All My Favorite Reads from the First Half of the Year

14 Books I Can’t Stop Thinking About + a Giveaway for You

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Listen, I love a good competition. Not for anything I’m actually bad at, of course — but wherever I excel? Let’s go.

I don’t know if it’s fair to call my reading habit something I excel at, so much as I just love to do it. I will drop pretty much anything to spend an evening (or a morning or an afternoon) reading. Trawling the aisles of a bookstore will forever be my favorite way to while away the day.

And there are a lot of benefits to reading! It stimulates your mind, expands your knowledge, and — perhaps most importantly, especially as of late — it can increase empathy by widening your understanding of the world.

I love reading for all of those reasons, of course — but also just because I enjoy it.

My reading goal for this year is 111 books, for no particular reason except it seems reasonably challenging to me, and Jordan says my previous reading challenge goals have been too easy for me to hit. (Okay, so who actually made it a competition? Jordan, I think.) Plus, I just like the magic of the number “111”.

I know that, to some people, that’s a lot of books. To others, it’s puny pickings. No matter; the person I’m competing with is myself — and at a game I love playing. If nothing else, setting a reading goal for the year gives me an excuse to make time for this activity that I love so much, that enriches my life and provides an escape, that teaches me things and inspires my own creative practice. (Not that I’ve ever needed a good reason to read.)

I get that setting a reading goal isn’t for everybody; for me, it’s one of my favorite datasets to follow all year long! And since I’ve been tracking my reading activity, I can tell you which of the books I’ve read so far this year really stood out from the rest.

Keep Reading to Find:

• My 14 favorite books from the first half of this year (listed by the month I read them)

• A giveaway for my favorite book of 2025 thus far

• A quick update on my own book writing progress

Favorite reads of 2025 so far - less the books I’ve loaned out and those I got from the library

January 2025

Winner: The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne

Non-Fiction, Memoir

Griffin Dunne is Joan Didion’s nephew, and he knows as well as we do that that’s why most of us picked up this book. I’m so glad I did.

Dunne is a great writer in his own right, and he sprinkles in just enough insight into his famous family (and their famous friends) among stories of his own adolescent hijinks and misadventures to keep you hooked.

That’s not to say his own experiences aren’t compelling — I have a friend who teases me for voraciously reading memoirs, non-fiction books that “aren’t even about famous people!” Suffice it to say, I love a good personal story whether you’re related to literary royalty or not — but the glimpses behind the curtain make it extra delicious.

It was fascinating to read about the legendary parties at his aunt Joan and uncle John’s, his friendship with a young Carrie Fisher, and the tragic murder of his sister, Dominique. It’s a cinematic telling of a complicated, glittering, deeply human family — and I was captivated on every page.

Buy The Friday Afternoon Club on Bookshop

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Honorable Mention: A Little Less Broken by Marian Schembari

Non-Fiction, Memoir

Fun fact: I “met” Marian over a decade ago through the blogosphere, and we both attended an unofficial group gathering (albeit on alternating years) called “Bloggers in Sin City” — which was exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of early Internet nerds gathering for a weekend in Las Vegas. It was a blast.

Marian and I were never more than acquaintances, so when I say we “lost touch,” I just mean we both stopped blogging as much — but of course I recognized her name when I heard about her book deal and was so excited that one of my fellow keyboard comrades had made it through the publishing trenches.

After all that “I knew her when!” preamble, you might think I’m biased — but truly, her first book, A Little Less Broken, is fantastic. It’s a deeply personal memoir about Marian’s life leading up to — and following — her autism diagnosis in her early 30s.

She writes with such clarity and heart, and I think so many people (women especially) will see parts of themselves in her story, wondering if there’s been something “wrong” with them, only to discover they were never broken at all.

Buy A Little Less Broken on Bookshop

February 2025

Winner: The Dry Season by Melissa Febos

Non-Fiction, Memoir (Researched)

Melissa and me at Powell’s Books last month

Jordan teases me for having a crush on Melissa Febos — which is fair and true, but it’s specific to her words and the way she writes and what she’s written that’s given me permission to share my story too (as I always tell him when I correct him).

I know I’m not alone in considering Melissa one of the best memoirists alive today, but I’ll say it again anyway: she’s such a compelling writer — she makes even the most mundane feel propulsive with her prose. Melissa’s writing is the bar I set for myself (seemingly unreachable, but worth aspiring to) when I write about my own life. I will forever be first in line — metaphorically — to read anything new she’s written.

