Happy New Year of 2026!

It’s time to recap my year of 2025 in books!

These are the books I finished in 2025, in order of reading, as far as I can remember. I completed 40 books!!!! That averages to over three books a month. Not quite one a week which is what I aimed to do, but that’s OK. I am so pleased with myself for doing this!!! I did this on top of all my responsibilities, mostly by listening to audiobooks and reading right before bed. This is also in addition to all the podcasts I listened to, especially for my Come Follow Christ study. I am pleased with the mix of fiction and nonfiction that I finished, across a wide variety of subjects. The size of the book cover images in this post show how much I loved the books. The bigger the image, the more I liked it.

The book above I started in December and finished in January. It is so, so good!!!! The author starts the story with a Christmas vacation to Africa so in that sense it’s Christmas-y. If you want a book to inspire you about what one woman can do, especially fulfilling her pursuit of God’s will, read Kisses from Katie! It is all true and so amazing!!!

The Message is soooo good as well! This is one book I want to read every year in January. It is about a man who died, was allowed to watch his family from heaven to see what they were doing, and then God allowed him to come back to his mortal life with “the message.” It is all true!!!! So incredibly marvelous! I found it a thrift store last year and picked it up because I remembered my Veggie Gals recommending it. I just found another copy today when thrifting. I’m excited to give it to my mom and talk about it with her! I hope to find many more copies of it to give away. I love that it shows big family life, faith in God, and a view of the spirit world. It’s utterly fabulous!

The Air We Breathe is also soooo good! The author, Glen Scrivener, explains how the values of freedom, kindness, progress, and equality, which reasonable people appreciate the whole world over, all come from Jesus. Without Jesus, we wouldn’t have these values. Another way of putting it is that we can’t have these values lasting in our civilization without believing in Jesus. I want to read this one again too! Jesus has influenced our culture to the point that His values have permeated our lives to be just as unnoticeable as the “air we breathe.”

I found Angela Braniff as a YouTube influencer when I saw one of her videos about recommended Christmas gifts on amazon a year ago. This book is her story. It was fun and interesting. I admire for adopting internationally and being willing to be a mom of of so many children, following faith in God.

I heard about the above book from Marcie Holladay over at singlemomonafarm.com. She used what she learned in this book to get her dream, which is a farm with lots of acreage in Virginia. I enjoyed it! It’s another one to read/listen to every January. I love all the stories the author tells of people achieving their dreams, from famous people like Tim Allen to ordinary people. It’s an exciting book! If these people can achieve their dreams so can you and I!

We did the above book for our December Morning Basket 2024 but then it took us until about February 2025 to finish it. The illustrations are just so sumptuous! A lovely book!

My son and I listened to a few Gordon Korman books while I drove him to his different classes that he participated in as part of his homeschool education in winter, spring and fall of 2025. These are all fun books for tweens and teens. Mr. Korman is a gifted writer for coming up with captivating plots and witty dialogue.

The one above was for Sisters’ Book Club. It was fun but frustrating. The mom in the story annoyed me because she was such a micromanager. It paints stay-at-home moms in a bad light.

This one is such a great book! It’s a graphic novel about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian, family man, and spy. He was part of the plot to kill Hitler. Such an amazing, true story!!!! So grand! If you don’t read it, you are missing out!!! I show how to make timeline cards for it as an educational aid for teaching history over here.

The 13th Gift was another item for our December Morning Basket which spilled into January and February. It is a true story of a widowed mom of three who had someone give her family gifts for a “Twelve Days of Christmas” project. Such a fun, inspiring, heartwarming story! Put it on your TBR books for your Mother’s Merry Christmas curriculum for next year!

Another Sisters’ Book Club pick. It was delightful!!!! I listened to it in everand.

Linked is a great story as an introduction to Jewish life and culture. It’s also a great story of community and forgiveness.

Speaking of Jewish life, this next one also relates to that. The above book is another amazing book! Go here to read my full review! It’s about a young man, Jason Olson, who was born to a Lutheran father and Jewish mother. He converted to become a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a teen after reading/studying The Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Another true story of God working in someone’s life to bring truth to someone who earnestly sought to know God better. I absolutely loved it!!!!

