I didn’t go into 2025 with a reading plan. I went into it tired, angry, and quietly looking for something that made sense of the world I was living in.
What I found instead were books that didn’t look away.
The stories that stayed with me this year weren’t light or soothing in the way people often mean when they talk about “comfort reads.” They were grounding. They reminded me that fear, longing, love, and resilience aren’t personal failures — they’re shared experiences.
Each of these books met me in a slightly different way, but together they formed a throughline: connection in the middle of uncertainty.
Endurance Without Romance: The Four Winds
The Four Winds didn’t offer hope as a feeling. It offered hope as a practice.
This is a story about a woman living inside forces she can’t control — climate, economy, motherhood, love — and still choosing dignity. What stayed with me wasn’t the plot so much as the refusal to sentimentalize survival. Strength here isn’t loud. It’s necessary.
Reading it reminded me that love stories don’t always look like romance. Sometimes they look like staying. Sometimes they look more like family than passion — and that matters just as much.
Grief and Unanswered Questions: Looking for Alaska
I read Looking for Alaska years ago, but returning to it now felt different.
This time, it felt like permission to stop trying to tie everything up neatly. The book sits inside grief instead of explaining it away, and that mattered in a year where so much felt unresolved — personally and collectively.
It’s a reminder that some questions aren’t meant to be solved. They’re meant to be lived with.
This book is frequently banned from high schools for its real and raw teen perspective on adult issues. Teens need stories they can see themselves in too — and they can handle more than we think, especially with us alongside them.
PSA: Don’t ban books. Have book clubs with your teens.
Modern Messiness: Girl Dinner
Girl Dinner captures a kind of modern womanhood that’s sharp, anxious, funny, and uncomfortable.
What I appreciated most was its refusal to polish anything for the reader. It doesn’t ask you to like its characters all the time — it asks you to recognize them. In a culture obsessed with palatability, that felt honest.
The women in this book read like modern-day women: hundreds of tabs open in their brains, constantly trying to interpret and fit into a world that keeps shifting beneath them. If you ever sit with questions of women and power, this satire slaps.
The Weight of What’s Unsaid: Atmosphere
Some books don’t announce themselves. Atmosphere was one of those.
It’s a quiet book, but it carries emotional weight in pauses, glances, and things left unresolved. Reading it reminded me how powerful restraint can be — how much trust it takes to let a story breathe without filling every silence.
More than that, it’s a reminder that we can connect deeply with characters who are nothing like us — because they still dream, love, and search for purpose, just like we do.
Hope as Connection: Project Hail Mary
Project Hail Mary surprised me with how human it is.
Under the science and the stakes is a story about cooperation, care, and choosing connection even when it’s inconvenient or risky. In a year where isolation felt encouraged, that message landed hard.
Hope here isn’t abstract. It’s relational. Even in the most unlikely situations, we can find strength, friendship, and a reason to persist.
Highly recommend the audio version.
When the Cost Finally Lands: Empire of Storms
By the time I reached Empire of Storms, I was ready for a story that didn’t pull its punches.
This is where the consequences show up. Where love becomes dangerous. Where power demands sacrifice. What stayed with me was the willingness to let things hurt — and trust the reader to stay.
This is the fifth book in Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series and is often tandem-read with Tower of Dawn, following different characters through the same unfolding crisis. Empire of Storms tracks a heroine learning what it takes to love her people and her home — and the courage that requires.
Memory, Timing, and Almosts: Every Summer After
If I had to name one emotional throughline of my reading year, it would be this: the ache of almost.
Every Summer After lives inside memory and missed timing without turning either into a villain. It understands how the people we almost were can shape us just as much as the lives we end up living.
It’s a love story, yes — but more than that, it’s about how we carry the past forward. This one was deeply personal for me. My love story isn’t linear and doesn’t look like anyone else’s. Maybe those stories deserve to be written, read, and recognized too.
Why These Books Mattered Together
Taken individually, these books span different genres, tones, and scopes. But together, they reminded me of something simple and necessary:
Stories don’t fix the world.
But they keep us from feeling alone in it.
In a year that often felt fractured and isolating, these books offered connection — to other people, to interior lives, to the possibility that attention and care still matter.
And sometimes, that’s enough to keep going.
daniella does it all 
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