And that was the case with The Dry Season, her latest, which was published last month — though I was lucky enough to get my hands on an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) back in February. I tore through it in three days.

In The Dry Season, as in her previous books, Melissa is so honest, often funny, so curious and considered in her approach to the wisdom that’s come from the women before her and the wisdom she’s gleaned from her own life. Like Melissa at the start of this book, I’ve been consistently romantically partnered since high school, and I’ve often wondered — even in a partnership I love — if I’d benefit from time alone.

“I was reassured by the fact that I never felt afraid to be alone,” Melissa writes. “I did not consider how one might not ever feel the thing she had successfully outrun.”

Oof. That was one of many lines I copied into my notebook — lines that turned into paragraphs, then pages of words I wanted to remember.

The Dry Season is about Melissa’s year of celibacy, yes — but it’s also about the internal narratives we carry into relationships, the ones we forge (or don’t) with ourselves, and how connecting deeply with ourselves can allow us to love without needing to be “made whole” by someone else. I can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t benefit from witnessing Melissa’s excavation of these stories.

Much like when I read Leslie Jamison’s Splinters last year (or The Recovering back in 2018), I finished this book not just struck by how much I related to Melissa’s experience, but by how much I longed to interrogate my own life with the same radical, tender honesty.

What a gift to get to read from her again.

Buy The Dry Season on Bookshop — or enter the giveaway below to win a FREE copy!

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Honorable Mention: Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian L. Weiss

Non-Fiction, Spiritual

This metaphysical classic is one of those books that quietly rearranges your mind.

Many Lives, Many Masters is part memoir, part case study, following Dr. Brian Weiss — a respected, traditionally trained psychiatrist — as he’s pulled into the world of past-life regression therapy almost by accident.

His patient Catherine, gripped by chronic anxiety and fear, begins to recall vivid, detailed memories from lifetimes she couldn’t possibly have lived in this one. And as she shares these seemingly improbable stories, her symptoms begin to dissolve, piece by piece.

Weiss, skeptical and rational to his core, finds himself unable to dismiss what he’s witnessing — and he discovers a deeper truth: that we are souls on an endless journey of growth, healing, and remembering. This book is gentle yet mind-opening, inviting you to consider that who we are stretches far beyond this one brief life chapter.

It’s one of those stories you may pick up feeling a bit wary — is it too out-there? too “woo”? — only to find yourself dog-earing pages, underlining whole passages, and feeling oddly comforted by the idea that maybe we’ve all done this before, and we’re all here to learn how to love (ourselves and one another) better — again and again.

Buy Many Lives, Many Masters on Bookshop

March 2025

Winner: This Is a Love Story by Jessica Soffer

Fiction, Literary/Contemporary Romance

This Is a Love Story by Jessica Soffer offers exactly what its title promises, but not in the way you might expect.

It’s a love letter to a fifty-year marriage — to the beauty and ache of two lives stitched together by time, choice, and the city that holds them. Abe and Jane have always returned to Central Park — as young dreamers, weary parents, artists chasing meaning — until now, as Jane is dying and Abe tells the story of them to keep her close.

This novel holds all the quiet, complicated truths about the things we know about each other — and the parts we don’t want to know. It’s about the son who feels abandoned, the student who longs for her own story, and the Park that listens to it all. (I loved the chapters where Central Park was the narrator.)

Soffer’s prose is tender, wise, and deeply human — reminding us that love isn’t perfect, but it is enduring.

Buy This Is a Love Story on Bookshop

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Honorable Mention: Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

Non-Fiction, Memoir

I have passed by this book for years, feeling so drawn in by the title, but for some reason, never picking it up. Perhaps I assumed I knew too well about this tribe, and didn’t want to open the Pandora’s Box of feelings I assumed might spill out if I read it.

I finally ended up buying Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in March, and couldn’t put it down once I started. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t know exactly what the book was about — and I’m glad for that. T Kira Madden writes about growing up queer, biracial, and deeply lonely in the privileged, chaotic swirl of Boca Raton in the ’90s.

This is not just a story about being fatherless in the ways you might expect — it’s about claiming your own belonging, and loving the wild, messy version of yourself you were and are along the way.

Buy Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls on Bookshop

April 2025

Winner (it’s a tie!): Animal Instinct by Amy Shearn // Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

Fiction, Literary/Dark Humor

I loved both of these unhinged books so much! Clearly, I couldn’t choose between them.

Animal Instinct is wild, sharp, and delicious. And there is so much sex — just so much sex. It was excellent.

