Saturday, January 24, 2026

Books Read in 2025 -- BOOK LIST


BOOKS I READ IN 2025

Every January, when I remember, I post a list here on Rose City Reader of the books I read the prior year. I keep track of the books I read on LibraryThing.

Here's the list of the 201 books I read in 2025, in the order I read them. I've never read so many books in a year before this. I credit the jump to my work finally slowing down a bit. Maybe when I really retire, I'll read even more, which I would love. I added notes, which I haven't done in the past but might continue. It helps me remember the book.

Notes about my rating system are below the list.

How many of these have you read?

  • Absolute Truths by Susan Howatch, the final book in her “Starbridge” series of Church of England novels that take place in the mid-20th Century. I loved the series, even when the melodrama was over-the-top. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell. This retelling of events during the 1857 Indian Rebellion won the 1973 Booker Prize. The events and the writing are serious, but the absurdities of the colonial class system also gave Farrell opportunity to poke fun. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Scoop by Evelyn Waugh was a reread for me and I appreciated the satire much more this second time around than when I first read it about 20 years ago. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Venetian Affair by Helen MacInnes. Less Venice than I expected, more Paris, but a lot of mid-century excitement. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan. This was my first go at one of his books. I thought it was interesting, but it didn’t wow me. It felt like he packed things into this family story (a black husband, a lesbian affair, and more) to be intentionally provocative. And the pacing was so uneven, I was distracted by trying to sort the timeline. 🌹🌹🌹
  • We Solve Murders by Richard Osman, the first in a new series. It was hard for me to switch from Thursday Murder Club to this new group of characters, but I'm sure it will grow on me. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods engendered lively discussion in my book club. Overall, the group enjoyed the historical fiction side of it, with its braided narrative switching between the 1920s and present day. But the magical realism caught most of us by surprised and didn't go over well. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Zabar's: A Family Story, with Recipes by Lori Zabar. Zabar's is a Manhattan institution and spot I always try to visit when I'm in New York, so ir was wonderful to read the history of this family treasure. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien knocked my socks off. It will definitely linger with me for a long time. Read my review here. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Patriarch by Martin Walker, the eighth novel in his Bruno, Chief of Police, series set in a French village. This is another series I love and am trying to complete, but it will take me longer because there are 18 novels and several novellas and short stories. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. To commemorate the 250th anniversary of Austen's birth, I reread her six major novels in 2026, in publication order, starting with this one. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller by Margaret Forster. This wrapped up a Du Maurier Deep Dive project I participated in in Instagram. Over roughly three years, we read all du Maurier's fiction and then finished with reading a biography of our choice. I thought Forster's was excellent. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Slough House by Mick Herron. This is the seventh book in his Slow Horses series. I raced through all of them so I could watch the tv show. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Sleeping Giants by Rene Denfeld is a thriller set in Oregon and one of my book club's picks. The story, inspired by true events, really grabbed me. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Bad Actors by Mick Herron, the eighth Slow Horses book. A ninth came out in late 2025, but my library hold on the audiobook didn't come in until January 2026. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Lost & Found: Public Theology in the Secular Age by Michael A. Milton is a nonfiction book aimed theologians — pastors, professors, seminary students, etc. Still, even though the target audience may be professionals, or professionals in training, it is interesting for any Christian looking for a biblical response to social issues. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Q.’s Legacy by Helene Hanff. This follow up to her big hit, 84 Charing Cross Road, is must reading for diehard fans but probably meaningless without reading 84 first. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Skunk and Badger by Amy Timberlake is an adorable children’s story. I wanted to read it first before sharing it with my grandkids. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Finally! I added this to my Classics Club list to give me the push I needed to read this Russian masterpiece. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Fatal Pursuit by Martin Walker, book 9 in his Bruno series and a particularly good one featuring a very rare, expensive vintage car. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Lady of the Mine by Sergei Lebedev is a beautiful, tragic novel about Russia in Ukraine. It will stick with me. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The List by Mick Herron, one of four Slow Horses novels I read after I caught up with the novels. All were very good, although I am drawn to novels before shorter fiction. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Catch by Mick Herron, another novella. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Standing by the Wall by Mick Herron. This one included a short story with the title novella. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Careless in Red by Elizabeth George. I struggled with the two Inspector Lynley books before this one, With No One as Witness (🌹🌹🌹) and What Came Before He Shot Her (🌹🌹). With No One involved gruesome serial killings, not in keeping with the rest of the series, not to mention a gratuitously sad ending. What Came was a sociological study more than a mystery and felt like homework. So I was extremely pleased that Careless got the series back on track. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Bitter Orange by Clair was my first Fuller book but not my last. Terrific! Shades of A. S. Byatt and Iris Murdoch. 🌹🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Love him or hate him, Elon Musk is bigger than life. I figured it was a good time to read Isaacson’s fascinating biography. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Templars' Last Secret by Martin Walker. Book 10 in the Bruno series. The story had history and adventure, and all the French cooking and charming village life the books are known for, but the character list is getting crowded. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • Beat Not the Bones by Charlotte Jay, winner of the very first Edgar Award in 1954 for best crime novel and an unexpected jungle adventure. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. This was a reread for me and I liked it better than the first time, because I've read a lot more Waugh between then and now. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • This Body of Death by Elizabeth George. Another winner, featuring more of Lynley's teammates -- Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny. I had caught up with her Three Pines series, a favorite, so was happy to jump on this new one. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, another reread for her 250th birthday. Always fantastic. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Taste for Vengeance by Martin Walker. It says something that now, nine months after I read it, I don't recall anything about the mystery, even after reading the publisher's description. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Sun Bird by Lindsay Moore. This is another children's book I read before passing it on to my grandkids. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Secret Place by Tana French, book 5 of 6 in her Dublin Murder Squad series. Although it is incredibly popular, this is not a series I'm fond of. There is always something completely unbelievable about each of the stories -- like outlandishly unbelievable. This one is the best so far and I'm a completist so went on to read the sixth. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau, proof that camping has never been fun. 🌹🌹🌹
  • From Doon with Death by Ruth Rendell. I reread this one because I want to tackle her Inspector Wexford series once and for all. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. I read this classic devotional with a group on Instagram and appreciated it all the more for the group discussion. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Salzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes. This one was particularly exciting -- a romp through the Austrian Alps in search of hidden Nazi secrets. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George. I was still trepidatious after the two George wobbles, but this one was a good, solid mystery. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Slightly Foxed, Vol. 84, Winter 2024. I keep track of these as books to remember which ones I've read. Shile technically a "journal," it's bound like a book -- a book of essays -- and I keep them after I read them, so I feel justified counting them as books not magazines. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen by Nigel Slater. This is the first of several Kitchen Diaries by Slater. I loved the peek into his life as a cook and food lover. Mostly I noted his lifestyle and how I could copy it, but I also marked recipes I'd like to try. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue by Sonia Purnell. This was one of my favorites of the year. She was Winston Churchill's daughter-in-law and a source of information to him from her lovers during WWII; led a jet set lifestyle in Europe after the war; settled in America and married Leland Hayward, a Broadway producer; later married her old flame Avril Harriman and became a Georgetown mover and shaker; and ended her career as Bill Clinton's Ambassador to France. Those are just the bare bones of a fascinating life. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, a charming story of four friends spending a month in Italy, published in 1922. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller. Even darker than Bitter Orange, equal parts frustrating and entrancing. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith. I have the first, and main, three Ripley novels in an omnibus edition so wanted to read the two sequels to The Talented Mr. Ripley, which I read a few years ago. I appreciate the talent behind these books but they aren’t for me because I like my killers to get their comeuppance, not get away with their crimes. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Just One Evil Act by Elizabeth George. This 18th book in the series focused on Barbara Havers and, unique for the series, takes the story on the road when Havers goes to Italy to help a friend find his missing daughter. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Body in the Castle Well by Martin Walker. This is where I started to turn on the series. The plots are starting to look alike and the characters are now overflowing the stories. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • Literary Feasts: Inspired Eating from Classic Fiction by Sean Brand. I expected more from this short book. There was less discussion of the food eaten and the role of food in various books than I had hoped. It's really a collection imaginary menus inspired by different books. I found it formulaic and gimmicky. 🌹🌹
  • The People We Keep by Allison Larkin. This story of found families was a book club pick I enjoyed more than I thought I would. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Penmarric by Susan Howatch. I loved this shaggy family saga loosely mirroring the history of the Plantagenet royal family in England. 🌹🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith. The third Ripley book and my last. 🌹🌹🌹
  • One Man’s San Francisco by Herb Cain. This is a collection of newspaper columns by the extremely popular San Francisco journalist. The columns are definitely of their time so offer a glimpse of mid-century San Francisco history seldom considered these days. 🌹🌹🌹
