The books—old and new—that our readers and staff enjoyed this year
As the year wraps up, Barn Raiser asked our readers and staff to tell us their favorite rural and rural-adjacent books they read in 2025. Here’s what they said (click on the book title or cover to learn more about each book):
I loved it for its beautiful language and the story of a dull life with no escape, a near dead experience and being conned by a crazy visitor which in the end opened doors to possibilities that were right in front of oneself. —Jana Mayfield
In his memoir, the author courageously shares his story, in particular, his dad’s story and his struggles keeping the dairy farm in Canaseraga, a rural town in Upstate New York. It is a story of strength, resilience and love for their farming life. In the book, the unfortunate circumstances, which brought to the end of the family dairy, are unwrapped in such powerful, heartwarming and, at times, humorous prose. —Alessandra La Gioia, Galway, Ireland
He shares my story of my childhood on the farm in a vivid and emotional way. I lived inside the story as I read it. —Greg Mager
Emotional stories of a family trying to survive in the changing world of dairy farming is something that more people should experience!
The anecdotes are relatable to agriculturalists in rural America, especially those of us in upstate New York who have experienced this lifestyle. What a great read! —Canaseraga Country Kids 4H
You can read an excerpt of Barn Gothic here.
The book does not break new ground but it neatly wraps up how screwed the Democrats are by turning their backs on rural and working class voters. The last chapter, Party Building – A Path Forward, includes devastating quotes from Democratic Party chairs in rural counties on how bad things have become and how bleak the future is for the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Obama. —Matt Barron, Chesterfield, Massachusetts
The Life and Death of the American Worker by Alice Driver is a harrowing account of the abuse and exploitation experienced by undocumented workers in the meatpacking industry during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is more than just a book about the horrors surrounding the modern meat industry—it is a story about resistance, finding community, organizing, and fighting back against the largest meatpacking company in America, Tyson Foods. —Alex Cragun, Salt Lake City, Utah
This book is set in the fictional small town of Tabor, a sugar beet farming community in the Red River Valley of North Dakota. Erdrich tells a compelling story that weaves the influence of sugar beet farming throughout the book—the environmental and economic impacts, the historical trauma of land theft, the differences in the lives of owners and workers. The central characters are Ojibwe, and the relationship between indigenous and white culture is ever present as well. It’s a beautifully written book, filled with terrific characters, surprising plot twists, and more than I ever imagined knowing about sugar beets. —Sherry Kempf
JP Morgan was shutting down anthracite coal mines in mountainous central Pennsylvania in order to raise the price of coal. Unemployed miners started going into the mines on their own, or starting new ones nearby, and digging out coal. First they themselves trucked it to the East Coast cities; then truckers from the cities started coming to them. Thus they not only took over production, but also distribution. —Theresa Alt, Ithaca, New York
I am a novice gardener, thank goodness because my minimal experience with putting seeds into soil, watching plants grow in their mysterious ways (one zinnia plant took over the entire end of my 5’x8’ raised garden!) gave me the foundation for understanding how awesome Gabe’s story is. It is very well-written, backed by science, and supremely encouraging. —Eva Simonsen, North Carolina
—Alice Palmer-Lacy, Joshua Tree, California
It couldn’t have come at a better or more needed time to inspire us in the face of the backsliding of democracy and provide practical steps for anyone who loves their community to lead. —Liz Moran Stelk, Homewood, Illinois
—Faye Dant, founder and executive director of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center, Hannibal, Missouri
Soil health and human health are completely intertwined. —Birgitta R. Meade
—Erica Etelson
—Jill Swenson, Appleton, Wisconsin
This book was wildly creative, offering the reader narration that alternated between some unlikely characters and the main character’s whose inner voice came to light so beautifully and so honestly. This brought a new kind of connection between reader and narrator and the historical fiction was simply delightful to read. —Jaimie McGirt, Alamance County, North Carolina
An oldie, from 1997, of import in this time of idealizing the American revolution. —Nicola Bastian
The First Nations Version of the New Testament is a thought provoking read of familiar texts. There will be nothing new here to a practicing Christian, but its language and perspective adds color to the tapestry of God’s word. —Pat Gerig
—Billy Rose, Clinton, Iowa
—Antoinette Kunda
Not sure how rural related this title is, but a book on the integrity of journalism has to resonate with many regardless of where we live. —PA Smith, Cranston, Rhode Island
Seth Harp’s history of the U.S. Special Forces and the domestic consequences of the Global War on Terror, in particular events that occurred in and around Fort Bragg, North Carolina, reads like a thriller. A haunting read, definitely not for the squeamish. —Paco Alvarez, Barn Raiser assistant editor
Friendship, love, betrayal, beauty, wonder—it’s all here in Richard Powers’s Playground. Five years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Overstory, a book that flexed the novelist’s understanding of trees and the lives of people who protect and destroy them, we get Playground. This time, Powers is focused on the ocean. Through the intersection of the lives of 3 people, he brings the ocean into our dreams while bringing us deeper into ourselves and the heart of a machine. —Laura Orlando, Barn Raiser Contributing Editor
I’ve never read a book that reads like Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. It subverted every expectation I had about what was going to come next without trying to be subversive. It takes place on a fictional Anishinaabe reservation in North Dakota, where Erdrich explores spirituality, gender, loss and strength, beautifully extending the long arc of her Love Medicine series (which you do not have to read to love this book). —Laura Orlando, Barn Raiser Contributing Editor
A lot is packed into the title of Thomas Tweed’s “new” history. Clearly, religion is the subject and the “lands that became America” is the setting, but this basic premise has far-reaching implications. Yet what makes this book compelling is not just the range of evidence amassed by Tweed but how he arranges this evidential record into a coherent whole.
