For the first mini-project of 2025, we asked for “A New Year’s Reading List.”
4 books, either on your reading list for this year, or that you would recommend to a friend. One book for each season, with one or two sentences explaining each pick.
Elena Bowes
Since I launched my podcast Elena Meets the Author, I’m always on the lookout for books that I will enjoy. The books can’t be too heavy or too light. This Goldilocks likes books that I can read before turning out the light at night, and that will not give me nightmares. Sweet dreams only.
I loved the The Safekeep by Dutch author Yael Wouden. It starts out slow. I’ll admit I didn’t love the main character at first and wondered if I should stick with it. But then the story unfolds and I couldn’t put it down. It’s a story about how one’s past always catches up with one involving WWII, antisemitism, guilt, forgiveness and love. I also loved the author’s essay On (not) Reading Anne Frank.
On the lighter side, I’m looking forward to reading Every Tom, Dick & Harry by Elinor Lipman because I really enjoyed her earlier book Ms. Demeanor. Lipman writes clever love stories set in NYC, and hey’s it’s almost Valentines month.
I just finished Oriana by Anastasia Rubis. What a trailblazing journalist Oriana Fallaci was. Not only does this book tell her incredible life story, an impoverished Italian woman born in 1929 in conservative Italy who never went to university and became arguably the best journalist in the world in the 1960’s and 70’s, but Oriana is also a passionate love story between Oriana and a Greek dissident poet, ten years her junior, who was killed three years after they met. There should be more books about amazing historical women.
And my final pick: I’m excited to read Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche because I adored Americanah, her last book published twelve years ago.
Regina Beach
Spring: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I learned so much about the history of plants for cooking and eating, for medicine, for adornment and beauty through listening to the author narrate the audiobook. She’s an indigenous woman and professor of environmental biology in New York.
Summer: One Day by David Nicholls. I read this after binging the 2024 Netflix limited series and then watching the 2011 film starring Anne Hathaway. Taking place over 20 years the book checks in with Emma and Dexter yearly on St Swithin’s Day, July 15, as their relationship ebbs and flows.
Autumn: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I do not typically read novels but this one was magnificent. Told through the perspective of a robot tasked with befriending a young girl so that she may never experience loneliness it’s the most humanizing portrait of AI I’ve encountered.
Winter: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. My therapist recommended this book and it truly is an amalgamation worth digesting. Part medical memoir, part travelogue, all heart. It takes us through slow days and inclimate weather in gorgeous prose.
Jill Hopper
These are the reads I’m promising myself in the seasons ahead:
Spring: Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst. An account of the shipwreck and survival of a couple in the 1970s; it won the Nero Non-Fiction Award 2024.
Summer: The Benefactors, the first novel by short story writer Wendy Erskine. I will treat myself to the hardback the moment it comes out, as I am obsessed with her writing.
Autumn: The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota, about a man running for the leadership of a trade union while grieving the loss of his young son. Has had fantastic reviews.
Winter: Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham, about a young Black man involved in the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Fascinating setting for a coming-of-age story.
Max Parfitt
Delegator that I am, I passed this month’s invite to a few people in my life, asked them to recommend me something, and filled in just the remaining season (Summer) myself. Perhaps I’ll take it upon myself to review all four as the year goes on…
Winter (recommended by Liz Parfitt):
As we have just passed “Blue Monday” (apparently last Monday was officially the most depressing day of the year), the weather forecast is grim for the weekend ahead, and the news headlines are full of wildfires and wars, it is perhaps a bit strange that the book that came to mind for me was The Siege by Helen Dunmore – a love story set during the Siege of Leningrad. It is undeniably a harrowing read, describing the relentless privations endured during the freezing winter of 1941, but it is also an uplifting story of resilience and the human spirit and survival against the odds, beautifully told. A book that reminds us to count our blessings.