  • The Trespasser by Tana French. I'm not a fan of stories about teenagers, so this wasn't my cup of tea, but I did like the relationship between the two detectives. Mostly, I was just happy to finish the Dublin Murder Squad series once and for all. 🌹🌹🌹
  • The Shooting at Chateau Rock by Martin Walker. I love the series but the stories are starting to blur in my mind. Martin has created a huge cast of supporting characters and getting them all crammed into every story means the stories are going to be similar. It's not like Bruno goes off by himself and solves a mystery in Thailand or something. He's there in his French village, with his two ex-lovers, assorted friends, the same co-workers, and a gaggle of neighbors. 🌹🌹🌹
  • The Snare of the Hunter by Helen MacInnes. This is another worthwhile adventure, but not as much of a nail biter as The Salzburg Connection. There was a lot of driving around and route planning. And it annoyed me that none of the good guys could figure out who the glaringly obvious bad guy was. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan. This fun romp was not as good as the Crazy Rich Asians books but still entertaining. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George. The books keep getting better and better as I get closer to the end of the series. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Brilliant, Beautiful, Bipolar by Liz Casper. This is a fascinating memoir about a successful, professional woman who lost almost everything when she became bipolar in middle age. I read it in one sitting because I couldn't stop. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh. This later Waugh novel was odd and my least favorite of his books. It is the semi-autobiographical story of a man suffering from hallucinations while on a sea voyage. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. It's hard to rank Austen novels because they are all wonderful, but this is the least wonderful for me. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Pink Palazzo: A Palm Beach Romance by Kiki Astor. I don't read many romance novels, but came across this one on Instagram and found it quite entertaining. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Towards Zero by Agatha Christie, a country house mystery featuring Inspector Battle. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Cimarron Rose by James Lee Burke. I used to gobble up his Dave Robecheaux book until they just got to be too much for me. This one is the first book in his Billy Bob Holland series set in Texas, but it all the same. It won the 1998 Edgar Award so I read it. Because it's been a long time since I've read a JLB book, I enjoyed it well enough, but t will be a while before I read another. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • The Coldest Case by Martin Walker. Same women, dog, horse, and dinner parties. They are starting to blend. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir by Ina Garten was a highlight of my reading year. I've never been an Ina Garten fan. Not that I disliked her, I just knew nothing about her except that she is known as the Barefoot Contessa. I never watched her show and don't own any of her cookbooks. But my sister gave me her memoir for Christmas and I loved it. What an entrepreneur! She is an inspiration. Read my review here. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Maigret and the Spinster by Simenon. I have a lot of Simenon books on my shelves so wanted to try one before I acquire any more. I liked it a lot, even if I didn't love it. I liked it enough to look forward to reading more. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • A New Lease of Death by Ruth Rendell, the second in her Inspector Wexford series, my new favorite. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Punishment She Deserves by Elizabeth George. Barbara Havers again features in this, the 20th novel in the series. It's another long but entertaining mystery. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Table for Two: Fictions by Amor Towles. I loved Rules of Civility and this collection of short stories and a novella is in the same spirit. The novella is a sort-of sequel to Rules of Civility. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene was excellent. It's the story of an architect who lost his passion for his work and his religious faith and goes to a leper colony in Africa to lose himself. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler is an early international thriller, published in 1930. The plot was a little messy, but it was a lot of fun. 🌹🌹🌹
  • The Pilgrim's Regress by C.S. Lewis. I wanted to like this Christian classic, but I struggle with allegory. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter. This short collection of three southern gothic novellas knocked my socks off. Porter is in the same school as Flannery O'Connor, with maybe a tough of Eudora Welty. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz, book five in his Hawthorne & Horowitz series. This is one of my very favorite series, but the fourth book, The Twist of the Knife, disappointed me. It was not as clever, more traditionally formulaic, than the first three. So I put off reading this fifth one when it first came out. I'm glad I finally read it because it is as snappy and fun as the first three. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Let’s just say, I’m not a stoic. This was a slog. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Transcription by Kate Atkinson. This story of WWII and Cold War espionage in London was a delight. I wish I read it earlier. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki. This coming of age story about three sisters in Greece was fabulous, a highlight of my reading summer. This was my Greece pick for the European Reading Challenge and I was proud of myself for reading a translated book. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Double Blind by Edward St. Aubyn. I greatly admire his Patrick Melrose books and Lost for Words is an all-time favorite, so I was excited to read this. It had way more brain science than I expected and not enough story about the human relationships, but it was good and I'm glad I read it. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan is his only kids book. It was a short, enjoyable read. 🌹🌹🌹
