (The Goldfinch, which totals a whopping 800ish, depending on the edition). Luckily, reading is in session, and in season, and I’m excited to leaf through every last page.

Just as I have managed to make wonderful new friends in adulthood, I’m pleased to report that I found a new auto-buy author as well, Bruce Holsinger. I first read one of his books, The Gifted School, back in 2021. I still vividly remember spending a several-hour stretch on my couch, devouring every last word. When I read the Acknowledgments (as I religiously do), I saw that he mentioned the university where I work, which is how I discovered that we both, in fact, work for the same university. I immediately recommended The Gifted School to friends and family (and still do, to this day).

Fast-forward to 2025, when Holsinger’s fifth novel, Culpability, got selected for Oprah’s Book Club. I’m confident this book would have made its way on to my radar regardless, but Oprah, of course, catapulted it onto a different plane of publicity. As soon as I heard about its release, I eagerly bought it from my local bookseller and proceeded to read it in record time. Like The Gifted School, Culpability crafts an absolutely devourable plot with an overlay of moral/social/ethical commentary throughout. Both novels center on issues that I myself grapple with daily - admissions at an elite school and artificial intelligence - but their juicy storylines, characters’ relatable flaws, and modern-day dilemmas as presented are universal.

It was during or shortly after reading Culpability that I came to a thrilling realization: Holsinger is a new auto-buy author for me. I will read anything he writes and feel confident that I won’t be disappointed. Accordingly, I returned to my local bookseller and picked up his 2022 novel, The Displacements. Talk about modern-day dilemmas: The Displacements centers on themes of privilege, class, and climate change, and I loved it just as much as the others.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Holsinger at a bookstore event here in Charlottesville. The very first thing I asked him was “are you working on anything now?” Such is the mind of a person who has discovered a new auto-buy author in her life. And the good news is, yes, but we’ll have to wait a little while.

Happy reading—and hunting—of all the auto-buys waiting to be discovered out there.

Now that I am in a completely different job, city, and phase of life, I feel fortunate that I no longer feel the Sunday Scaries as I once did. Of course, I prefer the weekends to weekdays like any normal person, but the doom associated with going back to work is largely gone. That being said, I also happen to work at a school, which means that the tempo of busy-ness is largely dictated by the ebb and flow of the academic calendar. Despite not getting winter break or spring break like my students do, summertime does mean a bit of a respite from the pace I’m keeping up the rest of the year. Everyone and everything is a bit more relaxed. My team goes on vacations, I work from the pool some afternoons, and the ease of getting around in a college town when the kids are gone reminds us that we are in the thick of sweet, sweet summertime.

For these reasons, on this gloriously beautiful Sunday of Labor Day weekend, it feels to me as if something is ending. It’s the scariest of Sundays because it portends the return of the hustle, the wondering if you need to bring a jacket to dinner, the winding down of summer reading. Regardless of the book, summer reading just hits different, in the best possible way.

If you’re looking for one last joy ride of a book before the leaves start to fall, Salty by Kate Myers embodies the fun and frivolity of this season. Set (mostly) aboard a luxury yacht in various tropical settings, every time I picked up this novel I felt as if I was jetting off to vacation. The writing is so clever and funny that, only a few pages in, I made it a point to add Myers’ first novel, Excavations, to my TBR.

I know that, when the time comes, I will welcome the coziness of autumn and its accompanying reading with a (hot) coffee and a blanket. For now, I plan to drown the scaries in pool water, cold brew, and juicy reads.

I mentioned in my very first post that this newsletter would contain book-adjacent content such as cats and particularly cute bookshops, and this edition is no different. This absolutely perfect bookstore on Park City’s main street was not only named after a cat - featured prominently on the logo - it also shares a storefront serving up some of the best ice cream I’ve had in a long while. (Like books, I consume a lot of ice cream, so I know what I’m talking about).

