Anna Wierzbicka's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2024
• 2025

One of the most nourishing reads in 2025 for me was Jacques Philippe’s little book Fire & Light: Learning to receive the gift of God (Spectre 2016). Jacques Philippe is a Christian spiritual author whose advice I always find eminently practical. I read Fire & Light a page or two at a time, and then I ruminated on what he says, and drew strength from it. I was particularly struck by his comments on interior peace.

“The more the world goes through crises, the more society is marked by tensions and insecurities, the more necessary it is to find true peace,” Philippe says. According to him, “Our peace doesn’t come from the world, from exterior circumstances. It comes from our communion in faith and love with Jesus, the Prince of Peace. It is the fruit of prayer. God is an ocean of peace, and each time we are in intimate union with him through prayer, our hearts find peace again. Sometimes praying until peace comes back is an urgent duty.” (p.78)

Strikingly, Philippe maintains that “the first duty of a Christian isn’t to be perfect or to resolve all one’s problems, but to be in peace.” In this, he agrees with one of his two heroines, Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, whose journal, published posthumously in 1981, was a huge worldwide success.(His other heroine is St Therese of Lisieux, whose writings Jacques Philippe also opens to the reading world in a new way, making them a revelation even to those who had read them before.)

Writing in 1942, in Nazi-occupied Holland, Etty Hillesum wrote: “Ultimately we have just one duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.” (p. 75)

Perhaps for readers who are going through smooth and relatively easy stretches of life, the advice offered in books like Jacques Philippe’s, including the quotes from his favourite writers like Etty Hillesum, may sound irrelevant, even annoying. But I have spent much of this year, 2025, in a nursing home, among old people with dementia and other debilitating conditions, and I can testify that in such circumstances, Jacques Philippe’s quiet, practical guidance can be very helpful and relevant. 

A novel which I particularly enjoyed this year is Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede. Honoured as a Virago Modern Classic, published originally in 1969, it was re-published in 2025 by Cluny - a marvellous publisher specialising in re-issuing classic Christian literature. The “House of Brede” is a Benedictine Abbey in England, based closely on a real monastery (Stanbrook Abbey), though obviously fictionalised. My interest in this book was sparked by the fact that a friend of mine, a mature-age professional, entered a Benedictine monastery recently, and I thought that this novel would give me some insight into her new life and the world which she is now inhabiting. I was not disappointed: the book was an eye-opener for me, providing amazing imaginative access to a world apart – the world of a Benedictine Abbey, a life of unceasing work and prayer focussed entirely on “the true horizon”, peaceful and largely silent, yet also full of human drama, including the echoes of some dramas from the women’s past lives and the inner dramas behind the tranquil surface of their seemingly repetitive days now. 

The novel is a close study of human relationships (based largely on real life) in a place where ninety women live permanently together, at close quarters. These are all women who left their past lives behind in order to devote themselves largely to praying for other people (often in response to desperate requests from the outside world); trying to build together a world of love, peace, patience, and sacrifice. Above all, it is a life centred on God and a reminder and witness to other people of the reality of God. Time and eternity are very close in the daily lives of the women in the Abbey, and the veil between the two is very thin.

The book is full of quiet humour, often understated, never loud. The pace is sometimes slow, sometimes fast, a bit like a river. I loved it and couldn’t put it down, and I was very sorry when I came to the end, and there was no more … 

Dag Hammarskjöld was the second Secretary General of the United Nations, from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in 1961. He was widely admired as an outstanding man of action on the international scene and a peacemaker. (He is the only posthumous recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.) After his death, a manuscript of his secret, intimate diary was discovered – a diary of the soul. It was first published in 1964 and was a revelation for thousands of readers around the world. I first read it in a Polish translation (when I was still living in Poland, under a communist regime), and it was a revelation to me too. In mid-2025, I re-read it in a beautiful English translation by the poet W.H. Auden and Swedish-American scholar Leif Sjöberg (also published in 1964) and have been reading and copying snippets from it ever since. Here are some of my favourite ones:

“It is now, in this very moment, that I can and must pay for all that I have received.” (p.57)

“To preserve the silence within – amid all the noise.” (p. 83)

“How ridiculous, this need of yours to communicate! Why should it matter so much to you that at least one person has seen the inside of your life? (p.87)

“’-Night is drawing nigh’ – For all that has been – Thanks! To all that shall be – Yes!” (p.89)

“Do what you can – and the task will rest lightly in your hand, so lightly that you will be able to look forward to the more difficult tests that may be awaiting you.” (p.124)

“Each day is the first day – each day is a life.” (p.147)

“I don’t know Who – or what – put the question, I don’t know when it was put, I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone or Something - and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, has a goal.” (p. 205)

“Prayer, crystalized in words, assigns a permanent wave length on which the dialogue has to be continued, even when our mind is occupied with other matters.” (p. 106)

In his Foreword to the English translation, W.H. Auden pays his respects to Hammarskjöld as a man who “deliberately sets out to eliminate all selfish and self-regarding motives from his work, to act solely for the good of others and the glory of God, thereby depriving his ‘flesh’ of the only consolations, like the prospect of money or fame, which can alleviate the pains of toil.” (p.xviii).  He also says that “the overall impression that the book makes” is “the conviction when one has finished it, that one has had the privilege of being in contact with a great, good, and lovable man.” (p. xxii). I couldn’t agree more.