Things worth sharing... 8 books I loved this year

My favorite books of 2025.

Hello!

Happy New Year’s Eve, and welcome back to Things Worth Sharing. In this month’s issue, I’m sharing my top reads of 2025 (in no particular order).

The Japanese Woodcut 1916 by William Merritt Chase (also my NYE mood this year, and I’m totally fine with it).

As usual, I want these catch-ups to feel like a group chat where we can all share and ask for specific recs, so I’d love for you to chime in via the comments with your favorite reads this year (if you’re reading this in your email, just open this post here to do that).

Here are the eight books I loved this year, with links to Goodreads so that you can add them to your list.

Glynnis MacNicol’s latest book, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, is a celebration of living unconventionally in your 40s, unapologetically and without shame, which is relatable for me. Loved it!

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher is a book I picked up from a surprise pile at a local bookstore. It’s a mix between horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and dark comedy. Not my usual genre, but I found it to be a great escape. I couldn’t put it down. Read it within a day.

How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir is a raw, honest, and relatable account of losing your mother to Alzheimer’s. The author, Molly Jong-Fast, added humor in all the right places, too.

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Heart the Lover and Writers & Lovers by Lily King were both great! However, I preferred Writers & Lovers — it felt a bit more layered with the main character grieving her mom’s death, navigating love/romantic relationships, and becoming a writer (and a responsible adult?).

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End is written by surgeon, writer, and public health researcher Atul Atmaram Gawande. It’s science-based (far from a light read, so if that’s what you’re looking for, skip right over this one), but it really makes you think about how you want to age and what aging well means to you, and at what point you’d want out.

Help Me! and Love Me! are two entertaining and candid non-fiction reads by Marianne Power. In Help Me!, Marianne documents her experience of trying one new self-help book a month (to see if it can really change her life), and Love Me! is a follow-up on finding love and realizing that maybe it has been there all along, just not in the traditional sense.

Your turn! What books did you love this year?

See you soon,

Alexis

P.S. Up next, I’ve got an interview about money and retirement with Pauline from Money Feelings, I’m answering a reader’s question about dating after divorce (+ insights on the topic from relationship and sex therapist, Kate Engler), and much more… stay tuned!