Amy Shearn gives us a protagonist who is messy, animal, unapologetically hungry — for touch, for freedom, for the feeling of desire realized. It’s about a woman, post-divorce, coming undone and back together again in ways that feel both feral and oddly tender.

I loved how the book asks what we do with our wants when they don’t fit neatly inside the roles we’ve built for ourselves — wife, mother, good girl, loyal friend. It’s funny, dark, and alive with questions I’m still chewing on.

And Sky Daddy, a book about loneliness, obsession, and the strange ways we try to feel known, is every bit as weird as you’d expect given the premise — but it’s also unexpectedly tender and poignant, too. Kate Folk gives us Linda, a woman living an outwardly ordinary life who also happens to be erotically obsessed with airplanes.

Yes, airplanes.

Linda’s true passion is boarding a flight not for the destination but for the intimate communion she feels with the sleek fuselages and intelligent windscreens of her “suitors.” It’s surreal, unsettling, and oddly moving to witness her longing — a desire so big it can’t be contained by human connection alone.

This is a love story, but one that hijacks the very idea of what love should look like. It asks how far we’re willing to go to be fully seen, to merge with the thing that makes us feel most alive, no matter how impossible — or unacceptable — it might seem to anyone else. Sky Daddy is weird in all the best ways, and it stayed with me long after the last page.

Buy Animal Instinct on Bookshop // Buy Sky Daddy on Bookshop

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Honorable Mention: Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara

Non-Fiction, Memoir/Technology

I saw Vauhini Vara speak on a panel about writing and AI at AWP. At the time, I didn’t even realize she had a book on that very topic coming out — but when I saw it in Vroman’s a week later, I bought it immediately.

This book is so clever (complimentary). Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age is part essay collection, part memoir, part experiment — Vauhini uses AI not just as a subject but as a collaborator, probing how these tools shape the way we remember, create, and understand ourselves. She writes about searching — for answers, for lost loved ones, for the limits of technology’s reach — in a way that’s intimate and rigorous all at once.

What I loved most is how honest she is about her own curiosity and unease. The book doesn’t pretend to have all the answers; instead, it invites you into the mess of questions we’re all asking: What do we lose when we outsource our stories? Where do our minds end and the machine begins? And how do we stay human — beautifully, imperfectly human — in a world that keeps offering us easy shortcuts?

Buy Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age on Bookshop

May 2025

Winner: Bitter Texas Honey by Ashley Whitaker

Fiction, Contemporary

The main character of this book is such a mess, but also kind of relatable? Despite the fact I wouldn’t make literally any of the choices she made, I could tell she was just trying to figure things out and I felt a lot of empathy for and resonance with that early 20s experience.

Bitter Texas Honey is whip-smart, tender, and a little unhinged in all the right ways. The main character, Joan West, is twenty-three, torn between her liberal Austin world and her Tea Party Republican family, ricocheting between old identities like a leftist feminist who kissed girls at parties and her newer, conservative leanings — all while obsessively mining her messy life for her novel-in-progress. She’s the kind of narrator you root for and cringe at in equal measure.

Ashley Whitaker writes Joan with so much heart and contradiction — addiction, politics, love, debt, family dysfunction, the whole mess. And when her cousin Wyatt’s crisis cracks her worldview open, you feel her unraveling in real time.

Bitter Texas Honey is funny, raw, and so true to the chaos of many of our twenties when you’re desperate to make art out of your own life — even as it’s falling apart.

In a fun turn of events, I found out the author is in a writing community I’m in (Chelsea Bieker’s and Kimberly King Parsons’ The Fountain) after I read her book, and I had the chance to message her and tell her how much I loved her debut novel!

Buy Bitter Texas Honey on Bookshop

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Honorable Mention: Hardly Strangers by A.C. Robinson

Fiction, Romance

I bought this 831 Stories novel at McNally Jackson during my trip to New York back in May. All 831 Stories novels are slim, so I finished this one before my plane landed back in Portland — and though it was quick, it packed a punch.

I’m always more impressed with that in novellas or short stories, where there’s so much less real estate to craft a compelling narrative. A.C. Robinson does it well though — and it was even more fun to discover after the fact that the plot had been based on an IRL experience of her own. (You know this now: I love memoirs about people who aren’t even celebrities!)

Hardly Strangers drops you right into one night in Silver Lake. The main character, Shera’s, plan is to finally romantically connect with the filmmaker she’s been orbiting for months, but then Max King, the chaotic, magnetic frontman of an Irish punk band, appears — and everything shifts.

