What to Read in the Summer of 2025
A list as eclectic as your Spotify playlist!
If every time someone asks you "what books do you read?" you find yourself hesitating, thinking a bit of everything and ultimately not knowing what to answer, you are not alone. The truth is that our reading preferences are hard to fit into a single label. Sometimes we want something more light, other times more demanding. Sometimes we look for a story that captivates us, other times a thought-provoking idea that stays with us.
Now that summer is approaching and there's more time for reading, whether on vacation or during a cool afternoon on the balcony, it's the perfect opportunity to enrich your to-be-read pile. That's why I gathered some of the most interesting releases of 2025. A list as diverse as your Spotify playlist. Here you will find books that cover different genres and moods, but they all have one thing in common. They are worth giving your time to this summer.
1. The Let Them Method - Mel Robbins
Mel Robbins returns with another self-improvement book that promises to help us free ourselves from the weight of others' opinions. With practical advice and personal examples, she shows how we can focus on what we can control, finding more peace.
Why read it:
It is a direct and practical self-improvement book, with applicable strategies, written in a lively and simple style, ideal for anyone who wants to bring order to their psychological everyday life.
Two simple words can change the way you see life.
If you are struggling to achieve your goals or feel happier, the problem is not you. The problem is the power you give to other people.
In this book, you will learn how two words – Let them – can free you from the opinions, dramatic reactions, and judgments of others. Break free from the exhausting cycle of trying to manage everything and everyone around you.
There is a better way to live.
The Let Them method is a proven way to protect your time and energy and focus on what matters to you. Stop wasting time chasing the acceptance and happiness of others, letting their opinions influence you. Learn how to stop giving away your power and start creating a life where you are the priority – your dreams, your goals, your happiness.
The Let Them method is a simple tool that millions of people around the world are constantly talking about, because it works. The fastest way to take control of your life is to stop trying to control other people and focus on what you can control: yourself.
By letting other people live their lives, you will finally live your own.
2. Drops - Rolling Pistachio
A family reunites in Agrinio on the occasion of a funeral. Everyday relationships, guilt, distances, and unspoken conflicts unfold in a calm yet deeply charged story.
Why read it:
This is a contemporary Greek novel that deals with grief and family with a realistic tone and emotional balance. If you enjoy psychological character portraits, it is a well-structured narrative.
Life is made of drops – either cool water that quenches your thirst or a deep, dark river that drowns you.
For the heroes of this book, loss becomes a torrential rain that soaks them to the bone, leaving a hint of a rainbow, a faint hope for light.
Jenny returns to Agrinio for her father-in-law Loukas's funeral, accompanied by her children. Dimitris, her ex-husband, mourns his father, struggling with the distances ―emotional and real― that have caused cracks in the family. His brother, Antonis, carries the weight of the past, while Vangelio, Loukas's widow, feels the ground slipping from under her feet… along with her husband.
As the heroes grapple with grief, bitterness, and guilt, they are called to realize that life does not always continue. Life stops. THIS life. The one you lived until then. However, in the traces of loss, it is not impossible for a new life to begin.
Our lives run like drops on the glass, and their paths force us to admit that circumstances often outweigh our desires. Even if you want to erase someone from your life, everything you lived with them and everything that binds you are ropes of steel.
Every person carries their own drops. Drops of memory, pain, love, which sometimes refresh and sometimes burn, sometimes liberate and sometimes weigh down the soul.
3. Rare to Meet a Good Person - Flannery O'Connor
Twelve short stories by the iconic American author that combine the tragic with the ironic, through the unique atmosphere of Southern Gothic.
Why you should read it:
It is a classic example of 20th-century American literature, ideal for those who love dense writing, existential depth, and social observation through short stories.
One of the most important voices in American literature, Flannery O’Connor signs twelve dark and subversive short stories filled with humor, suspense, and existential questions. At the center are ordinary people who confront the absolute and the absurd, in stories that unsettle you and make you think about them long after the last page.
4. Sworn Virgin - Rene Karabash
The story of Bekia, a woman who decides to live as a man in order to avoid social restrictions in a Balkan village. A narrative about identity, freedom, and personal choice.
Why you should read it:
A bold narrative about gender identity, written in a concise and meaningful style. Ideal for those interested in social issues and personal stories that break patriarchal stereotypes.
Ostainica: in the patriarchal societies of Northern Albania, Kosovo, Northern Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia, a woman who takes a vow of chastity according to the Kanun and begins to live as a man. It is a constitutionally recognized gender transition that grants the woman the rights and freedoms of men, freedoms she did not previously have, rights that other women are still deprived of.
A day before her wedding to the man her father chose for Bekija, another man rapes her; she is no longer a virgin, and her future husband, according to the customary law of Kanun, can kill her with a bullet left in her dowry by her own father. Instead, Bekija decides to renounce her female identity and become an ostainica. She takes the name Matija, cuts her hair, burns her clothes, and wears only men's clothing. However, by making this choice, she tarnishes the honor of the man she was to marry and must designate a man from her family to be murdered by a member of the disgraced husband's clan to restore his violated pride. She is thus called to decide who will be killed, her brother or her father.
