The goal for me heading into a new year is never an exhaustive reading plan or “to read” list. It’s simply locating a place to start. I find most of the time this emerges from the natural outflow of where my reading year in 2025 brought me. What themes and stories and directions it finds me moving towards. I outlined that in a previous post in this space:https://thestoriesofmylife.ca/2025/12/30/end-of-the-year-reflections-the-story-of-my-reading-journey-in-2025/
Here I am simply looking at some specific first steps to begin fleshing that out in terms of titles to kick off the year:
Beginning where I usually do every January with the next book in Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series. Which sadly is going to be the final one (Before We Forget Kindness). This is a series about looking backwards and assessing the past, so it always feels like a perfect fit for the early January months.
I usually pull out a book I’ve been saving for the winter season as well. This year its a book by Canadian and local Winnipeg author S.M. Beiko, Scion of the Fox: The Realms of Ancient. Its a mix of fantasy and mytholog and historical setting that I’ve been anticipating getting to. Now is the time. I am pairing that with Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May and the fantasy Where the Dark Stands Still by A.B. Poranek (fitting as well for the long dark days of the season.
The final week of 2025 also happened to offer something that feels tailer made for me- Phaedra Patrick’s The Time Hop Coffee Shop. Coffee and time travel. I’m sold.
I’m also trying to tackle some sequels, which include The Wild Robot Escapes (Peter Brown), Twighlight Falls and Summmers End (both new installments in the Shady Hollow series by Juneau Black), the follow up to Once a Queen, Once a Castle (Garrick Hall #2) by Sarah Arthur, who is quickly becomming an all time favorite author of mine, and the The Book Womans Daughter by Kim Michele Richardson (the follow up to The Book Women of Troublesome Creek)
I’ll also be looking to get my hands on the newest from Ransom Riggs (The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Barry), a book I did not even know existed and was brought to my attention after seeing that the sequel is coming out this next year.
The new year is usually finishing up books I’m currently in the middle of reading as well, which include Martin Scorsese with Antonio Spadaro (Conversations on Faith), Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, and my long (or slow) read for the year, Mark Twain by Ron Chernow.
On that same front, I will be starting a new slow read once I finish with Chernow’s massive biography, Circle of Days by Ken Follet (I have a long standing fascination with Stonehenge). And later in the year I will likely be starting the equally sizeable King Sorrow by Joe Hill
In preparation for the biography on L.M. Montgomery by Jane Urquhart, I’ll be reading her books The Blue Castle and Emily of New Moon
One of the places 2025 brought me is to rediscovering the power of story. On that front I picked up Hwang Bo-Reum’s Every Day I Read, I’ve started the book Everything is a Story by Kaitlin B Curtice. I also wrote about this interest in a previous blog post here, but one of the things I have paired that with is looking into this recent trend on recovering th art of letter writing. I picked up Virginia Evans The Correspondent, and I’ve paired that with Syme’s Letter Writer by Rachel Syme as a place to start.
As a connective piece, given that my church is travelling through the Gospel of Mark this year (every year its a different Gospel), I have started the book Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of the Gospel by David Rhoads, and have paired that with James R. Edwards commentary The Gospel According to Mark.
There’s been a resurrgence in Lewis and Tolkien scholarship as of late, and this year I’ll be digging into The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams. by Richasrd Hughes Gibson and Between Interpretation and Imagination: C.S. Lewis and the Bible by Leslie Baynes.
I’ve had a handful of recommends (I love getting recommneds and read anything anyone passes my way) that I failed to get to before the end of the year. They include Septology by Jon Fosse, No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister, Ad Limina by Cyril Jones-Kellett, and Staricase in the Woods by Chuck Wending.
Since I spent 2025 with a book called How To Write Your Story, and actually made some progress, a book called The Gospel of You: Start Telling Your Story by Thomas Roberts caught my attention. Felt like a good one to pair with Never Too Old To Save The World: A Midlife Calling Anthology by John F Allen. In an odd way, I came across a book called Reversing Entropy by Luci Shaw that feels like it fits, especially in this winter season as I approach 50.
I also have a number of classics waiting to be tackeled. Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) and Clara Callan (Richard B. Wright) are probably highest on the list.
On the Canadian/Local front (which I was excited to do well in through the 2025 year), I have Ship of Dreams by Donna Jones Alward, Strangers at the Red Door by Dennis Bock, Portage and Main: How an iconic intersection shaped Winnipeg’s history, politics, and urban life by Sabrina Janke, and Canada’s Main Street: The Epic Story of The Trans-Canada Highway by Craig Baird.
On the theology front, aside from the Gospel of Mark and C.S. Lewis I have three books I’m excited to dig into right now. That includes The Vision of Ephesians, the latest from N.T. Wright, Augustine the African by Catherine Conybeare, and The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth by Meggan Watterson.
On the travel front (because I always like to have a travel book on the go, be it a travelogue or other, The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection by Gavin Francis, and Imagine a City: A Pilots Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker.
As always, there is a ton of new books coming out in 2026, and I’m super exicted to see where it all takes me. But this is a place to start, and I’m eager to kick it all off.
The Stories of my Life 