Honorable mentions

and some DNFs

Starting the year with intentions helps me focus what I’m doing in my life for a year at a time, and as my friend Rebecca said, it’s great fun to look back over several years of intentions and see what all we’ve accomplished and changed in our lives. I divide my intentions into three buckets, not to be too USA Today about it. One intention in the health/living well/learning bucket is reading.

I’m a lifelong reading addict, though many years passed during the height of child-rearing and career-having when I read very little. That’s all changed, in large part due to a much more solitary lifestyle and the fact that there’s no TV or continuous streaming services in my environment.¹ In addition, as a habit I’ve begun visiting many more bookstores than ever before. I bet I know nearly every small bookstore in this state and have bought something from all of those I’ve visited. Which means I have a shit ton of books to read. And I intend to read them. So in 2025, I put reading a certain number of books on my intentions list. This post isn’t about humblebragging so I’m not giving the number — that’s not important. What I love is to look back on what I’ve read this year through Goodreads, where I track them, and remember them.²

I’ve had to get creative with my book storage. Here’s a Pinterest-inspired move where these live under the bed, but where I can see them. The books in these pictures are a mix of to-read, and read-but-I-can’t-give-them-ups.

Here’s some stuff I enjoyed this year. Don’t like reading other people’s book lists? Me neither. TL;DR and you just want one suggestion?

Nonfiction: Reimagining Nonprofits by Vu Le. If you are a nonprofit leader, worker, volunteer, funder, or board member, read this book! Informative, insightful, and also funny.

Fiction: Isola by Allegra Goodman. Technically it’s historical fiction. This book combines everything I love, stories of women’s strength, survival in the frozen north, and a happy ending.

Something different: Wild and Precious, a Celebration of Mary Oliver. Audio only, feels like an extended audio-documentary with many interviewees and lovely clips of Mary Oliver herself. If you love her poetry, give yourself the gift of this audiobook.

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A respectable, normal bookshelf in the guest room/office.

Back in 2024 I wrote about not being able to read fiction, but I got over that. This year I really enjoyed some historical fiction including Isola and The Marriage Portrait and Great Circle³. I also read The Red Tent, pure fiction options like Medusa’s Sisters and the memoir A Well Trained Wife. All these titles depict women overcoming strictures placed on them, partly through their own cunning and perseverance, and sometimes in association with others who supported them. And they all have happy endings, in my opinion.

As usual I read a lot of Indigenous authors, both in fiction and nonfiction, and was so pleased to meet some of them this year. Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz (Lumbee) wrote The Indian Card and spoke on a panel at the 2025 IndigiPalooza. The Lumbee just last week received their federal restoration and I’m thrilled for them. Rebecca Nagle’s (Cherokee) By the Fire We Carry is essentially the book version of her fantastic podcast This Land and I highly recommend her substack Native America. She’ll be at IndigiPalooza in 2026! In fiction, I read The Buffalo Hunter Hunter⁴ by Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) and Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis (Mohawk). I also got through House Made of Dawn and The Death of Jim Loney, classics, and enjoyed newer nonfiction collections like Theory of Water by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Anishinaabe).

Side note, as a recovering English teacher I am always thinking about how literature connects to our everyday nonfiction lives. I had an inexplicable and weighty experience in a specific canyon on the Fort Belknap reservation⁵ a couple of summers ago. Imagine my surprise when I reached the final scene of The Death of Jim Loney (James Welch, Blackfeet/Gros Ventre), which occurs in the same place.

I bought these cute invisible shelves. In this straight-on view it’s hard to see, but the books are just hanging on the wall, like magic. You can’t pile too many on, though.

Are you interested in nonfiction about the West? I can suggest The Emerald Mile, Cheap Land Colorado, God’s Middle Finger⁶ and … oh my god … The Crazies by Amy Gamerman. This book was absolute insanity, and I cannot help but look out the window and think about those billionaires each time I drive through Springdale and Big Timber on I-90. Did you know someone straight up owns Crazy Peak? How can that even happen?

Books about nature and the usual survivalist/extreme explorer fare⁷ loaded my shelves this year. I also read about cults and the destruction of our society through capitalism and technology. Check out Superbloom if you need a good example of the latter.

I shelved several books as Did Not Finish, perhaps because they were awful, or they had a terrible narrator, or … well, they were awful. Awful books do exist.⁸

Listen, I could go on. (I’m impressed if you’ve made it this far.) My rich inner life, as they say, is spun up and frosted by books. They inspire me⁹ and make me mad and provide an enjoyable backdrop to whatever I’m doing with my hands, like quilting, or during the unfortunate month when I crossed paths with a paint-by-numbers kit. Reading helps me relax for a good hour before I fall asleep at night, and on NoneDay¹⁰ when I don’t use my computer, I often finish books on my couch. I suspect many of my friends enjoy the same delights.

What do you like to read? Whatever it is, and however you choose to mark this pastime or not mark it at all, I wish for you a rich reading life in 2026.

An uninspired final effort has been color-coordinated stair storage. It would be so much better if I didn’t have that awful post-renter carpet.

1. I did watch the entirety of Succession earlier this year, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I also watched Shiny Happy People, a docuseries suggested by my friend Caitlin as a companion to not one but two books we both read. I’m not against TV, I just usually can’t sit still long enough to watch it properly.

2. And yes, I count audiobooks. Why the hell not?

3. I guess Great Circle is “inspired by real events and people” but not “based on a true story” which is an important, if wobbly, distinction.

4. This one made it onto Obama’s 2025 list. I liked The Only Good Indians better.

5. IYKYK

6. Listen to this one. The phenomenal reader was so good I found another book he narrated just to listen to him some more.

7. I cannot get enough of this genre. Is someone hypothermiating to death, paddling a kayak through the North Atlantic, suffering from scurvy? I will read the hell out of that book!

8. Are you a rubbernecker on awfulness? Okay, here are my DNF this year: Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie (I usually love his work…just not this one), Upstream by Mary Oliver (I KNOW!!! THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE!), Freedom’s Dominion by Jefferson Cowie, I tried audio and print, and both were too terrible to continue with, Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck, and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

9. You are a lucky friend if you haven’t been bludgeoned with my insistence on a certain this-or-that book

10. a day I choose on the weekend, usually Sunday, to not open my laptop at all.