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Sarah Lewis | bookstagrammer

@lostinherpages

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| making sure no more average books enter your bedside stack.
| 📖 - john of john
| 🎧 - bellies
| wathaurong country, surfcoast vic

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2025’s reading wrap, aka: numbers, vibes, and the books i refuse to shut up about.

so here’s the proof I did in fact read this year and not just buy books for my aspirational tbr.

my 2025 was heavily influenced by all of these reads - a list of books i loved deeply, recommended aggressively, and will absolutely bring up in unrelated conversations.

consider this both a recap and a warning.

the finest picks:

loved one
the poisonwood bible
reservoir bitches
the slip
seascraper
things in nature merely grow
perfection
discipline
big feelings
aue
a great act of love
wild dark shore
the mademoiselle alliance
an american marriage
everyone and everything
these precious days
australian gospel
the burrow
careless people

don’t @ me because i couldn’t get this down to 12 or even 10.

i am who i am.

any of these on your radar?

go and check out my thought.

big ups again to all the v generous publishers and authors who shared their wonderful worlds with me. by @lostinherpages

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8 months ago

just your friendly psa to all my book loving friends to make use of your local library.

saved thousands this year, so here’s what you need to do:

be patient, there will likely be a wait for those new releases.

locate your humour, your holds will likely all arrive at once.

put in early requests for new titles, or request books not in their catalogue - they’ll magically be yours first when they do land.

add your library to the libby app to access their audio and ebook catalogue.

make friends with your super friendly librarians - they’ll magically might sneak you a favour.

check out the wonderful free events they offer - think author chats, school holiday fun….

and with that… go explore and enjoy these glorious spaces.

thanks to @geelonglibraries for the savings.

#lostinherpages #aussiebookworm #booksaremylife #booksavingtips #aussiereaders #bookishreels #readingaddict by @lostinherpages

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2 years ago

hip, hip, hooray!

@lostinherpages was three yesterday.

thanks for all the chats, laughs, meme bombs and just goooood times. by @lostinherpages

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2 years ago

this is the best part of the #bookerlonglist

picking up something you’d never have considered.

the unexpected reads that slaps

imagine renovating your bathroom only to discover that the builders have installed a prison cell instead.

complete with guards.

in your home.

in italy.

what starts as an absurd, almost comical premise slowly becomes something much heavier.

a story about exile.

belonging.

political repression.

and the grief of watching your father disappear into dementia.

the genius of this book is how it uses the completely bizarre to explore the painfully real.

the prison becomes more than a prison.

it’s a connection to a homeland left behind.

a past she can’t quite escape.

and a history that refuses to stay where she left it.

weird, darkly funny and quietly devastating.

the kind of book that makes you wonder where the hell the story is going, then leaves you deeply pondering.

proof that sometimes the best reads are the ones you never would’ve reached for yourself.

one of my favourite surprises on the booker longlist. by @lostinherpages

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3 days ago

the death of reading deserves a visible reaction.

may my face always remain fluent in disbelief. by @lostinherpages

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5 days ago

dropping my #tenbeforetheend full of delulu.

anyway, here’s another list for the people who love a list. by @lostinherpages

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6 days ago

five stars: no comment. one star: please see my forthcoming dissertation.

book included for beauty not judgement. by @lostinherpages

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6 days ago

damn, dam.

tears abound.

how can strout fit so much about the human condition into so few pages and ALSO deliver us artie?

what gets me about strout is her understanding that the inner life is both the most consequential thing about us and the thing we have the least access to in one another.

we move through the world believing we know people.

we love them, judge them, construct entire narratives around their behaviour. all the while, there are whole rooms inside them we’ll never enter.

things we never say is interested in the distance between what we feel and what we can articulate.

between the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and the less flattering truths that occasionally slip through.

strout’s greatest subject, i think, is the moral complexity of ordinary people.

the uncomfortable territory where love coexists with selfishness.

good intentions cause harm.

and our capacity for compassion sits alongside our capacity for self deception.

we are rarely as good as we’d like to believe, but neither are we reducible to our worst failures.

and strout doesn’t try to resolve that contradiction for us.

understanding someone doesn’t mean absolving them.

empathy doesn’t undo damage.

sometimes loving someone means accepting that there are parts of them we’ll never fully understand, even after a lifetime of trying.

which makes the moments when we do manage to reach one another feel all the more extraordinary. not because we suddenly understand everything, but because, for a moment, we see something we hadn’t seen before.

and perhaps this difficulty extends beyond our private lives.

artie’s private despair unfolds against an america increasingly difficult for him to recognise.

strout brings the political into the domestic so quietly that you almost miss how much the two are shaping each other.

the questions of responsibility and moral courage that complicate our closest relationships don’t disappear when we step outside the front door.

what does it mean to be a decent person when the world seems to be losing its bearings?

what do we owe one another, and what happens when we look away?

and ARTIE. honestly.

cont. in comments… by @lostinherpages

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7 days ago

cancer sun, reader brain, absolutely no emotional objectivity. by @lostinherpages

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8 days ago

min jin lee’s american hagwon is a sharp, intimate examination of ambition, education, and the quiet pressures that shape migrant families.

set within the competitive world of korean american education, the novel follows the people drawn into a system where academic success carries the weight of family sacrifice, immigration, class, and hope.

lee is particularly interested in the strange territory where love and expectation begin to blur.

parents want to give their children opportunities they never had.

children learn, sometimes very young, that those opportunities come with obligations.

and somewhere between the two is the question of how much of a life can be planned for someone before it stops feeling like their own.

the world of the hagwon becomes a fascinating microcosm of the american dream.

education promises mobility, security, reinvention.

but when access to that promise depends on money, competition, and relentless performance, the pursuit of a better life can become exhausting in its own right.

cont in comments … by @lostinherpages

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8 days ago

fictional people. v real consequences. by @lostinherpages

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9 days ago

follow me, your tbr will hate you. by @lostinherpages

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10 days ago