The readings of 2025
- Annie Mpinganzima
- Dec 19, 2025
- 5 min read
There were times in my life when I could read a 500-page book in just one day. Those were also the days I could sit and watch a series with 149 episodes without getting tired. Reading felt easy back then.
As I grew older, the number of pages I read became fewer, and so did the number of books I finished in a season. My taste in books also changed over time. At one point, I loved dystopian and sci-fi stories. Later, I moved into young adult fiction and romance. After that came self-help books and memoirs, when I was searching for guidance and understanding.
I’ve learned that what I read often depends on the season of life I’m in. When I was pregnant, I read many books about motherhood and parenting. Now, in this season, I’m drawn to homemaking and faith-based books—books that help me grow and build a meaningful life.
I still enjoy young adult fiction, but I’ve mostly lost interest in self-help books. And on many days, I read business and economics, which keep me updated and aligned with my line of work.
This year, I read 10 books. Four of them meant a lot to me, and I would really love for you to read them too. Here they are.
The beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri
Nuri, a beekeeper in the Syrian city of Aleppo, is living a peaceful life with his wife Afra (a painter) and their circle of friends, honey, and hives. They love simple beauty: the rhythmic buzz of bees, fragrant orchards, call to prayer at dawn… the sort of life that feels sacred until war smashes it apart. Then suddenly, bombs replace beehives and fear replaces daily routine. War doesn’t care about honey — or art — or people. So their world unravels. After losing their home and their young son, and Afra tragically going blind (a grief-induced wound as much as a physical one), the couple has no choice but to flee. Their journey through Turkey, Greece, refugee camps, smugglers, sea crossings, and bureaucratic limbo is harrowing in ways most of us only see in headlines or on TV. Yet they cling to each other, and to hope, which sometimes is as fragile as the wing of a bee.
You’re Not Enough (And That’s Okay) by Allie Beth Stuckey
In a world crammed with “You’re amazing! You’re enough! Self-love! Self-care! #BestSelf!”, Allie Beth Stuckey looked around and said: “Hold up. What if this thing we call self-love is actually a scam?” And so she wrote You’re Not Enough (And That’s Okay) to deliver the shocking (or comforting?) news: you are, in fact, not enough. And yes ... that’s perfectly fine. Instead of telling you “you’re enough,” Stuckey suggests a different path: embracing your insufficiency, acknowledging you can’t fix yourself or fill the void inside alone — and turning to God for fulfillment, identity, and purpose.
It Will Cost You Everything: What It Takes to Follow Jesus by Steven J. Lawson
Steve Lawson read a few verses in the Gospel (Luke 14:25‑35) where Jesus tells a crowd, “If you want to follow me, expect cost. Take up your cross. Sell all you have; renounce your old life.” And Lawson said: “That’s not a suggestion. That’s the deal.” So he wrote It Will Cost You Everything , a short but sharp book (about 128 pages), that tries to wake up anyone who wants the “easy version” of faith. According to Lawson, Jesus didn’t offer a comfortable lifestyle or a “spiritual hobby.” He offered, with brutal honesty, a total commitment. And if you want to follow Him, you need to realize: you’re signing up for a life that might be uncomfortable, costly, unpopular but purposeful and eternal.
A Woman After God’s Own Heart by Elizabeth George
Elizabeth George looked around and wondered: “Can someone make her home, family, faith, and life all point to God so clearly, they become a beacon?” And from that question she wrote A Woman After God's Own Heart, a guidebook for women who want to shape their lives according to what she sees as God’s design, not just Sunday-church, but everyday routines, relationships, and homes. Each chapter invites the reader to examine their heart, home, marriage, motherhood (if applicable), prayer life, and spiritual walk. It encourages women to aim for a heart devoted to God’s Word, committed to prayer, obedience, loving, serving, nurturing, and making their homes a place of beauty, peace, and grace.
Also, this year, I found comfort in reading articles. Short, personal, warm and insightful articles. Here are those that stayed with me:
The author reflects on the exhaustion of always giving more in relationships than they receive, questioning their worthiness of deep, reciprocal love and recognizing patterns of settling for minimal effort; they conclude that stopping the chase and refusing to lose themselves for someone else might be the first step toward finding real love.
This in-depth piece explains how unhealed childhood trauma and patterns drive adults to recreate familiar but unsafe relational dynamics, mistaking intensity and familiarity for safety, and emphasizes that true healing requires adult self-leadership rather than outsourcing emotional work to others or repeating patterns rooted in early experiences.
Self-improvement often brings a sense of isolation because growth can distance you from old habits and people, require quiet self-discipline without external recognition, and force you to sit with yourself, but this loneliness is part of the process, and over time it draws toward connections and environments that align with your evolved self.
The author speaks to those who constantly dissect words and actions in search of hidden meaning, explaining that overanalyzing is often an attempt to control uncertainty, but it ultimately leads to exhaustion and distracts from experiencing life as it is, urging readers to let go of the need to solve every ambiguity and instead live more freely with the unknown.
This piece suggests that trying to control or change people who have repeatedly shown they do not value your well-being is futile, and instead of repeatedly explaining yourself in hopes they will understand, you should accept their choices, detach with self-respect, and stop investing energy in those who choose not to treat you well.
The author shares how they learned that admitting and honoring desires—whether small or large—is an act of courage that makes life more authentic, arguing against minimizing wants out of fear and instead advocating for acknowledging and pursuing what genuinely matters to you, even when it feels vulnerable.
The author laments how emotional avoidance and silence have become normalized in relationships, describing avoidant partners who retreat instead of communicating, how this dynamic hurts people who crave connection, and how society masquerades avoidance as self-care when it often stems from fear and leads to neglect rather than genuine boundaries; they resolve to stop chasing those who won’t show up.
This piece argues that sex alone is a poor basis for deciding to have children, warning against equating fleeting pleasure and chemistry with readiness for the lifelong responsibility of raising another person, and urging intentionality, emotional maturity, and self-awareness in decisions about sex and reproduction instead of romanticized impulses.
The author reframes personal struggles and setbacks in life as part of spiritual warfare that reveals weaknesses in faith and dependence on self, encouraging believers to recognize spiritual battles, build a firmer foundation in God, and grow stronger in character and trust through adversity rather than seeing hardship as abandonment.
This essay validates the deep, ongoing struggle of feeling stuck or weighed down by life, explaining that healing doesn’t mean the pain disappears but that it gradually stops dominating one’s experience, allowing small moments of ease, self-care, and resilience to emerge, and that “better” often means learning to live with the mess while still moving forward.
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