Ashley's Favorite Reads of 2025 - Part 2
- unabridgedpod
- 37 minutes ago
- 4 min read
by Ashley Dickson-Ellison (@ashley_dicksonellison)
It's hard to believe it's time for a year-end wrap-up post for 2025, but here we are. My reading life has eased up and improved since I finished my grad program in August, but my reading life has still experienced a significant impact this year. However, I do have some favorites from the second half of the year, and I'm excited about the prospect of a vibrant reading year in 2026.
Marie Bostwick's The Book Club for Troublesome Women (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
I loved this brilliant historical fiction novel, set in the 1960s and centering several women, all of whom are married and have significant domestic responsibilities. As the women get to know each other better, they start being real with each other about their hopes, their ambitions, and their limitations.
Their book club first forms around a discussion of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, but from there, the club begins to read other books together as well, and their lives grow more complicated as they start to discover more about their own passions and dreams. I love the way we get to know each one of the women and their unique circumstances, and though Bostwick grounds the setting in historical 1960s events, it is eerily and importantly relevant to today. I love the way Bostwick celebrates the bond between women and the way that bond can profoundly enrich lives.
Debby Dahl Edwardson's My Name Is Not Easy (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Set at a residential school for Alaskan Natives in the 1960s, this historical fiction YA novel showcases the realities of schooling for many Native families in that time living in rural Alaska. The Catholic teachers at the school range in their compassion and their tolerance, but generally they fail to see the Native students as whole people with a wealth of culture and broader knowledge about the world around them.
The students' cultural differences are ignored and tensions between them bubble under the surface, but as circumstances become more dire, the students discover they have more in common than they first thought. Told from a variety of perspectives, this novel brilliantly and hauntingly portrays some of the cruelties and injustices done to Native Alaskan young people and their families during this time in history. It certainly prompted further reading for me, and I learned about some atrocities that occurred that have gone largely unacknowledged even into present day.
Alison Espach's The Wedding People (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
I was captivated by this story from the moment I started it, and I had to know what was going to happen. The premise certainly grabs you: a woman, Phoebe Stone, arrives at a fancy hotel with the sole plan to have one last splurge, but she's confronted by a wedding party that was supposed to have reserved the entire hotel. She and the bride have an immediate standoff, and both of them have to face the way their plans go awry because of the other's presence.
What comes to pass is hilarious, poignant, and ultimately highlights how, by being honest about what we really want, need, and think, we can transform our lives and the lives of those around us.
Stephen Graham Jones's The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Wow, this multilayered book contains multitudes. It's a vampire revenge story that explores the legacy of America and questions how to possibly rectify damages done over centuries. While the scope is broad in many ways, Jones specifically spirals toward the real-life Marias Massacre of 1870 as well as the near extinction of the buffalo, looking at what happened when the U.S. soldiers slaughtered an estimated 200 people within the Blackfeet nation and the impact of that atrocity over time.
Through complex storytelling and a detailed journal kept by a Lutheran pastor and discovered 100 years later, Jones explores the contrasting lifestyles and values of the settlers against those of the Native tribes.
This profound novel requires the reader to reckon with a bloody legacy that is often glossed over or ignored. Jen and I discussed this book in episode 299.
Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
I was surprised by how fascinating I found this nonfiction book, which focuses on the way we get together with other people and how it can be done more effectively with some forethought and consideration for how gatherings can work. I didn't know what to expect when I started this, but I found it very thought-provoking, and I found the challenge to make our gatherings (whether they are meetings, book clubs, dinners, or major events) to be inspiring and provocative.
As Parker points out in the text, we as humans gather all of the time, but doing so with more intentionality could have profound effects on those we gather with and on ourselves. This is a book that has really stayed with me and is one I will revisit many times to come when I think about planning gatherings.
We hope you have read some books you've loved this year! We'd love to hear about your favorites from 2025.
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