  • The Ice Saints by Frank Tuohy, a forgotten classic that won the 1964 James Tait Black prize. It is the story of a woman from London in the late 1950s who goes to Poland to visit her sister who had married a Polish soldier after WWII. The story is sweet, a little funny, and sad, providing a clear-eyed look at life behind the Iron Curtain. This was my Poland pick for the ERC, even though it is not in translation. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Something to Hide by Elizabeth George. This final (so far) Inspector Lynley mytery was a complex, fascinating story. 🌹🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • Emma by Jane Austen. This is my favorite Austen! 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Agent in Place by Helen MacInnes, another terrific Cold War adventure. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Beauty: A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scruton, an excellent discussion of the meaning of beauty, why beauty matters, and why art is not beautiful when it becomes propaganda, pornography, or kitsch. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I read this classic with a church book group and benefitted from the discussion. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym was a delight story of single life and the search for connection. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes, an excellent thriller set on the eve of WWII. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Helena by Evelyn Waugh. I loved this one! It is a comic, imaginative interpretation of the life of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine and early Christian saint. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Templar Legacy by Steve Berry was a fun but uneven Da Vinci Code knockoff. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • Wolf to the Slaughter by Ruth Rendell. I like the Inspector Wexford books more and more as the characters develop. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • This is Happiness by Niall Williams. This absolutely charming novel is set during the electrification of Ireland in the late 1950s. It was one of my absolute favorites of the year. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • I Like it Here by Kingsley Amis is about a curmudgeon who travels “abroad” to Portugal with his family. LOL funny. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Austen Sisters by Dee Blankenship. I don't read fan fiction as a rule, but this Austen-inspired romance about five sisters, each embodying the spirit of Austen's heroines, was a delight. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Old Bones by Aaron Elkins. This was a terrific cozy but exciting mystery set in France. I want to read more from the Gideon Oliver series. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Thus was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell is the first in her hilarious but short series of mysteries featuring young lawyers and their professor/mentor Hilary Tamar. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning is a book-themed thriller that kept me turning pages. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr was as wonderful as everyone says. I can see myself rereading this engaging story. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Jazz Funeral by Julie Smith is a fun New Orleans mystery set in August, which did nothing to bring down my core temperature when I read it in August in Greece. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • August Folly by Angela Thirkell. I am so glad I finally dipped my toe into this cosy pond. It was like a Golden Age mystery without a crime. I'll read more! 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. I loved this quiet novel about a young girl summering on aa island off Finland with her grandmother. Jansson wrote the Moomin books and, while this is not a children's book, it captured the POV of a child. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • To Kill a Troubadour by Martin Walker. By this one, book 16, I was really making an effort. 🌹🌹🌹
  • No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym. Every time I read a Pym book, I remember why I love Pym books. I want to read them all. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Water by John Boyne. This was the first of four interconnected novellas that were published separately and then combined into an omnibus edition called Elements. Water is the story of a wife starting a new life after her husband is convicted of awful crimes. Unfortunately, the wife is one of the few likable characters in the four books and she gets short shrift. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • Earth by John Boyne. Earth tells about of a professional athlete on trial for sexual assault. Like the first one, this was a quick read and kept my attention, but such unlikeable characters! The bad guys -- and there are many -- are one-dimensionally heartless. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • Fire by John Boyne. The third one. Fire examines the unsettling way a doctor has developed for dealing with her childhood trauma. She seemed almost sociopathic, not like a fully-developed human. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Air by John Boyne. Air brings the earlier three somewhat together in a story about a dad trying to forge a bond with his teenage son. 🌹🌹🌹1/2
  • A Guilty Thing Surprised by Ruth Rendell, Wexford book five. I started tearing through them with this one. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. More fun than I remembered from earlier reads. I enjoyed it even more this time. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff. I read this because of the title and am glad I did. It was a wonderful, bittersweet family story about so much more than their annual vacation at the beach. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien is the first novel in the trilogy of the same name. O'Brien perfectly describes the prickly, sometimes even mean, friendships between girls when they are children and teenagers. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman won the International Booker Prize in 2017. An Israeli friend recommended it and it is very good. Sad, but good. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. This one is really popular and the author won the Nobel Prize for literature, but it was not for me. I didn't like the idea of a crime spree with no consequences. I read it the week after Charlie Kirk was killed so a story about killing people you don’t agree with didn’t feel good. Even if you throw in the John Wick-like motive. Still, it counted as a Poland book for the ERC. 🌹🌹1/2
