Winter Reading & One Pan Chicken Dinners

It’s the last 2 months of reading for 2025! Are you close to your reading goal? I hit my goal of 112 books and as of today, I have read 128 books this year and as of YESTERDAY, I finished ALL 3 of my Reading Challenges!!!! I did my local library’s Book Nerd Challenge, The Booklist Queen’s Reading Challenge and SBean’s TikTok Taylor Swift 2025 Reading Challenge! I love reading challenges because they get me to read outside of my regular genres. For Remembrance Day I read a few WWII books. I also read 4 new releases, a book of Canadian poetry and a few sci-fis. Of course I read a few great holiday romances, historical fictions, mysteries, and tearjerkers. As always I added the challenge category in italics beside each title and added links to Canadian bookstores to which I have no affiliation. Check out any of these titles at your local library, book store of thrift shop.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown Dystopian Fiction. This is a dystopian novel that takes place over 700 years into the future, where society is divided into classes by colour, the reds being the lowest and the golds being the highest. At first, I didn’t get it, but you get to know who Darrow is, what drives him, the order of the planet, the history up until this point, and basically all of the world building/origin stories in the first 9 chapters and I was totally on board for the mission starting in chapter 10! I liked the message, it’s not me against you it’s us against them. The mission is to infiltrate the golds. Over the next 5 chapters, the reader learns the fundamental differences between reds and golds as Darrow trains and becomes one of them. This book is perfectly setting up the series. This is the first book I’ve read in a long time with a first person, male main character. Actually, my first male author in a while too. Hope you have the rest of the chapters. Darrow is at the institution or the “school end“. This is unlike other schools, here there are no books just a simulation of war and being a leader. This is also different from other dark academia books because The teams don’t trust each other. They’re all working against each other. There is no loyalty, no relationships, and no mentors. I like Darrow‘s team though. I like Cassius, Roque, Sevro, Quinn, Pax and Mustang although I think she will betray them at some point. And I like that Darrow sees that the high drafts aren’t as helpful as the lower drafts to their survival, like the Sevro’s Howlers. So the ending has a twist, kinda, lol, and the door is open for an incredible book to which I am looking forward to reading.

The First Gentleman by James Patterson and Bill Clinton Fiction & Nonfiction by Same Author. What I like about these 2 authors is that I know exactly what I’m getting. There’s always the introduction/prologue that sets up the story and then they take you back to the event in question until we meet up with the time period from the intro/prologue. Like all of their books, this is fast paced, has multiple twists and turns, and is dripping with political intrigue. However, because you know what you get with these books, I pegged the corporate in the conclusion within the first hundred pages. This was a fun read, but not their best.

The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown An academic thriller. I have been a big fan of Brown’s Robert Langdon series for a long time. This book felt very familiar maybe teetering on the boring side of familiarity actually. It was nice to have Langdon “in love” and I like Katherine. I also like how the plan or the manuscript is “talked about” but you don’t know and still have to read to know what they already know. If that made sense? Dan Brown’s books can be very science forward or religion forward. This one is science driven, and honestly, a lot of of it went over my head. It was a slow read for me because I had to reread the science stuff and this is a long book already. There was a good twist and I loved the characters but I was missing the religious symbolism that Langdon’s stories are usually full of. We waited a long time for this book but although I’m glad I read it, I was left a little disappointed. 

Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice Written by an Indigenous author. Written around 12 years after the first book takes place, the sequel picks up with Evan, becoming a grandfather, and the survivors of the blackout having moved from the Rez 10 years earlier, establishing a new community in the bush. Now, the balance of nature is off, and the food is running out. A community decision is made to send a scouting party south towards the Great Lakes, where their Anishinabe ancestors originally came from. The five survivors walk south and the description of what they see was fascinating. Cities completely empty, houses stripped of everything including their wooden stairs, and sun bleached bones. They meet other survivors, other first nation people that have learned to survive in the New World without modern conveniences like electricity. As they make their way back to their traditional homeland, some of the survivors don’t make it. The ending was fully satisfying. I cried, but also was left amazed that a dystopian book full of hardships left me so hopeful. This was a powerful book.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah About sisters. Every time I read a book about the women’s resistance in WWII, I am blown away. This is the story of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, far apart in age and temperament but both abandoned by their widowed father at young ages. This is the story about how each sister deals with living in occupied France during World War II. Like in all of Kristin Hannah‘s books, the women are strong, the story is heartbreaking, and I learned a lot. What women had to do during war times is not talked about, remembered, or celebrated at all and these stories remind us. Each of the sisters had their own path, each did things they were ashamed of and things they were proud of. I am in awe of the people (mostly women and children) that survived the atrocities of war. The ending of the story was satisfying and heartbreaking and I will remember this book about these heroic sisters for a long time.

Crushed Wild Mint by Jess Housty From the 800s. Poetry is hard for me. I feel like I’m not smart enough for poetry. Actually, I have realized that poetry is like meditation, it takes time and patience to see results. I would read a poem and then sit on it, think about it, and sometimes I got it most times I didn’t lol but I liked how it the poems made me feel. These poems, where about relationship relationships relationship relationships with yourself with your family and with nature. I loved the visuals that I imagined, while reading about the mountains, cedar, and crushed wild mint.

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly Audiobook with Multiple Narrators. This was recommended as an audiobook with multiple narrators and it does have lots of narrators but I found it hard to listen and keep focused. So I followed along reading at the same time as listening. Told from 3 different points of view starting September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland, there’s Caroline in NY, Kasia in Poland and Herta in Germany. It was interesting/frustrating to read Herta’s story as she is a German Nazi doctor, and I’ve never read the perspective of someone that believed Hitler was saving Germany before. I also didn’t realize how much the Girl Guides played apart in the resistance in Poland during the war. I had also never read about the Polish “rabbits”. It was heartbreaking to read what they did to healthy young women. It was also shocking to read Herta’s story. Not once did she think she was doing something wrong. I always wondered how that happened and now as I watch the news, I can see it just like Herta’s story.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers About or featuring robots as characters. I always say I don’t like science fiction, but as soon as I open one up, I’m totally into the story! This is a book about a rag tag team of tunnellers that live aboard the spaceship Wayfarer. They are a group of all different species and they all have secrets, including Rosemary the newest member of the team. I was fascinated by the relationship between Jenks and Lovey, the ships AI. This is an epic adventure story like The Hobbit but in space. It is slow at the beginning because she’s setting up a whole universe, a whole series, so there is a lot of history, species languages and terms that the reader needs to learn & that need to be described. It is also a very thoughtful book. For a book that takes place hundreds of years after earth has died, things really haven’t changed. The relationships are fascinating in this book. It’s really all about relationships actually and learning to truly understand and accept differences in others. It is eye opening how humans are considered in the grand scheme of species in the book. The faults in humanity that are so casually expressed, that actually make sense.

Shield of Sparrows by Devney Perry Intriguing Cover. I was into this book right away. It is easy to get into. Sometimes new fantasy books scare me because of all the world building, lore and magical beings/terms to learn but this was easy to catch on and understand. Odessa is funny and not your typical heroine. I felt like the twist was fairly obvious, but I didn’t care. I was just excited for the big reveal. This was a sloooow burn but I didn’t mind it. Their chemistry and banter is fun and it felt more believable. I am so invested, it’s like the first book introduced us to characters and lore and places while giving us a ton of answers but opening up whole new questions. Ugh, how many years until the next one? Lol.