For the tenth year in a row, I’ve assembled a list of books to match the year! The 24 reviews (and plenty of rambling reflections) can be found in the video above; below, there are 24 quotations to whet your appetite. Don’t forget to tell me about the best books you read this year and what’s on your TBR for 2025 in the comments! Wishing everyone a Merry and Blessed Christmas and a Happy New Year. ✨
1. The Tale of Snow White and the Widow Queen by Jonathan Pageau
She kept her sadness hidden in songs and kindness, but the King could see the suffering behind the smiles. Her heart was pure, but she toiled every day to guard it carefully, that her longing might not turn to bitterness.
2. Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge
While they were busily assisting their mother on this cold December morning, a merry troop of girls and boys came skimming down the canal. There were fine skaters among them, and as the bright medley of costumes flitted by, it looked from a distance as though the ice had suddenly thawed, and some gay tulip bed were floating along on the current.
3. Belinda by Maria Edgeworth
“I resolved, as soon as I heard it, to mention it to you, for I believe that half the miseries of the world arise from foolish mysteries - from want of courage to speak the truth.”
4. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron
So deem’d the Childe as o’er the mountains he
Did take his way in solitary guide:
Sweet was the scene, yet soon he thought to flee,
More restless than the swallow in the skies:
Though here a while he learn’d to moralize,
For Meditation fix’d at times on him;
And conscious Reason whisper’d to despise
His early youth, misspent in maddest whim;
But as he gazed on truth his aching eyes grew dim
5. The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
The crystal beads, as it happened, could not be seen…but she herself knew they were there, and the thought of them gave her a moral strength that can scarcely be overestimated…For Maria was one of your true aristocrats; the perfection of the hidden things was even more important to her than the outward show.
6. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
“If you had high hopes, how would you know how high they were? And did you know that narrow escapes come in all different widths? Would you travel the whole wide world without ever knowing how wide it was? And how could you do anything at long last,” he concluded, waving his arms over his head, “without knowing how long the last was?”
7. Rose in Bloom by Louisa May Alcott
“I don’t know how others feel, but, to me, love isn’t all. I must look up, not down, trust and honor with my whole heart, and find strength and integrity to lean on…”
“Your ideal is a high one. Do you hope to find it?”
“Yes,” she answered, with a face full of the beautiful confidence in virtue, the instinctive desire of the best, which so many of us lose too soon, to find again after life’s great lessons are learned.
8. Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Winters know
Easily to shed the snow,
And the untaught Spring is wise
In cowslips and anemones.
Nature, hating art and pains,
Baulks and baffles plotting brains;
Casualty and Surprise
Are the apples of her eyes;
But she dearly loves the poor,
And, by marvel of her own,
Strikes the loud pretender down.
9. The Pilgrim’s Regress by C.S. Lewis
Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place - to one friend rather than another and one shire more than all the land.
10. Love and Responsibility by Karol Woytyla
“I want happiness for you” means: I want what will make you happy, but I do not (for the time being) specify what that is. Only people of deep faith say to themselves quite clearly: it is God.
11. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
“My point is that life on earth can take cafe of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn’t have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines… It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.”
12. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
Clever men, distinguished men, and even men of exalted station formed a perpetual and brilliant court round the fascinating young actress of the Comedie Francis, and she glided through republican, revolutionary, bloodthirsty Paris like a shining comet with a trail behind her of all that was most distinguished, most interesting, in intellectual Europe.
13. A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton
If one has sought the publicity of print, and sold one’s wares in the open market, one has sold to the purchasers the right to think what they choose about one’s books; and the novelist’s best safeguard is to put out of his mind the quality of the praise or blame bestowed on him by reviewers and readers, and to write only for that dispassionate and ironic critic who dwells within the breast.
14. The Club of Queer Trades by G.K. Chesterton
The revolt of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist) has now been reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than the large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts of fire heap hell over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs.
15. Smouldering Fire by D.E. Stevenson
Iain thought: Is it a strength or a weakness in me that I see both sides, that I face both ways? Or is it neither a strength nor a weakness itself, but only strength or weakness according to how I use it?
16. These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder
He looked at her curiously. “Do you know there isn’t a man in town except Cap Garland who will ride behind these colts?” he asked.
“Pa said so,” Laura replied.
“Then why did you come?” Almanzo wanted to know.
“Why, I thought you could drive them,” Laura said in surprise.
17. The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope
“You have not caught the way of it. Think of something else. If you can once get the shape of your need alive in your mind, your body will follow it.”
18. Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace
The diner surpassed all expectations. It was pure romance to sit at a table spread with glossy linen and eat a delicious meal while looking out at flying white landscape. She began to think about her great project of changing herself.
“Two weeks is an awfully short time,” she thought. “But two weeks away from home is longer than two ordinary weeks.”
19. The Three Brides by Charlotte Mary Yonge
There is a promise that a great mountain shall become a plain; and so it does, but to those who bravely try to climb it in strength not their own, not to those who try to go round or burrow through.
20. Peterson Academy: The History of Western Music with Samuel Andreyev
It's a remarkable thing that you can take a piano sonata by Mozart or a song by Burt Bacharach or Bing Crosby, or it doesn't matter. You can listen to it 300 times, 1,000 times, 2,000 times, and not only continue to enjoy it, but to get more out of it each time you listen to it. And that, I think, is an extraordinary thing. How is that possible? Bach died in 1750. I mean, 273 years ago. How is it that we're still listening to his music today? And not only listening to it, but still learning to listen to it, still getting into the depths of everything that he had to contribute to humanity. We haven't exhausted it, not even close. It might be an inexhaustible force. That's an incredible thing to contemplate.
21. Merry Hall by Beverley Nichols
Cats have an infallible aesthetic sense which informs them where they will be seen to best advantage, and ‘One’ never loses an opportunity to place himself near something blue enough to show off his blue eyes; if there are half a dozen cushions on a sofa, he invariably seats himself on the blue one. So it is with the delphiniums. As you bend over him and speak to him, softly and tactfully, with a note, not of command, but of suggestion, inquiring whether there might not be some other clump of flowers which he might grace with equal comfort, he blinks and stares up at you with very wide eyes, and their blue is so beautiful, flecked with the reflected blue of the blossom, that you change the subject. After which, if you have any decency, you tiptoe away.
22. Little Lord Faultleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Nothing in the world is so strong as a kind heart.
23. The Rules Handbook by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider
Women who believe in good luck attract more of that. But you can’t just believe and do nothing.
24. The Joy of Believing by Madeleine Delbrel
We’re charged with energies that are disproportionate to the measure of the world - faith that knocks mountains over, hope that believes the impossible, and love that makes the earth blaze. Each minute of the day - regardless of what it calls us to be or do - allows Christ to live in us among people. So, it’s no longer a question of calculating the effectiveness of our time.
Our zeroes multiply infinity.
We humbly take on the dimensions of God’s will.
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