  • Murder Being Once Done by Ruth Rendell. Book six in the Wexford series, He's really growing on me. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Chateau Under Siege by Martin Walker. This is where I almost gave up. Walker add characters in every book and then tries to incorporate them into every plot. There are only so many stories that can involve local police, national security, military intelligence, former spies from allied nations, local restaurateurs, former lovers, the hunting club, the local school teacher, and a dozen others. As an acclaimed amateur chef, Bruno should know that you can't use every ingredient in the pantry every time and expect the meal to taste different. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. I loved this book when I read it in 1992, right after I finished law school. The story of two couples who become best friends shortly after grad school hit me hard as I was starting down that same path. I reread it last month, this time as an audiobook. This time around, the story hit me from the other side, now that I am about the same age as the two couples at the end of their time as friends. It's such a wonderful novel. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Zorba the Greek by Kazantzakis. I remember the movie playing on tv when I was a kid so I've had it in my head to read for decades and the book has been on my shelf for years. It was an exuberant, bittersweet story and I'm glad I read it, but it isn't a favorite. 🌹🌹🌹
  • No More Dying Then by Ruth Rendell. Inspector Wexford, book seven. Just as good as the others. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David. David is like an English Julia Child and this book is probably her most famous. It's a classic but took me forever to read because it is so dense. 500 pages with only a handful of pen and ink illustrations, mostly for chapter headings, and the ingredients incorporated into the text instead of listed at the beginning. I'm glad I read it but don't think I'll cook much from it. This was the last book in my TBR 25 in '25 stack. Woo hoo! 🌹🌹🌹
  • The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell. The second book in her Hilary Tamar series featuring frisky lawyers who love wine and travel. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz. Book three in his Susan Ryeland series featuring a book editor turned amateur sleuth. This series is fresh and lively and features a woman of a certain age. I love it. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite by Anthony Trollope. I admit I was disappointed. I loved the both the Barchester and Palliser series. This is the first stand alone Trollope book I've read. The story was soppy and a real downer. Unlike most of Trollope's female characters, the heroine was a nitwit. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Indian Summer by William Dean Howells. I loved this American classic about 19th Century expats living in Florence. I reviewed this one here. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark, a brilliant, imaginative tale inspired by the Lord Lucan disappearance. I thought it was excellent. Definitely in my top three of the year. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Grave in the Woods by Martin Walker. This is the 17th book and I have to take a break before I read the last one (at least until he writes a new one). I loved this series at first, really loved it. But this one put me over the edge -- Walker forgot to include a murder mystery! The bodies in the grave in the woods were from WWII and there was no perpetrator to apprehend. 🌹🌹1/2
  • The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Caudwell. Lawyers who drink wine, travel around Europe, and solve mysteries -- and the books are very funny. I love this series and wish there were more than four of them. This is book three. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Fisher King by Anthony Powell, a shipboard story with plenty of quirky characters. I’m glad I read it, but probably one for Powell completists like me. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Light of Day by Graham Swift starts as hardboiled detective fiction and ends as a melancholy love story. It kept me entertained throughout and thinking about it after. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The God of the Woods by Liz Moore was another book club pick. Not my favorite, despite it's popularity, but I don’t like stories about teenagers. And I thought the ending was absurd. 🌹🌹
  • Slightly Foxed, No. 87, Autumn 2025. I read this one as soon as it came to not feel like I was falling even further behind. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Autumn by Ali Smith annoyed me until I loved it. It took me a while to get into the writing style and the story. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Anti-minimalist House by Massimo Listri. I’m on a quest to read all my coffee table books and I liked the title of this one. It is different than most of my home decor books because the author/photographer is Italian and most of the houses featured were Italian or French. Interesting, but a different look than the English and American house books I am used to. Lots of dark colors, especially dark red, and what I think of as baroque furnishings. Not literally from the Baroque period, but heavy and ornate. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Some Lie and Some Die by Ruth Rendell, book 8 in her Inspector Wexford series I continue to plow through. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Lonely Girl by Edna O'Brien. This is the second book in O'Brien's Country Girls Trilogy. I liked this one a lot because the two main characters are adults in this one, not children and teen agers like in the first one, although it was difficult to watch them make bad choices. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. Definitely a big favorite of the year. I got this book years ago, when it first came out, but never read it. I am so glad I finally did! I don't like scary books, but I enjoy a story like this that is brimming with eerie atmosphere and suspense. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Complete Stories by Evelyn Waugh. I was in a readalong group on Instagram that read all Waugh's fiction over the last two or so years, one every other month. We finished with these short stories. I loved the entire experience. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Ivanov by Anton Chekhov. I’m trying to read more classic drama and I'm glad I read this, but I can't say it was a favorite. 🌹🌹🌹
