book review – Chrys Buckley

Resuming my weekly tour through favorite books of 2025 after a bit of a hiatus. I’d love to say the break was just because I was so busy with grad school and book stuff and that was definitely part of it, but I was also in a doomscrolling pit for weeks, because of course I was given all that’s going on.

Today we arrive at my favorite journalistic nonfiction. This category was a tie between two very different books that are both examples of excellent reporting:

Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile
Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

cover of Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile

Both books mix a bit of first-person narrative into their reporting but keep the book focused on the main story.

Catch and Kill is about Ronan Farrow’s reporting on the Harvey Weinstein story, and it reads like a spy thriller. I never thought a book could be so equally enraging and entertaining. I couldn’t put it down because the writing was so compelling. There are personal asides and anecdotes that add just the right flavor of touching and funny, and there are terrible tales about what powerful men will do to keep their power, and that is by no means limited to Weinstein and his immediate circle.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that so deftly manages to be equally enraging and entertaining at the same time.

Blazing Eye Sees All is about the Mother God cult and also about the history of new age cults in America. It will make you sputter how? and why? and what the actual fuck now? It will make you so angry at the people that propagate cults and lies, and it will also make you feel some empathy for how and why people get sucked into this sort of thing. Leah Sottile does such a good job, in all of her work, in threading that needle.

As a bonus, I got to meet Leah Sottile at the Portland Book Festival with a classmate of mine. We went to her pop-up reading, then went to have our books signed and had a nice chat with Leah. I was internally freaking out bc I’ve long been a fan of her work in both podcasts and books, but I think I held it together enough. We talked about cults and writing and the Crime Writers On podcast and tarot cards.

Congratulations to Leah Sottile for her Oregon Book Award nomination for Blazing Eye Sees All!

Reading and Book Reviews

Favorite Genre-Bender (and Funnest Book) – My Year in Books 2025

January 18, 2026January 17, 2026 Chrys Buckley

Continuing my weekly tour through favorite books of 2025, today we arrive at my favorite genre-bender and overall funnest book:

cover of Who Killed One The Gun? by Gigi Little

Who Killed One the Gun? by Gigi Little
Forest Avenue Press

I don’t know how to talk about this book other than to say, just read it. It’s so good. Several people I know are getting this book as a birthday present in 2026.

So what can I say that doesn’t give too much away? A (self-described) third-rate private eye gets stuck in a time loop after being killed. He has to solve the case he was working on before he died and his own murder.

It’s delicious. It’s funny. And fun. Gigi Little plays with language in delightful ways. It’s quirky in the best, truest way. It plays with a lot of noir tropes and subverts expectations. Every character’s name is a number followed by a rhyme. They all have distinct voices and personas, and are memorable. There’s a lot of old-timey radio in the book, and it is a blast.

It’s a murder mystery. Two murder mysteries in one. Since mystery was one of my earliest genres—I was a Nancy Drew kid—and is the genre I go to in my distraction-seeking listening behaviors, I’m usually good at figuring out whodunit. Sometimes that’s fun because it’s ego-satisfying to be ahead of the game and figure things out and be right. Sometimes it’s not so fun, more boring and obvious.

I won’t say whether I thought both murders were committed by the same person or different people, but I had a strong suspicion on one of the cases and a weak suspicion on the other. The weak suspicion ended up being partially right, and the strong suspicion was dead wrong.

It was so fun to be so wrong!

Again, I don’t want to say anything that would detract from the reading experience by revealing too much beforehand, so just READ THIS BOOK!

Chrys

Image Description: The cover of Who Killed One the Gun? showing a man (One the Gun) dead on a clock spiral and featuring blurbs by Mo Davies and Lidia Yuknavitch.

Pop Culture, Reading and Book Reviews

My Year in Books 2025

January 4, 2026January 4, 2026 Chrys Buckley

cover of Fifteen Wild Decembers by Karen Powell

cover of The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

This hasn’t been a banner year for me in number of books read. Grad school will do that. So will managing two departments of a press. So will having your own book in the works—I’m pretty sure I reread my book 9 times this summer for editing purposes. So will the state of the world.

I didn’t read as many books as I typically would. But, in all the chaos (internal and external) and busyness, I did read some excellent books. It was a banner year for quality, so I thought I would highlight some favorites.

My original intention was to post about books as I was reading them. I had that “I want to tell everyone in the world about how great this book is!” feeling, but then the list of books I wanted to post about but hadn’t found time for grew and grew. My next intention was to get a big Best Of list together by the end of 2025…and that obviously didn’t happen either.

So, time for a next next intention. I’m announcing it so I have to do it, this thing I’ve been wanting to do for months now. I still really want to share and exalt the great books I read and tell as many people as possible why I think they’ll love these books.

Over the next several weeks, on Sundays, I will post about my favorite 2025 books by category—completely made up by me—and write up about book in the gallery at the top of this post. I want to give each book its due, and share my excitement for each one.

In all cases except for one, these are books that I read in 2025, regardless of when they were published. Some of the books came out this year, and some definitely didn’t.

The order that book covers appear in the gallery at the top is randomized so that I wouldn’t play favorites with my favorites.

See you next Sunday!

Chrys

P.S. I also read some great manuscripts last year in my role at Ooligan Press and in independent editing work, books that are on their way to being out in the world but aren’t yet. Maybe that will be the next post series after this one because there are some incredible books in the pipeline that I think you’re going to want to know about.

Image Description: A gallery of book covers displayed in a 6×2 grid in randomized order: Fifteen Wild Decembers by Karen Powell, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, Who Killed One the Gun? by Gigi Little, Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile, Imagine a Door by Laura Stanfill, Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch, Cekpa by Leah Altman, Where We Call Home by Josephine Woolington, Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow, The Winter Sister by Megan Collins, The Likeness by Tana French, and The Love of My Afer Life by Kristy Greenwood.