I have always loved a good year end list—I think there is something so fun about looking back over the past 12 months and naming things that were favorites in your life during that season. I like looking back on these lists from year to year as I watch my tastes change, as I remember the things I was reading or listening to or watching in different periods in life. There are so many different ways to close out a year, but one of the things I’ve always tried to do is make time to look back on the things I read and share the best titles that made up this year. Sometimes this feels like trying to pick a favorite child! But every year I try & narrow down the books I’ve read to my 5 favorite fiction titles and my 5 favorite non fiction books. And this year, I just couldn’t do it in the fiction category. I read some absolutely incredible novels, the kind that immerse you in a new place, the types of books where the characters become part of you for a season and you grieve when the last page is over because you have to say goodbye. There is one book on this list where I may have closed the last page and immediately jumped on Instagram to find the author and messaged her to tell her how much I loved her characters and was she working on a sequel so I could spend more time with them? (She actually wrote back! And unfortunately there is not a sequel in the works….) So you get 7 of the best novels of the year instead of 5 (and honestly I’d go out on a limb and say these are truly some of the best novels I’ve EVER read, not just this year, but literally ever. So, without further ado, out of the 60+ books I made it through this year, these are the 12 best. Happy reading, my friends!

Favorite Non-Fiction

Miracles and Other Reasonable Things by Sarah Bessey. I’ve been reflecting a lot on who are the voices I let influence me the most over the past year and I think my answer really is Sarah Bessey. I’ve read everything she’s put out into the world this year, blog posts, email newsletters, instagram posts, and of course her new book that arrived this fall. I find Sarah to be one of the smartest, strongest, and at the same time gentle voices in our culture right now. She will absolutely channel Molly Weasley to defend what she believes and the people she loves, but she writes in such a way that you want to curl up under a cozy blanket with a cup of tea and absorb her words, challenging and prophetic as they may be. Her latest book is a story of healing and miracles, and also what happens when healing doesn’t come in quite the way we expect. I love her, and will continue letting her teach and lead me because I think what she has to say is so timely for our culture today.

Becoming by Michelle Obama. Now, before any of you who didn’t love the Obamas just skip this paragraph entirely, hear me out on this one! This is truly one of the best written stories/autobiographies I’ve ever read. Michelle Obama can write. And write incredibly well. Lets just say I have a close family member who was maybe not at all a fan of the Obama administration and this is not a book she ever would have picked up on her own. But after hearing me rave about Michelle’s story and her writing and how interesting it was she read this and loved it. It’s not a book about politics. It’s a story of family, of generations living together and raising one another, of serving a community, growing, and becoming something she never in a million years dreamed would be possible. I loved this book. I loved her story. I loved reading the early chapters of her childhood, and her elementary school, how her own parents advocated for her to have better teachers and better learning environments because they knew if she didn’t she’d become trapped in a system like so many others. It’s a story you read knowing she became the first lady but thinking “how on earth did she go from this incredibly humble beginning to living in the White House??” If you are looking for a wonderful story, Becoming will keep you turning pages and will suck you into the south side of Chicago, Princeton University, Harvard law school, and ultimately the White House in a rich and beautiful way.

Barking to the Choir by Father Greg Boyle. Living in Los Angeles, Father G, as he’s known, is a very well known name—most everyone I knew had heard of him, been to his ministry before, or somehow supported what he was doing. My friends & I used to eat at Homegirl Cafe, his restaurant that is fully staffed and run by former gang members, on a relatively regular basis. Moving this far east, however, I realized Father G isn’t known here and I hope that can change! Father G is a Jesuit priest who was assigned to the Boyle Heights neighborhood in east LA as his first parish appointment back in 1986. It was a church that was located smack between two large public housing projects and in the hotbed of LA gang activity of the late 80s. His story as to how he went about creating what would become the number 1 gang-intervention program in the nation, be honored by presidents and become the leading expert on gang member rehabilitation in the country is absolutely fascinating and you can read that incredible book Tattoos on the Heart: the Power of Boundless Compassion (in fact I wish everyone WOULD read it, my husband loved it so much he read it multiple times in a row which is unheard of for him!). But this year I read his second book Barking to the Choir: the Power of Radical Kinship and it was every bit as amazing as his first book. Barking to the Choir is a story of kinship—how we all really do belong to one another. It’s a story of life on the margins—the struggles and the joy found there. He convinces us of the true goodness found in each person, the work of God on the fringes of society and tells the stories of some absolutely remarkable young people who were trapped in a life of violence and poverty and how the transforming power of love, patience, compassion and kinship has changed them. As Father G says “what if, we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line, and stood instead with those who line the bottom?” He’s lived that out with every fiber of his being for decades now, and has transformed not just his own city but over 250 cities around the world who have implemented some of his programs. He’s worth reading about and this book won’t disappoint.

