Some books you read quickly and forget just as quickly. Others stay with you in fragments — a character’s thought, a final chapter, a feeling you can’t quite place but recognize when it comes back weeks later. This collection is made of the second kind.
These are 25 books I read over the past year or so, across different moods, seasons, and versions of myself. Some I picked up because I needed escape, others because I needed grounding, and a few because I just wanted to feel something familiar in the middle of everything changing.
This blog post accompanies a video where I walk through all of them — a kind of long-form reading diary.
Watch the video here:
Books about memory, identity, and the life you think you’re living
There is something about stories that mess with time — with memory, with perception, with the idea that we are always slightly out of sync with who we used to be. These are the books that made me think about that the most.
What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty starts with one of my favorite premises in fiction: what if you woke up and your life had already moved on without you? Alice believes she is 29, in love, and expecting her first child. In reality, she is 39, in the middle of a divorce, and raising three kids. What unfolds is not just about memory loss, but about the emotional distance between who we think we are and who we become when we stop noticing the slow accumulation of years.
The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn is a psychological thriller wrapped in isolation. Anna Fox barely leaves her home, and her entire world exists through windows, films, and fragmented observation. When she believes she witnesses a crime, the line between intuition and imagination starts to blur in a way that feels deeply unsettling.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is one of those novels that quietly reshapes itself as you read. Eleanor insists she is fine in the most rigid, literal way possible, and the book slowly reveals what “fine” can hide when it becomes a shield rather than a feeling.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng begins with a sentence that already tells you everything and nothing at the same time: Lydia is dead. What follows is a slow reconstruction of a family held together by expectations, silence, and projection.
And then there is The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, which stays with you because it explores how identity can split not just between people, but within families, generations, and choices that seem small until they are not.
Books about relationships, control, and the messy parts of being human
Some of the most interesting stories are the ones where no one is fully right or fully wrong — where everyone is trying, failing, adjusting, and trying again.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng is set in a place that looks perfect on the surface, Shaker Heights, where everything has rules and structure. But the arrival of Mia Warren disrupts that carefully maintained balance, exposing how control and morality are not always the same thing.
The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty plays with the idea that the people closest to us are always partially unknowable. A letter, a confession, and suddenly an entire life unravels in ways no one could have anticipated.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid takes a moment of misunderstanding and expands it into something much larger — touching on privilege, race, perception, and how quickly narratives form around people depending on who is watching.
Conviction by Denise Mina starts with collapse — a marriage ending, a life destabilizing — and then shifts into something unexpected: a true crime podcast that pulls the protagonist into a mystery that begins to overlap with her own past.
And then there is The Guest List by Lucy Foley, where a wedding on a remote island slowly turns into a locked-room mystery, revealing how history and resentment always find their way back to the surface.
Books about ambition, love, and the versions of ourselves we outgrow
These are stories about movement — emotional, physical, internal. About people becoming slightly different than who they thought they would be.
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston is both romantic and political in the most unexpected way. It’s about performance — public image versus private truth — and what happens when the two begin to blur.
Normal People by Sally Rooney follows two people who orbit each other for years, never fully separate, never fully align. It’s quiet, sometimes frustrating, and very honest in how it captures emotional timing that never quite matches between people.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid is one of those books that feels like it understands fame as a form of storytelling. Evelyn Hugo’s life is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed through the version she chooses to finally tell.
The Jetsetters by Amanda Eyre Ward takes a family and places them on a cruise together, forcing proximity where distance had become the default setting.
And In Five Years by Rebecca Serle plays with time in a different way entirely — asking what it means to glimpse a future that may or may not be real, and whether knowing changes anything at all.
Books about real life, true stories, and the chaos of being human
These books feel different because they are closer to reality — not always comforting, but deeply human.
This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay is a raw, often darkly funny diary of working in the NHS as a junior doctor. It moves between exhaustion, humor, and the emotional weight of caring for people at their most vulnerable.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb is part memoir, part therapy exploration, and part reminder that everyone — including therapists — is carrying something unresolved.
Atomic Habits by James Clear is less about motivation and more about systems. It reframes change as something almost invisible at first, built through repetition rather than intensity.
Hamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda (with Jeremy McCarter) is a behind-the-scenes look at how a cultural phenomenon is actually made — messy, collaborative, and full of iterations most people never see.
The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian is a thriller built around uncertainty and memory gaps, where the protagonist cannot fully trust her own recollection of what happened.
Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen M. McManus brings us back into the world of small-town secrets, disappearances, and the way teenage narratives often carry more weight than adults realize.
Books that feel like emotional closure, even when they aren’t
These last few books are the ones that sit somewhere between storytelling and feeling. Not always tied to plot, but tied to atmosphere.
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is about isolation, survival, and how someone can be shaped more by nature than by people when people fail to show up.
The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley takes friendship and turns it into something more claustrophobic, asking how well we really know the people we grew up with.
One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus and One of Us Is Next by the same author sit firmly in the YA thriller space where secrets are currency and everyone is a suspect.
Somewhere in all of these books, there is a pattern that I didn’t fully notice until I looked at them together. They are all, in one way or another, about what happens when life doesn’t match the version of it we expected. Sometimes that mismatch is dramatic, sometimes it is subtle, and sometimes it only becomes visible years later.
But that is also what makes reading feel so personal. You don’t always choose books randomly. Sometimes you choose them because they meet you exactly where you are, even if you don’t realize it at the time.
Hope you like them.
xx, Flor.
