Lidia Yuknavitch – Chrys Buckley

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.

Music, Writing

The Artist’s Way Reflections – Time Travel: Creative Monsters and Champions

September 3, 2020June 26, 2024 Chrys Buckley

task7 Today’s column will cover the Time Travel tasks from Week One. Next week, we’ll move on to Week Two. You can find the full schedule for the rest of the year at the bottom of this post!

I decided to pull out the Time Travel tasks (Tasks 3-7, so most of them) from Week One in their own post for a couple of reasons. One was to be able to ease in, pacing-wise, by spreading Week One out over two weeks here.

Sometimes starting (or restarting) The Artist’s Way can feel a bit like thawing out something frozen, and there’s something painful and scary about that. It can be like melting something that solidified inside you. And it’s not easy.

To me, these Time Travel tasks feel like the first steps in that process. And they can be hard. Last time through, in March, I skipped most of them and only half-heartedly and incompletely did the ones I didn’t skip.

I thought they deserved extra attention in their own post as an acknowledgement that they’re hard, and a way of tackling them together.

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Writing

A Lollapalooza for Writers – What I Learned at AWP in Seattle

March 2, 2014June 27, 2024 Chrys Buckley

I just got home from AWP in Seattle. For those who haven’t heard of it, AWP is this massively huge swarm of writers that descends on a different city each year. This year, AWP took over the Washington State Convention Center, an Annex and the Seattle Sheraton. Someone told me that the total number of people registered was 14,000. Unless you count music festivals like Lollapalooza and Coachella, I’ve never been around that many people in such a concentrated space.

There are oodles of writing-related panels. In fact, for every time slot, there are, oh, I don’t know, twenty or more different offerings. And then there are outside events, readings, contest winner announcements, drinking with some vague literary theme in mind, and then more panels. There’s also a bookfair, which is huge. This one was split into two separate rooms, that’s how huge it was. Booths everywhere. Books everywhere. Writers milling around booths and looking at books everywhere.

I was a total AWP virgin, open to all kinds of impression and experience.

So, here are some things I learned over the last three days:

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