Favorite Books of 2025

Another baker's dozen:

 The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl (nonfiction about birdwatching)

 The Rhine, Ben Coates (nonfiction travelogue about following the course of the Rhine River)

 The Curse of Penryth Hall, Jess Armstrong (fiction: 1920s-set mystery with a female protagonist meeting a most unusual doctor)

 The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough (nonfiction about the Americans who traveled to Paris in the early 1800s)

 It's OK That You're Not OK, Megan Devine (nonfiction book about grieving which I bought after my husband's death)

 The Book of Murder, Matt Murphy (nonfiction about a district attorney in California)

 The New Girl, Cassandra Calin (yeah, children's fiction and a graphic novel: Romanian girl moves to Quebec due to her mother's job and learns to adjust)
 
  Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty (nonfiction about working in a crematorium)
 
  The Cloisters, Katy Hays (dark academia fiction about a small-town girl accepting a job at The Cloisters in New York City for the summer)
 
  The Yankee Road: Volume 3, Apotheosis, James D. McNiven (nonfiction in which McNiven finally finishes his odyssey of U.S. 20)
 
  Written in Bone, Sue Black (nonfiction by a forensic specialist about the human skeleton with notes from her cases)
 
  Love is a War Song, Danica Nava (fiction about a Native American singer who angers her fans who is sent out to her grandmother's ranch to lie low, but instead learns about her heritage)

  The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson (nonfiction--Wilson's sweeping narrative about the Native Americans in North America)

Honorable Mention:
  Good Spirits, B.K. Borison (fiction: if The Ghost and Mrs. Muir television series ended happily)

 
Most Disappointing: A tie between James (started off promisingly with James teaching the kids how to talk and act in front of white people, then went off the track with him working at the minstrel show) and Lessons in Chemistry (the real-life struggles of professional women in the 1950s and early 60s clothed in absurdity including a dog named Six-Thirty who thinks like a human, ironically the most interesting character in the book besides Calvin).