Hello everyone! It’s 2025 and we’re still doing this thing!
For a change, I have more fiction than non-fiction. I also have – gasp – some poetry, which I don’t dip into very often. Poetry either feels too corny to me or it makes me feel dumb if there seem to be metaphors I’m not grasping. Usually I avoid it altogether, but every one in awhile, I find something that works for me.
Get any good recommendations to start the new year? Let us know in the comments!
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Custodians of Wonder
This non-fiction is part history, part travel. It reminded me a bit of Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity where we sort of travel the world and take a dive into different death rituals and traditions. Highly recommend that one as well.
A vivid look at the ten key people who are maintaining some of the world’s oldest and rarest cultural traditions.
Eliot Stein has traveled the globe in search of remarkable people who are preserving some of our rarest cultural rites. In Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive, Stein introduces readers to a man saving the secret ingredient in Japan’s 700-year-old original soy sauce recipe. In Italy, he learns how to make the world’s rarest pasta from one of the only women alive who knows how to make it. And in India, he discovers a family rumored to make a mysterious metal mirror believed to reveal your truest self. From shadowing Scandinavia’s last night watchman to meeting a 27th-generation West African griot to seeking out Cuba’s last official cigar factory “readers” more than a century after they spearheaded the fight for Cuban independence, Stein uncovers an almost lost world.
Climbing through Peru’s southern highlands, he encounters the last Inca bridge master who rebuilds a grass-woven bridge from the fabled Inca Road System. He befriends a British beekeeper who maintains a touching custom of “telling the bees” important news of the day and crunches through a German forest to find the official mailman of the only tree in the world with its own address – to which countless people all over the world have written in hopes of finding love. These are just some of the last people on Earth still in touch with quickly vanishing rites. Let Eliot Stein introduce you to all of them.
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Guillotine
Ready or Not was one of the most fun horror movies I’ve seen in recent history, so I immediately perked up when I saw this one. This one is incredibly violent and gory, but I’d suggest it to anyone who wants a gory horror comedy with an “eat the rich” plot.
The Menu meets Ready or Not in this dark tale of opulent luxury and shocking violence from the New York Times bestselling author of Bloom.
Thrift fashionista Dez Lane doesn’t want to date Patrick Ruskin; she just wants to meet his mother, the editor-in-chief of Nouveau magazine. When he invites her to his family’s big Easter reunion at their ancestral home, she’s certain she can put up with his arrogance and fend off his advances long enough to ask Marie Caulfield-Ruskin for an internship someone with her pedigree could never nab through the regular submission route.
When they arrive at the enormous island mansion, Dez is floored—she’s never witnessed how the 1% lives before in all their ridiculous, unnecessary luxury. But once all the family members are on the island and the ferry has departed, things take a dark turn. For decades, the Ruskins have made their servants sign contracts that are basically indentured servitude, and with nothing to lose, the servants have decided their only route to freedom is to get rid of the Ruskins for good…
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Helen of Troy, 1993
I’ve been dying to mention this poetry collection and it comes out soon. It’s a retelling of Helen of Troy but set in 1993. If you enjoyed Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf, definitely check this one out.
Named a Most-Anticipated Book of 2025 by Debutiful
Part myth retelling, part character study, this sharp, visceral debut poetry collection reimagines Helen of Troy from Homer’s Iliad as a disgruntled housewife in 1990s Tennessee.
In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn’t the same thing as staying gone…
Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the “if you never owned a bone-sharp biography… / i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.”
Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she’s never been seen before.
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Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat
For all my cozy, works-in-translation pals! This reminded me of Before the Coffee Gets Cold but with less magic. I’m also more aware of Korean lit that makes its way to the US after my two trips to Korea last year.
For readers who loved Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Book Shop, this heartwarming Korean bestseller tells the story of a mysterious diary left in a laundromat brings together residents from all walks of life.
Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat is a place where the extraordinary stories of ordinary residents unfold. Situated at the heart of rapidly gentrifying district of Seoul, it’s a haven of peace and reflection for many locals.
And when a notebook is left behind there, it becomes a place that brings people together. One by one, customers start jotting down candid diary entries, opening their hearts and inviting acts of kindness from neighbours who were once just faces in the crowd.
But there is a darker story behind the notebook, and before long the laundromat’s regulars are teaming up to solve the mystery and put the world to rights.
Instantly capturing the hearts of readers around the world, this is a novel about the preciousness of human relationships and the power of solidarity in a world that is increasingly cold, fast-paced, and virtual.
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