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:
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!
I have answers for you! And not just signed books, but also personalized!
It’s a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure depending on where you live, and so this post serves as your answers for every scenario. Whether you live near me or far away, I have ways to get signed books to you.
There are lots of ways to get signed books in the City of Roses:
Join me at my launch party on March 13, 7-8:30 p.m. at BOLD Coffee and Books. There will be a conversation about the book. There will be the reading of excerpts from the book. There will be food and drinks available for purchase before and during the event, as is always the case at BOLD. And there will be book signing. You can buy the book at the event and get it signed on the spot. This will be an easy way to get a signed book and it will be a blast!
Come to one of my other local events and buy a book and have me sign it! A whole bunch of different events are in the works, and I’m working on creating an Events page to keep it all in one place. Suffice it to say, there will be other opportunities outside of the launch.
Pre-order my book (pre-order hub here) and bring your copy to any of my events or coordinate meeting up with me in person outside of events to have me sign it.
How to Get Signed Books on Orcas Island and in Seattle
Along with local events, I’m working on some Orcas and Seattle events as well.
Orcas Island: Plans aren’t definite yet, but I’m working on two separate trips for bookish events on the island. One will be in June 2026 and will be an event with my publisher and other authors at the press, details TBD. Another will be next winter, January 2027 or so, and will be more focused on my book and its many mentions of life on Orcas.
Seattle: This is a bit more ephemeral, but would likely be coupled with the Orcas trips, either on my way there or on my way back. Details TBD. My dream is to do an event at Easy Street Records in West Seattle.
For either of these locations, you could either buy the book at the event or pre-order the book and bring it to the event for me to sign.
How to Get Signed Books if You Live in the United States outside of the Pacific Northwest
Most of my inquiries so far have come from people in this category. This is for you if you:
Went to high school with me in New Jersey
Went to blind camp (or JKRC or Avalon or Drew) with me in New Jersey
Went to Washington College with me for a brief time
Went to Northern Arizona University with me for a brief time
Know me from a certain internet forum (iykyk)
Know me from Camp Orkila and don’t live in the Pacific Northwest
Went to medical school with me and went outside the PNW for residency and/or practice
Know me from social media or this website/blog
Don’t know me at all
To make this available to people in places I’m not likely to travel to in the near future, I’ve partnered with local bookstore Annie Bloom’s Books in Multnomah Village, and they will be my hub for signed and personalized books.
Here’s how to get signed books through Annie Bloom’s Books:
In your Order Comment at checkout, write these things:
You are requesting a signed copy or a personalized copy.
What name you want it personalized to.
A quick note about how you know me, if you do, so I can write a more personalized note. This is especially helpful if you have changed your name since we knew each other most, or if I know you mostly by a screen name.
Your order comment could read something like this. “Requesting personalized copy, addressed to X. This is so-and-so from such-and-where.”
Then I’ll go in and sign and personalize and Annie Bloom’s will ship to you.
Note: This is for shipping to US addresses only! Which brings me to…
How to Get Signed Books at the NOAH Conference (Columbus, OH)
This isn’t a done deal yet, but I’m thinking of going to the NOAH Conference this summer, and will update here with details as plans progress. If I go, I’ll definitely bring books with me to sell and sign!
How to Get Signed Books if You Live Outside the US
If you want a signed copy of my book and you live outside of the US, you can buy the book from me directly, via Venmo or what have you, which will have to include the shipping costs, and I’ll sign or personalize and mail it to you. You can always reach out to me via my Contact Form if you need to set this up.
I think I have covered every earthly possibility for getting signed books to everyone who wants one. If you have questions or need help with any of the methods, reach out to me here!
Chrys
Image description: four photos of Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at Portland Book Fest.
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.
Goodbye, 2025. Hello there, 2026. New year, new me. All that jazz.
It’s a wildly intense time in my life, and on Monday I go back to grad school for winter term. I’m gearing up for a doozy of a course load. And oh yeah, I also have a book coming out ten weeks from today. So there’s that, too.
Yesterday, I did a lot of my calendaring for the term, made a weekly template of when I’ll do work for which class, when I’ll fit in book promotion work, when I’ll work on ebooks and audiobooks for my manager roles at Ooligan Press, when I’ll shower, when I’ll check my email, when I’ll pee. Okay, that last one, and only that last one, was a joke. I’m scheduled to the hilt is the deal.
Every term for the last several, I’ve made a mega Master Plan google doc that lists every due date, every reading assignment, every discussion post due in Canvas, every project, every paper. Some of it’s very granular, like preparing for two weekly Ooligan meetings each week, teaching a department lesson at Ooligan every week, and recurring reflection assignments for classes. Others are big projects.
This document is in a grid, so that on the left are the weeks of the term, and across the top are the classes. It’s not a spreadsheet, but it’s close, with everything in checkable boxes to cross off when they’re completed. You can take the type A planner med student out of medical school, but you can’t take those organization instincts out of the former med student, I suppose.
