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April 2025 Reading Roundup

Kristen Hall-Geisler

• 4 min read
April 2025 Reading Roundup

The absolutely final, no-changes version of my master's thesis was due on April 1, and you can tell because I finished reading a bunch of books last month that have nothing to do with medieval literature. Graduation is at the end of this month, and my cap and gown are ready to go. Did you know master's graduates wear a hood? I did not.

I listened to Mood Machine by Liz Pelly, and if you're on the fence about Spotify, let this book convince you to cancel your subscription and delete your account. I made the switch to Tidal a couple of years ago, and it's fine, but I can't imagine it's much better to musicians and listeners than Spotify as streaming services go. And both are rife with "laid-back listening" playlists, which are not my literal jam. This is music that is meant to be played in the background and basically ignored while you do other things, like study or work. Also, Tidal has had a bunch of seemingly AI-generated slop showing up under established artists' names as new albums. I've reported a couple, but there's only so much I can do. As a person who actually likes music and enjoys engaging with it, those laid-back playlists are maddening, and only more so after reading Pelly's very good, thoroughly researched book. In related news, I bought a reissue of a Sun Ra album on vinyl in April, Uncharted Passages.

I've been waiting for years for J'emporterai le feu by Leila Slimani to come out; it's the third in a trilogy of novels based on her French and Moroccan family. It finally came out this year, and I was able to order it from the excellent FrenchBooksOnline.com, which I've mentioned before and can't recommend enough to fellow lecteurs.

Autism Is Not a Disease by Jodie Hare was not on my radar, but I have a yearlong subscription to new ebooks from publisher Verso thanks to a Kickstarter campaign I backed last year. Verso sends a list of excellent books every month, and it will take me years to get through everything they send. But being neurodivergent myself, this title rose to the top of the TBR immediately in April. Why yes, that is Autism Awareness or Acceptance month, based on your level of difficulty relating to autism as a neurotypical person. Hare's book is short and bold and smart. I think I might reread it and take more notes as I do; I feel like I didn't absorb all that I could on the first go.

Woodworking. Y'all. I know I read a lot of deep, challenging, philosophical, and/or odd books. I know my recommendations aren't for everyone (but I know they're for a bunch of you, Wingback Workshoppers, and I'm so glad). My friends and family will straight up say to my face, "I'm not going to read that" when I bring up something like Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno. What else are they going to say to that, really. This novel by Emily St. James, however, I am recommending far and wide, and the people are convinced! They're adding it to their TBRs! It's a story of two trans women in a small South Dakota town, one in her thirties and just cracking her shell and one on the cusp of adulthood and sure of her transness ... if not much else. Friendship! Romance! Bad decisions for understandable reasons! Laugh-out-loud snarky teen stuff! Regrettably relatable middle-age stuff! One of the most crowd-pleasing novels I've read in ages. Feel-good book of the summer or whatever. You'll love it.

I bought Yoko Tawada's Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel a while ago, and I don't remember why. She has a new book of essays on language coming out, and I have a copy for review (look for it later this month!), so I decided to read this novella to get a taste of her literary work. She was born in Japan and now teaches at a university in Germany, and she writes in German, so her work is translated to English, and boy do I not envy the translator, who did what I can only assume is a sparkling job of bringing Tawada's brilliant weirdness to the page. Tawada herself is a Celan scholar, like the protagonist of this book, but I think the similarities end there. He refers to himself sometimes as "the patient," sometimes by his first name, and sometimes in the first person. He might go to a Celan conference in France, he might not, or he might have already gone. I'm not doing a very good job of selling this to you, but if you like books that break narrative boundaries, Tawada hasn't met a boundary she likes. I read this over a weekend and wanted to start again immediately.

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