The List Linda Asked For
My sister-in-law Linda turned 70 in March and called me the following Tuesday with a request she had been workshopping in her head, I could tell, for at least a week.
"Vicki," she said. "Just send me the list. The actual list. The books I should read this year. And I don't want any with the word 'luminous' or 'sweeping' on the cover, because life is too short and so, frankly, am I."
I laughed. Then I thought about it for forty-eight hours. Then I sat down at the kitchen counter at 4:13 in the morning with a cup of tea and started writing the email.
What follows is the email. I have opinions. I've earned them. I've read sixteen "best books for seniors" lists this year and three of them recommended The Alchemist. The Alchemist! Linda deserves better. So do you.
Twelve books. Each one with the year, where to buy it, whether it's worth the hardcover or you should wait, whether the audiobook is the version, and one honest line about who should skip it. Because every book is wrong for somebody, and the lists that pretend otherwise are the ones I throw across the room.
A Note on Format Before We Start
Two of every three books I read now are large-print or audiobook. My eyes were tired in 1987, too — I just didn't admit it. I admit it now.
Libby is the free library app. If you have a library card and you don't have Libby, fix that this week. Audiobooks, ebooks, large-print holds, all free. Audible is the Amazon one ($14.95/month). Libro.fm is the same idea but routes a percentage to your local independent bookstore, which I prefer for reasons I'd bore you with. Thorndike Press is the publisher behind most large-print library editions; their versions land two to three months after the hardcover.
My shorthand through the list below: 🔊 means the audiobook is the version to choose, ⬛ means large-print is widely available, 📚 means the regular paperback is fine. Skip-ifs are in italics. Now, the books.
Four Books About Starting Over After 60
1. A Man Called Ove — Fredrik Backman (2014) 📚⬛🔊
Grumpy retired Swedish widower discovers, against his will, that the neighborhood needs him. Paperback is everywhere, $14-$16. Large-print Random House edition lives in every public library in America. Audiobook narrated by George Newbern is the canonical version. Frank tried to read this one. Frank does not read fiction. The book became a coaster on the patio table. Documented. Skip if: you've already read it three times. Try Backman's Anxious People instead — funnier, weirder, same heart.
2. Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again — Elizabeth Strout (2008, 2019) 📚⬛🔊
The Olive books are about a retired schoolteacher in Maine who is rude, lonely, observant, and so precisely drawn it broke me at 64 and rearranged something in my chest at 71. Read them in order, then sit quietly. Strout's writing is the closest thing to hearing your mother think. Both books large-print, both audiobooks strong. Skip if: you need plot. These are mood, character, weather, and grief. Plot happens but it isn't the point.
3. A Gentleman in Moscow — Amor Towles (2016) ⬛🔊
A Russian count is sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel for the rest of his life and proceeds to live the most interesting life imaginable inside its walls. Audiobook narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith is, no exaggeration, one of the best-read audiobooks of the last decade. The first 80 pages are slow. They are also the slow that earns the next 380. I read this the year we moved to Scottsdale, when retirement felt stranger than I'd expected, and one line stayed with me: you don't need a bigger world. You need better attention. Skip if: you bail on slow openings. You'll bail at page 30 and miss the book.
4. Tom Lake — Ann Patchett (2023) ⬛🔊
This one is new for the list and I'm putting it second because the audiobook is narrated by Meryl Streep. Yes. That Meryl Streep. Three grown daughters come home to their parents' Michigan cherry farm during the early pandemic, and the mother tells them about an old summer-stock romance. It is a domestic novel about memory, marriage, and the lives we don't choose. The audiobook is the audiobook of the decade. I am not exaggerating — I rarely exaggerate without flagging it. Skip if: you find quiet domestic fiction boring. You know who you are. Frank does. Frank told me the plot at dinner and used the word "nothing" four times.
