Gang & Girlies,
In 2025 I made the decision that I cannot be buying all these books I own and simply not read them. Since then the only tbr/wtr [to-be-read/ want-to-read] list I make annually is for books on my shelf. Last year I decided that I would try and read 12 books I own and even though I failed to reach that target, I’ve decided in 2027 we go again.
Something else I decided to do last year which I’ll be doing in this one is to not only read popular books. So yet again I’ve split this list into three categories depending on how well known they are (in relation to my own frame of reference).
However, unlike last year I want to challenge myself and stick to the program by actually reading all the books on my list. So for once my reading goal and my tbr will be the same. So without further ado here are twelve books that I own that I plan to read this year.
BOOKS I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT.
This category is books I’ve never ever heard anyone talk about. I have never even heard of the authors. I’m going in there absolutely blind:
1. The Outcasts of Time – Ian Mortimer
December 1348. With the country in the grip of the Black Death, brothers John and William fear that they will shortly die and go to Hell. But as the end draws near, they are given an unexpected choice: either to go home and spend their last six days in their familiar world, or to search for salvation across the forthcoming centuries – living each one of their remaining days ninety-nine years after the last.
John and William choose the future and find themselves in 1447, ignorant of almost everything going on around them. The year 1546 brings no more comfort, and 1645 challenges them still further. It is not just that technology is changing: things they have taken for granted all their lives prove to be short-lived.
As they find themselves in stranger and stranger times, the reader travels with them, seeing the world through their eyes as it shifts through disease, progress, enlightenment and war. But their time is running out – can they do something to redeem themselves before the six days are up?
I bought purely because of the cover and the title is also kinda cool. I tend to read more books by women so this is my intentional token male author.
2. Lemon – Kwon Yeo-Sun
In the summer of 2002, when Korea is abuzz over hosting the FIFA World Cup, nineteen-year-old Kim Hae-on is killed in what becomes known as the High School Beauty Murder. Two suspects quickly emerge: rich kid Shin Jeongjun, whose car Hae-on was last seen in, and delivery boy Han Manu, who witnesses Hae-on in the passenger seat of Jeongjun’s car just a few hours before her death. But when Jeongjun’s alibi turns out to be solid, and no evidence can be pinned on Manu, the case goes cold.
Seventeen years pass without any resolution for those who knew and loved Hae-on, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover some of what she’s lost, ultimately setting out to find the truth of what happened.
Told at different points in time from the perspectives of Da-on and two of Hae-on’s classmates, Lemon loosely follows the structure of a detective novel. But finding the perpetrator is not the main objective here. Instead, the work explores grief and trauma, raising important questions about guilt, retribution, and the meaning of death and life.
Another book I bought because of the cover and the blurb sounds really effing cool.
3. A Pinch of Magic – Michelle Harrison
All Betty Widdershins wants is an adventure–one that takes her far away from Crowstone, the gloomy island where she’s always lived. But instead of an adventure, Betty and her sisters, Fliss and Charlie, are given of a set of magical objects, each with its own powers: a scruffy carpet bag, a set of wooden nesting dolls, and a gilt-framed mirror. And these magical objects come with their own terrible secret: the sisters’ family is haunted by a generations-long curse that prevents them from ever leaving their island–at the cost of death.
The sisters set out to break the curse and free their family forever. But after stumbling upon a mysterious prisoner who claims to be able to help them, they find themselves in great danger. And in order to break the curse–and stay alive–they must unravel a mystery that goes back centuries, one that involves shipwrecks, smugglers, and sorcery of the most perilous kind.
Yet a third book I bought purely because of the cover. I find this cover so pretty. My best friend picked it up last year when she visited and I thought to myself, why not.
4. The Rewind – Allison Winn Scotch
When college sweethearts Frankie and Ezra broke up before graduation, they vowed to never speak to each other again. Ten years later, on the eve of the new millennium, they find themselves back on their snowy, picturesque New England campus together for the first time for the wedding of mutual friends. Frankie’s on the rise as a music manager for the hottest bands of the late ’90s, and Ezra’s ready to propose to his girlfriend after the wedding. Everything is going to plan–they just have to avoid the chasm of emotions brought up when they inevitably come face to face.