The story begins 11,000 years ago in the Ice Age, at a burial site on what is now farmland in a state called Texas, and progresses all the way to 2020, the quadricentennial of the Pilgrims’ landing. In the hands of another historian, this story might be the romantic triumph of Christendom in America (thus cuing much pious genuflection to the idea that God has chosen America as a “Christian nation.” Adherents to this notion may be surprised to know Deism, not Christianity, predominated the religion of the founders of the United States).
Tweed’s meticulous and even-handed approach surfaces a truer, more interesting story, which follows in the footsteps of historians in the 1960s and 1970s to upend the conventional Protestant-centered narrative about religion in America (or that religion itself was synonymous with Protestant Christianity). What emerges is an impressive, often surprising and always readable history of religion on the American continent that doesn’t just dwell in the past, but illuminates contemporary concerns around religious pluralism, racial, economic and sexual inequality, and how to face the ecological crises of our own day. Religion in Tweed’s history is a dynamic presence in the continent’s history, always transforming and being transformed by its interaction with people, technology, culture and ecology.
As Katharine Gerbner wrote in her review of the book for Barn Raiser, “With the 250th anniversary of the United States on the horizon amid the rising influence of Christian Nationalism and its theocratic claim that America was founded as a ‘Christian nation,’ Tweed’s history offers a corrective to narrow visions of American religion that begin with Plymouth Rock.” —Justin Perkins, Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher
Key events of What We Can Know by novelist Ian McEwan take place in 2014 in a barn, albeit one converted into the home of Francis Blundy, a famous and fictitious early 21st century English poet, and his second wife, Vivian.
The narrator from , Thomas Metcalfe, is a self-absorbed literature professor and the world’s expert on the poet and his circle of friends. He is writing in 2119, after the earth has experienced what historians of his time call “The Derangement” (our current era in which the world’s leaders failed to address global warming and went to war) and “The Inundation” (a period of time in which the sea levels rose dramatically obliterating coastal cities and turning what was once Great Britain into an archipelago).
What We Can Know is set in a world in which people travel in boats and on wooden-framed bicycles, eat engineered proteins and where one hot button political issue is whether deadly tobacco should be legalized. On the other side of the Atlantic, America is ruled by battling warlords. In the skies above, satellites orbit no more.
McEwan, best known for his novel Atonement, tells an engaging tale about the people who populate his story, but the most compelling aspect of the book is the way Thomas in a post-apocalyptic future talks about the events of the past in a common-sense, matter-of-fact way. It is clear from his 22nd century vantage why our present period goes down in history as “The Derangement.” —Joel Bleifuss, Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher
Barbara Kingsolver’s first work of nonfiction, based on her work as a freelance reporter in the 1980s, is a fascinating story from the front lines of what is now all-but-forgotten labor struggle. It is also it is also an example of journalism at its best: The stories that result when reporters, from the subjective position of human beings with a moral conscience, cover events from the perspective of the people most affected.
And once those stores are there for the telling, it is our responsibility as citizens to hear them. Kingsolver put it this way: “What happened in Arizona could happen again and it will, somewhere, to someone. It will happen again and again, if we do not open our eyes and believe what we see.” —Joel Bleifuss, Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher
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