I figure you might be in the same predicament. So, here is explicit encouragement to keep chipping away at last year’s pile even as 2025 books begin to cascade from your favorite bookstore and your local library.

One of my favorites of 2024 is “Hester” by Laurie Lico Albanese, in which a mid-20s Nathaniel Hawthorne falls for a married but apparently abandoned young seamstress who possesses an ability to translate words and letters into colors.

I loved the Salem, Mass., of Albanese’s novel and the speculation that Hawthorne’s novel might have had its genesis in a doomed romance from his youth.

If you read this newsletter faithfully, you won’t be surprised to see a Richard Powers book here but “Playground” is so sumptuous, so marvelous and so meaningful that I simply won’t be satisfied until every book lover in Minnesota has read it!

And here’s a wild spin on “The Great Gatsby” that I loved and recommended to many friends last year. I somehow missed this book when it was published in the summer of 2021 but I think “The Chosen and the Beautiful” by Nghi Vo is fantastic.

Told from the perspective of character of Jordan Baker, we encounter a Jay Gatsby who is so obsessed with Daisy Buchanan (now married to someone else) that he has bartered away his soul for a second chance with her.

The descriptions of the decadence, the careless wealth and the parties are delicious, and I loved the way Vo pulled a glittering magic thread through this most familiar of stories.