One of January’s simple joys is looking back at last year’s book list and planning the reading year ahead.
The list I plan bears little resemblance to the list I complete, due mostly to the special merging of time, circumstance and interest along the way, telling me a particular book is the one I must read now.
So before January passes, the time when perhaps you, too, are considering what you’ll read in 2026, here are a few of my favorites from the 2025 bookstack. I hope you’ll find one or two worth adding to your reading list this year, and I’d love to hear about your favorites, too.
The Way of Heaven and Earth: From Either/Or to the Catholic Both/And by Matthew Becklo
This is the book I wish everyone would read.
“A crisis of polarization more and more threatens the future of civilization.” So begins the opening paragraph on the back cover The Way of Heaven and Earth, which goes on to describe the ubiquitous either/or dilemmas of our time: “Religion or science? Conservative or liberal? Faith or works?” I pre-ordered within minutes of reading those words in a promo, first because the truth of that sentence gripped me; second because I’ve long admired Matthew Becklo’s writing and editing for Word on Fire. I knew he would call me to think more clearly about the cultural climate and encourage us all to light a candle rather than curse the darkness.
I was not disappointed.
Becklo is a cogent guide through the history of ideas. In in a congenial and accessible way, he considers what major luminaries of western philosophy including Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Pascal, Luther, Kant, Marx and Sartre have proposed as answers to the great philosophical questions. But The Way of Heaven and Earth is far from a slog. it sparkles with literary lights as well: Dante, Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are among them.
Each chapter concludes with a consideration of how the old, “forgotten Way” of Christianity addresses the subject we’ve examined from proposals on one side or the other. The Catholic Both/And is the way of heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, faith and works, contemplation and action, Scripture and Tradition, faith and reason. Becklo directs us each time to Sacred Scripture and its interpreters within the tradition including Irenaeus of Lyons, Augustine, Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, Benedict XVI and many more.
If you’re weary of binaries and longing for balance, The Way of Heaven and Earth: From Either/Or to the Catholic Both/And can lead you to surer footing. Your brain will feel better. Your heart will, too.
Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power by Timothy Ryback
One of the most unforgettable courses of my college years was on the history of the Holocaust. Our kindly Jewish professor led us on on the hellish journey by way of a lengthy book list, recommended films and a visit from an Auschwitz survivor.
I kept all of the books from that course on my shelf for years, the sight of their spines provoking queasy questions about how the Holocaust happened in an allegedly civilized country. And ever since, I’ve been fascinated by the ordinary and extraordinary people who recognized the dangers posed by Nazi rule, Deitrich von Hildebrand, Father Alfred Delp, and Sigrid Undset among them.
So when I listened to this conversation with historian Timothy Ryback (I never miss Dr. Tod Worner’s podast!) I knew I had to read Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power. Aware of what Hitler did after becoming Germany’s chancellor, I was curious to know more about how he achieved the appointment in the first place.
The timeline comes to life in this book.
Ryback sets the stage by summarizing Hitler’s dysfunctional childhood, failed attempts at art, his time as a drifter and his his military service in World War I, his competitive inner circle and his intense desire for power. But it hones in specifically on the political climate in Germany just before the takeover: German humiliation after World War I, the economic crisis that resulted from the outrageous demands of the Treaty of Versailles, and threat of both Bolshevik and Nazi violence that began to evaporate the more centrist movements in the country’s multiple party system which eventually left the aging president Paul von Hindenburg to believe he had no choice but to appoint a man he despised to the position of Chancellor.
“The center cannot hold,” Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote in his post-World War I poem, The Second Coming. As I read this gripping book, those words echoed in my mind. Takeover is accessible both in its length and readability. It is refreshingly well written history. Simply fascinating.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
This exquisite novel deeply involves us in the lives of the “little people” who paid the price for Hitler’s monstrous power grab. And that makes it an excellent companion read with Takeover. Here we follow the intertwined lives of Werner Pfennig, a German orphan whose analytical grasp of radio technology gains him admittance into a selective Nazi boarding school and Marie-Laure LeBlanc, the blind daughter of a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.
Doerr masterfully contrasts images of light and darkness, the visible and the invisible, the risk of adventure and the ties of familial love in an absolutely riveting tale.
When Paris falls to the Germans, Marie-Laure’s father is tasked with smuggling a legendary diamond known as the Sea of Flames (without knowing whether his burden is the actual diamond or one of two copies made to confuse the Germans) to the seaside city of San Malo, where they will live with LeBlanc’s great uncle, whose mental health has been shattered by his experience in World War I.
