Reading List for October 2025
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."
Last month I had the chance to attend the Booker Prize 2025 Shortlist Announcement and I was in awe to sit in front of the judges talking about their experience reading, selecting and reviewing the books together for the past year. Did you know that they have to read at least 150 books the whole year just to get to the final longlist of 13? If a book on average has 40,000 words that means that they had to read 6,000,000 words in one year, or almost 3 books per week on average. When you think about that level of commitment and possibility, then you wonder how it is that new statistics show 46% of Americans haven’t read a book in the past year, or that only 16% read for pleasure on any given day, or that maybe many of the people surrounding you have just read a few books in a whole year? It’s never too late to start! Reading not only educates you, but also breaks your patterns and expand the world you know. As George R.R. Martin said once, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” Which is most of what my reading list this month is about: A new life after challenging religious traditions, consequences of our decisions, the art of how to change, and my cherry picked Booker Shortlist selection that I truly enjoyed and have a favorite for (Hint: it’s about an audition!).
The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon - Do you practice religion, pray, participate in community, and read from ancient scriptures? Great, this book is for you. Avoid religion or have a strong opinion against it? Great, this book is for you. Sarah McCammon writes about her experience in a well-researched way growing up in a white evangelical family in the Midwest during the 80s and 90s during the Ronald Reagan era, now evolving into Trumpism. As fear and unresolved questions mounted, she describes experiences like reading Josh Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye and stopping romantic relationships until marriage, believing she’d be the only one saved because she follows Jesus, and watching families separated over homosexuality or differing opinions. With Sarah, there is now a whole generation fleeing the fold, deconstructing the “alternative facts” of their childhood. Maybe call it freedom, or just being able to embrace different perspectives? We still see this cycle throughout most religions, now rooted in political movements too: always having a scripture answer behind their reasons, always thinking of conspiracy theories and doomsday, always needing to be right, always in an us vs them. This book made me angry, but also empathetic with my surroundings.
Coming Up for Air by George Orwell - A gripping novel that tells the story of a man who fought in the Great War and once felt in control of his life - until it was “too late.” He feels miserable with his work, his purpose, and most importantly, his wife and kids. This book explores the psychology of trying to find a way out in some of our life circumstances to then fall into the trap, once again. We all know Orwell for Animal Farm and 1984, his dystopian views of a future totalitarian state, and how we all feel inevitably trapped within (winking at some realities these days). But this book points to us as directly responsible. When you make mistakes early on and live with the consequences decades later; when you stop thinking and just live on autopilot; when you stand in front of something but can’t see it. The moments when you lose yourself. Quite surprising, this book was released on June 12, 1939, right before WWII started, and makes significant allusions to Hitler, the rise of fascism, and critics at the time not believing in any of it. One of my favorite quotes comes when George Bowling (the protagonist) with his First World War experience, tries to convince a well-read man about the menace of Hitler, but failing miserably to do so, concluding that “a man really dies when he loses the power to take in a new idea... Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste—but he is not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again…Dead minds, stopped inside… Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.”
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits - This book is about a man who found his partner cheating on him, but their life looks too perfect to blow it up. They stay together for the kids, he finds a good job that gives him purpose, he abandons his dreams for the sake of stability amid chaos. But then, what happens when the kids move out? When there’s no need to pretend anymore. When the facade collapses. After years of solitude in his head. After many days of misery and automation. Trapped and stifled in a dire marriage, facing a health issue, and after helping his youngest daughter to move out, the man decides to keep driving west and reconnect with his past while meeting again with significant others. Among them, an old friend who seems to have not fully inhabited his own life but gives him advice on how to do so; a brother who was always “momma’s boy,” attached, navigating a world after his own divorce, and projecting his own traumas onto love. Memories of his late father who shared relationship advice while having an affair and divorcing his mother. On the road, he meets with his ex and asks himself “what if I moved in with Jill and the last thirty years of our lives turned out to be an interruption?” What seems like an escape brings him face-to-face with one of life’s hardest tasks: finding yourself. Then you ask, which parts of your life are real and which are just comfortable distractions? The end stayed with me.
Master of Change by Brad Stulberg - Starting a job, leaving a job, getting married, getting divorced, having children, losing a loved one, becoming ill, moving to a new town, graduating from school, meeting a new best friend… Did you know that an adult experiences a disruptive event in their lives every 18 months on average? Or that recovering from disappointment is actually harder than just having low expectations from the start? Or that many current political movements capitalize on giving people the illusion of control and a sense of the past? Or how unhelpful it is, for example, when someone is going through something hard and you tell them “brighten up, you’ll be okay, everyone gets sad from time to time!” This is one of the best self-help books I’ve read this year. Drawing from philosophical concepts, Stulberg expresses in 200 pages how inevitable it is to go through change, and that we can shape change as much as it can shape us. How your expectations play a role. How your identity plays a role. How values like patience, drive, even creativity, can play a role. Yes, it’s important to become resilient, but it’s not a solo game, and this book provides the tools to navigate it.
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller - Between 1962-1963 Britain experienced what is known as “the great freeze”, one of the most brutal winters on record, from late December to March, with harsh snow, rivers and parts of the sea frozen, disruption in services, transportation, and families disconnected from reality. The narrative in this novel revolves around two couples who are old enough to carry memories of WWII, but still young enough to leave them behind. As they each fought their own demons, they remained trapped in their secrets until it was too late. Miller writes about a misogynistic cheating partner, a daughter reflecting on mental illness and trauma, and others wrestling with family and class issues. None were prepared for the winter that came ahead of them. This book is filled with scenes that are both fundamentally descriptive and very human, making you wonder about misguided ambitions and things we hold on to. Things that become threads of our lives. Things that we control so much that they end up controlling us back. A slow, haunting meditation on how the past freezes us in place.
Audition by Kate Kitamura - This short novel grabs you, shakes you, and then throws you back to the real world. It opens with an older woman meeting a young man in a restaurant and, as they finish ordering, she says what she needs to say, and turning towards the door everything spirals into frenzy. As you start to follow the plot flipping pages, there’s a sudden shift, a signal pointing that time has been wasted far enough, and that the “beginning” is terribly needed now. Then Kitamura forces you to ask: what’s the point of a performance? Is it that it allows us to live in a different world or just the hypocrisies of our desire? Is it to hide emotions from us or to get closer to them? Rituals, relationships, dialogues, roles, spaces, fictions we get trapped in, sometimes even in our own houses. Kitamura points out how we are all seeking the same thing: to know that we exist in the world, the most fundamental validation. The one that comes and goes, and once gone, can never be regained the same way. But in the process we build our own sense of self, patterns emerge, our perceptions start performing too. Anything you observe, any way you watch yourself act, how you hear yourself speak and then articulate again—what you leave behind is mostly emptiness. It is then that you become aware of the unknown surrounding you.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on these ideas. The best books you can read come to you through word of mouth, so if you know good titles that relate, please share them! If any of these resonate with you, pass them along.