Leah De Forest

George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, because when am I not reading this book? I had the pleasure of teaching an excerpt this fall, and I listen to the audiobook most days. I love this big, baggy 19th century novel, which includes lines like: “Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on” and “the remark lay in his mind as lightly as the broken wing of an insect among all the other fragments there.”

Marisa Silver’s novel At Last is about two women who become in-laws when their children marry … and also about what it means to be a person, a parent, a friend, and generally to be alive. It’s gorgeous. And the New Yorker named it one of the best books of 2025.

David Haynes’s novella and stories Martha’s Daughter is full of his signature wit and humor. The titular Martha is a wonderfully complex character, and I remain impressed and intrigued by the novella’s use of direct address. The book is scooping up much-deserved recognition, too: it’s been named one of the top books of 2025 by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Washington Independent Review of Books.

I’m about halfway through Jeanette Winterson’s 2021 essay collection 12 Bytes: How AI Will Change the Way We Live and Love. Winterson frames her exploration of the risks and opportunities of AI with a reminder of the changes—and damages—wrought by the Industrial Revolution.

Robyn Fivush’s 2019 book Family Narratives and the Development of an Autobiographical Self, which explores how the ways that parents reminisce with children shapes memory, and in the process, people’s sense of themselves. It includes intriguing facts such as: “more than 90 percent of everyday emotional experiences are shared with someone within 48 hours of their occurrence”. (In other words: we remember together).

Margaret Hutton’s novel If You Leave brought the world of of WWII Washington, DC, to life for me. The novel follows two women: one who abandons a child, and her friend, who raises that child. It’s a book about art, and love, and friendship. I also loved Hutton’s essay in Memoir Land about writing and making art.