What I’m Reading & Studying in 2025

I always read fiction growing up. From Roald Dahl as a little kid, through the Twilight saga as a preteen/young teen, then through all young adult dramas (think John Green’s entire collection) and finally onto more classic Sad Girl™ titles like Wuthering Heights and The Bell Jar towards the end of my teens.

Then something shifted, and for years, I found myself only reading self-help, psychology, and mental health non-fiction. When you’re deep in recovery work, those books become lifelines, or sometimes maybe even coping mechanisms. 

This year, I wanted to come home to the kind of reading that first made me fall in love with the craft of writing, the reading that set me on the path to getting my Creative Writing degree 10 years ago. So I’ve made a return to fiction, especially the kind that aligns more with my interests and asks big questions, from philosophical and historical fiction to literary and classic fiction.

So I thought I’d put together a little entry just noting the fiction I’m reading (and non-fiction I’m studying) in 2025, to see if anyone has any similar interests or if anyone in the recovery space has also found themselves more drawn to this type of reading as they’ve healed.

My Fiction Bookshelf for May

Here’s what’s been on my reading list this month:

✅ Life After Life – Kate Atkinson

✅ The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

✅ The Outsider – Albert Camus

📖 Currently Reading: The Secret History – Donna Tartt

 ⏭  Up Next: Siddhartha – Herman Hesse

Coming Up This Year

Here’s a peek at what’s waiting on my bookshelf to be read this year:

• The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch 
• Persuasion – Jane Austen
• The Alchemist – Paul Coelho
• All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr
• As You Like It – William Shakespeare
• Hera – Jennifer Saint
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint Exupery
• The Iliad – Homer
• The Odyssey – Homer

What I’m Studying in 2025

Alongside the fiction for my daily reading, I still always need a book or two on rotation for actually studying. My theology, astrology and philosophy collections are really coming along, and it’ll be good to get through them one by one, even if I’ve been on the same one for a year now. I started my first study of the Bible last year, the KJV, with a focus on metaphysical interpretations. 

This isn’t “religious” for me in the traditional sense, more a personal study of theology, philosophy, and historical symbolism. But safe to say it’s taking me… a while – it’s definitely heavy work. I’ve also been studying some Charles Fillmore work alongside this for reference, which is super interesting, too.

Up next I have the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita (which I’ve read beautiful excerpts from but not studied in full) and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which has sat on my bookshelf for years at this point, but I’m aware of some of the concepts.

Also on my study list for this year are two volumes in an evolutionary astrology collection by Jeffrey Wolf Green (“Pluto: The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul” and “Pluto: The Soul’s Evolution through Relationships“) on account of my Scorpio ascendant and Pluto in the 1H, and getting to know them a little better. This kind of work has really opened up my spiritual practice in the last 2-3 years, so I’m really excited to get to these.

Reading in Recovery

The books we choose in recovery can tell us a lot about (and even shape) the head space we are in. Books are ideas, after all. Let me know if you’ve read any of these or have any recommendations along similar lines. 

Here’s to books that help us return to ourselves.

Lizzie 🤍