To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope by Jeanne Marie Laskas. Apparently this was the year of reading books that had come out about the Obama administration! That wasn’t intentional, but this was honestly one of my favorite books of the year because it was so interesting, so I had to share it. It’s actually not really about Obama. It’s about the mail. Really. Did you know that the president gets thousands upon thousands of letters a month? I’m sure you knew that. But do you know what happens to those letters? I didn’t. But this is a book about that and it was absolutely fascinating to me. This is a book about the American people and their dialogue and relationship with their president of 8 years. Some loved him, some hated him, some thought he was wrong and had their minds changed, some simply wanted to know what his favorite color was. But they all wrote letters. Every president has had a different relationship with their mail—most will see samples of it at times, but for the most part the communications team handles it all—responding to those that need responses, filtering through letters and emails for threats, gifts, or other needs. The white house employs a huge team of people solely to handle mail. President Obama was the very first and only president who said to his team “I want to see the mail. Every day.” He knew that as president he couldn’t just anonymously go wander the streets and sit in coffee shops listening in on the dialog America was having. The mail was his best avenue to hear directly from the American people in an unfiltered manner. So every day his team would choose 10 letters that had arrived, a sample of the questions, concerns, stories and voices that had come in that day, and give them to him in his evening briefing book. He read every single one. And replied to many personally with his own hand written note. He was the very first president to ever take the mail he received as seriously as he did, and he let the mail greatly inform his policies and things he began making priorities. Amazon’s description of this book says: “In To Obama, Jeanne Marie Laskas interviews President Obama, the letter writers themselves, and the White House staff who sifted through the powerful, moving, and incredibly intimate narrative of America during the Obama years: There is Kelli, who saw her grandfathers finally marry—legally—after thirty-five years together; Bill, a lifelong Republican whose attitude toward immigration reform was transformed when he met a boy escaping MS-13 gang leaders in El Salvador; Heba, a Syrian refugee who wants to forget the day the tanks rolled into her village; Marjorie, who grappled with disturbing feelings of racial bias lurking within her during the George Zimmerman trial; and Vicki, whose family was torn apart by those who voted for Trump and those who did not. They wrote to Obama out of gratitude and desperation, in their darkest times of need, in search of connection. They wrote with anger, fear, and respect. And together, this chorus of voices achieves a kind of beautiful harmony. To Obama is an intimate look at one man’s relationship to the American people, and at a time when empathy intersected with politics in the White House.”

Taste and See: Discovering God Among Butchers, Bakers and Fresh Food Makers by Margaret Feinberg. I love food. And I love scripture. So a book that delves into the food found in scripture was practically written for me! In Taste and See, bible teacher Margaret Feinberg dives into the culinary aspects of the bible. She learned to fish on the Sea of Galilee with a Jewish family (whom she also stayed with to celebrate Passover), learned to pick olives in an olive grove in Croatia, visited a fig grower in California, and a butcher in Texas all about the meat. She learned how to bake bread with a bread-making theologian from Yale, and explored a salt mine in Utah trying to understand the important references to salt in scripture. Everywhere she went, she asked the individuals in these industries to read the passages of scripture about their particular type of food they specialize in and asked them how they understand that passage given their knowledge of the crop/harvest/mineral they worked with. Their answers were fascinating and made these passages of scripture come alive in a new way. Plus she has recipes for each section which are always my favorite!

Favorite Fiction

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. This was a book that came out in 2017, and I spent all of 2018 hearing about how wonderful it was, how it was the best book people had read that year, but honestly the size of it intimidated me a bit. And the plot summary. My copy is right at 500 pages and it was described as an epic, sweeping family drama set in Korea and Japan that spanned 4 generations. It was a part of the world and season in history I didn’t know much about and thought I’d be confused or struggle to keep characters straight, so I put off picking this one up. Until one of my very best friends told me it really was incredible and I needed to read it. Y’all. I tore through these 500 pages in about 5 days. I could not put this book down. Then I handed it to my mom who read it maybe in 3 days? Faster than I did. She adored it too. Min Jin Lee can write a story that you never want to end. Pachinko is a gambling type game that reminds me of the old Pinball machines and serves as a metaphor for the life of this family—4 generations of Koreans who end up in Japan in the early 1900s and the prejudice they experience, the fight they have to endure to survive, and the choices they make to thrive in a very precarious time. I promise this one is worth your time!

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Talk about another book that got a TON of buzz this year—book clubs everywhere, from Reese Witherspoon’s club to every real life book club I know of has read this book. It’s got almost a perfect 5 star rating on Good Reads and Amazon and I have to join in the chorus of people who LOVED this book. Like Pachinko I actually heard all the buzz and thought this one really wasn’t going to be for me. I don’t entirely know why but I kind of picked this up because everyone, everywhere was telling me I had to. I read it this past summer and basically ignored my children for a week while I finished it. The story of Kya, a young girl who grew up in the marshes of the North Carolina coast and was essentially abandoned by her family at a very young age but found life, solace and sustenance in the marshes both inspired me and broke my heart. But almost in a good way. It’s an achingly beautiful story of her resilience, her desire for community, It’s a story of redemption with a bit of a murder mystery thrown in for good measure. There’s been a trend lately in novels I’ve read where the physical setting is so powerfully described it almost becomes a character in and of itself. I’m thinking of Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone where the Alaskan wilderness is almost the main character of the book and Jojo Moyes new book The Giver of Stars set in Appalachia. The marshes of North Carolina come to life here as you encounter the wildlife and vegetation that sustained Kya through many years. This one was a 5 star book for me, hands down.

