September 2025 Reading List
The books that I'm reading over August and September this year. Join me while I read some French Revolution Romance, poetry, and more!
How This Works
On the first of every month, I’m going to post a reading list for that month and then review them the month after.
Even though I am posting this reading list this first week of August, I won’t review the books until September, just to give you time to read them with me if you want to.
There is no reason why you shouldn’t read every single one of the books on my list, but by no means should you bite off more than you can chew. We were all beginners once; why not choose just one book for now, and come back for more later if you’d like?
The Books
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
This is a re-read for me. It belongs to a genre that I like to call the French Revolution Romance, which almost always features a love story but is more in the literary tradition of a medieval romance— I’m talking true love and high adventure here. It was also made into an amazing movie in the eighties featuring Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings. What fun!
The blurb:
The year is 1792. The French Revolution, driven to excess by its own triumph, has turned into a reign of terror. Daily, tumbrels bearing new victims to the guillotine roll over the cobbled streets of Paris… Thus the stage is set for one of the most enthralling novels of historical adventure ever written.
The mysterious figure known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, sworn to rescue helpless men, women, and children from their doom; his implacable foe, the French agent Chauvelin, relentlessly hunting him down; and lovely Marguerite Blakeney, a beautiful French exile married to an English lord and caught in a terrible conflict of loyalties—all play their parts in a suspenseful tale that ranges from the squalid slums of Paris to the aristocratic salons of London, from intrigue on a great English country estate to the final denouement on the cliffs of the French coast.
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
I have watched the movie for this before; let’s hope I like the book better! I have always wanted my favorite book characters to come to life… but if the villains got out too? Now that would be a problem.
The blurb:
One cruel night, Meggie's father reads aloud from a book called Inkheart— and an evil ruler escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books. Meggie must learn to harness the magic that has conjured this nightmare. For only she can change the course of the story that has changed her life forever. This is Inkheart— a timeless tale about books, about imagination, about life. Dare to read it aloud.
Selected Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I have never read much of Longfellow’s poetry at all, and this is where I am going to start. We gave this book to my mother a year or two ago for her birthday and I am going to steal it from her, seeing as she’s finished it. I hope that it will help me hone my poetry-writing skills!
The blurb:
Longfellow was the most popular poet of his day. This selection includes generous samplings from his longer works—Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Hiawatha—as well as his shorter lyrics and less familiar narrative poems.
Join Me!
Which books are you most excited for me to review? Would you like to see a post about a certain book? Would you like me to review your book? Drop a comment below!
Other Reads This Month
I don’t know if I’ll get to reading anything else this month… truth be told, I stared at my computer screen for an hour searching the internet for books I should read. I drowned myself in book this summer, and it seems the well has run dry. Not to mention I’m doing life-y things like volleyball and college classes. I know what it’s like to be busy; I also know that it’s possible to make time to read. You can do it!
Inkheart had caught when i first read this, but mostly because i remember it but remember so little about it. I know of Longfellow, but i've only read a few poems only incidentally, so the poetry is interesting. That Scarlet Pimpernel i remember, and have been wanting to read for historical reasons, but it's been still waiting on the list of reads to be done.