Last few suggestions for 2025…

I will definitely be reading Melissa Bernstein’s new book, Thee Heart of Entrepreneurship . She and Doug started Melissa & Doug, the incredibly successful toy company in their basement and Doug’s parents’ garage in 1988 and built it into a billion dollar business. In 2021 they also launched a new venture, Lifelines, what has come to be a platform for stress relief with tools designed to de-stress, calm your mind and boost your mood. I was lucky enough to work for the Bernsteins at Lifelines leading up to, and during the launch which was thrilling, creative and fun!

Thee Heart of Entrepreneurship by Melissa Bernstein (nonfiction)

From the creator of Melissa & Doug toys, Melissa Bernstein offers entrepreneurs a guide to discovering and launching their unique vision.

Entrepreneurship isn’t for the faint of heart. Melissa Bernstein, cofounder of the wildly successful toy company Melissa & Doug and cofounder of the wellness company Lifelines, knows this firsthand. Connecting deeply with your soul and crafting a clear vision is central to launching a successful business. In The Heart of Entrepreneurship, Bernstein offers a guide for the creative and visionary process of bringing a business, product, or service to life.

Bernstein walks readers through the process she uses when launching a new product or venture—a process she has taught to hundreds of students at Duke University and through Sounds True’s Inner MBA® program. She likens this process to creating a new cultivating a mindset of curiosity, gathering ingredients, diving deep into your area of intrigue, allowing ideas to simmer, assessing and altering as needed, and serving your perfected recipe to consumers. Each chapter offers insights and practical exercises to help you apply these ideas to your own life and business.

Turning your passion into ideas that serve others requires courage and commitment, and offers a profound sense of fulfillment. Bernstein writes, “You’ll come to see that the solutions to both entrepreneurial challenges and life’s most important questions are waiting (and have always been waiting) within your very soul.”

The Pursued by Corey Mead (nonfiction)

The terrifying true story of a woman at war with a violent stalker who eluded the police for years—until they found the truth in the last place anyone would have dared to look.

From 1977 to 1981, Ruth Finley, an ordinary wife and mother from Kansas, was tormented by an elusive maniac known as The Poet. The police, already on edge from BTK’s reign of terror, spent years searching for the stalker. Meanwhile, his cryptic letters in rhymed verse grew more disturbing and violent, spilling into deeds like stabbing and kidnapping.

In this propulsive nonfiction account, as Ruth is surveilled from all sides, her nightmare takes a chilling the stalker is no stranger at all. It’s someone the police have been close to for years, someone nearer to home than Ruth dared to admit. The revelation recasts what seemed like a cruel twist of fate as something far more disturbing.

The Pursued is not just a gripping true-crime story. It’s also a darkly textured portrait of the deceptions that drive us and the explosive reckonings that occur when they finally tumble down.

I Wanted to be Wonderful by Lihi Lapid (fiction)

This book begins where most love stories leave off: at the beginning of real life.

I WANTED TO BE WONDERFUL follows the lives of two women in their first years of marriage and motherhood. One is a fictional character trying to live the happily-ever-after many imagine for themselves, and the second woman is inspired by the author herself, relating the most intimate moments of her life.

Both couples start their marriages full of idyllic happiness, but as the stressors of everyday life seep into their daily lives, that spark of young love begins to dim.

In trenchant, thoughtful prose, Lihi Lapid tells a braided story of women struggling to live up to modern pressures; about shattered dreams; and about finding the strength to gather up the pieces and to learn to smile again.

Till Taught By Pain by Susan Coventry (historical fiction)

Inspired by the groundbreaking discoveries of ether and chloroform anesthesia, William Stewart Halsted pursues a surgical career with relentless ambition, daring to perform operations deemed impossible by his peers. His reputation skyrockets with each bold success— until his quest for an effective local anesthetic leads him to inject himself with cocaine. Caroline, the niece of Confederate General Wade Hampton, seeks to escape the constraints of post-war South Carolina by training as a nurse. When she takes a position at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital, she finds herself captivated by the brilliant yet troubled chief of surgery, Dr. Halsted. Till Taught by Pain is a poignant exploration of love and sacrifice, as Caroline grapples with the difficult choice between enabling her husband’ s addiction and supporting his pioneering career. As their lives intertwine, both must confront the consequences of ambition, the nature of love, and the toll of personal demons on their shared dreams.

