I’m sharing another list of books this month because, honestly, I’m really tired. And I have a feeling you are too. Last days of 2025–we’ve got this! We’re gonna make it! Let’s go 2026!!!!!!
This list is compiled of books published by Orison Books, a nonprofit small press that selected my essay as the winner of their 2025 Best Nonfiction Spiritual Literature contest. Orison Books aims to address the gap between literary publishers and religious publishers by focusing on the life of the spirit from a non-ideological standpoint. You can read more in their mission statement here. Pretty cool, right!? And they’re going to publish my essay in their anthology next year!
Over the last few months, I enjoyed the following three books published by Orison Books:
To turn earth into heaven is a tall order, but no matter where they live on this planet, the people in these stories hold out hope that at least a small portion of heaven might brighten their patch of earth. A doctor and his relatives are at loggerheads over whether England will be more of a paradise if a splash of Pakistan is added. A Tamil doctor who flees his homeland torn by civil war struggles to make a new life in the American Midwest. A New Zealander visiting India strikes up an unlikely friendship with a little boy facing hard times. An American mother struggles to live without her son following the Iraq war. A Sri Lankan aboriginal finds (and then loses) her paradise when confronted with visiting researchers several years apart. These vivid characters and more demonstrate what connects us all, no matter where we’re from or where we find ourselves.
I don’t read a ton of short story collections but I’m glad I read this one! The characters are so rich and complex, they fill these stories with heart. My favorite story is “The Peacock’s Cry” which is about a white woman who goes to India thinking a peacock feather she inherited from her grandfather is worth a lot of money. She’s so beautifully hopeful, but also so misguided, ignorant, and just kind of a ditz. I had a good laugh at myself for how much I could relate to her. The ending surprised me and it also reminded me of the peacocks that lived at the Buddhist temple near my old home in Ukiah, CA. Those peacocks would squawk such loud, ugly cries in the evenings–also embarrassingly relatable.
You or a Loved One
Stories by Gabriel Houck
In his debut story collection, You or a Loved One, Gabriel Houck ushers readers into the hidden worlds of working-class people and their families, delivering their stories in raw, unflinching prose. An unhappy switchboard operator at SaveLine comforts distressed callers while her own life collapses around her. A man hired to perform choreographed fights for children in a Spider-Man costume comes undone and breaks a client’s jaw. An adolescent Dungeon Master discovers the fact of his queerness while traversing the spooky realm that lies beyond childhood. And a lonesome bachelor hides a fugitive woman in his underground bunker while reckoning with the ghosts of dead loved ones.
With sly wit and tenderness, Houck swings open a door into a peculiar existence that few writers are willing to enter. Even more remarkably, You or a Loved One captures those rarest of moments when a character hears an uncanny whisper of comfort from nowhere or defies the unrelenting tug of gravity and glides out into the void. While shining a light on those who often hover in the periphery in life, Houck’s stories recall the strange tales of grief and redemption we privately tell our loved ones and ourselves.
I loved these stories because they were smart and well crafted, but also gritty and human. I’m always up for some dark humor, especially when it’s paired with emotional complexity and good sentences. And in “Hero’s Theater” when the fake Spider-Man beats up the awful dad at the birthday party? Such a satisfying scene.
The Height of Land follows the quest of a young man torn between spiritual longing and commitment to his community’s survival in a harsh landscape. Red sacrifices everything to study the long-lost words of the gods. He does not know that he is reading the poetry of Lucille Clifton, Ḥáfiẓ, and Walt Whitman, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, and the Tao Te Ching. In a world reborn from catastrophe, these ancient texts take on new meanings.
To seek such things is to court peril. Belief in the gods is forbidden. But Red is desperate to know the gods. And he is not searching alone. Forsaking all that is familiar, Red pledges himself to a clandestine church in the city and falls in love with the charismatic priest. But Red may lose both love and faith in defying the church for the sake of a friend.
Have the gods truly abandoned the earth, or just Red? What kind of answer can he receive when he has lost the words to ask?
This novel is quiet, deep, and thoughtful. Benner Dixon created such an interesting world in which to play with questions around faith, spirituality, and loneliness. From a writing craft perspective, it’s impressive how the book maintained momentum when the main character was alone for a good portion of the plot. But that in itself served as such a good metaphor for the difficulties of isolation and questions around how spirituality plays a role in lonely seasons of our lives.
Last year, my goal was to read everything on my to-be-read shelf and not buy too many new books. That did not happen. Like at all. I think I had maybe 50 unread books on my shelf at the beginning of 2025. I just counted, and somehow I’m at 71. And I read 32 books this year. As the kids say, the math is not mathing. I may have a problem.
Here’s to lots of reading, thinking, and buying too many books in 2026! Happy New Year!
Amy C. Lutz 