The Harpy’s Top Reads of 2025

These are the books that most shaped me this year. Each one unpacked a hidden history, revealed an unsustainable pattern, or gave me new language for something I’d long been sensing.

1. The Canary Code by Ludmila Praslova

I think this should be required reading for all workplaces. Especially now, when so many industries are falling apart at the seams. The way we work is often fundamentally unsustainable unless you’re at the top and the money is funneling into your back pocket. Praslova writes with urgency and clarity about how to build structures that actually support people. Especially neurodivergent people. Especially anyone who’s been flattened by the system. A sharp and necessary read.

2. Heal the Witch Wound by Celeste Larsen

This goes deep into women’s history and the history of witchcraft. It unpacks a lot of residual trauma many of us are still carrying. For me, it meant confronting how I’ve downplayed my intuition because I didn’t want to be called crazy, ignored, or locked up. And then blamed when things fell apart anyway. This book names that dynamic and breaks it wide open.

3. Advanced Tarot by Paul Fenton-Smith

This book impressed me more than I expected. It’s not just a guide to reading tarot professionally. It’s about ethics, care, and clarity. The way Fenton-Smith talks about holding space for clients helped me build the foundation for my Ethical Spaceholding Project, where I cover everything from tarot to sex-positive spaces to education and employment. Deep, practical, and full of integrity.

4. Priestess of Lilith by Lisa Hoffman

This is not another fluffy tome on women’s empowerment. It’s rigorous, richly layered, and unafraid to make demands of the reader. Lilith is explored not as a flat symbol of rage or sensuality, but as a liminal, exiled force that never needed to return. She is archetypal mother of transformation, rage, and refusal. The book balances spiritual work with historical and psychological depth. It interrogates source material rather than just reciting it. The lack of citations was a drawback for me, but the substance of the work still holds. This is not a beginner’s book. It is an initiation.

5. Historical Works of the Right Rev. Nicholas French, D.D., Bishop of Ferns (Vol. 1 & 2)

He’s not a direct ancestor (he was a Bishop). But considering he’s a French from Wexford, Ireland, it’s probably safe to assume he’s in the bloodline. The writing is impenetrable, which is fair enough considering it was written in the 1600s, but the insight is razor sharp. Nicholas French chronicled the land theft that took place during and after the Irish Confederate Wars, documenting which Irish Catholic families had their land taken. And then there’s the iconic The Unkinde Deserter of Loyall Friends and True Men, where he absolutely goes in on the Duke of Ormond for selling Ireland out. And honestly, the duke had it coming. If you want to know how betrayal reads when it’s written in seventeenth-century prose with receipts, this is it.

What ties all of these together?

They are about reclamation. Of labor, lineage, power, and truth. Some are personal. Some are political. Some are spiritual. All of them insist that we look directly at what has been denied or buried. They don’t offer easy comfort. They offer depth.

Sometimes reclamation looks like refusing to go back. Sometimes it sounds like a bishop calling a duke a traitor. And sometimes it feels like finally saying, “I saw it coming. You just didn’t listen”.