The first quarter of 2025 has been exhausting and horrifying for various reasons, but at least my reading year is off to a great start.

At the beginning of each year, over on the Book Cougars, we have a special episode with our BookTuber friend Rusell of Ink and Paper Blog to discuss each of our Top Ten reads of the prior year. To make that process “easier,” this year I plan to post my top reads each quarter.

Will this help make that end-of-the-year list easier to figure out? Maybe. Maybe not.

Often, a book that wasn’t an exceptional reading experience for me lands on my Top Ten list. This could be a book full of plot holes, flat characters, or clunky writing, but it stays on my mind for some reason. Months later, I still find myself wondering about it.

Last year’s book in this category was Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary. I wrote about it in a short vampire round-up post, mentioning wanting to re-read the novel. It was not an ohmygodthiswasamazing! desire to re-read. It was more of a feeling that I had missed something. Calling it “philosophical” in my round-up may have been a stand-in for a feeling I perhaps did not understand then. And then there’s the issue of translation. Did the translator not properly convey some vital aspect of the work?

Anywhoo, on with the task at hand.

So here we go, my top reads of the first quarter. Ten was too many and three too few, so I went with six. They’re listed in the order in which I read them, first fiction, then nonfiction.

Fiction:

1. The Militia House

by John Milas, published 2023.
This book caught my eye at the new Bank Square Books in Mystic, CT. I was browsing the horror section and the word “militia” popped out. The writing is crisp and clear, and the plot, revolving around the well-worn haunted house trope, is fresh and compelling. If I had to pick a top novel of the year now, this one would be it.

The protagonist is a Marine serving in Afghanistan. While on fire watch, he becomes intrigued by an abandoned barracks constructed by the Russians in the 1980s. He and his squad eventually check out the building. The British soldiers who take them there stay outside.

Milas is a veteran, so the military aspects of the novel, from boredom to jerky superiors to fear, feel realistic. He is also a fan of Shirley Jackson, so there’s that. Milas also studied writing under Roxane Gay.

Readers of horror, complex military fiction, and those interested in post-traumatic stress would find this novel fascinating. Stephen King meets Tim O’Brien is how the publisher pitches it.

2. A Son at the Front

by Edith Wharton, published 1923.
This is one of Wharton’s lesser-known novels. It is a World War I novel, but not about the fighting in the trenches. The story is about a middle-aged man who is a famous artist. He’s divorced from his son’s mother, who is now married to a wealthy banker. War breaks out, and the son honors his service obligation.

Wharton was an American who lived in France before, during, and after WWI. She did not run toward safety but stayed and worked to support wounded soldiers and civilians who were suffering from the war’s collateral damage. This book is fiction informed by her experience.

The protagonist is not a very likable fellow even before the stress of his son serving in a wartime army. He is selfish and self-pitying. Wharton creates a vivid story about formerly comfortable people who had their (and their children’s) lives planned out before the tragedy of war changed everything. It was not a great reading experience, but discussing it with friends made me appreciate the novel much more than I did initially. I admire what Wharton was trying to capture.

Check out the new Oxford World’s Classics edition edited by Julie Olin-Ammentorp. Her introduction explains why we have such a narrow definition of what qualifies as WW1 literature. A Son at the Front pairs well with One of Ours by Willa Cather.

3. A New Home, Who’ll Follow

by Caroline Kirkland, published 1839.
I’m pretty sure I read parts of this book in graduate school in the mid-90s. It is a fictionalized version of the author’s experience in 1830s Michigan. Initially, I thought it was a memoir, but the Library of Congress and the publisher categorize it as fiction. Goodreads lists it as a memoir, so maybe that’s where I got the idea.

In the early 1830s, Kirkland and her husband headed to Michigan to establish a town as an investment. They were white, wealthy easterners. Michigan was then the western frontier. It is not your typical Midwest farming story. I was pleasantly surprised by the freshness of the narrator’s voice, her humor, and the clarity of the writing. I was prepared for nineteenth-century verbosity, but this is an early work of realism, which strips away a lot of that. There is some 19th-century piety to endure, and it sagged a bit in the middle, but then picked up again.

A New Home, Who’ll Follow makes me think of A Lost Lady by Willa Cather (sorry, can’t help myself). Cather’s novel explores the decline of the second wave of western settlers, those who established towns and later railroads. Spoiler alert: the Kirkland’s plans did not pan out. They eventually head back east (where Caroline became friends with Edgar Allan Poe). Had their empire-building plans worked out, would Caroline have ended up like Mrs. Forrester in Cather’s novel?

People who grew up reading/watching Little House on the Prairie might appreciate this novel. I also recommend it to readers of historical fiction and those who enjoy learning about women’s lives from earlier times.

4. The Vanishing Kind

by Alice Henderson, published 2025.
As a fan of Nevada Barr’s series featuring National Park Ranger Anna Pigeon, I jumped on Henderson’s first novel, A Solitude of Wolverines (2020). The Vanishing Kind is Henderson’s fourth entry in her Alex Carter series.

Alex is a wildlife biologist, and each book finds her studying a different species and fighting different bad guys. In The Vanishing Kind, she is studying jaguars in New Mexico. Alex goes through her worst experience yet. She encounters obstacles to the well-being of jaguars and other wildlife, anti-immigrant extremists, and a vile billionaire.

Henderson’s books are suspense novels and will appeal to readers who enjoy mystery/thrillers and adventure stories. At the end of each book, she offers resources on how to support the species she’s written about and other ways to help support environmental efforts.