I heard about this book from Sarah Mackenzie as one of her books she recommends to moms. It was fun but there’s nothing morally outstanding about it. It’s OK if you miss it. I picked it for Sisters’ Book Club in June, and hadn’t read it previously. From now on I will only pick books that I have already read so I know whether or not I can give it a hearty recommendation.

The above book was another Sisters’ Book Club pick. It was horrible! I don’t recommend it. I wasted 6 hours or so of my life listening to it. A fictional book, it shows a woman cheating on her fiance with no repercussions. I didn’t appreciate the open door bedroom scene which I quickly skipped over. Come to think of it, there may have been more, which I also skipped over. I kept thinking it was going to get better and it never did. So take it from me and avoid this book! Notice the image is really small to show how much I hated it. I have it just big enough so you can read the title and the author so you know to avoid it. My sister-in-law picked it not having read it. I hope she only picks books she has read before as I have vowed to do from now on.

I love Patti Callahan Henry’s books. She is a great storyteller! Another Sisters’ Book Club read.

In what was definitely a serendipitous/positively Providential/God wink discovery, I found the book just above and the one just below at the Orem Savers maybe three years ago? and finally read them to help me in writing my novels. One is to come out this winter of 2026. So watch for it!

I somehow stumbled across a YouTube video of the author above. So then I did some sleuthing and found her blog and her publishing company of books for homeschoolers. She is so wonderfully delightful! Sarah Janisse Brown, in this memoir above, shows the power of a godly young woman who dedicates her life to God, following His will as to who she will marry and how many children to give birth to as well as to adopt. Her story is so fun to read, so inspiring, and best of all, it’s all true! I envy anybody who hasn’t read this book yet and gets to read it for the first time. This is just such a huge meaty treat of a book!!! It’s steak and ice cream for the mind all at once! I admire Sarah so much. She resonates a lot with me as a home birthing, homeschooling mom of many. You can see more of her here.

A friend was raving about this book above. It sounded so fun I had to read it myself. It’s by one of the co-authors of The Burning Book, James Goldberg. It’s a totally delightful story about a Latter-day Saint young man falling in love with a Sikh young woman. It’s entertaining, educating, and thought-provoking! A wonderful book!

OK, this one above is a must-read. It is written by a woman who lived a lifestyle totally opposite to my life. As an atheist, she was a professor of English at Syracuse University and set out to prove the Bible wrong. Imagine her surprise when she came to know the Bible as true! She is now the wife of a pastor and homeschooling mom and grandma! She makes a case for including all people, not matter their background, as part of a mother’s hospitality, to “make strangers into friends and friends into family.” Her stories are fun to read, heartwarming, and instructive of how to have a hospitality culture in your home. Just don’t compare yourself with what she does. I believe there is a season when a mom has many children and/or other responsibilities to focus on her own and not feel guilty for not doing more.

I stumbled across this one when I was researching for and writing my blog post over here about musical big families. It is the true story of a woman growing up black with only sisters. Her dad was determined that his daughters would be more successful than he was. A big key to success, he was told, was for them to study music. So he got them playing in a family band. They traveled all up and down the East coast doing gigs, which helped pay for their college educations. I think it was all but one of the five daughters that became either a doctor or a dentist. This is a wonderful story of the power of parent mentors. So, sooo, sooo good! I love true stories like this! The author, Yvonne Thornton, became the first black woman to become board-certified in neonatology medicine after becoming an OB-BYN. Very inspiring!

My son and I read the above book for Morning Basket for spring, summer, and fall of 2025. It took us that long because I would read aloud 1-5 pages a day and we had some breaks in there. It tells the story of Helmuth Hubener from one of his closest friends, Rudi Wobbe. So, sooo, soo good!

We, my son and I, listened to Carry On Mr. Bowditch for the Pyramid class I am mentoring, that he is in. This is such a splendid book. Another must-read for everyone! I had never heard of Mr. Bowditch until I became a homeschool mom. He was a real person who revolutionized the world of navigation with his mathematical figuring. His book, The American Practical Navigator, is on sale in amazon today. Imagine writing a book that is still being sold over 200 years later.

