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September 2025 Reading Roundup

Kristen Hall-Geisler

• 4 min read
September 2025 Reading Roundup

Only three books this month! And yet more than a thousand pages. Thank you, Ms. Mantel.

I started reading A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, a 750-page doorstopper that was clearly a runway for the Cromwell trilogy. He's even mentioned a couple of times. If you are in the mood to settle in to a long work of historical fiction as the days get shorter and colder and rainier or frostier, this book is excellent. Mantel puts words from the historical record into her characters' mouths, figuring that the likes of Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins probably tried out their speeches and essays in conversation before committing them to paper. I do not like having to keep factions straight, and boy does France love a faction, so that was a downside for me. (I can't keep the most of the factions in Star Wars straight, and I have been watching those movies since the 1970s. I am clear on the Empire, for the record.) But most people will have no trouble figuring out who is on whose side, even as allegiances shift between the storming of the Bastille and the Terror.

After that, I needed something shorter if not lighter, so I picked up On the Calculation of Volume II by Solve Balle and translated by Barbara Haveland. I don't usually care about spoilers; if a book or movie can be ruined by a spoiler, it probably sits on a flimsy premise. However, I also think going into these books cold is more fun. And I think it's more fun to have to space them out, since the series is in the midst of being published, rather than being able to binge these short books over a week or two. So just take a flyer and get on board with these books now. (If you want to binge a book series this fall, I recommend Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan books. I binged those over a summer a couple of years ago and it was the most engrossed reading I've maybe ever done. I was in it.)

Lastly, I had placed a hold on The Coin by Yasmin Zaher at the library and forgotten about it. It came up that the ebook was ready for me to borrow just as I finished Balle's novel, so I trusted past me to have chose well. She did! This is not a crowd-pleaser of a book, but it is original. The first-person narrator remains unnamed, but she seems to know the reader. She shares stories from her past and makes references we are assumed to understand, and she speaks to us in the second person. She anticipates our questions and clarifies her meaning. The fascinating thing is, she is not a great person. Her flippancy and shallowness and obsession with cleanliness are covering her grief and, in some respects, lack of agency. Yet in other respects, she has all the agency in the world. As a Palestinian woman whose parents died years before in an accident, she is an adult orphan without a recognized state; her current place of belonging might be inside her Birkin bag next to the red crocodile-skin wallet stuffed with cash. She draws you in to her story and makes you feel like a good friend or a close confidante, but eventually I started to wonder why I was friends with her. Do I even like her? Am I complicit now in these shady or questionable choices she's making, since she's told me about them? Are her actions admirably free of convention and stodginess or ill-considered and reckless? It turns out she's not really talking directly to the reader, but the feeling of connection lingers. In any case, if you read this book and don't buy a loofah, you are better than me.

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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.