I finally read two 5 star books in a row and maybe my best read of 2025! Then I had some more 4+ star reads so this was probably my best reading month of the year. This month I read:

• The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher – After hearing Meredith rave about this old family saga from the 1980’s, which I can picture my mom reading in my childhood, I knew I wanted to read this. This is a beautiful novel, a sweeping family saga that tells the tales of multiple generations living in England in WWII and through the 1980’s. We follow Penelope from her childhood to old age, out of order, but through love and loss and war and dealing with her adult children. I loved her, and her friendships and love of her garden and artwork. I did NOT love her children (Noel and Nancy were awful and Olivia was good, but not great!) and I didn’t enjoy that the author painted Penelope as a very old woman, when she was in her early 60’s! The closer I get to that, the less old it feels. But I did love Penelope’s adventures and how she shared her love with those deserving it. I loved this book!
• After the Crash by Michael Bussi – This is the second 5 start book I read this month, and maybe the best all year! I loved this fast-paced, thrilling story. After a tragic plane crash in the mountains of France, one 3 month old baby is found alive as the sole survivor. The only problem is that there were two families on board the flight with 3 month old babies. The relatives of the deceased parents fight for custody and since this begins in the 1980’s, there are no DNA tests readily available to determine the baby’s identiy. We follow the baby’s life and the dectetive who spends 18 years trying to track down the truth. This was such a great book!
• 107 Days by Kamala Harris [audiobook] – Listening to Kamala Harris tell the story of the 107 days of her campaign for the presidency was beautiful and so depressing. Knowing the election results, it was so hard to hear her hope and all of the hard work her entire team put in, knowing they inherited an uphill battle. It was interesting to hear the way she tried to maintain respect for President Biden, even while hinting that his team shelved her for his entire presidency and didn’t do anything to support her. Kamala repeats a lot of her professional successes in both books; she is proud of her work and it is clear how few people knew all that she has accomplished. This is the second book I’ve read by Kamala and she is intelligent, detail-oriented, wise, mature, and fun. She would have been an incredible president.
• Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More than they Expect by Will Guidara – This nonfiction book primarily about a restaurant’s growth was a Secret Stuff book club pick, and nothing that I would have picked up on my own. However, I did waitress in my MUCH younger years, and I have family who work in the restaurant industry, and I found the entire story to be entertaining, educational, and inspiring, with lessons that go beyond restaurant management. The author, Will, outlines how he came to be the GM of Eleven Madison Park, in NYC, and how he and the new head chef decided to be full partners in the running of the restaurant. It is rare for the front and back of house to work that closely together, but these men forged a parntership intentionally to do something different. They worked incredibly hard to provide what they coined “unreasonable” hospitality, as they worked to gain better reviews, more stars, and to make it on the 50 Best Restaurants in the World list. They were creative, innovative, a bit crazy and wild, and fun! I appreciated when they began to work to make sure that each diner’s experience was unique and personalized, something that we want to do in schools as well, but which takes significant effort, research, time, and human capital. They invested in people and it paid off most of the time. I found this to be a fascinating read.
• The Safari by Jaclyn Goldis – I found this book by chance at my library – I love random serendiptiy! In this story, we meet the Babel family in South Africa, at the luxury safari camp they own. Odelia, the rich mother, is about to marry her much younger, new boyfriend, and her three children are less than pleased about the wedding. Sam and Bailey, twin siblings, who both seem to be less than what their parents hoped they would be as young adults, while their older brother Joshua, is married with a beautiful wife and young baby, and works for the family company. Odelia’s best friend Gwen joins the group for the tense pre-wedding planning. When one of the guests is found murdered, the entire family is busy trying to hide their own secrets while figuring out what everyone else was lying about. This is a fast-paced thriller with so many suspects you have to read the very end to learn all the hidden stories.
