My In List for 2025

In photographs.

You know how everyone and their influencers in Christ made a polished, well though out, creatively attuned in and out list for 2025?

I loved yours!

IN: your newsletter can be whatever you want it to be.

OUT: anyone who doesn’t believe in magic.

Feeling soothed and expanded by the power of the Universe, she stepped into 2025 ready to surrender to Quantum Leaps and raised frequencies.

I read and skim and skim and read and I tap into your algorithm — the trend-setting of the moment patterns, the collective draining of energy. Did everyone shame January and officially declare hibernation mode in effect? Another winter is awesome! everything is awesome! newsletter (been at this a year!) proclaiming myself as the antitheses of your cold weather slumber isn’t really it. But this still rings true for my goals: I hope this post brings you small tokens of delight and that you’re trending in the right direction.

To give heft to an email ladled with photos — below are the last three books I read. If you need some fresh literature air for your downtime mode activated, these will do.

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin

The confident ease with which I can recommend Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone probably has a lot of you nodding along. Her books take you straight to the lush world she’s created through poetic, immersive descriptions. Set in a small town Alaskan wilderness in 1974, a family in crisis in more ways than one is faced with survival on the harsh, unforgiving, final frontier.

The last frontier was like her dad, it seemed. Larger than life. Expansive. A little dangerous.

From a village in Ghana deep under African skies, to Mississippi plantations, the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, the determined streets of Baltimore, and jazz clubs in Harlem — Homegoing illuminates the fraught underbelly of lives linked by slave trade, marginalized by American society throughout time. It whispers hypnotically, as opposed to shouts — the voices through eight generations of descendants.

Suddenly H felt like he couldn’t breathe, like that decade’s worth of dust was climbing up his lungs and into his throat and choking him.

Do you wander into your local bookstore and stare at the shelves with intention — lingering at smooth covers to inspire the next set of cream colored pages meant for you? Will the crisp text turn into to exactly the right book at the right time? My Last Innocent Year follows Isabel Rosen in her final semester at a small elite college in New Hampshire. The year is 1998. Resonant and sharply focused, a relatable coming of age, I have a feeling a lot of you will enjoy this one!

When you write, you have to take people to the closet. Not to the living room or the kitchen, not even to your bedroom. No, you take them straight to the goddamn closet, the place you keep your most secret, unmentionable things.