Happy New Year!
Thank you all for your patience with me as I recoup from Christmas travel and general craziness. I’m so excited to bring you more writing in 2025.
In 2024, I had a goal of reading 24 books and I met it. I’m really proud that I was able to do it (though it involved quite a bit of sprinting on New Year’s Eve), and I’m so thankful that I got to share my thoughts on the books I read with all of you. Low key, book reviews are my favorite things to write on this Substack.
However, I have a problem with the Goodreads algorithm: It doesn’t encourage you to read longer books. The logical next step for this year would be 25 books in 2025, but I didn’t want to stick with only the short, 200-pagers just to keep up with my goal. I have 400- and 500-page books that have been on my TBR list for literal years.
So 2025 will be the year I finally read them.
This year’s goal will be 2,500 pages in 2025. This challenge will hopefully give me more flexibility if I want to throw in a longer book. I will still be reading shorter books, especially new books from authors I love that are coming out later this year. But 2025 will be my Year of Chonky Books.
And before we start with that, let’s wrap up the last three books I read in 2024.
Mr. Dickens and His Carol by Samantha Silva: Ever since I took a Charles Dickens seminar in college, capped off with a trip to London for his 200th birthday, I’ve been a big fan. Yes, I knew the story of A Christmas Carol before then, but Dickens is meant to be read, and if you can manage, read aloud. I have multiple audio versions of ACC that I cycle through during the Christmas season, with those by Jim Dale and Kyle Munley in the heaviest rotation. So when I found out this book existed—a fictionalized take on the circumstances that lead Dickens to write the second most famous Christmas story ever (OK, maybe Rudolph has Scrooge beat)—I was immediately interested. However, while I enjoyed parts of this book, I won’t be returning to it every year.
First of all, get the audiobook. Euan Morton’s fantastic performance is very Dickensian. Second of all, while Silva’s writing isn’t an exact replica of Dickens’s style, it definitely has the same flavor and has plenty of Easter eggs for diehard Dickens fans. And the descriptions of London in winter made me yearn to go back; I listened to this part driving on the highway on a foggy day and the vibes were immaculate.
So why was this book overall just OK? In this story, Charles Dickens the character is set up to go on the same emotional arc as Ebenezer Scrooge: to rediscover the true meaning of Christmas. In ACC, Scrooge is only allowed two-thirds of the first chapter to be the miserly grump we know and love before his heart begins to soften. In this book, Dickens the character is stuck in the miserly grump stage for at least the first two-thirds of the plot, and it’s draining. And then the only thing that begins to snap him out of it is his crush on (read: creepy obsession with) a young seamstress at the theatre, and not a reconciliation with his wife and children? It just isn’t satisfying. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a pearl-clutching apologist who cannot fathom Dickens cheating on his wife; there is a lot of speculation that he did.
I also think the message of the book doesn’t land well at all. In ACC, Scrooge is set up as an extremely wealthy man who refuses to spend money unless he absolutely has to. When he has a change of heart and becomes much more generous, you never once think he’s headed for debtor’s prison. In MDAHC, Dickens the character is forced by his publishers to write a Christmas story because his financial situation is strained—which is historically accurate. However, the way he handles this crisis is not by having an honest conversation with his wife or setting hard boundaries with his family members that hound him for money. It’s by getting more money so he can maintain his lavish lifestyle. I read a Goodreads review from Madeleine at Top Shelf Text that says it much better than I can: “[Silva’s book] reinforced the message it set out to disown, that Christmas is about the money we spend and gifts we give. I believe the original tale better serves the true meaning of Christmas.”
⭐️⭐️ - 2.5 stars
CW: religious trauma, divorce, purity culture
The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife by Shannon Harris: The public downfall of evangelical pastor Joshua Harris in 2019 fascinated me. I even wrote about it in my very first article for FemCatholic, but it doesn’t appear to be on the site anymore. It was an unfortunately rare instance of a religious leader rejecting the toxic principles he had built his life and career on and humbling himself before his audience saying, “I was wrong.”
In case you need a refresher, Joshua is the author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, the book that became the manual for the toxic Christian purity culture of the 1990s and early 2000s. When Joshua wrote the book, he was unmarried and had no seminary training, yet for many millennial American Christians, his book and his messages were shoved in their faces with nearly the same frequency as the Bible. In 2018, Joshua released a documentary interviewing people who had been hurt by his teachings. The following year, he announced that he was getting a divorce and “by all the measurements that [he has] for defining a Christian, [he is] not a Christian.”
In this book, his ex-wife Shannon tells her side of the story.
This book for me is a perfect example of a conclusion I don’t see many readers come to: “I’m not this book’s target audience, but I’m glad I read it.” Shannon Harris didn’t grow up in a religious family, and as a new, adult Christian, she was quickly swept up into a high-profile, meticulously scrutinized relationship with American evangelicalism’s golden boy. She shares how her decades as a pastor’s wife in a high-control church slowly ate away at her authentic self, and how, just as slowly, she learned to let go.
Until now, the only other “leaving toxic cult memoirs”—my term, not theirs—I’ve read were by Jill Duggar Dillard and Mike Rinder (RIP ❤️). Both of those books were brutal to read at times, but you were left with a sense of hope at the end. Shannon’s book was not like that. You get the sense that at the time she wrote this book, she was still very much in her healing phase. That’s not a bad thing, but as I pointed out in my original FemCatholic article about Joshua’s downfall, if you lead people from your open wounds instead of your healed scars, you will lead them astray.
Shannon Harris isn’t a pastor. She has no pretensions to lead. She’s a survivor sharing her story. If you are also a survivor, you will probably get more out of this book than I did. I am still glad I read it though.
⭐️⭐️⭐️ - 3 stars
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton: Yes, add this one to the list of “Books I Should’ve Been Assigned in School But Wasn’t,” along with The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye. And no, I haven’t seen the movie either.
My impetus for reading this book was my mom buying tickets for the whole family to see the Broadway musical during Christmas week. I had a goal of finishing the book before then. I made it to Chapter 4, which just about covers the first act. It’s probably the closest feeling I’ll ever get to someone whose only exposure to Wicked was Part I of the film, and then they go see the Broadway show.
To be honest, it was a mad dash to finish this book on New Year’s Eve to reach my book goal for the year. But what a book to end on! There are books you read for which immediately obvious why they’re classics and have held up so well for tens or even hundreds of years. Ponyboy is such an identifiable protagonist—a well-meaning kid who dreams of something more but feels trapped by the circumstances he was born into. I love the exploration of the relationship between the three Curtis brothers—and the musical dives even deeper into this, imo. And even though I kind of hate Dallas Winston as a character, I won’t lie and say his reaction to Johnny’s death didn’t break my heart, and I think the book sets up the older brother-younger brother relationship between the two of them much better than the musical does.
This book just works. There’s no other way to put it.
Also, go see the musical if you can. It’s fantastic.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - 4.75 stars
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Thank you so much for reading! Let me know what other topics you’d like to see from me, and I will see you next time.