Every character in this page-turner is well-drawn, among them the LeBlanc’s inimitable housekeeper Madam Manec, whose faith and fighting spirit give her strength to defy the Germans in subtle acts of resistance, and Werner’s boarding school friend, the frail Frederick, forced by family pride into the esteemed Institute and who pays a horrible price for a self-defining moment of refusal to cooperate with cruelty.
I have yet to see the Netflix series inspired by this beautiful book because I don’t want the images Doerr has drawn in my mind to vanish. But if anyone has both read the book and watched the series, I’d love to know what you think!
The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan
One of the reasons I fell in love with Fredrick’s character in All the Light We Cannot See is that he is a bird lover, as am I. Frederick treasures his copy of James Audubon’s Birds of America, the lavishly illustrated ornithological guide by the great 19th century American naturalist. My bird-loving mom once took me to an Audubon exhibit at the Denver Art Museum to view his glorious paintings.
Novelist Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club) has more than a little Audubon in her soul.
When the pandemic lockdown forced her to stay on the premises of her beautiful California home, she became fascinated with the birds that visited her feeders.
And it turns out that Tan is not only a gifted writer, but a talented artist. Her book is a clever chronicle indeed, with notes about bird behavior, feeding preferences and migration patterns. It’s also a psychological chronicle of a a beautiful obsession. It is funny, fascinating, and at times deeply moving. And it’s a thing of beauty, a joy to page through and ponder questions like should I buy bird seed with pepper to keep the squirrels from stealing their food? Is the bird who soulfully stares at me sick? And if so, should I clean and hide the feeders for a few weeks, sad as the prospect may be?
“Creating The Backyard Bird Chronicles was pure fun,” Tan writes, “spontaneous, a bit of a mess, come what may….I could respect science and also allow playful anthropomorphism and a lot of wild guesses. Unlike fiction, I didn’t need to hope the story pulled together. The story was the moment in front of me, one day, one page, one sketch.”
But the novelist never left Tan while she created this lovely book. She is a storyteller at heart, and in this one she’s the protagonist. We’re willing observers, grateful to be along for the flight.
Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
“How was it that Christianity, a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire,” came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world? It would have been impossible to forsee, considering its unlikely beginning. As Katharine Tarvainen points out in her review:
“This revolution did not begin with bombs or bayonets but with a different means of intimidation: a crucifixion.”
In Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Tom Holland–the historian and co-host of the podcast The Rest Is History–sets out “to trace the course of…how the belief that the Son of the one God of the Jews had been tortured to death on a cross came to be so enduringly and widely held that today most of us in the West are dulled to just how scandalous it really was….and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain–for good and ill–thoroughly Christian.”
A specialist absorbed in the history of the Roman empire, Holland would come to notice that the Romans are nothing like we moderns, with our dedication to human rights and our belief that compassion is a virtue. This realization drove the research behind Dominion.
In lively chapters that sweep through the centuries, Holland focuses on both leading and lesser known actors in the history of the West, from St. Paul to St. Catherine to Martin Luther, Napoleon, Marx, Tolkien, and even the Beatles. In the process he repeatedly reveals Christianity’s strange hidden power, the message of Jesus which continues to act as the very standard by which the failures of Christians are judged and at the same time is the unnamed force behind the “assumptions of many who would never dream to describe themselves as Christian” when they fight for equal rights and condemn every manner of social injustice. It’s a provocative and thoroughly engaging read.
Looking for more book suggestions?
The Fall Writer Showcase, The Wide World of Books, has an intriguing variety of short reviews by writers participating in the Word on Fire Institute’s Writing Community. Grateful that my review of Wanting: the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life is among them, as is Katherine Tarvainen’s Dominion review, cited above.
Wishing everyone a happy reading year! As I plan my 2026 reading list, I’m wondering, what were some of your favorite recent reads? I’d love to hear from you.
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You might also enjoy Nazi Prison New Year: The Integrity of Alfred Delp, Flight from Norway: Fascinating Facts about Sigrid Undset, Part 2 and Can Birds Rehumanize Red and Blue Politics?
“What kind of person can remain free when the crowd is everywhere?”
Wanting: the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by topped my 2023 list of favorite reads. This year the book I’m most excited about is The One and the Ninety-nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, the forthcoming release by Luke Burgis.
Burgis says that this book is “about a modern problem most of us can feel but struggle to name: how to become a solid self—free, grounded, and capable of love—without losing the bonds that make life worth living, without having to flee the world or opt out of every invitation.”
I’ve pre-ordered. How about you?
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Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash.
