My Fall 2025 reading list

'Tis the season for cozy books by the fire

Note: i added too many pictures, so this post is too long for email. Click on the title to open this in the app or your browser! Also if on desktop, don’t read in your substack inbox, but click on the title too: the pics look better there :))

I’m seeing a lot of personal curriculums¹ going around, and while I don’t really have time for this right now, I desperately want to be kinda included in the fun. So here goes my reading list of books for this Fall season!

It’s also the entirety of my physical TBR, so I’ll admit I didn’t do any more curation on top of that. I really want to be rid of all of them on my shelves come January so that I can go on a shopping spree, guilt-free!

Fiction

In October, I plan to read MUSHROOMS! For a fungi fan, I still haven’t read Annihilation (or any VanderMeer for that matter) and I plan to remedy that. I got the shiny holo cover of books 1 and 2.

To keep with the horror theme, I also have Don’t Let The Forest In, which I bought because I saw the author shitpost on some platform somewhere and they were great (cgdrews , apparently the platform wasn’t substack).

For the rest of the fall, I’ll have:

• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, which is apparently amazing, queer, melancholic, and very well written

• The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal, a comedy, to keep us warm in those weird times (and I don’t even live in the USA). I really want to get to Lady Astronaut next, but that’s not the one I bought for some reason?

• The Forever War, the opposite of a comedy, but also some hard scifi and I haven’t had any of that in a while. It’s also a classic of the genre, so it got this nice bright yellow cover.

  

Non fiction

I’m not breaking those down by month, because that’s too annoying and there’s no super strong theme between the books.

Well, now that i’ve written this, of course there is: I’ll be doing nanowrimo this November², so i got some craft books to peruse. They should mostly get read in October (I’ve gotten started already) so that they can be used to prep. From the advice I’ve read, you should really only be writing during November, so I need to figure my stuff out before that.

• Creating Character Arcs – because I already know characters are my biggest weakness (maybe the autism and difficulties to understand others have something to do with it, but i’m not too sure)

• Save the Cat Writes A Novel — because they give you a spreadsheet with percentages of which parts of the book should be which length and in which order, and that’s all very soothing to me!

• On Writing Well — apparently a bible of something — writing, reading, editing?? Idk, I didn’t buy this, it was for free on the sidewalk so I took it.

On a completely different genre, I also have:

• A City On Mars: an exploration of the actual challenges of what it would mean to send people to live on Mars. Not in an Elon Musk kinda way, just in a science people are wondering kinda way.

• The Notebook – as the title says, it’s about notebooks and how people have used them over history. Could be nice (i like notebooks).

In the depressing genre:

• Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum. Depending on how the world turns out, I might not, just to keep myself sane (or will devour it, out of morbid curiosity). I bought it because I liked the cover and the orange penguin (it’s my first penguin book!), also it won the Pulitzer prize, so why not!

• Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. I’ll admit I bought it because of the wonderful pun lol. Also I’m in computer science so algorithms and data biases are orthogonal to my job. A bit afraid it’s outdated (came out in 2017).

• The Great Derangement, subtitled Climate Change and the Unthinkable, about how we speak and imagine stories around climate change and what that says of us. I read lots of good reviews of it so I’m excited (also it’s short and has big margins)

In the self-helpy genre:

• I kinda want to go back to How To Do Nothing, which I started and abandoned last spring. My main complaint was that there was nothing new, because everyone and their mother read it when it came out in 2019, so the ideas have permeated culture or something, and I’ve seen a bajillion youtube videos about it.

• I still have 3 weeks of The Artist’s Way to complete. I’m not liking any better than I did last time I wrote about it

I don’t want your spiritual creativity, Julia, it’s way too exhausting

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Will this be manageable?

As we know, those kinds of lists (just like the curriculums), are fantasies – of course I can read all the paper books on my TBR before the end of the year! – that rarely get completed.

This one is meant to be moderately manageable, with the constraints i have for the next 3 months:

• of course, autumn stops on Dec 21st, so that means the end-of-year holidays aren’t included (so much less time to read).

• and i’ve decided to maybe enroll in nanowrimo (more precisely Heart Breathings’ offshoot because i like her vibe), so there won’t be much reading in November.

• i’m also shooting for a promotion at work somewhere in Jan/Feb so i need to put in my (normal, French, reduced) hours and can’t read on company time anymore (goodbye Friday afternoons 😞).

I think I can read all the stuff I planned if – and it’s a big IF – I don’t get distracted and buy anything else (or binge watch TV). That’s harder said than done, but a girl can dream, can’t she?

I was going to ask you: what books do you have on your TBR for fall? but now i hesitate in case it’ll tempt me into an impulsive purchase…

I’m also a bit uncertain about the amount of non-fiction on this list. It stems from a bunch of impulsive buys that one time I went to Scotland and had access to bookshops without any queues³, and I was on holidays so a) I was dreaming of the best version of myself who totally reads non-fiction for pleasure and b) money didn’t count.

Now that I’m stuck in front of the pile, I kinda regret it. I love love LOVE fiction, that’s what i read at night before sleep. I can’t quite find the same relaxation in nf, it feels like I need all my braincells for that — and since there’s no dramatic tension, I just close the book and go to sleep.

I’ll try to switch up my reading habit for this, but also I promise I’ll give myself a lot of slack and I’ll have permission to quit anything I don’t love after 30 pages. Vinted will take care of those copies, and so my conscience will be clean (and my wallet ever so slightly larger).

Some fun for the road?

I made punchcards to track my progress. It took a long time. I nearly lost the war with the printer. It wasn’t as fun as I thought it’d be.

Now the books better be good, and I better read all of them so I can post the punched out thing for brownie points on Notes, or else I’ll be mad 😭📇

I’ve made up my mind and decided to ask, and I promise I’ll still read all the comments: What are you reading this fall? Did you make yourself a curriculum? Are you reading new books or old favorites? Did you read anything on my list?

Read you next time,

1. i know it doesn’t take an “s” in plural form because it’s latin, but it looks so bad without it that i just can’t let it happen

2. writing a book in 30 days, during november. It’s NAtional NOvember WRIting MOnth (i never understood what the NAtional had to do with it, it’s been international on the internets since forever)

3. in Paris, English-language books are mostly found at Shakespeare and Co or Abbey bookshop, both of which have become tourist attractions