What we've been reading: May 2025

Welcome to our monthly reading-round-up for May 2025!

This is the place where we gather highlights from what the Lighthouse team have been reading each month. You can check out round-ups from previous months and years amongst our book lists.

This month the team have been treated to hopeful visions of the future, fiction told from the perspective of a queer mountain lion, a wonderful middle-grade verse novel and so much more. Explore and browse below!

Jim

How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia - This short read is a wonderfully accessible gateway to a vast, fascinating and of-misunderstood art form. Everything you wanted to know about jazz but were afraid to ask.

Noor

Phytopolis by Stefano Mancuso - Mancuso is fast becoming one of my favourite writers. Phytopolis focuses on the impact of cities on the environment and climate and what we have to do in order to make cities less destructive to the world we live in. Mancuso conveys his research and arguments in a compelling but conversational way which I find very easy to read, so I flew through this book in two days and feel like I learnt a lot. And while he impresses the severity and danger of climate change on the reader, especially regarding the parasitic nature of cities, he also really stands by his vision of the future which I found very hopeful. Most of all, he talks about the need to act in order to make a better future for all of us, and how this responsibility falls on the Global North in terms of making our cities more climate safe, and the need to be prepared and welcoming to climate refugees from the Global South as the world gets warmer. He rallies against the cruelly enforced borders of Europe by talking about safe migration not only as the morally correct path, but also as the very survival mechanism that all organisms on earth are being made to do for survival at the moment, from trees to humans, and how we have to embrace that as the way for us all to survive.

Jess

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso - There's something acerbic and tilted that I really like about Manguso's writing - discomfort comes through between sentences and paragraphs. Here, a childhood and adolescence happens in moments that are as mundane as they are filled with aggression and resilience. It's a really disturbing and, I think, realistic portrait of toxic family life and inherited trauma that never veers into explicit violence or voyeurism.

Open Throat by Henry Hoke - another novel (I seem to have returned to them)! The narrator is a queer mountain lion residing under the Hollywood sign. Fire and hunger force them to venture into LA, where the boundaries of their body and sense of self come up against the mess and injustice of the city. It's pretty wonderful - shattering, funny, philosophically questioning, all while being immediately inviting.

JJ

Going to Meet the Man: A collection of James Baldwin's short stories - At all times queer, sharp and devastating, this is my first time reading his work. I immediately understood why he is a master of writing. Baldwin sees the intimate violence of having to conform, and the loneliness of being the only one to question things. The stories are still so relevant, but make sure you have something comforting to do after reading, the titular story is maddening.

Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes by Katharina Volckmer - wickedly funny and raunchy daydreams of a queer call centre worker. The short novel takes place in one shift, it's easy to devour, and totally unique.

Christina

I absolutely INHALED The House at the Edge of the World, Nadine Aisha Jassat's new middle-grade verse novel. Like Jassat's previous work, it is a love letter to libraries and friendship - this time with a gothic haunted house twist and an opera-singing aunt! At the launch event, Jassat said that her books highlight that "no one gets to say who you are except you". It is a warm, hopeful book that I highly recommend to readers of any age.

Mairi

Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid a sapphic folkloric hunger games that explores technological dystopias and ecological collapse. Heavy on the action and a fascinating fictional follow up to my recent reading of Laura Bates New Age of Sexism, for the ways patriarchy & capitalism conspire to co-opt or corrupts technological progress.

and The Secret History of the Rape Kit by Pagan Kennedy is a tremendous piece of feminist history, reads like true crime, both deeply personal and expansive in its examination of police misogyny and sexual violence. (Read this one on libro.fm and the audiobook was brilliant)