My daughter picked the above book for Sisters’ Book Club in October. I was happy about that because I had read it before and wanted a reread. It’s a fun book that shows the power of friendship and resourcefulness. It also gets the reader more interested in WWII. Definitely a Charlotte Mason living book that can and should be used to teach WWII. My sister Emily reviews it on her blog here, scroll down to Book #6 in her list on that page.

After listening to three Gordon Korman books with my son for all our driving to classes, I felt it was time to expose him to an old classic, so we did Little Britches. I think both our minds wandered during a lot of the listening, so he hasn’t discovered its magic. It’s still a great book!

The woman/main character in the story above reminded me of my mother-in-law just a bit. Catching Christmas is a darling, Christ-centered, clean, wholesome Christmas romance story. I’m glad I listened to it! It’s another book that shows the power of what one woman can do. This book and the next bunch below were all part of my Merry Christmas Mother Curriculum. (I’m thinking of having a personal curriculum that I formerly name from now on. I’m thinking January’s will be my “Jolly January Hygge for Mother” curriculum.)

Mr. Dickens and His Carol really delivered for me! It was even better than The Man Who Invented Christmas! Both titles have the same topic: the story of how Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol. The former started out as a screenplay and became a book, the latter started out as a book and became a movie. This one is better because of all the author’s luscious, evocative descriptions of Victorian England, as well as the emotional interplay going on with the characters, which is just hard to do with a movie. That interplay caused Dickens’ great transformation, a parallel to Scrooge’s transformation. It is so good I want to listen to it every Christmas!

The Christmas Chronicles! This is such a lovely, lovely backstory of Santa Claus. I listened to this book in podcast form, over here. It’s just so fun, so magical, so lovely, and fabulous. I love that it incorporates the Christ Child, St. Nicholas, Dasher and the other reindeer, Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, Santa’s workshop, and the elves into one beautiful amazing story. It rivals C.S. Lewis in Christian storytelling! So, soo, soo good!

I read maybe 80- 90% of this for our family and Church’s Come Follow Christ study for 2025. So I’m counting it! So many beautiful truths are in this book! If you haven’t read it, read it here or in the LDS Gospel Library app on your phone.

I listened to the above book, from a YouTube video, during an afternoon while multi-tasking. The American Girls books and dolls came out when I was a teen so I didn’t really get into them, or even when I was raising my daughters, even though I did get one of them the Felicity doll and some of the books. I decided that the Christmas stories would be fun to listen to during the Advent season. This book is short and delightful and shows family love. I enjoyed it! Next Christmas I’ll do some of the others involving Samantha, Molly, Addy, etc.

A Christmas Dream is kind of like a child’s version of A Christmas Carol. I also listened to this in YouTube while working. It’s a beautiful redemptive story!

The books above and below are collections of true short stories from LDS authors. They were fun and heartwarming! I liked the one above better than the one below.

I finished the one above after finding it when thrifting in 2024. I learned that the seven traditions listed are to be done as part of Advent, but not every day the week before Christmas, but starting the Sunday, before Thanksgiving so that you do one a Sunday and then one on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I didn’t plan ahead well enough with this because I finished reading this so close to Christmas. So I adapted this book to go through all of it in an hour for our family Christmas Eve program. We talked about each Nativity figure, what it symbolizes according to Emily, read the scripture, sang the song, and discussed the discussion question. It was lovely!

This one was great! A wonderful follow-up after watching the movie of the author’s journey to finding Christ, called A Case for Christ. I review the movie here.

At the request of one of my children, I read/listened to the one above. The whole concept of the autism spectrum fascinates me. I’ll be delving into this subject more in 2026.

Elder Jeffery R. Holland’s daughter wrote the book above. I found it thrifting. It’s short and sweet. Perfect for reading in one sitting.

We as a family used the study guide above for our study of Christ and His words in the Doctrine and Covenants for 2025. I enjoyed using this study guide. Sometimes I used the discussion questions as journal writing prompts which caused me to have some reflection for which I’m grateful for. 2026 involves the Old Testament part of the Bible which I’m excited about.

That’s my 2025 in books! I’d love to hear what you read, so if you’d like, please share in the comments below.