Robinson captures that delicious spark of what-if — the giddiness of letting your guard down with someone who feels both brand-new and strangely familiar. It’s a quick read, but it lingers in that hopeful, messy space between heartbreak and possibility.

Buy Hardly Strangers on Bookshop

June 2025

Winner: Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Fiction, Literary/Romance

I read this book in a day. A weekend day, of course, but still. I refused to do anything else after I’d started it. I was hungry to know what came next.

Broken Country is beautifully written, has the “edge of your seat”-ness of a mystery or thriller, has multiple compelling love stories, and the characters just feel so resonant — so imperfect and honest and vulnerable and true.

Hall writes with such tenderness and tension, toggling between past and present in a way that makes you feel how heartbreak and desire echo through years. This book is about love and loss, but also about who we are when we choose to remember what we once wanted — and who we become when we dare to want again.

It’s a beautiful book, and I’d recommend it to pretty much anybody.

Buy Broken Country on Bookshop

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Honorable Mention (it’s a tie!): Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid + Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success by Jeff Hiller

Fiction, Historical Fiction + Non-Fiction, Memoir (Celebrity)

We have another tie here!

I hesitated to add Atmosphere, because do I really need to hype a TJR book?

Don’t get me wrong, I love her and I’m obviously a fan of her writing — but she’s got a multi-million-dollar book deal. I think she’s doing alright without one more fawning review.

That being said, forgive me for fawning a little: Atmosphere might be my second favorite of Reid’s books, right after The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (always and forever the top of the TJR pile for me).

The story — about a quiet, brilliant physics professor who’s suddenly given the chance to become one of NASA’s first women astronauts — is so exquisitely told: so well-researched, so vivid, so genuinely moving.

Reid pulls you into the tight-knit, high-stakes world of the early shuttle program and the friendships and secrets that spark to life under all that pressure. I was crying so hard I hiccuped as I read the final few pages. Just masterful storytelling that tugs on the heartstrings in all the right (and unexpected) ways. I loved it.

And then I read Actress of a Certain Age by “Somebody Somewhere” actor, Jeff Hiller (a memoir by an actual celebrity — take that, teasing friend!). I already suspected I’d love Jeff, just because I associate him closely with his sweet, genial character on SS. Jeff is a lot like his character, Joel (by his own authored admission!), but also a lot funnier and with more of an edge, as evidenced by the stories he shares in his book.

This memoir is such a delight — sharp, awkward, heartfelt, and deeply human. Jeff writes about growing up “profoundly gay” and very Lutheran in small-town Texas, enduring the bullies, fumbling through his stint as a truly terrible social worker, and slogging through decades of bit parts and basement improv before finally having his big, overdue moment. (He was just nominated for his first Emmy yesterday!)

He’s honest about how brutal the hustle can be — the rejection, the aging, the temp jobs — but the way he tells it is so funny and warm, you just want to hug him and say, “Same.” If you’ve ever had a dream that felt impossible (and stuck with it anyway), Actress of a Certain Age is like a pep talk from the world’s best best friend.

Buy Atmosphere on Bookshop // Buy Actress of a Certain Age on Bookshop

GIVEAWAY CLOSED: Win + Read My Favorite Book of the Year

If it wasn’t already obvious, The Dry Season by Melissa Febos is my favorite book of 2025 thus far (it’s not a tight race!), and I have one copy to giveaway!

To enter, comment under this post on Substack (click the speaking bubble icon next to the heart in the header or at the bottom of this post), and tell me about a book you’ve read this year that changed you for the better — even just a little.

I’ll randomly pick a winner on Wednesday, July 23rd, and send the book your way!

What’s New in My Writing World

I started my six-week memoir class last week, and I’m already so grateful for the space. I love a class, and I love working on a writing project with the built-in accountability of a group container.

I took a pile of notes to my first 1:1 call with my instructor last Thursday, and the way she helped me thread the seemingly disparate parts of my experience — biracial identity, parental abandonment, marriage and divorce, sobriety! — together into the beginnings of an actual outline felt like therapy.

I feel like this might actually be a book.

I feel like I might actually be excited to write it.

I feel like one day you might hold it in your hands . . . and it might end up on someone’s list of “Favorite Reads from the First Half of the Year” one day.

One can hope!

I look forward to sharing more with you along the way. ✨

What have you read and loved so far this year? Share your top book recommendations with me — and enter to win a copy of The Dry Season! — in the comments below.