Reading Roundup!
What I read in September 2025
September was an in-between month - I handed in my Master’s thesis and then spent a couple of weeks waiting for the new university term to begin, bringing with it all the induction and getting-to-know you sessions that have come with starting my PhD. As well as spending time with friends who are back in town for the new term, I managed to spend a fair bit of time curled up with a book too…
So here’s what I read last month:
As always, just a note that these are commission links - that means that you pay the same price you would otherwise, but I get a tiny cut of that price.
Swordcrossed - Freya Marske
The Favourites - Layne Fargo
All Among The Barley - Melissa Harrison
Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
Every Summer After - Carley Fortune
Well Played - Jen DeLuca
Deep Cuts - Holly Brickley
How to Solve Murders Like a Lady - Hannah Dolby
Happy Healthy ADHD - Lisa Dee
Some Girls Do - Jennifer Dugan
A Closed and Common Orbit - Becky Chambers
The Plot Twist - Eleanor Goymer
Yellowface - Rebecca F Kuang
The Paris Express - Emma Donoghue - on 99p Kindle offer today!
There’s a few of these that I want to mention specifically. First off, The Favourites, by Layne Fargo, which I read on audio. If you haven’t heard of this novel, I’d pitch it as Daisy Jones and the Six meets Spinning Out (IMDB link - it’s an incredible psychological drama TV series set in the world of figure skating) - and a must-read ahead of February’s Winter Olympics! The audiobook is a full cast recording, which really works with the ‘documentary’ style of the book; like in Daisy Jones, the action is interspersed with talking-head interviews, and having the different voices really helped me remember who was who.
I will say that I wish they’d obscured the text of those interviews instead of letting them be encoded into chapter titles for the audiobook: it meant that I got a couple of spoilers just from scrolling down the list of chapters to see where I was in the structure of the book.
Last year, I Love You, I Love You, I Love You by Laura Dockrill was all over the place, and while I thought it was a good read, it wasn’t quite what I personally was looking for. Deep Cuts exactly hit that spot for me and I can see why so many people are talking about it this year. The paperback comes out next spring, and a film adaptation with Saoirse Ronan and Austin Butler is on its way from A24, so I think this will be on every beach next summer…
Looking at everything I read in the month, now - since I’ve started using Notion, it’s really easy for me to put tags on my reading and see the themes of everything in aggregate. It’s no great surprise that romances, books about friendship, and contemporary settings were the most present in my September reading - those are things I go back to time and time again.
In terms of release years, there’s a fairly good spread, with half of what I read in September being published before last year. Honorary mention to Catching Fire holding the fort for pre-2010 releases there…
Coming back to the goals I’ve been sharing on a weekly basis, it’s also nice to see that I’ve been chugging my way through books on my Kindle as well as physical books on my bookshelf in roughly equal proportion.
As of today, 1st October, I have 503 unread books on my Kindle, plus 36 on Audible and 7 on LibroFM, for a total of 546 unread digital books. That’s only one less than I had in last month’s round up… All I’m going to say about that is that you can’t celebrate getting over a novel pandemic virus by buying a few e-books, when can you buy books…
What have you been reading lately?
Speak soon,
Lily