You know that feeling when December hits and suddenly everyone is screaming about goals, vision boards, and “becoming the 2026 version of yourself” before you’ve even processed what the hell happened in 2025? Yeah. Me too.

I’m tired. You’re probably tired. And the last thing either of us needs is another hyper-productive, grind-culture book telling us to wake up at 4:47 a.m. and journal 47 pages before coffee.

So this year, I’m doing something different. I’m curling up with books that feel like a long hug from someone who actually gets it. Books that say:
“It’s okay to be messy. It’s okay to rest. It’s okay to not have it all figured out by December 31st.”

These aren’t the usual suspects you’ll see on every “best books of the year” list. You won’t find Atomic Habits, The Subtle Art, or The Alchemist here (love them, but we’ve all seen them 400 times). These are the quieter, deeper, slightly-under-the-radar gems that have genuinely helped me exhale when I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath.

Here are the 5 books I’m reading (or rereading) as I wind down this year. I hope one of them finds you exactly when you need it. Find more books to read or add to your to read list here.

5 Quiet Books That Will Hold You While 2025 Finally Lets Go of Your Throat

1. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman

This book ruined me in the best way.

Burkeman drops the gentle truth bomb that the average human lifespan is about 4,000 weeks. Not “you have so much time!”, no. The exact opposite. You have shockingly little time. And once I accepted that, something magical happened: I stopped trying to optimize every second.

Instead of teaching you how to squeeze more into your days, this book teaches you how to stop treating your life like a project to be managed. It’s deeply comforting if you’re ending the year feeling like you “wasted” time, or didn’t hit your goals, or somehow failed at adulting.

There’s a chapter called “The Efficiency Trap” that made me close the book, stare at the ceiling, and whisper “oh my god, I’m free.” Because the more efficient we become, the more tasks we attract. The book gives you permission to be joyfully mediocre at most things so you can be truly alive for the few things that matter.

If you’ve been beating yourself up about everything you didn’t do in 2025, this book will hold your face and say, “Sweetheart, you were never going to do it all. And that’s the whole point.”

2. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times – Katherine May

This is the book I wish someone had handed me every time life knocked me flat.

Katherine May writes about “wintering”, those seasons (literal or metaphorical) when everything feels cold, dark, and dormant. Job loss, heartbreak, depression, burnout, grief , whatever has you feeling like life has pressed pause.

She doesn’t rush you out of it. She sits with you in it. She shows how wolves change their hunting strategies in winter, how trees go quiet to survive, how some butterflies spend winter as pupae inside cocoons. There’s wisdom in falling apart.

I cried reading the chapter where she visits a sauna in Finland and realizes that sometimes the bravest thing is to just… be warm. To stop performing wellness and actually heal.

If 2025 kicked your ass (and let’s be honest, it kicked most of ours), this book feels like permission to hibernate without guilt. You don’t have to bloom right now. Some seasons are for surviving, and that’s holy too.

3. The Book of Delights – Ross Gay

Okay, switch gears, this one is pure medicine for your soul.

Ross Gay spent a year writing daily “essayettes” about things that delighted him: a stranger’s high-five, the way airport carpets look, carrying someone’s groceries, the smell of a bakery at 3 a.m. They’re tiny, perfect bursts of joy.

But here’s what makes it extraordinary, Ross is a 6’6” Black man writing about joy in a world that doesn’t always make space for Black men to be soft. He doesn’t ignore pain; he writes straight through it into delight anyway.

I read one essay per night before bed, and it retrains your brain to notice beauty again. After a week, I found myself crying (happy tears) because someone held the door for me. That’s the kind of year 2025 was, I forgot how to be delighted by ordinary things. This book brought me back.

It’s like someone bottled Black boy joy, queer joy, human joy, and handed it to you in bite-sized pieces. Read it slowly. Let it work on you.

4. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy – Jenny Odell

This book is subversive in the gentlest way possible.

Jenny Odell makes the radical argument that doing “nothing” (birdwatching, wandering, staring at a tree for an hour) is actually one of the most politically powerful things we can do right now. Because capitalism wants your attention 24/7, and refusing to give it is rebellion.

I know, I know, sounds pretentious. But it’s not. It’s practical and beautiful and made me completely rethink my relationship with my phone, social media, and the constant feeling that I’m “falling behind.”

There’s a chapter where she spends pages describing a single tree she watches from her window, and by the end you’re weeping because you remember that the world is still here, still beautiful, even when everything feels like it’s on fire.

If you’re ending the year doom scrolling and feeling helpless, this book says: start by paying deep attention to something that can’t be monetized. A rose. A cloud. Your neighbor’s terrible holiday decorations. Reclaim your attention, reclaim your life.

5. Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto – Tricia Hersey (The Nap Ministry)

Listen. If you only read one book from this list, make it this one.

Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, declares that rest is a form of resistance against white supremacy and capitalism. That exhaustion is not a status symbol. That grind culture is literally killing us (especially Black people, especially women).

She calls rest a spiritual practice. A divine right. A portal to imagination and healing.

This book made me cry in public because someone finally said out loud: “You are not a machine. You deserve to rest, not because you earned it, but because you are human.”

There’s a part where she says “What would it feel like to be consistently rested?” and I had to put the book down because I couldn’t remember. That’s how deep the exhaustion went.

If you’re a chronic overworker, people-pleaser, or just someone who feels guilty every time you sit down, this book will absolve you. It will fight for you. It will tuck you in and tell you that your dreams are trying to reach you, but they can’t get through the noise of constant productivity.

So Here We Are, Friend

Five books. None of them telling you to hustle harder. All of them saying, in their own way:
You did enough.
You are enough.
Rest. Reflect. Delight. Resist.
The year is ending, but your life isn’t a performance review.

Pick one. Or pick all five. Read them slowly, with tea and fuzzy socks and zero pressure to “get something” out of them. Let them hold you.

And if you’re feeling tender about everything that happened (or didn’t happen) this year, I see you. I’m right there with you. We don’t have to fix ourselves before January 1st. We just have to keep going, gently.

Which one is calling your name? Tell me in the comments, I read every single one, always. You’ve got this. Actually, scratch that, you don’t have to “got this.”You just have to be here. That’s already everything.

All the love,
Your friend who’s also trying to make it to 2026 in one piece.