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October 2025 Reading Roundup

Kristen Hall-Geisler

• 4 min read
October 2025 Reading Roundup

Hello! You may have noticed that I haven't been sending out so many missives from the Wingback Workshop lately. I'm looking for an agent for my nonfiction book about Ancrene Wisse, a medieval text that morphed quite a bit over 200 years, and I'm drafting shiny a new novel. I'm also finishing up the four-volume series of Céleste Mogador's memoirs. And I've been writing academic articles and sending those out to journals. It's a lot, but it's the kind of a lot that I like.

But I'm also on the fence about the Wingback Workshop, both in its direction (which is always changing anyway. The Wingback Workshop loves a whim) and in the platform I use to create it and send it out.

All of the platforms I've used to get newsletters out to the people assume I want to sell you something. Like, courses or coaching or 10 HOT MARKETING TIPS or some other writing-adjacent thing that I do not want to do. That includes this one, Ghost, which is fine but also very sales-oriented. I use affiliate links with Bookshop.org, so I do get a teensy slice of revenue that way, and I do hope that you'll buy my books. But this is not a sales heavy venue because ... ew.

So do I stay here with the Wingback Workshop and just keep sending newsletters into the ether? Do I switch platforms again to something even simpler, a platform that never sends me an email using the term "sales funnel" or "lead magnet"? Do I get better at coding and build a dumb little website for myself? (This last option gets more appealing by the day.)

If any of you have thoughts, reply to this email, leave a comment, tell me next time you see me. Shrugging and moving on with your day is also a valid option. I'm just typing out loud here.

In the meantime, I did finish three books in October, one I would recommend to anyone, one I would recommend to its particular audience, and one I would not recommend to anyone really. Let's start there.

I liked Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, and he won a Nobel prize a few years ago. So when I was looking for literature that took on humanity vs automatons for an essay project, I thought Klara and the Sun would be it. It was not it. I understand that a flatness of tone is Ishiguro's calling card, and that it can be used to contrast disturbing events and emotions. Here, though, it was just plain old flat. I didn't understand why this automaton was considered so clever, and how she could learn things about the humans around her but not the word for "living room." Learning words is, like, basic for AI, right? Even in the early stages when this book was published, spring of 2022, computers could learn words. I kept waiting for a twist, which I normally do not like in a book. There was no twist. Spoiler alert, I guess.

Not everyone is going to be into The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary by Pepys expert Kate Loveman, but if you are even a tiny bit interested in literary history or seventeenth-century London, this book is fun! There's so much more going on in the diary than most people know about, since the dirty bits were suppressed for centuries. But the story of the book itself (a subject I'm very into, which is why I picked this up for research purposes) is also, as the title says, strange.

Secondhand Time:The Last of the Soviets is by another Nobel winner, Svetlana Alexeivich, and this is the book I'd recommend to anyone. It's long, and it's not an easy read. She spent decades interviewing Russians of all ages, economic strata, and political stripes about their lives before and after the collapse of the USSR. The older folks remember World War II and the early Cold War, the middle-aged subjects have a very mixed bag of twentieth-century experiences, and the young mostly split into rabidly capitalistic or starry-eyed communistic. I don't remember what reminded me to finally pick up a book by Alexeivich; I'd been meaning to read her work for ages. The narrative structure and use of interviews creates a not-quite-novelistic work that illuminates such a complicated situation. Her work does something for both literature and humanity, which is surely why she received the Nobel.

Links to stuff in this post:

(I receive an affiliate commission from Bookshop.org if you order using these links. Thank you!)

KHG’s latest translations, Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion, Volume 2: Spectacle, and Volume 3: Luck, are available now. Volume 4: Payback will be published January 27, 2026.