The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall. I read this just a couple weeks ago because Knox McCoy, of my favorite podcast The Popcast With Knox and Jamie said it was his very favorite book of this year. That’s high praise from him and so I looked it up. Oh goodness. I loved this novel. This was a book that was not at all plot driven, there weren’t really any fast paced or riveting events, but the characters and their development made me love this story of 2 couples and their faith, doubt, pain, calls to ministry, friendship and reconciling of their pasts. Charles and Lily and James and Nan were both called to pastor the Third Presbyterian Church in New York through the turbulent 60s. But what do you do when you’re in ministry and doubt creeps in? Or pain or disappointment? What do you do when your spouse cannot believe the faith you cling to so certainly? How does a marriage and a community weather disappointment or activism or political upheaval? The Dearly Beloved made me fall in love with all 4 of these individuals by the end of the book as you uncover layers that explain why they are the way they are. You find empathy and find yourself asking the same questions about faith they do. It’s a story of what makes a beautiful life, marriage, faith, children and love.

The Gown by Jennifer Robson. It’s funny, the theme of “I didn’t think I was going to like this book but read it because friends told me to” is definitely one of this year. And this particular book also falls into that category. A book about the royal seamstresses who embroidered Queen Elizabeth’s wedding gown in the 40s? That truly did not sound remotely interesting to me. I was so wrong. This was a spectacular book connecting multiple generations, moving the story back and forth between London in 1947 and Toronto in 2016. It’s based on the real life women who did the intricate hand stitching on the queen’s wedding gown and veil and their lives as WWII was wrapping up. In modern day Toronto, a young woman, Heather, finds samples of the flowers from the royal wedding gown in her grandmother’s things, yet her grandmother had never said a word about her life in Britain. Heather sets off to solve the mystery of who her grandmother really was and how she came to be in possession of these one of a kind artifacts. This story was so compelling, so well written, and the history was so fascinating I could not put this one down. If you like The Crown on Netflix, you’ll love getting sucked into this story of the royal wedding!

Beyond the Point by Claire Gibson. This one was one of my Book of the Month club picks from last spring that I truly loved, probably my favorite Book of the Month pick this year. It is set on the campus of West Point Military Academy and begins in the year 2000. Three young women are recruited to become cadets at West Point and play on their basketball team. The nation hasn’t been at war in a while, it seems like an easy way to get college paid for, serve the country a bit and still play basketball. Then comes September 11, 2001 and their lives will never be the same. It’s a gorgeous book about friendship, honor, duty, service, growing as individuals, sacrifice, love and loss. From the halls of West Point to the dusty streets of Afghanistan, this book captivated me. The author, Claire Gibson, grew up on the campus of West Point as her father served there for many years, and her writing made the place absolutely come alive.

The Storyteller’s Secret by Sejal Badani. This was the book I finished and immediately messaged the author on instagram to tell her how much I loved it. My mom and said this was the best book she’s read recently so I picked it up because we usually have similar taste. She wasn’t kidding. This is an incredible novel. In order to escape some painful personal circumstances (the dissolving of her marriage after her 3rd miscarriage) New Yorker, Jaya, decides to take a trip to India to learn more about her family’s past. She has a lot of questions about her own mother and is determined to uncover the secrets her family seems to be carrying. When she arrives she falls in love with the people, the culture, the community of her grandparents (who are no longer living) and it’s her grandmother’s faithful servant, Ravi, who begins to share her grandmother’s story with Jaya. It’s a story of love, courage, difficult choices, and defying a culture, and it is a story that gives Jaya the strength and desire to pick up the pieces of her own broken life and begin putting them back together. I loved the characters in this story and wanted so badly to have more time with them, and I loved the redemption Jaya found through her grandmother’s and then through her mother’s histories.

The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes. I love pretty much everything Jojo Moyes has written, so her new novel that came out this past month was my Book of the Month pick, and it did not disappoint. Set in the Appalachian mountains in Kentucky, around the era of the Great Depression, this is the story of the brave women who traveled on horseback to get books and reading material into the homes and hands of otherwise fairly uneducated mountain families. Knowledge is power. But knowledge also almost incites changes. And in a community that valued doing things the way they’ve always done them, change wasn’t always welcome. What happens to these 5 women and those they love becomes a story of passion, inspiration, justice and friendship. This is one of those stories where the physical setting is almost a character in itself—the descriptions of the mountain communities as these women ride miles and miles on horseback delivering books are stunning, but it’s the characters themselves that captivated me and made me want to keep reading to find out how their stories resolved.