I patronized the ice cream shop twice and the bookstore zero times, but that’s only because I already had my hands very full with reading, and I’m never too full for ice cream (literally, never). We did spend some quality time browsing the shelves and I was very tempted to buy something, although strolling the aisles with my fellow bibliophile (hi Jen!) while pointing at titles asking “have you read this” and commanding “you must read that” was, I swear, as fulfilling as actually taking home a new novel.

My restraint was mostly due to the fact that, at that moment, I was reading two books at the same time, rather rare for me but necessitated by the exact same hardback/long flight dilemma as I shared in “What Happens in Vegas” back in June. Only this time, I had a bit too much of my hardback to finish before the trip, and it was way too good of a book to rush through, so I packed a paperback for the long weekend, knowing that I had the end of the hardback to look forward to upon our return.

Enter Dream State by Eric Puchner.

I intentionally started reading this book before the Utah trip because it’s set in Montana, an adjoining and similarly scenic state (I assume; I have yet to visit) that I figured would get me extra excited for the adventure awaiting us in Park City. While Dream State dished up a great amount of scenery (if Montana had not already been high on my list of places to visit, this book would have given it a boost), I really fell in love with the story and the characters. As is the case with most of my favorite novels, this one involves - you guessed it - a love triangle with a side of dysfunctional family.

Perfect for a pool day: unexpected twists and turns, laugh-out-loud dialogue, heartwarming moments of male friendship. While the books I typically read tend to focus on female friendships, families, and romantic entanglements, I actually enjoy reading about male friendships the most. Perhaps this is because I have always been exceedingly proud of how my male high school friends have kept in touch with me and with each other over the last (fine!) 28 years. They have all, thank goodness, married wonderful women, such as my bibliophile friend, so it’s not always just me and a bunch of dudes. But these male friends have taught me more about enduring friendship than anyone, and have remained as solid and reliable a presence in my life as books. Now that is a dream.

All of that is to say, without a much-anticipated Nantucket novel anchoring my summer reading list, I’ve felt a bit adrift (seems I can’t even write a sentence without evoking sailboats bobbing in the ocean). Perhaps that is why, while I’ve read one or two “beachy” books since Memorial Day, I’ve also found myself selecting some rather, shall we say, wintry reads.

Enter Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall. I started this book while on vacation in South Carolina and remained engrossed the entire time. When I say this is a “wintry” read I don’t mean to imply it’s Anna Karenina or anything. The writing actually feels quite jaunty, despite a more serious subject matter. I don’t like to give too much away in terms of plot when recommending books, but just know that it’s a family saga/love triangle set on a farm in 1960’s England.

It should be said that I experienced a lot of this chilly novel on a particularly perfect (and hot) vacation day. I started with my usual morning run along the beach, followed by my favorite sandwich and coffee in the co-op, followed by an hour or two floating in the ocean, returning to shore only to get back to the characters within these pages.

Whenever I think of this book, despite some of its devastating plot points, I’ll also remember this quintessential, happy beach day—and vice versa. I love this about books, how they can connect us to points in time like this, and maybe that’s what I loved so much about the rhythm of Elin’s summer releases: I began to associate each one of them with a certain exotic vacation, or extra-long pool day, or difficult year of life that I managed to pull through. Just as summer turns to fall, winter turns to spring.

Before I close (and before I attempt any more poetic sentences) I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Broken Country was my first-ever purchase from Charlottesville’s newest bookstore, Commerce Street Books. Although I already have one beloved independent bookshop in town (shoutout New Dominion), I will happily have two or two thousand, because there is absolutely no such thing as too many independent booksellers in this world (just too many of the other B-word).

Have a lovely weekend reading, friends, whichever season of books you prefer.

In advance of the trip, I finished Mansion Beach by Meg Mitchell Moore (a delightful read, and a suitable replacement for the gaping beach read hole left by Elin Hilderbrand’s semi-retirement) and packed Anne Tyler’s Three Days In June for the three days in Vegas. Well, three hours in June is all it took for me to read that book, so I spent the last hour of our flight staring out the window, which was actually lovely - all that desert and canyon landscape stretching on into infinity.

