Recommendation News: Summer 2025

Welcome, or welcome back, to our (now) seasonal issue of the Recommendation News, an occasional publication featuring recreational and recommended reading from our SJPL Librarians. While this is the Summer Recommendation News, we delayed releasing Rec News in July to allow folks to finish up reading through all the wonderful Summer Learning featured recommendations. Yet, we aren't quite seeing the yellow buses roll down our streets yet, so there's still time for a few great beach reads before the kids are back to school and the weather turns autumnal. Hopefully, the reading lists I share today will help you find your new favorite read before the leaves fall.

Fresh Reads Added to Favorite Lists

Your Staff Picks team for San José have been working diligently to find new, great additions for our booklists of beloved genres. Each of these booklists were updated in the last few months, so they now feature new titles to discover.

Adults can discover new favorites on these updated booklists:

Teens, check out the new additions to these beloved genre/theme booklists:

Featured Booklists

Disability Representation Reads

Adults, opens a new window
Teen/YA, opens a new window
Children's Novels, opens a new window
Picture Books, opens a new window

I know that this blog is being published in August, but for the featured booklists this time around, I want to roll back the calendar one month to revisit July. While we don't need a special occasion to spotlight characters with disabilities, July is Disability Pride Month in the USA! July was chosen for Disability Pride as 7/26 is an important anniversary: on July 26 in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities act was first signed. Disability Pride is about increasing visibility for folks with disabilities, celebrating the disability community, and also aims to share the cultures of people with disabilities. Each of the books in the lists above will feature characters with disabilities, and will make for great reading any time of year.

Niche Lists to Discover

These booklists will speak to more specialized interests, bringing together books belonging to unique subgenres or featuring specific themes, and serving as a demonstration of how unique and expansive the stories in our city's library collection can be.

Spy Fiction for Adults, opens a new window

For those of you that love tales of keeping your cover, confidential files, and possibly Cold War antics, then you may be interested in this list of Spy fiction, or Spy-fi, if you will. While there are certainly plenty of picks for fans of James Bond (you could even try You Only Live Twice, opens a new window - a classic Bond novel featured on this list), there are also tales of real life spies adapted to fiction, as well as spy stories featuring women spies, and some reads blending Spy-fi with speculative genres (specifically Prophet, opens a new window - an intriguing blend of Spy-fi, Sci-fi, Mystery, and Noir). With Spy fiction being a subgenre of Thrillers & Suspense, you can expect these works to, generally, be fast-paced and suspenseful.

Dark Academia for Teens & Young Adults, opens a new window

Cover of Dark Academia is a literary theme with a specific aesthetic and atmosphere. Emerging as a trend in the 2010s, a Dark Academia theme suggests: stories revolving around education; a style that features elements of Gothic literature, art, and architecture; idealization and romanticization of learning with an emphasis on the arts; and inspiration from prep schools and Ivy leagues, where wealth and privilege overlap with learning. Think characters in Oxford shoes, blazers, leather messenger bags with some classic Russian literature or The Picture of Dorian Gray, opens a new window tucked into a pocket. Think Rory Gilmore and the Life & Death Brigade at Yale. Stories of Dark Academia will also typically have something awry with the school, a place the protagonist cannot casually walk away from.

As Told By Animals: Novels for Middle Grades (~3-7), opens a new window

One of the wonderful things about reading fiction is it gives you the chance to experience perspectives and emotions you wouldn't be able to otherwise, pushing and expanding our capacity for empathy, opening our minds, as well as strengthening creative thinking. For the animals lovers among us, each title on this booklist offers a special point of view indeed; from birds to dogs to mice to even dinosaurs, all of these stories all stretch our imagination as they are all narrated by a non-human protagonist.

Picture Books About Overcoming Fear, opens a new window

Of course I want to offer up some reads for every member of our community, so this list of picture books is perfect for caregivers hoping to share some targeted tales with their toddlers, preschoolers, and early elementary students. All of these stories will feature the theme of overcoming fear, of which there can be a lot to deal with when you're just a little! From jitters before a music recital to a bathtub that's terrified of it's bather, these stories will tackle fear, anxiety, worries, even difficult points in a daily routine, in relatable ways for young children.

SJPL 5forU, opens a new window

If you're looking for further recommendations and aren't in the mood to browse, let us do the browsing for you! San José Public Library's 5forU team offers personalized recommendations via email. You can also fill in the profile on someone else's behalf and we can find just the right titles - perfect for caregivers looking to recommend books to their children, for book clubs stumped on what to discuss next meeting, or if you're hoping to give the gift of literature. Just fill in the profile and we'll do the rest - and remember, the more information you give us in the profile, the better and more tailored your recommendations will be! Hearing exactly why you love or hate a book gives us more clues to find your new favorite- it just so happens to be what we love to talk about, too, so don't hold back. Ready to begin your 5forU journey?

Start your 5forU Request!, opens a new window

Browse Better With Booklists

All our curated lists start with "SJPL Picks" or "SJPL Recommends"; this makes finding lists we make easy.

You can search for lists to browse curated picks! In the top-right corner of this page you will see our search bar. You need to change "keyword" to "list" from the dropdown menu to search for booklists.
Type SJPL Picks to pull up San José's lists first, and then try a genre or search term after. For example, if you were looking for aforementioned Earth Day Green Reads you could try SJPL Picks Green Reads.
Hit the magnifying glass to search and you will pull up our related lists. To see the results of the Green Reads list search above you can click this link, opens a new window. You will see our four Green Reads lists for different age groups returned first, as well as some other lists from San José's librarians. Try this search strategy for a heritage month, or your favorite genre, or even that niche subject you are looking for, and you'll be able to check out related lists in a jiffy.

Didn't find what you were looking for? Try looking at the profiles that host all our lists to browse everything we have on offer. Check out links that take you directly to our profiles in our Quick Links section below. ↓

Of course, we also curate some pretty specific lists which you may not know the term for; that's why you still need me (I hope!) to show you all the weird and wonderful ways to read with our city's collection. I have four lists to highlight for Spring to show off just how specific and expansive our collection is; one each for Adults, Teens/YA, Middle Grade readers (~grades 3-7), and Young Children.

SJPL Picks: Quick Links

If this month's featured reads aren't quite what you're in the mood for, or you're looking to expand your browsing further, try checking out any and all of the lists from our librarians on our SJPL Picks team. All our lists will be labeled "SJPL Picks" or "SJPL Recommends".