What to Read in September 2025

/ September 3, 2025

Is it still summer? Is it the fall? Is it back to school? I suppose it depends on where you are in the country (and the world) and what your schoolyear calendar looks like. Here, school started ages ago (three weeks for my young adult and teen but in July for my year-round nephews), and the weather will remain mostly scorching until sometime in October. We have been enjoying an almost-false fall, but that won’t last. And as for back-to-school reads, what would that even be? I like the approach my bookstore had with back-to-school, which was featuring books that take place in an academic setting. I’ll extend that, here, as well as just tell you what’s coming up in September publications. I’ll leave the Halloween reads for next month.

As I promised, here is a list of books with an academic setting (like for back-to-school mood reading–or for escapism and wishing you went to these schools instead of your own). These are the ones that I have read and can recommend. (The list of ones I haven’t read follows.) Some of them are a little bit of a stretch, but the point is that the “school” is a main setting and is important to each of these stories. There are more YA suggestions here because an academic-setting book is much more likely to be for kids and young people, though some of these are grad school and even at least one with a parent of a school kid.

Also, I just started Forbidden Alchemy, by Stacey McEwan, which begins in the academic setting, but I’m not sure how long we’ll stay there as the characters are currently twelve and there’s going to have to be a major time-shift before we can get to the actual romance part of the romantasy.

And I started The Will of the Many, book #1 of the Hierarchy series by James Islington, which it turns out, also takes place in academia (at least for much of the first book). Who knew? (Well someone, obviously.) I am loving it, so far.

And here are the academic-themed books that I have not read but seem like the ones to read.

  • Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo
  • Babel, R. F. Kuang
  • My Oxford Year, Julia Whelan
  • If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio
  • The Secret Place, Tana French
  • Lessons, Ian McEwan
  • The Idiot, Elif Batuman
  • Changing Places, David Lodge
  • The Secret History, Donna Tartt
  • Erasure, Percival Everett
  • A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik
  • The Love Hypothesis, Ali Hazlewood
  • The Atlas Six, Olivie Blake
  • Vicious, V. E. Schwab
  • Blood Over Bright Haven, M. L. Wang
  • Stoner, John Williams
  • Nocticadia, Keri Lake
  • The Deal, Elle Kennedy
  • God of Wrath, Rina Kent
  • Legendborn, Tracy Deon
  • Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon
  • Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  • The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
  • The Magicians, Lev Grossman
  • The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies
  • Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett
  • The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
  • A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
  • Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld
  • A Separate Peace, John Knowles
  • Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers
  • Old School, Tobias Wolff
  • My Education, Susan Choi
  • The Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy
  • Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
  • 2666, Robert Bolano
  • Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee
  • The Human Stain, Philip Roth
  • Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers
  • Possession, A. S. Bayatt
  • Rez Ball, Byron Graves
  • Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, Carlos Hernandez
  • Truly Devious, Maureen Johnson
  • A Very Large Expanse of Sea, Tehereh Mafi
  • I Have Some Questions for You, Rebecca Makkai
  • True Biz, Sara Novic

The anticipated publications of September include:

  • This Inevitable Ruin (Dungeon Crawler Carl #7), Matt Dinniman (Is this a re-release? I’m a little confused)
  • The Last Letter, Rebecca Yarros (which is a re-release/special edition)
  • The Secret of Secrets, Dan Brown
  • Strong Ground, Brene Brown
  • Good Things, Samin Nosrat
  • Alchemised, Senlin Yu
  • The Impossible Fortune, Richard Osman
  • What We Can Know, Ian McEwan
  • The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze, Derrick Barnes
  • The Academy, Elin Hilderbrand
  • We Love You, Bunny, Mona Awad
  • Fake Skating, Lynn Painter
  • Sisters in the Wind, Angeline Boulley
  • Buckeye, Patrick Ryan
  • Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy
  • All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert
  • The Poisoned King, Katherine Rundell
  • The Loneliness of Sonia Sonny, Kiran Desai
  • The Wilderness, Angela Flournoy
  • Will There Ever Be Another You, Patricia Lockwood

My best reads of the summer (considering I did not post by month) are:

  • Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu
  • Emily of New Moon trilogy, L. M. Montgomery
  • Hamlet, William Shakespeare
  • The Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats
  • Kindred Dragons, Sarah Mensinga
  • Funny Story, Emily Henry

And then also good reads of my summer…

What I’m being forced (ahem) to read in September:

And what I’m hoping to get to (though I clearly will not get to all of them):

  • A Forbidden Alchemy, Stacey McEwan (began as ALC)
  • The Seven Year Slip, Ashley Poston (summer read)
  • A Novel Love Story, Ashley Poston (summer read)
  • 100 Places to See After You Die, Ken Jennings (work-research-related)
  • The Spider-Man Handbook, Grahame Smith (work-research-related)
  • The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, Axie Oh (missed this book club last month)
  • The Dead Fathers Club, Matt Haig (Hamlet adaptation)
  • The King of Infinite Space, Lyndsay Faye (Hamlet adaptation)
  • Nutshell, Ian McEwan (Hamlet adaptation)
  • Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
  • Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman
  • Assistant to the Villain, Hannah Nicole Maehrer
  • The Experiment, Rebecca Stead (ARC)
  • Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders (ARC)
  • Endling, Maria Reva (ARC)
  • The Incandescent, Emily Tesh (ARC)
  • The Phoenix Pencil Company, Allison King (ARC)
  • Hot Desk, Laura Dickerman (ARC)
  • True Colors, Elise Gravel (ARC)

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