Tuesday Tea: What's the first book you're reading/read in 2025?
Never to soon to start a new TBR
Hello, friends! And welcome to 2025!
We’re easing back into the real world after sinking blissfully into ‘what day is it’ mode. Our holidays were marked not by schedules and to-do lists, but napping, reading, board game playing, and cookie eating. We are re-charged and ready for many bookish shenanigans this year. Beginning with our first books of the year!
Dave says…
I’m catching up with my fantasy reading with this Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-il Kim. It’s a traditional-but-also-modern sword and sorcery book from a Korean author. I also read Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell. It’s more of an essay broken into chapters — it’s as delightful as its title.
Mel says…
I usually read Jane Eyre in January. This year, before I reunite with that old friend, I’m enjoying two classics that are new to me: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (Charlotte Brontë’s biographer and a novelist in her own right). It’s pretty talky, but more readable and snarky (compliment) than I expected — and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen on audiobook. Then Jane Eyre.
Hello! This is my first time on the substack! I'm reading All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. It's so beautiful and I'm really enjoying it. I find it's been a while since I've read a book with such a heavy subject matter. Sometimes I dodge them because reading needs to be relaxing for me, but this one is so beautiful it softens the difficult topic (that's not to say it romanticises or glosses over the horrors of war, just intersperses those horrors with beauty).
I'm also obsessively collating ideas for other books I'd like to read this year and already have a long tbr. I'm signed off work with a hand injury for the next month so plenty of reading time!
My wife suggested this book, as she read it in 2015. ‘Howard’s End is on the Landing’ written by Susan Hill is a memoir in which in her search around her house for a certain book, she realized there were many books she had never read in her personal library. She decided to take a year and only read books that were in her house. She lists the final 40 as an appendix. I love this idea since I have over 1,500 books at home that I haven’t read. But I can’t go cold turkey on new books, for I work part-time in retirement at an Indie book shop and need to read ARCs to recommend to customers, I have made a resolution that for every ‘new title’ brought into the house over 2025 (which I will read), I will read 3 books that already were in our home on January 1st.