18 Books to Fall In Love With This Autumn

St. Catherine Reading a Book by Carlo Dolci, courtesty of
Wikimedia Commons.

Autumn is one of my favorite seasons. Leaves turn yellow, orange, and red and give the light a pink cast. Besides walking in the chill wind (which hasn’t arrived here yet—it’s almost October and it’s still hitting 80), I love reading next to a window where the pink light spills on the pages of the book and I can sip hot cider.

If you’re looking for some great reads this fall, here are some recommendations.

(Please note, some of these books contain adult situations and/or language. If you don’t like something, skip it.)

Hurry Up and Read This Before The Movie Comes Out: The Martian by Andy Weir.

Upmarket/Literary Fiction: A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, The Kite Runner/A Thousand Splendid Suns/And the Mountains Echoed By Khaled Hosseini, The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

Thrillers: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (Note these first two books don’t have sympathetic main characters.) The Expats/The Accident by Chris Pavone, Until You’re Mine by Samantha Hayes, The Vanessa Michael Monroe series (The Informationist, The Catch, The Mask, etc.) by Taylor Stevens, Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Spy Thrillers: the Gabriel Allon books by Daniel Silva (The first one is called The Kill Artist).

YA: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (excellent book, even for adults), Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles: Cinder, Cress

Romance: (I don’t usually read romance. But I got this novel to review “by accident,” and it was quite good): The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

Fictionalized History: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain (about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife.)

Non-fiction: The Plantagenets by Dan Jones

Theology: Newton on the Christian Life by Tony Reinke (a distillation and explication of John Newton’s pastoral letters.)

What's Up Friday

What’s up Wednesday is a blog meme that I’ve been interested in doing for a while. But I haven’t quite gotten around to it. In the meantime here’s my What’s Up Friday.

What I’m Doing

Finishing a resume. I haven’t written one of these in two decades. Ugh. It’s interesting though—who knew there were fads in resume writing. I looked at resumes of technical writers (that’s what a lot of my past jobs have been) and I discovered some…creativity. One tech writer (currently with a very reputable laboratory) had a resume with a “cowboy theme.” In fact, one phrase mentioned “wrangling words and people.”

Why are there fads in resumes? Why can’t we just list our past jobs, list our degrees, and promise to work really hard? I mean, what else is there?

What I’m Writing

Editing. And more editing. I’m two-thirds of the way through an edit of my latest work-in-progress. The 2/3s mark is always writing/editing kryptonite for me. I’m just starting to get burned out, but not quite burned out enough to say, “What the heck.” So instead, I experience huge amounts of self-doubt. Do the themes work? Is the character development arc legitimate?  Just how underwritten is this puppy? Will anyone want to read it? And, am I EVER going to hit the necessary word count?

What I’m Reading

 

Earlier this week I got my next book to review for “Blogging for Books.” It’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. I’m not far into it, but the words and phrases are so lovely. It’s like entering a spell cast by a muse’s fairy godmother.

The setting is interesting—Chechnya, the characters are sympathetic, and pacing is spot-on, so I just hope, hope, hope that the author can pull off a wonderful plot. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

If you missed my review of the last B4B book I read, click here.

You Know You're Addicted to Books When...

You Know You’re Addicted to Books…

1. When a vacation is coming and you spend more time planning the books you will take than you do planning your vacation.

2. Now that you own an e-reader, you no longer worry when you go purse shopping whether your purse will be big enough to hold a hardback with a library binding.

3. The crack of a book spine makes you swoon.

4. You judge people by their book shelves.

5. You’ll admit to reading through a dictionary and thesaurus, but the truth is…you’ve read phone books too.

6. You’re not really sure who the Kardashians are, but you know all the emotional crises of Katniss, Tris, and Liesel.

7. You’re reading at least three books at once.

8. You own multiple copies of a favorite book, just in case you lose one.

9. Your dream dinner party involves inviting people who don’t really exist.

10. You keep a massive TBR pile because your deepest, most secret fear is that you’ll run out of good books to read.

You Had Me With Chapter One

Even though I have a stack of to-be read books, I decided to borrow a book for my Kindle from the library. (Mostly because I was sick and a lot of my to-be reads are books written by people I know and I don’t want to read their books with “sick brain.”)

