Classics, Memoirs, Fantasy & Romance
Book Reviews
October & November 2025
Every month, I have the astounding privilege of diving into new worlds and experiencing the beauty of different minds through books. The only thing I love as much as reading the books is talking about them. So, here we are. This is everything I thought about the books I read in October & November 2025.
Rating: 4.0 ★
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Review: Okay, I’ll admit, I’ve been sleeping on non-fiction for way too long. This was way more entertaining than I ever could’ve expected!
Greenlights walks the line between a personal development book and an epic memoir of Matthew McConaughey’s life, pre-, during, and post-fame. It’s unsurprising that he’s had an incredibly interesting life (he seems the type), but the meaning he has made from that interesting life is much more intriguing to me.
Greenlights inspects the different moments in McConaughey’s life where he’s been met with green lights (all good, full speed ahead), yellow lights (proceed with caution), and red lights (time to pick a different road). It then frames those moments with little nuggets of wisdom to carry away.
There is no doubt in my mind that Matthew McConaughey is an absurdly talented storyteller. Does he come off as a bit conceited at times? Sure, but if you’re able to look past that, there is some really great stuff in here. Maybe not anything groundbreaking, but still, valuable messages that are easy to forget.
Unfiltered Thoughts: Great f***ing story! Bonus points for listening to the audiobook with Matthew McConaughey as the narrator.
“The sooner we become less impressed with our life, our accomplishments, our career, our relationships, the prospects in front of us—the sooner we become less impressed and more involved with these things—the sooner we get better at them. We must be more than just happy to be here.”
“A denied expectation hurts more than a denied hope, while a fulfilled hope makes us happier than a fulfilled expectation.”
“I have a lot of proof that the world is conspiring to make me happy.”
Rating: 4.0 ★
Genre: Epic Fantasy, Dark
Review: Give me a cutthroat female lead who’s hell bent on revenge, and I’m sat. After being betrayed and left bloodied and broken on a mountain (assumed dead), Monza pulls together a ragtag team to help her dish out her sweet revenge.
The crew? Well, they’re a handsome mix of a mass murderer with a questionable attachment to numbers, an egotistical poisoner with an unsettling assistant, a raging alcoholic ex-colleague and a Barbarian who’s trying out this whole “being nice” thing.
As always, Joe Abercrombie’s characters are vibrant beyond compare. He’s got a proper knack for crafting characters that aren’t necessarily likeable, but they’re more interesting for it.
This is a jack of all trades kind of book. You might not be overwhelmingly impressed with any one individual element, but everything comes together in a cohesive story that I personally loved. With well-balanced plots, gripping characters, exceptional writing and an ever-present sense of humour, it’s a winner for me.
Unfiltered Thoughts: Apparently, murder and chuckles are a winning combination.
“Men are brittle, I reckon. They don’t bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them. Burned into them maybe.”
“When God means to punish a man, He sends him stupid friends and clever enemies.”
“When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.”
Rating: 3.0★
Genre: Fantasy, Dark Academia, Romance
Review: Two rival PhD students venture into hell to retrieve their professor to save their shot at a career in magic. What could possibly go wrong? Turns out hell is a little tricky to navigate…
Katabasis really shines in its atmosphere and fantasy landscape. I may not be familiar with the multiple references to other sources on hell that R.F. Kuang uses throughout the book, but that honestly didn’t matter to my ability to enjoy it. Don’t let the academic quality of the book deter you.
Beyond the fantasy elements, Katabasis also offers a valuable critique of the exploitation of power dynamics in academia, and a discussion around selective feminism. My main gripe with the book was that the character relationships felt a bit meh, particularly between Alice and Peter. I only ever felt like a friendship between them was believable: romance was a far stretch.
Unfiltered Thoughts: Every time they came across the bone dogs, the only thing going through my mind was “can I pet that dawg?”
“Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest.”
“Sometimes I am very clever but most of the time I am not. I have been a good person sometimes, and a bad person at others. Sooner or later I will die. But before I do, I will try—I will try very hard—to make it count.”
Rating: 4.75 ★
Genre: Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Romance
Review: What do you do when you want more from life than what society says you’re allowed to have? Naturally, make a deal with the devil. Well, more like devil-adjacent but close enough.
When Addie makes a deal to live a free life, she doesn’t realise that there’s a catch. For her now very long, immortal life, she will be cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Until one day she isn’t…
This book was phenomenal from the first page, and every time I thought I knew where it was going, it shifted. Beautifully written and wonderfully complex, not only with the character relationships but also the multiple time periods that Addie survives and the many lives she lives over hundreds of years. This was the perfect blend of dark and gritty, while also having a whimsical and almost dreamlike essence. Highly recommend!
Unfiltered Thoughts: This is everything I want in a fantasy romance and more. I desperately need more of this.
“If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.”
“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives – or to find strength in a very long one.”
“Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”
Rating: 4.0 ★
Genre: Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Romance
Review: Honestly, this was an exquisite take on the Greek myth of Achilles and Patroclus. I doubt I’m alone in saying that Percy Jackson catapulted me into a deep appreciation for Greek mythology from a very young age, and The Song of Achilles feels like the more grown-up and refined version of scratching that itch.
The writing is magnificent, and I loved how there were representations of many different kinds of love throughout the book. This isn’t a clean-cut story; it’s messy and heartbreaking to the point of aching. It has the makings of an epic and tragic love story that ebbs and flows through all the trials of life.
Unfiltered Thoughts: Truly beautiful. Also, don’t come for me if you cry so hard you throw up.
“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.“
“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world. “
“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him. “
Rating: 4.0 ★
Genre: Classics, Historical Fiction
Review: Usually, the classics are not my kind of speed. However, this was surprisingly engaging, even in its melancholic tone. Stoner follows the life of William Stoner from being born into a family of humble farmers to discovering his love of literature and pursuing the life of a scholar.
Putting it lightly, this is not the kind of book you read to lift your spirits. Stoner’s life perpetually takes grim turns, many of them self-imposed. There is a lingering apathy that bleeds into every decision he makes to the point where you wish you could shake him and maybe scream in his face a bit.
Despite my frustration with how he chooses to live his life, I found myself feeling a great deal of empathy for the kind of person who may, for whatever reasons, be incapable or unwilling to choose better for themselves. There is a kind of beauty in making peace with an “ordinary” life that has very few, fleeting moments of true happiness.
Unfiltered Thoughts: Like watching a car crash. Horrific, but you can’t look away.
“Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.”
“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
“‘Lust and learning,’ Katherine once said. ‘That’s really all there is, isn’t it?'”
Other Books I Read in Oct & Nov
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi
Rating: 2.5 ★
Genre: Contemporary Romance