Jill Underly

 Not every book we read changes us. Some do, of course. Some stay with us for years. But others simply don’t resonate the way we expect them to, and that’s part of the reading life, too. One of the memoirs I read this year was The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It’s a quiet, devastating reflection on grief and loss, written after the sudden death of her husband. The book isn’t dramatic in the traditional sense. Instead, it captures the strange, disorienting logic of grief—how the mind tries to make sense of something that ultimately makes no sense at all. It made me think of the podcast by Anderson Cooper, All There Is. I think I started listening to this after I read Didion’s book. Another memoir I picked up was All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert. My reaction to this one was… complicated. Part of that is probably my long-standing relationship with Eat Pray Love . I read it about thirteen years ago at exactly the moment I needed it, and it changed my life in...

 Not all the books I read last year were novels. Some of the books were the kind you read slowly, sometimes a chapter at a time, sometimes just a few pages, because they ask you to sit with an idea for a while. Looking back at my reading list, a small but meaningful category emerged: books about faith, courage, and understanding ourselves a little better. One that stood out was How We Learn to Be Brave by Marianne Budde. It’s a thoughtful reflection on courage. It’s not the dramatic kind of courage we often imagine, but the quieter kind that most of us are called to in ordinary life. For example, the courage to tell the truth, to stand up for others, to make difficult decisions when there isn’t a clear or comfortable path forward. Another was Unabashed Faith by C. Andrew Doyle, which explores what it means to live with conviction and humility simultaneously. Faith, at its best, is not about certainty or perfection. It’s about continuing to show up, to serve, and to try to live in...

 Apparently, I have a deep weakness for love stories. Especially the bittersweet kind. I have a tendency to gravitate toward the kind where life gets complicated. The stories where timing matters as much as love itself (makes me think of my favorite book, The Remains of the Day) . I have always tortured myself with stories about missed chances, second chances, and the quiet realization that life rarely unfolds the way anyone imagined. Looking back at my 2025 reading list, this may have been the biggest emotional category. I sometimes think there must be some psychology behind the books that resonate with us most. The stories we return to, the ones that stay with us, often reflect something about the way we see the world, or maybe the things we’re still trying to understand about ourselves. That’s one of the reasons I love reading. Books don’t just entertain us. They reveal things about us. The book that completely wrecked me this year was One Day by David Nicholls. I knew going in...

 Looking back at my 2025 reading list, I realized something about my reading habits: even if my reading life isn’t organized, my taste absolutely is. So instead of posting one long list of everything I read last year, I’m breaking it down by theme. Apparently, I read in categories without realizing it. The first, and probably most obvious, is historical fiction. I was a history major, and I’ve always believed the best history is really about people. Not just presidents and generals, but ordinary individuals navigating extraordinary circumstances. History lives in kitchens and classrooms, in letters and friendships, in small acts of courage and kindness that never make it into textbooks. That’s why I love historical fiction. It takes the events we think we know and lets us see them through human eyes. This year, I read several that stayed with me long after I finished them. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr was probably the most beautiful. Set during World War II, it fo...

  File Settings Done Title Description Thumbnail Will be cropped to a 3:2 aspect ratio Upload Scheduled for Mar 15 at 12:37 pm ∙  Edit Nearly twenty years ago, many women picked up Eat Pray Love at precisely the moment they needed it. It wasn’t really a book about travel or romance. It was a book about permission: the permission to pause, to question, to imagine that reinvention is not selfish but necessary. For some, that message arrived quietly. For others, like me, it cracked something open. Midlife has a way of doing that, too. I picked up the book about seven years after it was published. And what I will say is that there is a particular season of adulthood (often while raising young children, building careers, caring for aging parents, trying to meet every expectation placed upon us) when life can look perfectly functional from the outside and feel unsustainable within. It might appear on the outside that the house is standing or that the deadlines are met. The children...