Who Knows You By Heart by C.J. Farley (satirical tech thriller)

“Electrifying and smart, Who Knows You By Heart is part thriller, part prophecy, part gift and all the way live.”–Junot Diaz

“Scintillates with light and warmth…And it’s hilariously funny. The view of Big Tech through Olivia the coder’s eyes is delicious. I absolutely loved this book.” —Alison Bechdel

Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence.

Octavia Crenshaw, a Jamaican-American coder living in Manhattan, is broke, burned out, and haunted by her parents’ deaths. Desperate to pay off some debts, she ditches her nonprofit job for a high-paying gig at Eustachian Inc., a Big Tech company that specializes in audio entertainment. Language, communication, human connection—these are the markets Eustachian wants to revolutionize…and dominate.

Octavia finds herself swept up in the world of the Tech Titans, with its lure of instant riches and its seemingly limitless future. But as one of Eustachian’s very few Black employees, Octavia is uncomfortably aware of things that seem to escape her coworkers: unexplained tech glitches, cryptic remarks, a mysterious secret floor in the corporation’s gleaming headquarters.

But she sets her suspicions aside when she’s recruited by another Black coder—the infuriating but attractive Walcott—to collaborate on a secret project code-named Zion. Zion is a new kind of AI-powered storytelling, one that’s programmed to be free from the racist and sexist biases that plague other AI products. Zion could launch Eustachian into a bold new future and make its developers super rich while righting all kinds of injustices. Octavia and Walcott’s excitement over their creation sets off romantic sparks between the two of them, until they discover a toxic secret about their employer—something that they can’t unlearn, or overlook, but must overcome.

Only Way Out by Tod Goldberg (suspense)

A luckless thief’s wrong turn becomes a crooked cop’s fortune in a wild ride of a thriller by a New York Times bestselling author.

Failed lawyer Robert Green has such a good Crack three hundred safe-deposit boxes and sail off to South America with his brilliant, morally flexible sister, Penny. If it weren’t for the damned freezing rain.

In the dying resort town of Granite Shores, cop Jack Biddle is self-appointed king—mostly of bad decisions. Between his family’s crumbling legacy, a wife who just joined the city council, and life-threatening gambling debts, Jack’s looking for a way out. Then he spots a van spinning off a mountain road into the valley below. In the wreckage, Jack finds a very dead Robert, millions in heisted loot…and opportunity.

All Jack has to do is clean up the mess, disappear Robert’s body, make off with the fortune, and not get caught. One hitch is Penny. Another is Mitch Diamond, a wild card ex-con who knows more about the missing fortune than he lets on. Jack, Penny, and Mitch each have an endgame. But there’s only one way out, and they’re crashing headlong toward it.

The Gallagher Place by Julie Doar (mystery)

A layered exploration of family secrets, sibling misconceptions, and an unsolved murder in this chilling debut set in New York’s Dutchess County. 

When Marlowe, an illustrator living in New York City, returns to her family’s bewitching Hudson Valley estate for the holidays, she discovers a murder on the property that draws her back into the haunting case of her teenage best friend’s disappearance twenty years earlier. Marlowe soon finds herself unraveling the tangled dynamics of this small town and the legacy of a summer home that holds both secrets and scars. What follows is a gripping mystery that weaves between past and present as Marlowe confronts the fallibility of her own memory, the shocking truth about her lost friend, and an ultimatum that will change the course of her life.

In this chilling debut novel, Julie Doar parses themes of family loyalty, class tension, friendship, and identity, building toward a dramatic payoff that keeps readers guessing until its final moment.