The Alex Carter series in order:
A Solitude of Wolverines (2020) — set in Montana
A Blizzard of Polar Bears (2021) — set in the Canadian Arctic
A Ghost of Caribou (2022) — set in the Selkirk mountains of Washington State
The Vanishing Kind (2025) — set in New Mexico

Nonfiction:

5. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

by Sarah Wynn-Williams, published 2025.
I’m not usually drawn to reading about tech culture. In this case, I read a free digital sample after Ron Charles brought the book to my attention. That sample hooked me. Wynn-Williams is a good writer and knows how to tell a story.

Careless People is an excellent read; it is shocking, anger-inducing, sad, and well-written. Wynn-Williams writes in a way that does not make it feel like she has an axe to grind. She’s sharing her experience, and it feels almost like being in real time with her. There is some dark humor, but I would not use the word “funny” to describe this book. There’s more confusion, frustration, and tragedy than humor.

That said, I closed the book with an odd sense of hope. I’m not sure why. Maybe because people like Sarah Wynn-Williams are fighting to regulate tech and protect people. And as more people learn about what tech companies actually do, versus what they say or promise, the better.

Although Facebook/Meta legally stopped the author from promoting her book, at least temporarily, it is currently a New York Times bestseller, and I hear library holds are long. Read my review here.

6. The Many Lives of Anne Frank

by Ruth Franklin, published 2025.
Ruth Franklin wrote this book partly because the more iconic Anne Frank has become, the less we know about who she was. “The title of this book, The Many Lives of Anne Frank, refers to the multiplicity of ways in which Anne has been understood and misunderstood, both a person and as an idea” (9).

I did not read The Diary of a Young Girl until I was an adult; I read it in 2015, as a very middle-aged adult. I mentioned the book in several blog posts from that year and commented that a younger version of myself may not have appreciated Anne’s memoir. But as a 49-year-old, I certainly did, and my appreciation for Anne’s work has grown in leaps and bounds after reading The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin. It is part biography, part history, and highly relevant to today’s political climate.

Franklin weaves in Anne’s words, which are rendered in italics. We recently interviewed Ruth Franklin for an upcoming Book Cougars episode where she said she didn’t want to write about Anne, but write beside her. (Here’s a link to the episode, the interview with Ruth starts at 1:13:25.)

Like many people, I thought I knew Anne’s story before reading it. Also, like many others, I had picked up erroneous beliefs about the book, such as that her diary was a traditional diary of daily entries found and published “as is.” Or that her father was a controlling jerk who edited out lousy stuff about himself. Not true, not true.

Three diaries

What is true is that Anne Frank was a dedicated and sophisticated writer who revised her earlier diary entries into something better suited for general readers. The Franks went into hiding on July 6, 1942. On March 28, 1944, Anne heard a radio announcement by the Dutch minister of education, arts, and sciences, Gerrit Bolkestein, that the government planned to create a national archives at the war’s end that would include the wartime experiences of everyday people. Anne went back through her diary and got to work.

There are two versions of Anne’s diary. Make that three, if you count the first published edition edited by Otto Frank. Franklin explores all three diary versions, pointing out and explaining differences as her narrative unfolds. (The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition presents all three diaries as stacked entries on the page for comparison.)

Anne Frank and “Anne Frank”

Franklin’s book is in two parts. Part 1 is titled Anne Frank and delves into Anne’s biography. Her family’s background and their circumstances during World War II, and Anne’s time in the Secret Annex and what her experience may have been like in the various Nazi camps in which she was imprisoned. These last chapters of Part 1 are based on reports by people who knew Anne at Westerbork, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and the experiences of other women in these camps.

All of the well-known Holocaust memoirs have been written by men, so we have a skewed understanding of what life was like for women in the camps. Franklin cites several works written by women and presents documentation on the additional horrors women faced.

Part 2 is titled “Anne Frank” — in quotation marks to signify how she has been reimagined and used over the decades as a muse, icon, and idea.

The first chapter in Part 2 covers Otto Frank’s life after liberation and his early efforts with Anne’s papers. Miep Gies, who had helped the Franks while in hiding, saved Anne’s papers. She’d gone back to the rooms after the Nazi raid, saw Anne’s papers, and took them for safe keeping. She gave them to Otto after it was clear Anne was dead, saying, “Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you” (221).

Part 2 then goes into the Diary’s publication history, a play adaptation, and Anne’s (and Otto’s) use in fiction and the political world. Throughout the book, five short “Interludes” explore examples of how “Anne Frank” has inspired or been used. Four of these are in Part 2. The one Interlude in Part 1 describes the August 4, 1944, raid on the Secret Annex.

“People are really good at heart”

Franklin is a fantastic writer who deftly weaves multiple sources of evidence into each chapter. This book goes into so much detail, but it is a clear and compelling read. It was fascinating to learn how Anne revised her diary, basically turning it into a memoir, and what she may have experienced after the self-documentation of her life ended.

When discussing Anne’s oft-repeated quote, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart,” Franklin writes,

“To maintain belief in the goodness of humanity when you see the world being gradually turned into a wilderness isn’t necessarily a sentimental fantasy. It can be a courageous statement of faith in a potentially better future, a future in which democracy might yet win out again even as the thunder approaches and millions suffer. For activists who hope to build such a future for their country, that faith isn’t an indulgence–it’s a necessity” (330).

A good sentiment on which to end this post.

I hope your reading year is off to a great start. I’d love to hear about your favorite reads so far this year.