Two Memoirs That Earned Their Spots
5. Educated — Tara Westover (2018) 📚⬛🔊
A woman raised by survivalist parents in Idaho without formal schooling teaches herself enough to get into Cambridge. Four people in book club came back shaken. Two of them couldn't finish it for two weeks and then couldn't put it down. After 34 years of teaching teenagers to write essays, this book made me grateful and furious in equal measure — grateful for every kid who walked into my classroom and figured out a book could change the shape of their thinking, furious for the ones who couldn't. Skip if: you're going through a hard family stretch right now. This one waits well. It will be there in six months. It does not need to be this month.
6. The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece — Tom Hanks (2023) 📚🔊
Yes, that Tom Hanks. He wrote a novel. It is not a memoir, technically — but it reads like a memoir of a movie career he didn't quite have, and the wisdom about decades of work and craft and people is the real thing. Frank picked this one up at the airport and finished it on the plane, which is a sentence I never thought I'd type. The audiobook is narrated by Hanks himself, and his voice doing his own dialogue is exactly what you'd hope. Skip if: you don't care about how movies are made. There is a lot about how movies are made.
The Deep History Pick
7. Killers of the Flower Moon — David Grann (2017) 📚⬛🔊
The murders of the Osage in 1920s Oklahoma, and the FBI investigation that followed. Grann reports the way the best 60 Minutes producers used to report — patient, specific, devastating. Frank listened to this one on the drive to Sedona and actually said, "That was interesting," which is, from Frank, equivalent to a standing ovation. The audiobook is the format here — three narrators, each handling a different thread, and it works. Skip if: you've already read three Larsons or Granns this year and you're full up on American historical horror. The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson (2024) is the alternate history pick if you want something on the Civil War instead.
The 2026 Releases You Should Pre-Order Now
8. Land — Maggie O'Farrell (Knopf, June 2, 2026) 🔊
O'Farrell's next novel arrives this summer, set in 19th-century Ireland with a mapmaker, a love story, and the Great Hunger looming. O'Farrell wrote Hamnet, which won the Women's Prize and is the kind of historical novel that ruins you for the lazier ones. The audiobook will land same-day. I've already pre-ordered it through Libro.fm so my local indie gets the credit. The Kirkus announcement is here. Skip if: you don't like grief in your fiction. There will be grief.
9. The Keeper — Tana French (Viking, March 31, 2026) 🔊
The third Cal Hooper novel, French's series about a retired Chicago detective who's moved to rural Ireland and keeps stepping into other people's small disasters. Released last month — Linda, you're already late. The Searcher and The Hunter are the first two; read them first. French is the best literary mystery writer working in English, and I will defend that sentence in any room. Kirkus announcement here. Skip if: you hate slow mysteries. French writes mood and place; the case is almost incidental. People who want grip-lit thrillers should go elsewhere — Mick Herron, maybe.
The Pulitzer Everyone Kept Recommending Until I Finally Read It
10. Demon Copperhead — Barbara Kingsolver (2022) 📚⬛🔊
2023 Pulitzer winner. A retelling of David Copperfield set in southern Appalachia during the opioid crisis. I avoided it for two years because everybody recommended it and I am stubborn about being told what to read by everybody. I was wrong. Donna Wieczorek — my old AP History colleague, now retired in Madison — sent me a text after she finished it that just said, "Read this. Now." Donna is not a person who deploys italics frivolously. The audiobook is brilliant; Charlie Thurston narrates, and his accent is the right one. Skip if: you can't read about addiction right now. It is unflinching. Some weeks aren't the week.
The One You Should Reread, Not Read for the First Time
11. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) 📚⬛
I taught Gatsby for eighteen years. The first time I read it I was 19. The last time I read it I was 71, on the patio in April, with the citrus tree blooming about ten feet from my chair. At 19 it was a book about Gatsby. At 71 it is a book about Nick — a young man from the Midwest who watches the rich destroy each other and goes home, which is what Midwesterners do when the party's over. Reread it. Don't read it for the first time at 70 — that boat sailed. But the reread, with everything you know now, is the gift. Skip if: it traumatized you in high school. (Mr. Hapgood's class of 1968, you know who you are.) Pick something you loved, not something assigned to you.
