- Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
- The Book of Hope
- We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions
- Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
- The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
- How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, Difficult Days
- Stretching: 40th Anniversary Edition
- Not Too Sweet
- Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm
By the staff at Covered Treasures
As we leave another year behind, many of us make resolutions, hopeful we can be better versions of ourselves in 2026. Here are a few books that might help, whether our goal is for mind, body, or spirit.
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
By Katherine May (Penguin Random House) $28
Unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. Drawing on her own life’s difficult periods, May offers a guide to leaning into fallow times and savoring the lessons of hardship. She models an active acceptance of sadness and encourages ways to find nourishment in emotional retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear.
The Book of Hope
By Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams (Celadon Books) $29
How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? What is the relationship between hope and action? Jane Goodall reminds us that hope is not simply passive wishful thinking, that real hope requires action and engagement, and that actions, however small they seem, truly make a difference.
We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions
By Glennon Doyle, Abby Wamback, and Amanda Doyle (Dial Press) $34
When you travel through a new country, you need a guidebook. When you travel through the challenges of life—love, heartbreak, joy, parenting, friendship, uncertainty, aging, grief, new beginnings—you need a guidebook, too. The three authors asked each other and 118 of the world’s “most brilliant wayfinders:” As you’ve traveled these roads, have you collected any wisdom that might help us find our way? This book is their guidebook for being alive.
Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
By Oliver Burkeman (Picador USA) $19
Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life. Accepting our “imperfectionism” helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distractions, the impossibility of being perfect.
The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
By Margaret Renkl (Spiegel and Grau) $32
Margaret Renkl’s “howling love letter to the world,” published in 2023, presents a literary devotional: 52 chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. Perhaps this is the year for you to move through the seasons with her, becoming more aware of nature in your own backyard. From the crow and its resourcefulness and sense of community, to the sparrow singing in the pine tree next to your driveway, let her help you become more aware of the “radiant things … bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.”
How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, Difficult Days
By Kari Leibowitz, PhD (Viking) $29
Do you find coping with the shorter days and colder temperatures of winter to be especially difficult? Do you experience a slump every January and February? Psychologist and winter expert Kari Leibowitz uses mindset science to help readers embrace winter as a season to be enjoyed, not endured—and in turn, learn powerful lessons that can impact our mental wellbeing throughout the year. Inspired by cutting-edge psychological and behavioral science research as well as cultures worldwide that find warmth and joy in winter’s extremes, How to Winter provides readers with concrete tools for making winter wonderful wherever they live and harnessing the power of small mindset changes to help readers embrace every season of life.
Stretching: 40th Anniversary Edition
Bob and Jean Anderson (Shelter Publications) $23.95
Written and illustrated by Tri-Lakes residents Bob and Jean Anderson, Stretching is one of the most popular fitness books in the world, having sold over 3.75 million copies in 40 years, and has been translated into 23 languages. There are stretches for improving the bad posture attributable to cell phone usage (“tech neck”) and for people using computers. The 150 stretches include simple instructions and one- or two-page graphic illustrations to help you utilize the proper postures for your stretches.
Not Too Sweet
By Jessica Seinfeld (Simon & Schuster) $32.50
Many of us come away from the holidays promising ourselves to cut back on our sugar (or fat, or wheat—you name it) intake. If you are still craving that sweet bite, consider this collection of dessert recipes tailored for sweet tooths and dietary restrictions of most requirements—from gluten-free to vegan, dairy-free, less sugar—so you can have your cake and eat it, too. Each recipe page is headed with its dietary restriction features: “gluten-free, grain-free, vegan, no added sugar.”
Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm
By Charlie Mackesy (Penguin Random House) $27
“One day you’ll look back and realise how hard it was, and just how well you did.” Charlie Mackesy’s four unlikely friends are wandering through the wilds again. They’re not sure what they are looking for. They do know that life can be difficult, but that they love each other, and cake is often the answer. When the dark clouds come, can the boy remember what he needs to get through the storm? Sometimes a slim little book has the words to remind us that we’re stronger than we think.
Sit back, take a deep breath, and enjoy this time of new beginnings. If you get stuck on a resolution, or a promise, grab a helpful book. Until next month, happy reading, and wishing you a healthy 2026!
The staff at Covered Treasures can be reached at books@ocn.me.
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