May 2025 Wrap-Up and June TBR (Kinda)

Plus the next Booker of the Month pick and upcoming releases on my radar

Hi, book friends.

First, an exciting thing: I’m less than 10 readers away from having 1,000 of you subscribed here on Substack, which is bonkers. Thank you so much for carving out space for me and my books in your precious inbox. If you know anyone else who might enjoy my ramblings, I would so appreciate your help closing that gap!

On to business as usual. May was somehow simultaneously 100 days long and also 1 day long. The baby was healthier (thank goodness), although I was not (merp), and the weather was beautiful during the week but somehow always awful on the weekends — we haven’t had a weekend without precipitation where I live since mid-November, and this past Saturday it was in the 40s.

Still, things are looking up. You’re getting this wrap-up on the 2nd and I’ve already written reviews for all of last month’s books, which never happens. My daughter turns 1 year old in just over a month (what?), and party invitations are already in the mail. I onboarded a third awesome person to my team at work, which should help things feel less chaotic there. I felt well enough that I managed to get three runs in last week. And the cherry on top — my hot tub is finally working again after it went out of commission New Year’s Day. It feels like there’s a little bit of space to breathe again for the first time in months.

Alright, enough about me. On to the books!

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What I Read in May

Thanks in part to a few very long drives with audiobooks, I read 9 books in May, which ties it with March for my best month of the year so far. It felt great to finally catch up to the latest book in the Bone Season series, which I’ve been chipping away at all year, and to finish the Godkiller (aka Fallen Gods) trilogy. I started reading through this year’s Hugo Award finalists. The literary fiction really delivered. And I read that buzzy dystopian book with the mystery author so you don’t have to.

Click each title for a full review.

Loved

• The Dark Mirror (The Bone Season, #5) by Samantha Shannon† 🎧: The best one yet. I cannot wait for the next book in this series!

• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar* 📖🎧: Gorgeous and inhaleable — tandem read it in print and on audio in one sitting, trust me.

• The Antidote by Karen Russell*† 📖🎧: Layered and compelling. I will be rooting for this one during prize season — I need more people to be chattering about it!

• Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman*† 📖🎧: All my lit fic + SFF readers, this one is SO for you. Gorgeously written, very character-driven.

Liked a Lot

• A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher 🎧: A fun standalone (and Hugo finalist) that made for a great road trip audiobook.

• Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel 📖: A Pulitzer finalist for a reason!

• Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put by Annie B. Jones* 📖🎧: To a person who married her high school sweetheart and lives 45 minutes from her childhood home (me), this was a comfort and a joy.

• Faithbreaker (Fallen Gods, #3) by Hannah Kaner† 🎧: An epic conclusion to a fantastic trilogy with a classic feeling but modern sensibilities.

Liked

• Silver Elite (Silver Elite, #1) by Dani Francis*† 📖🎧: If you loved Fourth Wing, pick this up. If Forth Wing was meh to you, it’s probably okay to skip.

*print copy gifted to me by the publisher
†audiobook gifted to me by the publisher

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June TBR (Kinda)

See how empty this book cart is? That’s intentional. As I mentioned in my most recent mid-month update, I’m making space for even more flexibility in what I read this summer. Don’t get me wrong — I’m still me, and I still absolutely love a detailed plan, but I realized that I’ve been my TBR like a to-do list rather than a menu lately. It’s kept me from pivoting toward books I’m excited about in the moment (“mood reading”?) and shutting myself off from possibility.

So for this summer, at least, I’m going to keep my TBR intentionally tiny. I’ll surely still read 8–10 books a month, but the list I make at the start will only include definites — Booker of the Month picks, paced prize list reading, committed buddy reads, etc. Sure, I’ve still got a shortlist of other books for the month in mind, but by leaving them on that shortlist rather than porting them over to my official TBR, I hope to mentally trick myself into following my nose a bit more often. We’ll see how it goes!

This month’s definites are:

• Enlightenment by Sarah Perry*: This month’s Booker of the Month pick (more below)!

• Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara: A physical library loan that will need to go back soon. I borrowed this after

  Anne Helen Petersen
  raved about it.

• Assassin's Quest (The Farseer Trilogy, #3) by Robin Hobb: @danielle.is reading and I continue our Robin Hobb journey this month … although given the fact that it’s ~850 pages and 37.5 hours on audio, we’ll probably stretch it across both June and July.

• Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky: My next pick from this year’s Hugo finalists, which is missing from the photo because I borrowed it from the library via Libby.

*print copy gifted to me by the publisher

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June Booker of the Month

ICYMI, I run a book club called Booker of the Month, where we read one book from the Booker Prize longlist each month. There are 13, so we double up just once, and by the time next year’s longlist is announced, we’ll have read them all. The May meeting was fantastic as always!

We only have two more books to go until the 2025 longlist drops and we start again from the top, which is wild. Our June selection is Enlightenment by Sarah Perry. Join us!!

• Learn more about the book on the StoryGraph.

• Get a print or ebook copy or the audiobook.

• Sign up for our Zoom discussion on Monday, June 30 at 8 PM ET.

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June hot releases

FYI, I keep a running list of new releases I’m excited for on my Bookshop storefront, plus a list of recent releases I love or expect to love.

Books I have my eye on this month include:

• Flashlight by Susan Choi (6/3)

• On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy by Ira Wells (6/3)

• Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab (6/10) (I read this in January and it’s amazing)

• Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin (6/10)

• UnWorld by Jayson Greene (6/17)

• I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà (6/17)

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As always, thanks for sharing your corner of the internet with me! It would mean a lot if you were to take a second to like this post. I’d love to hear how your reading month went in the comments, too.

Finally, if you like this newsletter, please send a few friends my way.

Until next time,

— Deedi (she/her)