What I read in summer 2025

Here’s how I define summer: long weekend to long weekend. Memorial Day Saturday through Labor Day Monday, 24 May 2025 through 1 September 2025. Summer is not my favorite season. I do not suffer humidity gladly, so it has always had something of a to-be-endured vibe for me. This summer in Minneapolis started with an ICE raid near where the riots were in 2020 and finished with a school shooting, with often dangerous air quality from Canadian wildfires and political assassinations by an unhinged terrorist who the local paper writes about in unconscionable ways.

I coped by staying inside on the bad air days and reading a boatload of books, many of them poetry collections, cozy graphic novels and space operas.

My reading summer started off tremendously. I really enjoyed Babel: On the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang, whose take on dark academia set in Oxford was relentlessly anti-racist and anti-capitalist, which I appreciated. Given the subtitle, I did not expect a happy ending, so I was not disappointed.

With the #NYRBwomen25 online group, I continued to discover authors and titles I wish I’d known about sooner: Katalin Street by Magda Szabo, A House and Its Head by Ivy Compton-Burnett, the gobsmacking Angel by Elizabeth Taylor, Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant, the haunting Free Day by Ines Cagnati, the summery Talk by Linda Rosenkrantz, and the revelatory Lament for Julia by Susan Taubes. All six books were new to me, as were Compton-Burnett, Cagnati, and Rosenkrantz.

The graphic novels I read were all cozy though not without confict: Witch Hat Atelier v. 7 by Kamome Shirahama; The Moth Keeper, The Tea Dragon Society, The Tea Dragon Festival, The Tea Dragon Tapestry, Princess Princess Ever After, Aquicorn Cover, A Song for You and I, and Dewdrop, all by K. O’Neill; Twelfth Grade Night by Strohm and Booth; All Are Welcome by Gwen Tarpley. Many featured trans and nonbinary characters. Tarpley is a trans woman and O’Neill is nonbinary; I’ve long been a fan of their works.

I read a lot of poems. Part of my morning routine includes reading a poem, daily, but during August, I dabbled in The Sealey Challenge, and upped my poetry RDA considerably: *Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems by Deborah Keenan was first, followed by *Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers, which I learned about on David Naimon’s excellent literary conversation podcast Between the Covers, *Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems, The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan, Oberon Poetry 2025, The Latest Winter by Maggie Nelson, *The Father and *Satan Says by Sharon Olds, Snow by Lara Glenum, *Plastic by Matthew Rice, *Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez, The College of Wooster’s Goliard v. 35, its very well done student journal, From the Founding of the Country by Cristina Perez Diaz, Bubble Gum Stadium by Jalen Eutsey, *Wild/Hurt by Meg Ford, The Mirror of Simple Souls by Leah Flax Barber. I finished with the incandescent sorrow and rage of M. Mick Powell’s *Dead Girl Cameo. All these were very good. I marked the ones that reached up off the page and grabbed me by the throat and heart with asterisks.

So as not to taint them by proximity, I will list separately a book of very bad poetry that I felt was in very bad faith by a dude who has a lot of followers on Instagram. It features previously unpublished or unfinished poems, marketed under the umbrella that he was diagnosed as an adult with autism, so these are rough, outsider poems about insecurity and loneliness. My experience was that this guy put words on paper, made some line breaks and called it poetry, then a publisher and the marketing department made it look rustic and sincere. The whole thing felt like a hollow cash grab for scraps. I do not recommend The Never Was by Tyler Knott Gregson.

Melissa Febos’ The Dry Season has her heady mix of curiosity, research, and in-your-face memoir. I read Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey Through Schizophrenia by Carolyn Spiro and Pamela Spiro Wagner because my younger son read it in his college psychology class.

I finally finished Women in Clothes edited by Leanne Shapton, Sheila Heti, and Heidi Julavits, in which they interviewed women about their complicated memories, histories, and feelings about clothes. I particularly liked the interview with garment workers, and Miranda July’s photo essay on six women and their favorite outfits. I also enjoyed reading July’s All Fours, a wild, brazen sexy, not unproblematic novel that I intended to write more about, but haven’t managed (yet.)

With #APSTogether and Honor Moore, I read Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, which I found very complicated, and not very sexy or romantic.

Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars, a recommendation from my new bookseller co-workers, was my first space opera of the summer, and I loved the cast of characters, the romance, the main character Katrina’s journey, and the vicarious donuts. It spawned something of a challenge in my house, since my spouse then began it, did not enjoy it, and we had a late-in-marriage reminder that it’s OK to not love something the other person loves.

I similarly adored the audio version of Megan O’Keefe’s space opera. The first book, The Blighted Stars is tremendous. The next two The Fractured Dark and The Bound Worlds were good, and I continued to love the characters, but they were so beat up and traumatized by all the drama, that I admit to being a little weary by the end. Listen to the first one, though. It’s amazing.

A friend sent me a short story by Grace Paley, and I used it as a prompt to read the collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which had been sitting on my shelf for…some time. And it was stunning. I must read more Paley. How have I gone this long, etc. etc.

I read a useful and practical book about pelvic floors called Floored, by Sara Reardon. One of my books groups that I tried to quit and they dragged me back in by reading Twelfth Night, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. With them I also read The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. I really enjoyed it for the first 359 pages with its cozy vibes and found family of rag-tag aliens. But trying to cram a plot into the last 80 pages didn’t work for me. Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild Built remains one of my favorite books of recent years, though, so I’m going to re-read that and maybe give the rest of the Wayfarers series a miss.

Finally, one of my two favorite reads of the summer were Emma Torzs’ Ink Blood Sister Scribe, which a coworker recommended after I loved Babel. It is a great book with an interesting system of magic, and I look forward to what comes next.

The other was Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, which I read with Han Ong and #APSTogether. This was my second read. The first time I liked it well enough, but this time, perhaps influenced by Ong’s clear adoration of the novel, it really shone in all its brilliant particularity. I look forward to reading more Pym.

Was reading one of your coping mechanisms this summer? What were your favorite reads?