2025 Reading Reflections Part II: Bittersweet Love Stories

 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 that it had a reputation for being emotional, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how much it would stay with me. It’s a story about two people whose lives intersect year after year, roughly on St. Swithin’s Day, sometimes close, sometimes far apart, always shaped by the timing of their lives. I watched the Netflix series afterward and thought it was excellent, but I was glad I read the book first. The series stayed remarkably close to the story, but the book had a depth that made the ending feel especially powerful.

The Last Letter from Your Lover by Jojo Moyes explores another kind of love shaped by circumstances. Those circumstances are interrupted by time, memory, and the expectations of another era. It’s the kind of story that reminds you how fragile timing can be, and how much courage it sometimes takes to follow your heart.

Then there was Sweet Sorrow, also by David Nicholls, which captures something completely different but equally powerful: first love. That feeling when everything is new, intense, and a little bit terrifying. The kind of love that leaves a permanent imprint on your life. But beneath the romance, it’s also a story about growing up. What I took away from it was that it was about the moment when you realize you can’t spend the rest of your life explaining yourself through the mistakes of others. At some point, you have to forgive: your parents, the people who hurt you, and perhaps most difficult of all, yourself. Only then can you take ownership of your life and move forward.

One of the most unexpectedly delightful books I picked up this year was Forty-Year Kiss by Nickolas Butler. I found it at Dotter’s Books in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and the author is local to that area. Even better, the story itself takes place there. There’s something special about reading a book set in places you know and love. I could picture the towns, the landscapes, the rhythms of life. It made the story feel even more personal. It’s a bit fluffy, perhaps, but it’s also a lovely story about second chances and the enduring pull of first love.

And then there was The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, which was both glamorous and surprisingly thoughtful. I know it wasn’t a new book, but I finally got around to reading it. It made me think differently about the golden age of Hollywood and about the lives of movie stars from that era, particularly figures like Elizabeth Taylor, whose public lives were so intertwined with their personal ones. What stayed with me most, though, was the message beneath the glamour: that in the end, it’s your life. You live it as authentically as you can, even when the world tries to push you into a particular role. There is almost always a workaround. There is almost always a way to get to “yes.”

If there’s a thread connecting all of these books, it’s this: love stories aren’t really just about romance. They’re about time, choices, and the lives we build, sometimes with the people we expected, and sometimes with the people we didn’t. Love stories are, at their heart, about life. They are about missed timing and second chances. And they are about the long arc of a life and the quiet realization that love, like everything else, rarely unfolds in a straight line. Perhaps that’s why these stories resonate so deeply. They remind us that growing up isn’t just something that happens when we’re young. It happens over and over again across a lifetime, each time we learn to forgive, take ownership of our lives, and move forward with a little more grace than we had before.

Books wrapped for a "blind date with a book."
Photo by Theo on Unsplash


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