  • A Sleeping Life by Ruth Rendell. Another solid Wexford mystery. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Brazil by John Updike. This was an odd one about star crossed lovers in Brazil. There's a back roads adventure, gold mining, cannibals, and a fantastical twist that turns the story on its head. Add a lot, lot, lot of graphic sex to confirm that this one was not for me even though Updike is one of my favorite authors. Apparently, when you are as successful as him, you get to experiment. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Falstaff by Rober Nye. This 1975 book of historical fiction has been on my TBR shelf for years. It is the fictional autobiography of Shakespeare’s beloved comedic character. His picaresque adventures were highly entertaining. Not only did he participate in the historical highlights of the 1400s, he met other Shakespeare characters along the way. But the sex talk was over the top. It went from bawdy to downright raunchy to sometimes pornographic. A little went a long way and a lot went too far. I’m glad I read it but it’s not for the faint of heart. The book is on Anthony Burgess's list of 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, a Personal Choice. 🌹🌹🌹
  • Persuasion by Jane Austen, my final reread in celebration of her semiquincentennial. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch, a typically delightful, shaggy tale by one of my favorite authors. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. This one was even more depressing than Ivanov. I'll continue working my way through Chekhov's major plays, but it's a slog. 🌹🌹🌹
  • The Devil's Advocate by Morris West was an undercover gem. I loved it! It is the story of a terminally ill priest assigned to investigate the possible sainthood (ie: play the Devil's advocate) of a man who died in the war in an Italian village. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1959. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Rabbit Remembered by John Updike. This novella is a coda to his quartet of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Set during the fall and winter holidays of 1999, on the eve of the new Millennium, his extended family reminisce about Rabbit and their own lives. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett. I have not read her best seller, The Appeal, but I loved this holiday-themed sequel and now plan to go back to the original. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • My Life as a Man by Philip Roth. This was a mobius strip of a book. It starts with two short stories featuring a Nate Zuckerman prototype. The second part is a novel about Peter Tarnopol, the author of the two stories, which turn out to be based on his (also fictional) life. Both the Tarnopol and Zuckerman are alter egos of Roth, so it really spirals around itself. Only Roth could pull of a stunt like this. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe was a brilliant, witty critique of modern art. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Thousand Feasts by Nigel Slater disappointed me. Too many sensitive, wispy descriptions for my taste. It read like journal prompts or a high school literary magazine. 🌹🌹1/2
  • South and West by Joan Didion. I'm slowly working my way through all her books. This was interesting but unpolished -- literally. It is her notebooks from a month spent visiting the American South in the 1970s and a shorter section of notes she made while visiting California for the Patty Hearst trial. 🌹🌹🌹
  • If We Still Lived Where I was Born by Maria Giura is a collection of poems that can be appreciated and enjoyed by poetry connoisseurs and readers like me who shy away from poetry. Read my review here. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy. This is the happiest and most accessible Hardy novel I've read. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths. I've heard nothing but praise for her Ruth Galloway mystery series so was pleased my library finally got audiobooks. This one was very good, just this side of too scary for me. I plan to continue the series. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy. I love Maeve Binchy novels for the way they take a complicated jumble of difficulties and sort them all out in the end. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Sherlockian by Graham Moore. This was a great yarn of a novel, braiding a contemporary mystery with a historical story featuring Sherlock Holmes. I loved it. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Tempest Tost by Robertson Davies is the first book in his Salterton Trilogy. I love his novels and was reluctant to read these because I would no longer have the experience of reading them for the first time. Crazy, right? This one centered around a community theater troupe putting on an outdoor production of The Tempest. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Christmas Treasury of Yuletide Stories and Poems, edited by James Charlton and Barbara Gilson, was an absolutely charming collection of vintage stories, carols, poems, and snippets. I was pleased it included the full length version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which I was happy to reread. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • Leaven of Malice by Robertson Davies. This second book in his Salterton Trilogy involves the local newspaper and a threatened slander lawsuit. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • The Holiday Cottage by Sarah Morgan. I love reading at least one Christmas-themed romance and this hit all the high notes. 🌹🌹🌹🌹
  • A Mixture of Frailties by Robertson Davies. I ended the year with the last Salterton book. This one explored music and the lives of musicians, as well as the samizdat press. The common thread -- in addition to many of the characters -- was the role of traditional institutions in community life. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹


MY RATING SYSTEM

I now use roses for my rating system, since this is Rose City Reader. My rating system is my own and evolving. Whatever five stars might mean on amazon, goodreads, or Netflix, a five-rose rating probably doesn't mean that here. My system is a mix of how a book subjectively appeals to me, its technical merits, and whether I would recommend it to other people.

🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹 Five roses for books I loved, or would recommend to anyone, or I think are worthy of classic "must read" status." Examples would be Lucky Jim (personal favorite), A Gentleman in Moscow (universal recommendation), and Great Expectations (must read).

🌹🌹🌹🌹 Four roses for books I really enjoyed and/or would recommend to people who enjoy that type of book. So I give a lot of four roses because I might really like a book, but it didn't knock my socks off. And while I'd recommend it to someone who likes that genre -- mystery, historical fiction, food writing, whatever -- I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who asked me for a "good book.".

🌹🌹🌹 Three roses for books I was lukewarm on or maybe was glad I read but wouldn't recommend.

🌹🌹 Two roses if I didn't like it. Lessons in Chemistry is an example, which proves how subjective my system is because lots of people loved that book. I found it cartoonish and intolerant.

🌹 One rose if I really didn't like it. I don't know if I've ever rated a book this low. The Magus might be my only example and I read it before I started keeping my lists.

I use half roses if a book falls between categories. I can't explain what that half rose might mean, it's just a feeling.

Here is a link to the star rating system I used for years. I include it because the stars I used in years past meant something different than these roses, so if you look at my lists from past years, the ratings won't mean quite the same thing.



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