The 4 AM Cry
12. The Heart's Invisible Furies — John Boyne (2017) 📚🔊
This is the one that made me cry into my tea last March at a quarter past four in the morning. A boy born in 1945 to an unmarried Irish girl, his life followed across seven decades of Ireland's transformation. It is funny and it is brutal and it earned both, and I will not say more.
My mother Dorothy would have hated the language and loved the boy. Frank has not read it. He won't.
Move on.
How to Buy Twelve Books Without Going Broke
A hardcover is $28-$32. A paperback of the same book six months later is $16. Patience saves $192 a year if you read twelve hardcovers, which I did exactly once, in 2019, and I felt the bank account afterward.
The library is free. I know this is not breaking news, but most people under 70 have no idea their library has a large-print section, and a lot of people over 70 forgot. Walk in. Ask. The librarian has read more books than anyone you've ever met and will hand you a perfect one inside three questions.
Libby (Libby app, App Store, free) connects to your library card and lets you borrow ebooks and audiobooks from your couch. Holds can be long for new releases — I'm currently #47 of 81 for Demon Copperhead through the Phoenix system, and that is fine, because I am also reading three other things.
Used hardcovers at thrift stores in retirement-heavy zip codes are the secret nobody talks about. Scottsdale Goodwill on Hayden Road has a literary fiction section that would embarrass a small bookstore. I once found a hardcover of Gilead for $1.99 that someone had inscribed "To Margaret, with love from Donald, Christmas 1985." Margaret either died or didn't like it. I have her copy now. I think about her sometimes.
Finally: the Kindle Paperwhite is $159, the font scales as large as you want, the battery lasts six weeks, and Libby loads books onto it directly. Frank bought one. Frank does not use it. Documented.
Things I've Learned the Hard Way About Reading After 70
A short sidebar, because the reading life has rules nobody publishes.
- Don't buy the hardcover when the paperback is six months out. Wait. Or check the library. Hardcovers are $30. Patience saves real money, and the book hasn't gotten worse in six months. (Sometimes it's gotten better — a few books I've reread in paperback I should have skipped in hardcover.)
- Stop saying audiobooks aren't real reading. They're real reading. Your eyes were tired in 1987 too — you just had pride. Frank "reads" twelve books a year now via Audible, calls it "listening," finished Killers of the Flower Moon on the way to Sedona. That's a win.
- Don't read on a backlit phone at 4 AM. Buy a Kindle. The Paperwhite does one thing, doesn't ping you, the font scales, and library books load through Libby.
- Don't trust "Best Books for Seniors" listicles. Including this one, technically, though I've at least named twelve specific books and admitted who should skip each one. Most of them recommend the same eight books every year and four of them are by Mitch Albom. Mitch Albom is fine. You've already read all the Mitch Albom.
- Don't buy a book because the cover is pretty. This was a mistake at 35 too. At 72 you have less time to recover from it.
- Ask the librarian. They have read more books than anyone alive. They'll ask you three questions and hand you something perfect. They've been doing this for free your whole life. Use it.
- Don't quit a slow book at page 30. Sometimes, sure. But at 72, the slow ones are often the good ones. Gentleman in Moscow doesn't move for 80 pages and then it is the best book you've read in five years.
- Don't read only what your book club picks. Book club is for friendship. Your reading life is bigger than that. Read the weird thing too.
Linda Will Read Three
Linda will not read all twelve. Linda will read three. Maybe four if I shame her at Thanksgiving.
Three is fine. Three is more than the people who read zero, and three is enough to remind a person why she started reading in the first place — which, if you came to it the way I did, was because the world was too loud and a book was the only quiet room with the door locked.
The other nine will live on her nightstand and her hold list and the back of her mind. That counts too.
If you read three of these in 2026, I've done my job. If you read one and skip the other eleven and tell me which one and why — I want that email. I read every one. (My address is somewhere on this site. Find it. Use it. I'll write you back, possibly at 4:13 AM, with tea.)
Now go check Libby. The hold queue isn't getting any shorter.