While creating this Master Plan of Winter Term Domination, I had two thoughts swirling through my mind over and over.
A little over a week ago, I finished my second (of three) year in my grad program in Book Publishing. As with so many things, it went by both quickly and slowly.
It was often a frenzy. Especially this past spring term. I can say definitively it was the most intense term I ever experienced. And yes, that includes med school. I’m sure I’ll get more into the details of the term before too long on here, but now, in the more immediate aftermath, just thinking about it makes me too tired to function.
Since the term ended, I’ve gone through some swings in energy. And I’m remembering and realizing that it’s almost always this same pattern. The terms and the workloads may change, but this after-pattern is pretty constant.
I wonder, does anyone else have this same pattern too?
Welllll, the fact that I’m writing this post a day late should say something. It was probably the roughest week yet.
Writing
work on Moonchild (writing project) all seven days – four.
work on blog at least five days – three.
at least seven sessions of digitizing old writing – I don’t think I did any?
craft and send an important tweet – I did this one. Now that it’s done I can say what it is. I tweeted my leaving med school post at Taylor Swift. I knew it was a long shot that she would ever see it, but her album, and especially “exile” has become so inextricably linked to me leaving school, and to me telling people I’m leaving school, that I wanted to share. I think that years in the future when I look back and think of folklore, I’ll think of leaving school and telling my story.
Continuing on my quest to catch up on Technic and Composition sections previously skipped in Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book, I will do the composing for Unit 4, technic and compositing for Unit 5, and technic and composing for unit 6. Then I’ll be all caught up and can continue forward – nope.
Lifestyle
sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 189 nights (27 weeks) in a row – yes. Getting extremely tenuous.
don’t look at phone until after Morning Pages – this is back on – four.
Finish The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd – I’m very close to the end – and start a new book. Not sure yet what I’ll start with, as I’m in a few different book clubs and have so much I want to read – DONE, and I also read 11/22/63 by Stephen King, which is 850 pages, this week.
do an Artist Date – maybe? Maybe some of the reading counted? I don’t know.
journal about Moonchild (writing project) at least once – DONE this morning.
collect all relevant old notebooks from storage and bring them up into my apartment – still haven’t done this, so it’ll remain on the list.
work on Moonchild all seven days – currently working on Nick timeline (the timeline for a relationship that figures prominently in my memoir project, explained in the reflections section of this previous check-in) – DONE.
work on blog at least five days – DONE.
journal about blog at least once – DONE.
Music
seven guitar practice sessions – yeah, I actually did ten! I wanted to make up for the lost sessions last week.
Stephanie Carlson loved to read. She read whenever she got a chance to. She thought she never had enough time to, though. She thought she never had enough time to enjoy the lives of the characters, feel the suspense of a mystery or the romance of a love story. The truth was, as she discovered later, that she spent way too much time with her nose in books.
In second grade Stephanie discovered Nancy Drew books. She loved them.
In January Stephanie and her family went to visit their grandmother. Stephanie hoped she wouldn’t have to share a room with either of her sisters. Julie always wanted Stephanie to read to her. Then she would ask a million questions. Her other sister, Melanie, who was a year older than Julie, didn’t like it when Stephanie read.
For once Stephanie got her wish to be alone. Now she could read in peace because there weren’t any little sisters around to disturb her.
A few months ago, I wrote this post about how I felt sort of distanced from myself, and a time years ago when I felt more myself than ever, and how much I missed those times.
Well, I feel like I’m back.
First off, it’s like some switch totally flipped for me at some point, when I suddenly, acutely felt my intellectual frustration so strongly that I couldn’t ignore it or somehow make it okay.
I’m not sure how it started – with all these personal changes, it’s hard to pinpoint an exact start to things. They creep. Shift underneath the surface like tectonic plates until they’re erupting and lava is everywhere. And that’s a good thing, at least for me, because it’s like re-awakening, rekindling the inner fire. It’s passion. It’s aliveness. So, even though sometimes it makes present circumstances a little difficult or uncomfortable (because aliveness sometimes makes you aware of where your soul is dying), any day I’ll take it.
A few winters ago, I lived with my friend Tracy in a house at camp, and I’ve probably written about this winter before, and I’m sure I will write about it a million more times because I was so freakin’ happy that winter.
The house at camp where I lived (called The Dispensary because in the summer, the medical staff lived there) looked like a cabin, with wood walls and this real “old” feeling to it, like living there was actually a time warp, in a nice way, back to something ancient, even though we did have modern conveniences there. I also loved the lights, they had a soft glow that on the wood walls just somehow reminded me of something primal. It actually had a feel that brought to mind my grandmother’s house, probably the only other house I’ve loved as much as I love the Dispensary. Something about that house was just like IV nutrition for my soul.
Goals from Last Week – How Did it Go?
Chrys Buckley 