Spring (recommended by Alastair Creamer):
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. The subtitle is ‘Creative Living Beyond Fear’ – just my kind of thing. Over Christmas someone said I had to read this. The trouble is it’s waiting its turn as I have other books on the go, most notably Expert by Roger Kneebone (he’s a doctor can you believe it!). So I think I’ll be dipping into this when the snowdrops are over and the daffodils are sprouting. It was written in 2015 and may be overshadowed by her more famous book, ‘Eat Pray Love’. But it looks a cracker. Anything that explores the mysterious nature of inspiration gets my vote.
Summer (my pick):
The lovely Harry Ashton-Key has submitted various things to this newsletter over the last 6 months. When they sent their Christmas tale (well worth a read, by the way), they added that their mission over Christmas was to read Sense and Sensibility, which I’ve never read. And in fact, it made me realise that I’ve never read any Austen at all. I think it’s quite typical for those of us interred in all boys’ schools across our education – we rattled through our Fitzgeralds and our Steinbecks, McCarthy and Arthur Miller, but left Austen, Bronte, Woolf, and Eliot untouched. I’ve remedied those other holes, but Austen remains unopened in what I imagine to be a pastel-bound volume in the corner.
I think Summer is the season for classics, so I’ll sign myself up now to reading something. Let’s say either Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion… (messages welcome to convince me either way!)
Autumn (or “Fall” – recommended by Chloe Green):
Over the past few falls, I have returned to a short story I first read in a high-school English class on the comforts and desires of detective fiction – Margaret Atwood’s short story “Death by Landscape”, from her collection Wilderness Tips. Mysteries always feel fittingly autumnal to me – softly chilling as the brisk wind that strips the trees of their leaves, urging you to wrap up a little tighter, to hold someone a bit closer.
“Death by Landscape” is told from the perspective of an older woman called Lois, a widow whose apartment is filled with art depicting the Canadian wilderness. Lois has collected the pictures over a lifetime, but they seem to disturb her, rather than bring her any pleasure. Atwood, as if stepping through these pictures, leads us into Lois’s memory, painting a portrait of girlhood in all its intimacies and jealousies. A portrait in the form of a landscape, or, in Atwood’s words, “the holes that open inward on the wall, not like windows but like doors.”
Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash
Some writing resolutions from 26
My New Year’s writing resolution is to experiment with form and approach: I will write in unfamiliar setting in unfamiliar mediums, and see where it takes me.
– Anushka Shah (26’s Emerging Writer, 2024)
I’m diving back into my Substack and promising to update it weekly all year.
– Regina Beach
My writing resolutions are to write a haiku a day – I started on 1 January and am still going! I write them on my daily walks and post them on Instagram. I’m also committing to publishing a minimum of two times a month on Substack in the run-up to my book publication date (8 May!)
– Olivia Sprinkel
I like Olivia’s haiku a day. My parents (perhaps more out of miscommunication than wisdom) both bought me journals for 2025 – one is simple, professional, and will see me through my desperate attempts to work out partial exemption VAT for the opera charity with whom I produce. The other is Faber and Faber’s Poetry Diary 2025. In an attempt to find a special purpose for both, I’m writing a poem a week in response to their poem of the week.
So far we’ve had a moody response to Walter de la Mare (written during a black-out in my local coffee shop), a questioning of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64, and a brighter response to Wendy Cope’s “The Beginning.”
– Max Parfitt
The Beginning
Wendy Cope
None of us remembers the beginning:
the journey through a dark tunnel
to air and light, or our time
as a helpless baby.
When Aahva, two and three-quarters,
is the age I am now,
… full text via Faber & Faber
(For Aahva Benjamin Mackinnon Patel)
The End: A Response to Wendy Cope
Max Parfitt
None of us remembers the end:
the last perilous steps through the light
to airlessness and dark.
To time without time.
When Aahva, in his oldest age,
faces the end,
he will not think of death, but dwell back
– to those he loved and who loved him
and to the pile of unimportant fragments collected
across a life.
The coffees and candles and curiosities
that made perfect happiness.
How he sat once, in winter,
and whispered wishes to the frost.