Friday Mood Recs: A preorder list for building a satisfying 2025 TBR
My priority reads and the books I'll be keeping an eye on
Like many readers on Substack, I’ve been fairly immersed in classic and backlist reading so far this year, but today we’re putting the old aside and considering the new. Because, readers, I hate to tell you this but 2025 is going to be an epic year for books. Of course as soon as we all get commit to reading our shelves, become intimate with our local used bookstores, and dust off our copies of the books we should have read in high school, the publishing gods decide to offer us a bounty of incredible new books to tempt and delight us.
As eager as I am to continue on my backlist journey, I know that my most satisfying reading years are those that feel balanced. To help maintain balance this year, I’ve created a giant spreadsheet of all the 2025 releases I’m at all interested in. From there, I’ve devised a highlighting system that helps me prioritize my most anticipated books and visualize just how many there are. This is helping me avoid getting sidetracked by whatever shows up in the mail or is splashed all over Bookstagram.
I heard there’s a major preorder sale happening this week so it seemed like as good a time as any to share some of my anticipated new releases. My 2025 release spreadsheet is hundreds of books long, but I’m winnowing it down to the books I know I’ll be reading this year and the maybes I’m keeping an eye on. Of course, I hope to be surprised by books I don’t see coming too! But these are the books that are currently most intriguing to me.
First, a few thoughts on preordering books:
Preorders are pitched to readers as a way to help authors. According to
, this is somewhat true, but preorders are more of a way to help publishers gage potential sales and establish initial print runs than a predictor of actual sales numbers. Still, while we might not help a book become a hit just by preordering, we certainly can’t hurt our favorite authors by purchasing early.Personally, I am not preordering any books during this sale. As mentioned, I am trying to read more from my shelves and a good deal of backlist this year. But the real reason is that I get sent a lot of advanced copies of new releases so I don’t really need to preorder. I’m sharing this because I feel like a bit of a fraud suggesting that you preorder books when I myself am not partaking. But because I get many requests for my most anticipated books and because preorders can potentially help authors, I’m sharing anyways. Feel free to preorder or just save this post for the next time you head to your local indie.
As for the Barnes & Noble of it all, I’m conflicted. I live in a city with very few independent bookstores. For decades, one indie ruled them all, but due to mismanagement and changes in the bookselling world, it went bankrupt and was bought by B&N. There are a few small indies around that I support, but the best place for me to find the books I’m looking for and discover new-to-me titles is Barnes & Noble. If you have a great local indie, please consider preordering some of your most anticipated books from them. I’ve also created a Bookshop.org list that you can find at the bottom of this post.
Books I’ve read and loved
I’ve read seven upcoming releases and can wholeheartedly recommend four of them.