When we landed, though, I was a bit panicky without a book. I knew we were going to want to spend at least part of our weekend at the hotel pool; in case you hadn’t heard, Vegas is hot in June and there’s only so much time I can spend in a casino (my husband, on the other hand…). Not to mention the entirety of the flight back!

Upon arriving at the hotel, we learned that our room wasn’t ready, so I suggested the only natural thing - go find a local bookstore! Surely, we can’t be the first people to land in Las Vegas and immediately hit up a bookstore. Right?

After a quick search on Google Maps and a 15-minute Uber ride, we arrived….at quite possibly one of the coolest bookstores I have ever been to. This was unexpected to say the least; clearly I had not given Sin City enough credit for being home to some serious fellow bibliophiles. Although now that I think about it, I should not have been so taken aback—Vegas does everything a little bigger and brighter than the rest.

The bookshop is called Writer’s Block, and its rather unassuming exterior—surrounded by not one but three wedding chapels, a pawn shop, and, fittingly, the Clark County, Nevada Marriage License Bureau—gave way to a magical interior within which I quite literally could have lived. A charming coffee shop takes up the lobby entrance (this would be key to my inhabitation), and just beyond that you are greeted by walls and walls of books, artfully arranged among whimsical decor.

As I mentioned, ordinarily I would have spent an entire day/week/lifetime in a shop such as this. But we were in the first hour of our Vegas Vacation, so in a return of goodwill to my significant other for even joining me on this boondoggle, I knew I better grab a book and go. Luckily, I always always have a running list of books in my head that I’ve heard about or seen somewhere, so even as I was first perusing the shelves, a number of titles instantly stood out to me.

I ended up selecting Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, which I knew would be a light(ish) read for the Vegas pool scene while also carrying some depth in the story (if you’ve read We All Want Impossible Things by the same author, you know she’s not the type to write “just” a frivolous, summer romp-read).

It ended up being a perfect choice for the pool and part of the flight home: a funny and touching family drama that takes place on Cape Cod (Sandwich being the name of a beach town there, but also, the family eats a lot of sandwiches in the story).

The Writer’s Block ended up being the first of many, many wonderful surprises during our three days in June in Las Vegas, but just as we were preparing to leave on Sunday, I got one more—the Harry Reid Airport Hudson News carries a rather substantial selection of novels. I had to buy one, of course, taking a chance on an author I had never heard of, and I’m so glad I did. More on that next time.

The first and by far most lighthearted of the three is David Nicholls’ You Are Here. Imagine a classic rom-com but instead of a meet-cute in a bustling coffee shop or trendy nightclub, the protagonists find themselves on a multi-day trek across the English countryside. Aside from the vivid descriptions of moors and crags, what I love most about this book is how humorous and relatable it is. Things do not go perfectly for the two main characters, and the story is all the better for it. Speaking of things not going perfectly….

If you are an avid reader (which I imagine you are, if you found this tiny corner of the internet), it’s almost certain you have read, or at least heard of, Liz Moore’s masterpiece The God of the Woods. The story centers around a summer camp in the Adirondacks and the well-to-do, troubled family who owns it. Set in the 1960s and 70s, a pair of mysterious disappearances turns the town, camp, and family on their heads. I myself read it back in February, which I consider the perfect time of year for such a dark thriller. That being said, between the summer setting, enigmatic wealthy family, and devourable quality of Moore’s writing, don’t let me stop you from grabbing this as your next beach read. And speaking of beach reads….

…this book is not one, but the queen of the beach read, Elin Hilderbrand herself, “blurbed” Heartwood right there on the cover, which is what led me to pick it up in my local bookseller. I would describe this novel as a mash-up of the two discussed above. Like God of the Woods, it centers around a disappearance…..in the woods, believe it or not (this time on the Appalachian Trail), but, like You Are Here, the author employs humor and touches on some romantic themes, resulting in a still-gripping yet bit more uplifting read.

