It’s 2026, so time to look back on the year that was 2025!
In Life…
Odd-numbered years are session years, which start out incredibly busy and stressful before relaxing into easy summers. This was my second session as a mother (seventh overall!) and I was probably more surprised than I should have been at how different it was than the first. When C was smaller, I missed him and wanted to be home with him of course, but it’s a whole new ball game now that he’s more aware and MUCH more communicative. The guilt I feel for being away is much more intense, hence why against my own better instincts I spent a second session in a row leaning out as much as I could, in an effort to be able to make as many bedtimes as I could. I have probably hurt my own earning capacity by making these choices but doing anything else seems impossible to seriously contemplate. He is just the best thing and I enjoy so much watching him become more and more a little person. I’m not going to pretend parenting is all sunshine and rainbows, potty training has been a particular struggle, he can be moody and unpredictable and chaotic because he’s three, but he’s also funny and curious and so so observant.
There was no girls trip this year, as one of us is planning a wedding in April and marshaling resources. The annual skating trip is actually upcoming, because we decided to go to the European Championships, which will be held in just a few weeks in Sheffield, England. So a busy travel year next year but a lax one this year. I went to Nashville for the first time for my company’s annual retreat, a city I might have enjoyed more about ten years ago when bar-hopping was higher on my priority list, but sometime on the last five years or so booze too late at night has just been my invitation to a night of terrible sleep. And of course we made our Michigan trip, spending a week with family and friends. We had fun, but to be honest some of the admin around these trips, figuring out schedules and how to arrange our time to ensure that we’re seeing everyone, is becoming rather taxing. It’s a vacation, after all, and we may make some changes in our arrangements to ensure that we’re getting time to just enjoy each other’s company and relax a little more.
I turned 40 and continue to be a little surprised at my own indifference to the milestone. I’m aware of my own aging, certainly. The number of white hairs on my head steadily increases, bouncing back after anything from a hangover to a hard workout takes much longer than it used to, the creases in my face don’t go away after a decent night’s sleep. But I feel like I lived my peak youth, had fun, made mistakes, took big swings. I appreciate where I am now. Sometimes I wish desperately that I could peek into the alternate timeline versions of myself, where I made major choices differently, but for the most part I know that I am incredibly lucky to have ended up where I am and I am happy I made the choices I did because they led me here.
In Books…
Read: 71. My goal every year is to read more than I did the one before, so 65 was the target for this year and I was pleased to have exceed it despite it being a session year and tackling some doorstoppers. I tended towards female authors again this year at about 58%, though obviously less heavily than last year. One thing I noticed is that I read significantly more non-fiction than usual, ending up at 42% instead of my usual 30%ish. I suspect this contributed to the general feeling I had this year that it was a “down” year for my reading (despite the fact that my average rating was almost identical to last year), with many books that were fine but unremarkable and fewer than usual that I really loved, though I did have a nice little run towards the end of the year. I do enjoy non-fiction but it’s rare for me to get passionately invested in even a high-quality non-fiction book the way I do with a novel, so I think I’m going to make an effort to keep my nonfiction at 1/3 of my reading at the most. As usual, contemporary/literary fiction was my most-read subgenre of fiction, followed by historical, In non-fiction, it was history followed by biography.
I’ve decided to do another author identity theme year for 2026, and I’ve decided I’m going to read only books by authors of color. While doing an all-female year last year wasn’t a huge change because I’d generally read a relatively even split in the years prior to that, this will actually represent a significant difference for me as only about 20% of my reading has tended to be from authors who aren’t of European descent. This is something I’ve found embarrassing since I realized it as someone who likes to think she reads widely and diversely. My goal, like with the year when I read only women, is to still keep my reading varied…after all, people of color don’t just write about race. They write sci-fi and memoirs and literary fiction and biographies. I have a loose list of books I’m intending to read, and all of them come from my own existing physical and digital bookshelves, so these are books that I was going to read anyways but am just deliberately prioritizing for this year.
Best Book of the Year: The Wilderness
I am a sucker for a female friendship book, and this is an incredible example of one. I loved getting to know the four women Angela Flournoy creates (five if you count Desiree’s sister), reading along as their relationships change over the years, with individual twosomes becoming closer and then more distant. They all want vaguely the same-ish things: love, success, security, but all go about it in different ways and have feelings about the ways the other ones are doing it. As someone who loves novels that go deep into characters and relationships, it was right up my alley. It’s unusual for me to have a relatively new release as my top pick of the year, I read so many older books that have stood the test of time that those are often my favorites. Very close competition was Lily King’s Heart the Lover, another new release, which was also an excellent, beautifully-written book.
Book That Was Not Good But Was Tons of Fun: Fourth Wing
This book felt like pieces of every “special-est girl” young adult book (Twilight, Divergent, The Hunger Games, etc) got tossed in a blender with a smattering of spice (there are a few action scenes of the romantic variety, both are relatively brief and near the end) and the Wikipedia entry for Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which should have been a disaster but was somehow compulsively readable. Even as I was enjoying it, though, I knew that it was not well-written apart from having a propulsive plot, and I’ve read enough about how bad the two sequels are to know that stopping the series here will be the right choice for me.
Books That Made Me Trust My Own Sense of My Reading Taste: Nightbitch and The Vegetarian
These books were both trendy in reading circles several years ago and I had thought about reading them and ultimately decided against it. And then they were chosen for my book club this year and I did read them and I hated them! One thing that has been really valuable about this blog for me has been that it’s forced me to think critically about my own reading preferences, and I’m getting much better at reading a blurb and being able to get a sense if there’s a real possibility a book will work for me. Of course there are plenty of things that seem like they should work that don’t, and a good number that shouldn’t work but do, so I always try to keep an open mind, but I’m definitely honing my ability to know what’s likely to work for me and what isn’t.
Most Dad Read: The Gales of November
When I was a kid, I went through a phase where I was completely obsessed with Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. I had a tape with the song on it that I listened to constantly in my little Walkman. The loveliness of the song and the epic scope of the story of the doomed freighter just wormed themselves into my brain and refused to let go. I still know all the words by heart, so of course I was thrilled when John U. Bacon, who’s written several books about Michigan football that I’ve really enjoyed, announced that he was writing a book about the shipwreck. This is an extremely dad book…a big iron freighter sank in a sudden storms on an inland sea and there was even a 70s song about it! It’s well-written and engrossing and has an audience beyond dads but dads will love this.
Most Relentlessly Depressing: Prophet Song
I am a self-described lover of “bummer books”, but even this was too much of a downer for me to get into. The story of a family trying to survive what has become a totalitarian state, it seems like it’s trying to answer the question “why don’t they just leave?” and does illustrate how and why that could happen but it’s just grim and dark from basically the very first page to the very last one, which makes it a total slog to read.
Best Series-Ender: MaddAddam
Bringing a series to a close is HARD, and many authors do not do it well. Margaret Atwood is Margaret Atwood for a reason, though, and while there were some parts of this novel that didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped, I think she managed to bring her story about this world and these characters to a satisfying finish. When you consider that the first of these books was written in 2003, with this final volume published ten years later, they’re shockingly prescient and definitely on my list to revisit in the future.