But when they wake up in bed next to each other the following morning with Ezra’s grandmother’s diamond on Frankie’s finger, they have zero memory of how they got there–or about any of the events that transpired the night before. Now Frankie and Ezra have to put aside old grievances in order to figure out what happened, what didn’t happen…and to ask themselves the most troubling question of all: what if they both got it wrong the first time around?
I am reading this for the second chance accidental marriage of it all.
BOOK I’VE HEARD SOMETHING ABOUT.
In this category I’m only mildly aware about an aspect of the book. Perhaps I started it, or the author is popular even if the book isn’t or I’ve read works of that author before and now I’m here.
1. The Switch – Beth O’Leary
When overachiever Leena Cotton is ordered to take a two-month sabbatical after blowing a big presentation at work, she escapes to her grandmother Eileen’s house for some overdue rest. Eileen is newly single and about to turn eighty. She’d like a second chance at love, but her tiny Yorkshire village doesn’t offer many eligible gentlemen.
Once Leena learns of Eileen’s romantic predicament, she proposes a a two-month swap. Eileen can live in London and look for love. Meanwhile Leena will look after everything in rural Yorkshire. But with gossiping neighbours and difficult family dynamics to navigate up north, and trendy London flatmates and online dating to contend with in the city, stepping into one another’s shoes proves more difficult than either of them expected.
Leena learns that a long-distance relationship isn’t as romantic as she hoped it would be, and then there is the annoyingly perfect – and distractingly handsome – school teacher, who keeps showing up to outdo her efforts to impress the local villagers. Back in London, Eileen is a huge hit with her new neighbours, but is her perfect match nearer home than she first thought?
About two or so years ago I read O’Leary’s more famous book, “The Flatshare.” I found it pretty delightful. I definitely do not hear this one as talked about on tge interwebs.
2. Fierce Fragile Hearts – Sara Barnard
Two years after a downward spiral took her as low as you can possibly go, Suzanne is starting again. Again. She’s back in Brighton, the only place she felt she belonged, back with her best friends Caddy and Rosie. But they’re about to leave for university. When your friends have been your light in the darkness, what happens when you’re the one left behind?
Yet again, about a year or ago, I read the first book in this series, “Beautiful Broken Things.” It was alright and I had no intention of reading the rest of the series, but I came across this copy and decided I should buy it since I own the first one, so might as well. Have never heard anyone talk about either of these books or this author.
3. Paradise – Toni Morrison
Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.
In prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem, Toni Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation of race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present.
Everyone and their mom must have heard of Toni Morrison. Beloved is my favourite book of hers. And also the only one I’ve actually read. I mainly hear people talk about other works such as Beloved, Sula and the Bluest Eye. Not so much about paradise.
4. The Zookeeper’s Wife – Diane Ackerman
When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw—and the city’s zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen “guests” hid inside the Zabinskis’ villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants—otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes.With her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and their hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her.
The movie adaptation is one of my favourite movies ever. I’ve watched it like three times. It took me a few years to even know it was book, but it’s been sitting on my shelf for a bit. Bonus because this is my token nonfiction books
of the year
BOOKS EVEN YOU SHOULD HAVE HEARD ABOUT
These are popular books. Books even the biggest non-reader (unless you’re my aura faming best friend) should have at least have heard of somehow, somewhere.
1. Piranesi – Susanne Clarke
Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
There was a time you couldn’t be on bookstagram without this books popping up. This is my most anticipated book actually.
2. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley’s seminal novel of the scientist whose creation becomes a monster.
This edition is the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically charged aspects of Shelley’s original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. This edition also includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by author and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.
I need some literary girl points so why not this one.
3. Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
I’ve read Butler’s Fledgling which left a really sour taste in my mouth, my God. However, her most popular book is definitely Kindred. And I still have hope for her yet.
4. Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.
I read Purple Hibiscus in 2025 and had mixed feelings about it. People have since told me this is a far more superior book. So here we are.
