The Reading Room

Welcome to The Reading Room

Hi, hello, welcome 👋

If you’ve found your way here — I’m so glad you did. I’m Toni. I’m a developmental editor, a bookseller, a mom, and a person who has genuinely never met a TBR pile she didn’t immediately make too ambitious 😆

For years, most of my writing about books has lived on Instagram — in captions and comments and DM threads with the incredible community over at @readwithtoni. Those conversations are honestly some of the best parts of my week. But I’ve been wanting a quieter space. Somewhere I can think out loud a little longer about the things I care about most: how stories work, why certain books stay with us long after we’ve finished them, and what it’s actually like to spend your days inside other people’s manuscripts.

54 Miles

A new favorite by Pitts?

Together, a group of readers and I have read (some were a reread for a few of us) though Leonard Pitts Jr.’s backlist and let me tell you, it was amazing. Reading them in order of publication we really got a chance to see him hone his craft. From the beginning though, we could see his strength, his ability to write well-developed characters.

54 Miles was new to me (I had been saving it to read with the group), it followed some characters from his previous book The Last Thing You Surrender and I loved it even more than Surrender. It even rivals my absolute favorite by him, Freeman so I guess I’ll just say the two are tied for that spot.

The Last Thing You Surrender

“Make sure your decency, your humanity, is the last thing you give up.”

Summary - Set during World War II, that explores themes of race, war, and morality through the interconnected stories of three characters from Jim Crow Alabama: a white Marine, a Black woman working in a shipyard, and a Black man who joins the segregated 761st Tank Battalion. The novel follows their individual struggles with prejudice on the home front and the battlefield, examining how the war forces them to confront their beliefs about race and what it means to be an American.

Lightbreakers

No good life is free from unease, because unease is the start of exploration.

Summary - A speculative fiction novel about a quantum physicist, Noah, who joins a secret time-travel project in a desert lab to revisit his deceased daughter, while his artist wife, Maya, gets drawn into the lab’s mysteries and her own past. The book explores themes of love, grief, memory, and the nature of time, blending science fiction with a deeply human story about loss and connection. It’s praised for its emotional depth, complex characters, and genre-bending narrative.

Love Forms

It depends on the lens… Summary - Love Forms is about a Trinidadian woman, Dawn, who, at 58, embarks on a journey to find the daughter she gave up for adoption at 16 in Venezuela, exploring themes of maternal love, loss, and identity across Trinidad, Venezuela, and London. The book, longlisted for the Booker Prize, follows Dawn’s life after the adoptionmarriage, children, divorceas she grapples with her past and the possibility of reconnecting with her lost child.

Caller Unknown

This book terrified me…

An eighteen-year-old daughter kidnapped from under the same roof as a mother? Number one fear right there.

Summary - A high-stakes thriller where Simone, on a Texas vacation with her daughter Lucy, wakes to find her kidnapped and a burner phone left behind. The kidnapper demands she follow strict, illegal instructions rather than pay money, forcing her into a desperate, morally grey, and fast-paced, action-packed race across the desert to save her child.

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

For fans of Betty…

Summary - A dark, coming-of-age story told from the perspectives of two young sisters, Edie and Mae, who navigate a ctional home life with their unstable mother, Marianne. The book explores themes of family trauma, mental illness, and the intense bond between the sisters as they cope with their mother’s severe depression and their father’s absence.

I made it to around the 30% point thinking “dark” wasn’t very dark but then, it got DARK. If you enjoyed Betty by Tiffany McDaniel’s and/or darker books, I highly recommend this one HOWEVER 1. check trigger warnings and 2. go with the physical format. I did audio and there are a lot of different voices, which was a good way to gain objective perspective, but not great when you missed the viewpoint at the start of a chapter.

2026 Read to Learn Book List

The entire list of 2026 Read to Learn books!

Books transport us, books open our eyes, and books teach us new things. I equally love fiction and nonfiction. Should books be an escape, absolutely, but I also feel very strongly that if we aren’t also learning new concepts, new perspectives, new information then how can we grow as people.

Each year I compile books that I think hit on relevant, important issues that the world is dealing with, but also some books that teach us about pieces of history that we may have been misinformed about. I have previously shared the titles in quarterly posts but I wanted to be able to pin one post to the top so that others who don’t know about the group can easily find out the info!

Leonard Pitts Jr. Winter Reading Project

Who’s looking for a winter project??

Leonard Pitts Jr. is one of the most underrated authors of our time.

I first read Freeman way back in 2015, pre-bookstagram. Freeman was a masterpiece, I knew I had stumbled upon someone special. Fast forward to 2020 when I read a second book by him, The Last Thing You Surrender which may have impacted me even more?!

AND I RARELY (if ever) SEE ANY OF HIS BOOKS HERE.

Care work

“A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.”

Summary - A collection of essays about disability justice, a movement that centers the experiences of sick, disabled, queer, and trans people of color. The book is a “toolkit” for building resilient and sustainable communities by promoting concepts like “care webs,” where communities collectively provide support and resources to one another, and “collective access,” where access is seen as a shared responsibility rather than a chore. It addresses difficult topics like suicide, trauma, and emotional labor while ultimately offering a hopeful vision for a future where no one is left behind.