Friday Mood Recs: Playing favorites with the 2025 Paperback Summer Reading Guide

Plus our summer Margin Notes schedule

Every year when I release the Paperback Summer Reading Guide, I’m asked which of the books are my favorites on the list. I think I often speak to that in our PSRG Roundtable, but this year I thought I’d also give you a list as part of Friday Mood Recs. This year it was particularly difficult to choose favorites because overall this is my favorite PSRG I’ve created. The way the guide came together allowed me a lot of freedom and exploration in my own reading. Usually because I’m reading so many books for a project as I put this together, I wind up without a lot of year end favorites from the guide. That is never about the books themselves—it’s about the frantic feeling associated with completing a guide that doesn’t give me enough room to bask in the glow of a new favorite book. This year I had more of that necessary time and several of the PSRG books will be best books of 2025 as the year draws to a close.

But before I get into my favorites, I wanted to share a little more about an addition to Reading in Public that I’m exploring this summer.

FictionMatters is built on the belief that how we read is just as interesting and important as what we read. With that in mind, this summer, I’ll be launching Margin Notes, a special component of Reading in Public where I will share an essay walking through how I read, using specific books that you can read alongside me. For each book, I’ll illustrate the observations I make and the questions I ask as I read and invite you to do the same. I’ll also share my literal Margin Notes so you can see how I converse with my books on the page.

This summer, Margin Notes will focus on three books from the Paperback Summer Reading Guide that I’m interested in exploring in more depth (see the schedule posted below). These aren’t exactly readalongs in that there will only be one essay per book and each will be written with an intention of appealing to readers whether or not they’ve had a chance to read the book. But my plan is to extend this type of post into a full readalong of A.S. Byatt’s Possession in the fall. My hope is that this summer will allow me to tinker with how to best approach these essays and discussions before we launch into a larger deep dive together.

Part of this series is intended to be educational; it’s an exercise I did frequently with my students. But here, I hope it will also be communal. One of the fascinating things about reading is that it happens invisibly inside each one of us. I love learning about how other readers think through their books, and I’m excited to have a space where we can share and learn from each other. I want to offer a community where we can share the intricacies of our own reading processes and experiences knowing that there isn’t one right way to read and that we all bring different skills and observations to the table.

Margin Notes will be an exclusive for paid Substack subscribers, so join today if you want to follow along. I’ll give plenty of warning of our plans and timelines for Possession as we get closer to the fall if you intend to wait and jump in then!

For now, here’s our summer lineup: