Best of the Bunch (December 2025)

Today I'm sharing the best book I read in December.

Of the 13 books I read this month, I had two 5-star reads:

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship by KC Davis

Both of these books will undoubtedly be on my top ten nonfiction list that I post next week, so this is a tough call. I think everyone in the Western world should read El Akkad's book, but the other one has the distinct honor of being a book I recommended to people before I was even halfway through it, so that's going to be my Best of the Bunch this month.

KC Davis is truly a treasure. Her ability to dispense clear, accessible, non-judgmental advice in ways that are both practical and widely applicable is an absolute gift. I recommended Who Deserves Your Love to others before I was more than a few chapters in, and it continued to hold up to that recommendation over the course of reading it. I couldn't begin to capture everything that's valuable about this book, but here are a few standout elements:

• After naming the sensitivity / defense mechanism cycle, she then identifies that the key to getting out of the cycle is not understanding and deconstructing it, but self-regulation. I feel like this is such a missing piece in the vast majority of self-help/relationship literature out there.
• She notes how the same exact action can be taken for the "right"/healthy reasons and for the "wrong"/unhealthy reasons, and you can't know from the outside what's driving someone else's actions.
• Just about everything in this book can be applied to any relationship in one's life, not just a romantic partnership.

Would I quibble with her on certain specific points or the way she phrased them? Sure. But by and large, this is a masterful piece of work that I'd recommend to just about anyone and will definitely be returning to in the future.

What is the best book you read this month? Let me know in comments, or write your own post and link up below!

Looking back:
One year ago I was reading: Chain-Gang All-Stars
Five years ago I was reading: Strangers from a Different Shore and Feminist, Queer, Crip
Ten years ago I was reading: Jesus Calling, Lonesome Dove, The Quran, and Middlemarch

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