Café Sundaze Menu: May 2025

From what I plan to read to our big trip of the year, here’s what’s on the cards this month.

Hello May!

We’re hurtling through 2025 at a rate of knots and, for once, I’m not hugely panicking about it. There’s lots in store this summer and we’ll be enjoying the final dances of spring in South Korea and Japan. Yay! Life recently has been a glorious bloom of sunny walks, cosy writing evenings, and finally enjoying my Netflix subscription again. My brother took on paying for my original Netflix account as a birthday present in 2014, and I finally lost access to it a few months ago. Now I have a shiny new account that thinks my boyfriend and I have never watched a single TV series or film in our lives. But, it’s sort of nice to have the streaming service back again.

April was a month of two halves for me: sickness, then playing catch-up. Work life has been a little tumultuous, and it provided plenty of writing fodder, but also helped to inspire my motivation for novel-writing. It feels like 2025 so far has been a waiting room for the next eight months.

On the TBR

May’s reading list is themed around books by South Korean and Japanese authors, in celebration and commemoration of our big trip across the two countries. I’ll of course be packing my Kindle for our travels – hence adding two eARCs to this list – but there’s plenty of time in a month to read widely across this list and perhaps even beyond.

• Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa (reread)

• Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum

• Before We Forget Kindness by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

• People Pleaser by Catriona Stewart (NetGalley ARC)

• Soyangri Book Kitchen by Kim Jee Hye (NetGalley ARC)

What I’m searching for on Vinted

• Sézane trench coat

• Everlane ‘The Cheeky’ jeans (although I may cave and buy these new since I can’t find my leg length secondhand, which has always been the draw for me!)

• Damson Madder

• Lian Hearn books