📚On Reading in November 2025

Welcome to what my recent reading month looked like. November started with me in a weird reading funk (pour one out for all the books I DNF’d) until I read Layne Fargo’s The Favorites. It’s one of the year’s huge books because of social media and algorithms and while I am not in the camp of loving this book, it is a soap opera with a full cast audiobook that kicked me out of the reading rut I had been in so I give the book thanks for that.

Woodworking by Emily St. James

This shot straight to the top of my Fave Books of 2025 list. The setup is wonderful, the characters are fantastic, it’s plot driven, equally funny, bighearted, and so timely in many ways—I especially loved how it showed different generations coming out narratives. And it has an excellent audiobook with multiple narrators and a very clever way to avoid deadnaming one of the characters.

Erica Skyberg is a divorced high school teacher who is only out to herself until a new trans student transfers to her school. Erica and Abigail could not be more different and while Abigail—in all her wonderful snark—makes it clear to Erica that they are not friends, and Erica is certain they cannot be friends because of how bad that would be perceived by the town, they do form a relationship that helps guide each other and themselves. While the story takes place over a couple of months in 2016 I could have followed the characters forever.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker

The best decision I made was to start picking up books knowing absolutely nothing about them because had I known this was set during Covid I absolutely would have passed on it and thus would have missed out on reading one of my favorite books of the year. It feels like a strange time to say this but being uncomfortable isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Anyhoo, it’s hard to sell the fact that I loved being in the head of the main character who is dealing with a lot: her sister was murdered in front of her, she’s a crime scene cleaner who has noticed a lot of Asian women are being murdered, she’s seeing her sister’s ghost and not in a happy friendly way, and she is not okay with things opening back up after Covid lockdown because she is terrified of getting sick. But I did love being in Cora’s head and following her and her coworkers around as they try to unmask a serial killer and stop a ghost—all while Cora grieves for her sister as she unpacks PTSD and navigates being vulnerable.

I can’t wait to read Kylie Lee Baker’s 2026 novel, Japanese Gothic.

Night Chef: An Epic Tale of Friendship with a Side of Deliciousness! by Mika Song

I adored this unique graphic novel about a raccoon who wants nothing more than to be a chef and ends up displaced and going on an adventure. The pitch on this is “Ratatouille meets the magic of Studio Ghibli” and for once I can 100% say I agree with that pitch.

I read it as an ebook from the library and I definitely plan on buying a physical copy to reread and so it will sit on my shelves.

Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith by Grace Ellis, Hannah Templer (Illustrator)

This has an excellent author’s note in the opening explaining that Patricia Highsmith was a terrible person across the board and why it’s important to still tell people’s stories while pointing that out. In this case it’s a fictionalized graphic novel about the real Patricia Highsmith and her time working in graphic novels (which she hated) while trying to sell the novels Strangers on a Train and Carol (originally titled The Price of Salt).

I read this in one sitting, absolutely fascinated with the behind the scenes of the comic book industry during the 1950s and heartbroken by the completely still relevant look at how antiqueer sentiment can lead to internalized homophobia—PH was using the majority of her paycheck for an analyst to make her straight.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

I finally read this modern classic that so many dark academia and literary crime books have been inspired by. It is very good, it could have been 100 pages shorter, but still very good. It’s great writing, with a focus on a group of unlikeable characters and the desire to belong.

It starts with you knowing there is a murder, then goes back to the time leading up to the murder, and then what happens after the murder. It’s very literary and bookish, set on a college campus with tons of discussions about literature and the classics and language. I thought having heard about this for 10 years, and having read so many novels that were comp’d to it, would have diminished my ability to enjoy it but it didn’t. It was actually interesting to experience the novel after years of hearing the fandom’s gushing over it, which usually only happens in books that are not literary, nor academically centered.

Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela

There are themes that have been written about so much that at this point if it isn’t a fresh voice or perspective in publishing I'm not quickly reaching for it. A heartbreak novel is one of them, which is why the fact that Middle Spoon follows a gay married man experiencing his first broken heart by his boyfriend, written as an epistolary novel, was an interesting enough angle to sell me.

The narrator is as annoying and self-involved as a heartbroken person is but taking me into a world where his therapist is sick of hearing it, his husband is counseling him through the heartbreak, and he’s also navigating fatherhood—as he’s constantly writing letters to his ex—kept me deeply invested. In the oddest way, even though I found him selfish and insufferable (even his aside rants that I mostly agreed with could feel eye-rolling), I still wanted to keep following him. Give me what feels like fresh * new voices in literature any second of the day. (* I’ve known at least a handful of peeps like the narrator in real life.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading, and as always feel free to shout out anything you’ve been loving lately!