Add these one-sitting reads to your TBR
Are you a list maker and a goal setter? Did early-2025-you lay some reading plans that were, let’s just say, ambitious?
If your answer is yes, and you’re rushing to hit your reading goal for the year, we’ve lined up some quick reads to help you end the year strong.
Check out these quick but powerful staff picks to plow through before year’s end!
I love The End We Start From by Megan Hunter. At only 144 pages long, it somehow still manages to create a whole world filled with page turning tension and suspense as a young mother navigates surviving a natural disaster with her new baby. It’s at turns terrifying and tender, and so so good.
-Ally
Perfectly appropriate for this time of year, I highly recommend curling up under a blanket with a big mug of cocoa and tearing through Peter Swanson's The Christmas Guest, a spectacular Christmystery novella about an American girl who is invited to the Cotswold manor house of a classmate for Christmas.
-Cate
One of my favorites is To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers. The adventurous moments this space crew goes through together are beautiful, especially when paired with the ideas of humanity, personhood, and what makes a good life that are threaded throughout.
-Kim
I devoured The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis in one sitting: a speculative twist on female hysteria that had me in a chokehold (and some of the most gorgeous writing of the year!).
-Melissa
I devoured These Heathens by Mia McKenzie for Good Yarn Book Club in September. I couldn’t stop myself from turning all 272 pages in one sitting to follow 17 year old Doris as she tries to get an abortion in 1960s Georgia, meets quite the cast of characters along the way, including celebrities and civil rights leaders, and begins to figure out what she wants out of her life as a young Black woman.
-Robyn
Mort by Terry Pratchett. It’s the beginning of one of his Discworld book series and it’s so good. Just the kind of hilarious and witty story you can expect from the father of absurdist fantasy
-Maeve
Orbital by Samantha Harvey is just 136 pages, making it a quick, one-sit read. It's a lyrical and poetic account following six astronauts from different places and backgrounds over a 24 period as they work aboard the International Space Station. It's an observational work, not plot-driven, but meditative, offering a different perspective of our planet.
-Sarah
The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo is mine at 128 pages. I love that it explores the power of storytelling, female rage, and companionship.
-Kai
Sandwich by Catherine Newman, which I read, appropriately, while sitting on the beach with my family. Funny and entirely too relatable, and just the perfect quick summer read.
-Leah
Carmilla was a Lane recommendation for me. I love Gothic novels, origin stories, and rich settings — transporting and perfect for a one-sit read!
-Kathryn
Any book is a one-sit read if you just keep reading, but really, this year I loved the debut short story collection, The Sea Gives Up The Dead by Molly Olguin. Short stories are underrated in my opinion and this collection shows why. It's a delicious, fantastical, inventive, dark, box of folkloric chocolates concentrated in 150 pages.
-Adela