Spring/Summer 2025 Reading Update

Hi everyone!

Summer’s here and that provides many of us with an opportunity to enjoy the nice weather outside and crack open some of the books on our reading lists. In this post, I’ll provide you with an update on some of the reading that I have on my list for this summer to help keep me energized to write and teach!

I tried out something new with regards to my time management this year, in 2025. I decided to mentally break up the year into three sets of goals: reading, writing, and teaching. The logic here was that I have a lot of aspirations and goals, and I tend to work best when I work on large chunks of a single project at a time and then move onto something else. Accordingly, my idea was to get most of my most essential reading out of the way from January-April (check), most of my writing done between May-August (in progress), and then allow myself some time to update some of my course content in September-December (yet to be seen!).

We’re now in May, and I can happily say that I have read through my minimum reading list for the year during the winter 2025 months and, in fact, I even exceeded my goals (yay!). Of course, that’s not to suggest that I have entirely given up on reading in the summer. I still have a long list of books that I want to read with aspirations to get through some key items in the summer, but I am allotting a little less time to reading during these summer months and a little bit more time to writing.

So, what kinds of things am I reading this summer? There are two main areas of interest on my reading list for this year—primarily the classic science fiction works from the ‘big three’ (Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke), and academic literature on New Religious Movements (often termed ‘cults’ by modern news outlets and other media), particularly NRMs focused on science or pseudoscience. So far, my favorite reads this year have been The Positronic Man (1992) by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg (sci-fi) and Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion (2014) Benjamin E Zeller (academic). The Positronic Man provides a deep dive into questions surrounding what precisely it means to be a human being, and the lines between humanity and artificial intelligence. The latter work, Heaven’s Gate, provides a deep dive into the most infamous American New Religious Movement of the 1990s (Heaven’s Gate, also known as Human Metamorphosis). It was probably one of the ébest monographs that I have ever read, and was particularly strong in humanizing the membership of the now defunct religious community. Also, on the list for my summer vacation up north are some comic books: Thunderbolts Red, Le Château des Etoiles (Tome 7), Les Chimères de Vénus (Tome 2), The Beano Summer Special 2025, and The Dandy Summer Special 2025.

That’s all for now. What are you reading this summer? Any recommendations to share?

Enjoy the sun and the sand!

AK-M