Years later, Bekija/Matija will confront her story as she narrates it to a journalist.
The book challenges perceptions of masculinity and femininity by presenting a woman who struggles with gender identity for deeply rooted reasons, decides to become a man, something that destroys her family and leads to years of isolation. In the end, however, only love will save her.
Book Genre: Social, Historical Novel
Atmosphere: Dramatic, full of tension, emotional, with elements of mystery and suspense.
5. Wrong Head - Lina Rokou
An author shares a home with a famous colleague, seeking inspiration for her new book. The line between memory, imagination, and reality begins to blur dangerously.
Why read it:
A game of postmodern narration about creativity, identity, and the act of writing, aimed at readers who seek literary stories with philosophical dimensions.
Wrong Head – A subversive literary collaboration
Karina, after the success of her first book, finds herself blocked while writing her second. When the famous and reclusive author Pavlos M. suggests they become roommates to write together, she agrees — accompanied by the enigmatic cat Rat, who never meows.
6. The Bee Sting - Paul Murray
The Barnes family balances between financial and existential crises. Murray crafts a tragicomic narrative full of social commentary and psychological depth.
Why you should read it:
One of the strongest examples of contemporary English-language literature, combining social realism, dark humor, and multi-dimensional characters. A story with great emotional range.
The Barnes family is facing serious problems. The once profitable car dealership owned by the father, Dickie, is going from bad to worse due to the economic crisis in Ireland. However, he refuses to face the situation and spends his days in the woods.
His wife, Imelda, is selling her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter, Cass, who until recently was an excellent student, now seems determined to make it to the university entrance exams by drinking and staying out all night. And finally, the neglected twelve-year-old PJ is hatching a plan to run away from home.
What happened for everything to go wrong? A patch of icy road, a simple favor for a charming stranger, a bee trapped under a bridal veil—can a single moment of bad luck change the course of an entire life? And if the story is already written, is there still time to find a happy ending?
7. The Cancellation of the Future - Mark Fisher
Through 22 essays, Fisher attempts to analyze why contemporary culture recycles the past and is unable to produce new visions for the future, focusing on capitalist realism.
Why you should read it:
An essential work of social and cultural criticism for those interested in political philosophy, cultural theory, and contemporary sociological thought.
“For now, our desire has no name – but it is real. Our desire concerns the future – an escape from the dead ends and the vast desert of endless repetitions of capital – and it comes from the future – that future where new perceptions, desires, and knowledge will once again be possible. So far, we can only grasp this future through glimpses. But it is in our hands to construct this future, at the very moment when – on another level – it is already constructing us: a new form of collectivity, a new possibility to speak in the first person plural. At some point along this journey, the name of our new desire will be revealed to us – and we will recognize it.”
The twenty-two texts by Fisher included in this book, texts about capitalist realism and the secret sorrow of the 21st century, constitute a representative selection from his work, organized around the axes of malaise, culture, and politics.
8. The Seven-Sealed Library - Angelos Leventis
An allegorical story of self-awareness where the protagonist is a book trying to overcome its inner demons with the help of the librarian.
Why you should read it:
An original psychological narrative that combines allegory, philosophical reflection, and personal development tools, ideal for anyone seeking books with a self-awareness character.
Psychotherapy tools to help you feel safe and adequate by Angelos Leventis.
A book is trapped in the Sealed Library, struggling to find a lifeline, a ray of hope. Guided by a wise Librarian, it embarks on a journey of self-awareness and healing.
On every page, questions arise that lead to unknown paths: “Why does the past trouble me?”, “How can I trust again?”. As the book transforms into the “Best Book in the World”, its journey becomes a source of inspiration and emotional abundance for you, aiming to help you discover your own answers and build a life full of fulfillment, meaning, and acceptance.
Through allegories and therapeutic tools, psychotherapist Angelos Leventis offers a safe path that leads to relief and the recognition of your inner worth.
The answers are hidden within your own book!
9. Monique Escapes - Édouard Louis
Monique, the author's mother, plans her escape from an abusive relationship, for the first time without financial dependence. Louis captures her experience with dense, concise, and emotionally charged language.
Why read it:
An autobiographical novel that combines social observation and personal testimony, with a political dimension and intense social reflection on class and gender-based violence.
This book you are reading is, in a way, the result of a request from my mother.
I did not decide it, I did not plan it.
It was not my idea from the start.
Nothing in literature had ever given me so much joy.
1. The Let Them Method
Mel Robbins
Mel Robbins returns with another self-improvement book that promises to help us free ourselves from the weight of others’ opinions. With practical advice and personal examples, she shows how we can focus on what we can control, finding more peace.
Why read it:
It is a direct and practical self-improvement book, with applicable strategies, written in a lively and simple style, ideal for anyone who wants to bring order to their psychological everyday life.









Be the first to leave a comment!