If you’re going outside today, don’t get lost; if you’re exploring nature through the pages of a book, then, by all means, do.

The story takes place mostly in Florida and centers around a dysfunctional family, that is to say, a family. Some really messed up things happen in this book, but I found each of the characters to be believable and relatable. So much so that, yes, I wonder whether the author herself experienced any of these things, or whether she herself is like any of these characters (or, more likely, whether she is close to people who are like these characters, or who at least share similar traits with them). Or does this author simply have a wild, wonderful imagination that happened to conjure thoughts, feelings, and experiences that are nearly identical to my own?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter, but it makes me feel a certain kinship with the author and desperate to read more of her work (Flight quickly rose to the top of my TBR list). In fact, The Float Test spoke to me so deeply that, at first, I hesitated to recommend it to others as vehemently as I would want to, lest they start to wonder which of the dark souls in the book is most like my own; in this case, a recommendation felt tantamount to an admission of some kind. But I am, of course, sharing this recommendation, because this is what reading, and writing, is all about—expressing vulnerabilities and (hopefully) connecting with others as a result. Besides, I don’t think you need to see yourself in any of the characters in this book in order to enjoy it. The Float Test is a stunning, wildly entertaining novel in its own right, even if—maybe especially if—you find the characters utterly foreign and repellent.

Which brings me to mistakenly thinking I had read everything Sittenfeld has ever written. Am I the only one who, after finishing a book she adores, reads every word of the acknowledgements, front cover, back cover, inside flaps—everything one can find so that the book isn’t really over yet? It was in the process of doing this that I realized I had missed out on an earlier collection of short stories by Sittenfeld, one called You Think It, I’ll Say It. Suffice it to say, that title immediately went on my list to pick up at the local bookstore as part of my next regular (nearly weekly) haul.

After finally scooping it up during Charlottesville’s Festival of the Book in late March, I read Show Don’t Tell while on a short vacation with my husband. He had found himself in a particularly busy stretch with work, so every day I would read the book on the beach or at the Airbnb while he was working, and we would meet up for happy hour and I would tell him about that day’s stories. My husband is a good sport and always lets me recount the plot of whatever book I’m reading to him in great detail (a couple of summers ago, we were at the pool together while I was reading Romantic Comedy and I kept putting it down to shriek “ugh it is soooo good!” and to subsequently regale him with whatever the characters were doing in that very moment).

While reading Show Don’t Tell on the Georgia coast, two things in particular felt ultra-satisfying about sharing the stories with my partner over margaritas: 1) I could summarize an entire story relatively quickly and we could then discuss it at length, versus sharing what’s happening in a novel at that precise moment in time and then picking the thread back up the next day; and 2) every single one of these stories is, to me, so relatable and thought-provoking that they practically begged me to discuss them with someone. I know I am lucky to have a husband who has a particularly high tolerance for “rom com” talk (quite literally, when I was reading Romantic Comedy, but also, on one of our earliest dates I was stunned to hear him quote the most obscure lines from You’ve Got Mail). But the stories in Show Don’t Tell are so universal that they do not fall into that category, the category that might otherwise bore a non-rom com reader. It’s almost as if women’s fiction is just….fiction.

Someone recently asked me what it is I like about “reviewing” books (heavy quotation marks here because that is hardly what this is). My answer was immediate and from the heart: the only thing I love more than reading is sharing what I’ve read with others, and hearing from others what they have read and loved (or not). Recommending books to friends and receiving reading recommendations in kind….in some ways I can feel more connected to a person knowing that we both loved the same book than I would if we had had a conversation around the same issues that the book discusses. I crave human connection as much as I enjoy my solitude, and in this way reading is the perfect bridge between the two.

Having said that, I don’t want to spoil anything in the collection for those who haven’t read it. I will just say that if you like stories about the lived experience—anything from friendship to politics to love to failure to class dynamics to regret to joy and everything in-between—you will love reading Show Don’t Tell. And if you’re anything like me, it will leave you wanting to tell (not show) a special someone all about it.

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