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May 2025 Reading Roundup

Kristen Hall-Geisler

• 4 min read
The seven books I read this month: Doppelganger, Exophony, The Wall, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Rest Is Resistance, Practice, and Homework

A busy book reading month for me, including two for review. Let's not waste time, then.

I did a reading in March at Bold Books and Coffee in Portland, Oregon, and I sold a couple of books. Hooray! Then I bought Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, which brought my net take for the event down a bit. But it was all worth it, both the reading and the book. Doppelganger was kind of Klein's pandemic project, and it looks at the way the internet and social media in particular warp our views of each other and ourselves. She uses the lens of being continually, and increasingly, mistaken for Naomi Wolf, who has morphed into a funhouse-mirror version of herself and a not-quite-opposite version of Klein. A keen examination of the very weird moment we live in.

Then I read Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, by Yoko Tawada, for review. She was a new writer to me, but not to many other people. She's written plenty. I had already picked up one of her most recent novels to be translated to English, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, which also made it into the review. Tawada writes in both Japanese and German, and appreciate her comfort in the gaps between languages and cultures, places where others feel marked discomfort. I am definitely on the Tawada train now and will be reading more of her work.

My niece is a very plugged-in reader, and she often buys my mom the latest hotness, I assume based on TikTok recs? That's how Mom ended up with The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, which was first published in the 1960s and has been resurrected in its original German and in English every couple of decades since, when a new wave of feminists discover it. The basic plot is that a woman wakes up to find that she is enclosed alone inside a vast and invisible wall; every living thing on the other side of the wall has died a sudden death. She, her dog, a couple of cows, and a few cats make a life for themselves in her cousin's hunting lodge. Mom liked it and sent it to me, saying that it was my kind of book. She wasn't wrong. I didn't love it, but it has enough meat to dig some critical teeth into it, so look for an essay on feminism when there aren't men around later this summer.

We have reached a lighter literary lift! A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is Becky Chambers's sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built. We follow Dex and Mosscap out of the woods and back to civilization in this one, and it remains as charming as ever. I liked the first book better, but I still like this one a lot. They're short and comforting and you cannot go wrong with them.

On Independent Bookstore Day in April, I finally drove down to Third Eye Books, another shop in Portland. My little neighborhood is fairly self-contained, so I don't often venture out to other areas of the city. Brother, let me tell you, it was a drive to get down there. I forget that I live in a whole-ass city that is rather large and has traffic. I was thinking I should have brought snacks. But what a reward when I reached the shop. First, they had a table stacked deep with copies of The 1619 Project that they were giving away for free. FOR FREE. I was astounded and grateful that they would do this for readers. I took a copy and held onto it like I had been handed the Magna Carta on parchment. Inside, the shop is small and adorable and very thoughtfully laid out in an converted house. They stock one or two of almost everything you could want to find in Black literature, philosophy, history, cooking, theology—the list goes on. Newer titles and perennial best-sellers have lots of copies right up front by the counter. And if you have a question, the owner knows everything in the shop and can direct you to what you're looking for, even if you aren't sure what that is. I ended up with three books besides The 1619 Project, including the one I'd come for specifically, Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. I have heard Ms. Hersey on podcasts and I have followed her Nap Ministry on socials for years, so I knew that her work was not about drinking tea and lighting fancy candles. It is about removing the body from capitalist systems and reclaiming your wholeness as a human being, not as a machine to be used by others. She roots her work deeply in Black liberation theory, and it is liberating for all.

I do not know how I found out that Practice by Rosalind Brown even existed, but I am glad I did. This is a book that takes place over the course of a single day, a fun subgenre in itself. Annabel wakes up on a Sunday to write a paper on Shakespeare's sonnets. The reader is treated to a minute-by-minute account of her reading, thinking, daydreaming, ablutions, blanket preferences, yoga, dinner, and imaginary narratives about the Scholar and the Seducer, plus the decision she has to make about her older boyfriend visiting her at Oxford next weekend. This was almost the last book I read before walking in my own commencement ceremony at the end of the month, which seemed fitting.

But I squeezed in one last book! I can once again load ebooks for review onto my Kobo ereader (a device I do recommend), so I loaded Homework by Geoff Dyer and read it on the plane to and from commencement. Look for the review next week. Tl;dr: If you like Dyer's travel writing, you'll like his memoir.

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KHG’s latest translations, Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion, Volume 2: Spectacle, and Volume 3: Luck, are all available now!