“A Best Friend Is Someone Who Gives Me a Book I’ve Never Read” – A. Lincoln
As I have done for the past 16 years, I am asking for a list of books you’ve most enjoyed reading in 2025.
I’m most interested in what were your favorite reads this year (old or new book or rereads) with the thought that others might cobsider for their reading in 2026.
Even if you think others may recommend a particular book that you liked, please include it on your list. Some of you like to know that more than one or two MillersTime readers have enjoyed a given title.
You may send in one title or up to four. (If you’re struggling with limiting your titles to four, you may add several more titles and their authors, but please limit your comments about your favorites to four as it takes me a good deal of time to construct the final post.)
And you may include book(s) you cited in the 2025 Mid-Year List (link provided as many – most? – of us perhaps have forgotten what we cited six months ago).
Please take the time to include a few sentences about the book(s) you cite, particularly what made this book so enjoyable for you. It is the comments that are what s most important about MillersTime Favorite Reads each year according to the feedback I’ve received about these annual and semi-annual posts.
You have until December 20th to get your favorites to me in time for my posting of the results on Dec. 31/Jan.1. (Early submissions are greatly appreciated.)
Send me your list (Samesty84@gmail.com) with the title, author, and whether the book is fiction (F) or non-fiction (NF).
Thanks in advance.
Richard/Rick (depending upon how you know me)
Randy Candea said:
Donna Leon, “The Golden Egg”(F). The author, an expatriate American, has written over 30 mystery novels centered on the Brunetti family in Venice, Italy. This one is about the death of a handicapped man who according to the government had never existed.But why would anyone want this sweet simpleminded man dead?
William Kent Krueger, “Copper River” (F) Winner of numerous writer’s awards and author of over 20 novels centered in the Minnesota wilderness, this novels draws a powerful portrait of lost children caught in a culture that is indifferent to them.
Penn Staples said:
I have two books to recommend – An Immense World by Ed Yong and Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton.
They are very different books, but they offer the same sense of quiet and much needed relief from the relentless stream of troubling news that fills our days. Each, in its own way, returned me to a world that operates on very different terms, sensory, patient, and largely indifferent to the noise of the ‘human-sphere’.
An Immense World expanded my sense of reality by showing how animals perceive and navigate life in ways I knew little about. And Ed Yong is a rare breed – a gifted storyteller and a first-rate science journalist, and I found the book completely absorbing.
Raising Hare narrowed that focus, and asks that we slow down and pay attention to one small, wild life. I loved that book as well and will likely read it again. Chloe Dalton is another in the ‘rare breed’ category – bridging two very different ways of seeing the world given her work in the UK Foreign Office and finding herself in ‘lock down’ on her farm during COVID. As the sleeve notes attest, she is an exquisite story teller.
So, with these two books, who needs to take a vacation when one can simply dive into these two wonderful books?
Happy Holidays to you, Richard and Ellen!