What I Read in October 2025

Happy November, friends! I started putting up Christmas decorations around the house this weekend which makes my heart happy. In an ideal world, I would hibernate (eat, sleep, and read) through the new year but unfortunately, I still have work to do and real-life obligations….. Anyways, here are five books I read in October:

THE BRIDE TEST by Helen Hoang

I read The Heart Principle a few years ago and have been meaning to read more from Helen Hoang. There are very few options actually since she has not published anything else beyond her three Kiss Quotient series! The Bride Test is a bit cheesier I’d say than The Heart Principle. It’s an international forced dating story imposed by Khai’s mom who brings Esme from Vietnam as a potential wife for Khai. Khai’s mom expects them to get married by the end of summer, considering this is all news to Khai as Esme… just appears. The premise does sound a little (a lot?) out of pocket but Helen Hoang is a convincing storyteller. You’d quickly find yourself rooting for Khai and Esme and their happy ever after.

DEAD BEFORE CO-ED by Mary Vecellio

This debut novel by my Salem sibling is the creepiest and spookiest book I’ve read this year by far, even more so than Rouge by Mona Awad. Dead Before Co-Ed is set at Discordia’s College for Women (which is inspired by my alma mater Salem College!) as Edith visits Discordia to stay with her childhood best friend Sylvia during fall break. Their once intense friendship dissipated after their high school days and Edith is now reconciling the memories of their friendship with this new Sylvia in the backdrop of mysterious and cult-like Discordia campus and her flatmates. The suspense begins to build immediately and continues until the very end. While there is a pretty clear and somewhat satisfying resolution, I wish there had been more justification and explanation.

JUST MERCY by Bryan Stevenson

For some reason, I thought Just Mercy was an abstract concepts book which had deterred me from reading it for this long! Bryan Stevenson dedicated his career as a lawyer to defending those who were powerless in front of the corrupt and racist justice system. He highlights just a handful of the clients that his nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative supported and in doing so, he calls attention to the system of mass incarceration and draws parallel between death penalty and lynching. It is certainly a heavy book but an important book that more people need to read.

BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley

AP Lit Book Club pick of the month, Brave New World portrays a dystopian future where control looks drastically different than the world depicted in 1984. In the society Huxley created, everyone is born to a predestined caste, ranging from alphas to epsilons; their life is predetermined, engineered, and conditioned to fit the purpose of their respective caste; and the messiness of life is all removed for them to be happy all the time with the life they are given. I found Brave New World more depressing compared to 1984 (though it has been a while since I’ve read 1984 and I can’t recall too much) as well as more challenging to read since Huxley spends a significant portion of this relatively short book setting up the world and describing the details.

THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME: IN SEARCH OF A COMMON PARADISE by Olivia Laing

I had gotten The Garden Against Time in my (now quarterly) Letters Sidecar subscription and did not pick it up for months because I’m not into gardening (yes, I am being serious). While Olivia Laing does describe some of the mundane days she spends restoring the old garden at new-to-her Suffolk house, she reflects on works of literature and poetry (for example, Milton’s Paradise Lost and ) and their connection to gardening, nature, and the idea of paradise. Through this book, I learned about the relatively privatization of lands in English history (much of it supported by slavery in the US and elsewhere) and the quite dramatic altercation of those lands that we now see preserved in English country houses. An interesting and intertwining memoir and yet another example of Letters book subscription pushing me out of my comfort zone and me liking it!

P.S. I just finished reading Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman!