As always for me, last year was shaped by the books I read. Reading is foundational to my life and ministry. It is a primary way I encounter new ideas and explore new understandings. Since I was a child, I have not been able to fall asleep without reading at least a few pages of a book. These are the books that carried me through 2025; starred books were especially noteworthy.
The biggest theme of my reading for 2025 was writing by women. I read women’s writing across genres, eras and cultures. Many of these books broke through boundaries of acceptability or gentility, expanding our understanding of what it means to be a woman.
All Fours by Miranda July was one of the best books I read in 2025. July explores the identity and sexuality of her peri-menopausal heroine without fear. She has said this book grew out of honest weekly conversations she had with her best female friend, about what it meant to them to be women, mothers, and people getting older. She uses the framework of Homer’s Odyssey to put a woman’s heroic journey at the center of her story. She explores the power and possibility of honesty for people of all genders as we grow and age.
Sticking with Homer, Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad is remarkable. It is simultaneously scholarly and readable. She recasts Homer’s dactylic hexameters into iambic pentameter, the meter of English epic verse, making the blank verse flow with ease. I expected this to be a “hard book,” one I would have to read with specific daily goals in order to get through it. It turned out to be almost a page-turner. I have her translation of The Odyssey on my shelf for this year, and hope to read it before the new Odyssey movie comes out this summer.
Other remarkable books by women this year included Getting Lost by French writer Annie Ernaux, a diary which details her affair with a Soviet diplomat at the end of the Cold War. I know I am late to discover her, but Elena Ferrante’s prose in My Brilliant Friend is fluid and beautiful, and I look forward to returning to her story of girls growing up in mid-century Naples. Leonora Carrington was a 20th century a surrealist writer and artist; Jacqueline Harpman is a French writer whose book I Who Have Never Known Men is science fiction meditation on women’s friendship. I recommend them all.
As always, I want to know what you have read and loved recently, and what’s on your reading list for 2026. I hope you enjoy these recommendations, and happy reading to all!
2025 Books