• Tilt by Emma Pattee – I heard this book recommended on the Currently Reading podcast and knew I would like it because it’s Climate Fiction, one of my favorite subgenres. We meet Annie, who is 9 months pregnant, while she is buying a crib in IKEA. When THE BIG ONE, as in a Northwest earthquake, strikes, we are with Annie has she travels, on foot, to find her husband. This is a slow, harrowing tale of her journey through disaster, but also her journey to acceptance of motherhood, and her own past grief issues. This was beautifully written and hauntingly readable.
• I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris by Glynnis MacNicol – I read MacNicol’s first memoir about grief and her mother’s death and really appreciated hearing life stories from a middle-aged woman who never married and never had kids. That part of my life is rarely represented in books so I appreciated it, even though her life is still very different than mine. This memoir is a prime example of that. In August, during COVID, she is able to leave NYC for a month to go life in Paris mainly because she misses human contact and knows the rules of France quarantine are different. She has other single female friends in Paris, she knows the city well, and she jumps into a French dating app and meets a range of men, many much younger than her 46 years of age. Because she is a free-lance writer, she was able to create this alternate life for herself. Because is more confident at her age, she makes no apologies for the joy of sex with strangers and the freedom of no attachements. She also muses a lot on life without a spouse and kids, and so many of those thoughts were wild to see in print, as I’ve had similar thoughts. I enjoyed this glimpse into her life.
• The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze by Derrick Barnes [audiobook] – One of my reader work friends asked me if I read this book because she wanted to talk about it, so of course I had to read it. It was a hard book to read. Henson Blayze is a Black boy in Mississippi, an 8th grader whose entire town, made of mostly white people, is counting on him to help the high school football team finally win a season. The book begins with a graphic scene of two police men beating a young boy, but we don’t know who any of those characters are. Knowing that, I had a pit in my stomach through the entire book, waiting to learn what happened in that scene. The main story begins with Henson’s first day of school, where the entire town greets and cheers him on, ready to see him in action on the football field. Right from the beginning, it was clear to me that the townspeople only cared about his athletic abilities, and not him as a person. The racism is overt at first, and then explicit with significant exaggeration throughout the story. So many scenes were hard to read, as Henson was treated like an adult, but not quite human, by these greedy vicious people. Henson’s father and new friend Frida are the only bright lights in this rough story. I know this book was long-listed for the National Book Award. It is well-written and has a lot of lessons, but I wouldn’t hand it to a middle grades child. The saddest part to me is that my friend was looking for a good book for her middle grades son to read that had a Black boy protagonist and it is very hard to find a good book with a Black main character that does’t involve a lot of trauma and negativity.
• Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman – My friend and I were reminiscing about when we team-taught, and we used excerpts from this book with our middle school students. I hadn’t read the book in over 20 years, so I checked it out of my library for a reread. This is a collection of stories from the point of view of Einstein while contemplating time. In each chapter, something different happens with time: it goes backwards, it hops, it loops, it slows down when you are moving, it slows down the higher your altitude. In the stories, people are often chasing time, trying to capture their own memories, to hold on to their own best moments. It’s fun and whimsical and a great lesson on being present and savoring the here and now.
• Radical Candor: How to get what you want by saying what you mean by Kim Scott [audiobook] – While looking for resources on how to give effective feedback, I stumbled upon a video clip of Kim Scott explaining her radical candor continuum. I loved it so much and I asked my boss if she had read the book. She had read it, and she loaned me her copy to read, which I did in tandem with the audiobook version. I appreciate how Kim shares a variety of stories from her time owning her own business, working at Google, at Apple, and in a variety of environments. I loved the quadrants of the design: ruinous empathy, manipulative insincerity, obnoxious aggression and radical candor. The examples made each quadrant clear from the perspective of giving feedback. Her first lesson for a “boss” is that a boss needs to first ask for feedback on their management before they can begin to build the relationship where they can give effective feedback. But that all bosses need to be giving regular feedback often, which is so important for growth. There were many great lessons to learn about managing people from this book.