Five books. Every month. A variety of topics from different genres.
Here is the list from December 2025. Clicking on the title will direct you to the original post.
A Child is Born: A Beginner’s Guide to Nativity Stories (2025) by Amy-Jill Levine is a short but insightful book that examines the other nativity stories in the Hebrew Bible. Christians easily recall the narrative around the birth of Jesus, but how many know, much less think about, the nativity stories of Moses, Isaac and Ishmael, Samson, and Samuel. Just in time for Advent, author AJ Levine has prepared a fascinating four-part study explaining the context that would have been basic knowledge for the faithful in the first century CE while showing the connections between these ancient stories of displacement, pilgrimage, and exploration and the one we now celebrate on December 25th. A Child is Born is a book full of insight and wisdom.
Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (2006) by Craig Nelson is an excellent biography of the man who though he was born in England, was truly a citizen of the Enlightenment world. Paine would write three of the bestsellers of the eighteenth century, topped only by the Bible. Common Sense cemented his reputation. Rights of Man helped shape the French Revolution and—although it would take more than a century—inspire constitutional reform in Great Britain and foreshadow Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Age of Reason, a forceful call against organized religion, finds Paine sticking to his Enlightenment and deist values even at the expense of his public reputation. Paine’s mind was clearly a force of nature, and Nelson characterizes him as “the Enlightenment Mercury who sparked political common cause between men who worked for a living and empowered aristocrats across all three nations.”
Common Sense (1776) by Thomas Paine, published just six months before the Declaration of Independence, has been called the most influential polemic in all of American history. It is a fiery call for his adopted countrymen to throw off the yoke of British rule, and especially to revolt against the crown. Common Sense provided the vision of independence that would move millions in that fateful year to change their hearts and minds away from their deference and loyalty to Britain and the throne. Americans had never heard such words. The pamphlet sold 100,000 copies in the first three months after publication. There is, simply, no other publication as important to an era when Americans were beginning to think there was a different way forward than the one their London-based government insisted was proper, righteous, and inevitable. Reading Common Sense is a revelation in its relevance for today.
From Doon With Death (1964) by Ruth Rendell is the first of her twenty-four Inspector Wexford mysteries. Margaret Parsons is a timid housewife devoted to her garden, her kitchen, and her husband as they live a quiet and simple life in the Sussex village of Kingsmarkham. But now Margaret Parsons is dead, brutally strangled, her body abandoned in the nearby woods. Chief Inspector Reg Wexford, the big, gruff rural detective, is intrigued by the seeming disconnect between her life and death, and he works with his assistant and sidekick, Inspector Mike Burden, to uncover the truth. It turns out that the truth includes several dark secrets that those who knew Margaret Parsons want to keep quiet.
The Six Mile Circle: A Sea Story (2025) by Syd Stapleton continues the adventures of Frank Tomasini and his boat, the Molly B. Frank’s marine surveyor’s business has fallen on hard times. To make ends meet he signs on as a deckhand and cook on ocean-going tugboats and barges making runs between the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii. When one of the hulls is mysteriously pumped out in the middle of the ocean, a fellow deckhand gets sick and ultimately dies after contact. Frank knows immediately he has to get to the bottom of this mystery.
WHAT’S ON THE NIGHTSTAND FOR JANUARY (Subject to change at the whims of the reader)
- Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books (2025) by Hwang Bo-Reum
- The Correspondent: A Novel (2025) by Virginia Evans
- No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1995) by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (2025) by Allen C. Guelzo
- The Late Monsieur Gallet (1930) by Georges Simenon
Keep reading!
More to come . . .
DJB
NOTE: Click to see the books I read in November of 2025 and to see the books I read in 2025. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.
Photo of reading by Congerdesign from Pixabay
MORE TO COME... 