Tag: Dead Wake

My Top 25 Books of 2025

I am a couple weeks late on this. Many of my book reading blogger friends were more on top of it and posted their list during the first week of the new year. They took their Goodreads Year-end wrap ups and chose their 10 favorite books and posted them.

This year I read 50 books this year. I didn’t stray too far away from the types of books I like to read. I read plenty of fiction, some non fiction, historical fiction, biographies, and murder mysteries. Narrowing the list down to ten was more difficult than I thought, but here are my top ten reads of 2025 (with links to my posts about each).

10. The Book of Cold Cases – A thriller that follows two timelines. In 1977, the Lady Killer Murders took place and the main suspect is acquitted. In 2017, a true crime blogger runs into the main suspect and asks to interview her.

9. I Hope This Finds You Well – A workplace novel that was a fun read. An employee is accidentally granted access to everyone in the office’s email boxes. What she learns and what she does with the information brings about some funny and uncomfortable situations.

8. Surely, You Can’t Be Serious – A behind the scenes look at the movie Airplane! told by the creators. If you are familiar with the movie, you will be replaying scenes in your head as you read this. This is loaded with fantastic stories.

7. Dead Wake – This is the nonfiction story of the sinking of the Lusitania. For years I read books on Titanic, but I was unfamiliar with this story. A very well written account.

6. Kill For Me, Kill For You – This was SO good. It is a marvelous twist on Strangers on a Train with an ending I never saw coming.

5. The Deal of a Lifetime – This little short story/novella from Fredrik Bachman is one that will make you think about your life and legacy. It is a powerful message presented in a heartwarming story. I have yet to read a bad Bachman book.

4. Shemp! – As a Three Stooges fan, I’ve read all the biographies available on the boys. Finally, Shemp Howard gets a biography! Loaded with stories and information, readers will realize that there is a whole lot to learn about Shemp.

3. Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books – Another reviewer said this book: “takes an important, heavy, timely topic and makes it highly entertaining and extremely relatable while never sacrificing deep meaning, contemplation, and human empathy.” It was a ride that will have you feeling all the emotions.

2. Reports of His Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated – Despite the fact that my recommendation posted a little over a week ago, I read this one in 2025. The book has a similar premise to the book in my number one spot, but each are very different. At times it was very funny and at other times, I held my breath to see what happened next. A great story.

1. The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife – Hands down the best book I read last year. It was the one that I recommended to my reading friends. Frederick’s journey in the shoes of the deceased Bernard is one that will have you laughing and crying. It was a book that will stick with you long after reading it. It contains one of my favorite quotes: “You’ll never regret being kind even when people aren’t kind to you.”

I’d love to hear if you’ve read any of these and what you thought. If any of them are new to you, then you should have some to add to your “To Read” list.

I set my book reading goal for 2026 is 50 books. I’m hoping to exceed that this year.

Book Recommendation – Dead Wake

I have always been fascinated by the Titanic. I wrote many research reports on the ship while in school. With as many books that I have read on Titanic and other ships, I had never read about the Lusitania.

Dead Wake – The Last Crossing of the Lusitania came up on a book suggestion list. It was recommended because I had recently read The Demon of Unrest by the same author, Erik Larson.

Prior to reading this, I really knew about Lusitania was that it was sunk by a torpedo. This book revealed so much more about the story. It was truly fascinating to read the stories of passengers. By getting to know them, the impact of the outcome became much more devastating.

Here is Goodreads Synopsis:

On May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months, its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds” and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. He knew, moreover, that his ship – the fastest then in service – could outrun any threat.

Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small – hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more–all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.

It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour, mystery, and real-life suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope Riddle to President Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster that helped place America on the road to war.

If you are into history or non-fiction, I cannot recommend this more highly. Larson masterfully tells the story of the time leading up to the disaster and the results that followed. I was totally engrossed in his account of the disaster itself. From the moment that the torpedo is spotted until the moment Lusitania sinks is presented in great detail.

He presents the stories of many passengers and what they did from the torpedo’s impact until the sinking. After you read all of those accounts and all the things that they did, you almost have to remind yourself that it all happened in the time it took Lusitania to sink – just 18 minutes!

Larson doesn’t sugarcoat anything. It is a tragedy and he is honest about the horrors that were brought about by the event. Despite it being a beautiful sunny day, the water was only 55 degrees. It was not as cold as the waters that Titanic sunk in, but it was still cold enough to cause people to pass of hypothermia. Not every ending was a happy one.

After reading this book, I had a clearer understanding of the events surrounding Lusitania and a better understanding of the way that the US entered World War I. It was truly one of the best books I’ve read this year.

5 out of 5 stars.