I was looking for a thriller. I like the slow burn type, where the tension permeates and builds on every page even as the violence hangs on the periphery, waiting to pounce. (A five star example is Sister by Rosamund Lupton.) But being that I had sick brain that is not the type of book I borrowed. By mistake, I ended up borrowing a cozy, i.e. a mystery where the violence takes place off stage. I like mysteries, but aside from Agatha Christie, I don’t like cozies. Especially cozies that try to be funny. I’ve tried to read several of them, but they strike me as trying too hard, like a faux Noel Coward play that doesn’t quite hit the arch irony that undercuts the words. And so I never finish them.

Anyway, I downloaded the book and read the first two chapters. And I realized that it was a “funny” cozy, but I didn’t return it. I was hooked. And I read the entire book in less than 24 hours.

I’m a strong believer in reading outside your genres (those that you normally write or choose to read). I think they’re great opportunities, at least for me, to discover what it is that will pull me through a book in a genre that I don’t normally read. BTW, the book is Sick of Shadows by Sharyn McCrumb. What kept me in this book when I could’ve easily returned it and gotten another book from the comfort of my couch was that I fell in love with the main character. She had a witty, sardonic voice, which sometimes annoys me if the character uses everyone else as a butt of their own private jokes. But in this case, the author acknowledges that arrogance and undercuts it by showing the character’s own weaknesses and having her acknowledge her own failings. Clever. I really liked the MC’s relationship with her brother, who doesn’t even appear until the end of the book. The author establishes the relationship with letters that the MC writes, which the brother doesn’t answer—though the MC sometimes “answers” for him along the lines of “I know you’ll say...” and thus establishes the missing brother, his relationship with the MC, and his character—he loves his sister but hates weird family obligations. Also clever.

The bottomline: Will I read the next book in the Elizabeth MacPherson series? Probably. I really want to find out if Elizabeth falls for Milo, the hot archaeology grad student. And I need to know if Elizabeth will marry first and claim the inheritance of her crazed aunt, who promised her fortune to whomever of her nephews and nieces marries first. And you’ve got to love a series with a crazed aunt. As PG Wodehouse says, “It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.”

The Mystery of Reading

In our house, we have readers. They fall into two categories. First, we have the I’ll- read-books-in-any-format-currently available—iPod, Kindle, hardback, or loose leaf paper. And we have the you-can-have-my-hardbacks-when-you-pry-them-from-my-cold-dead-fingers readers. I used to be the latter. I love to hear the crack of a spine when a book is opened for the first time. I love the scent of the binding glue. And I love the feel of crisp paper under my fingertips. I love all those sensory experiences. A lot of people do, which is why hardbacks will never die.

But e-readers have a mystique that can’t be denied. There’s no sensory attraction; no bookish smell, no crisp feel, no sounds. But I can carry a whole library in my purse. I can still underline and take notes. I can adjust the font for my aging eyes. I can read on the treadmill without using rubberbands and paperclips. (Yes, I used to attract stares at the gym.) I can read books by authors whose novels are great, but couldn’t find a home with the big three houses (publishers).

However, none of those things are really the point. The reason I love my e-reader is the same reason I love printed books. It’s not the medium. About thirty seconds into reading, I don’t even know whether I’m turning a pages or pressing a button. Instead, I’m fencing a rogue, hunting a killer, or flirting with Mr. Darcy. (Sorry, Cal, but every woman flirts with Mr. Darcy.) And that’s one of the real reasons that people read. We travel through time and space to be another person, to think other thoughts, to be brave against all odds, and to feel other people’s pain and joy. That’s the part of reading that will never change. It’s why reading and writing will never die. 

Borrowing Library E-books

Very cool, exciting tech news for me. I borrowed an e-book from the library while wearing my jammies and eating breakfast! 

I’ve been waiting since December when I got my Kindle, hoping that libraries and Amazon could reach an agreement. They finally did. I don’t know how many books are currently available. But the book I looked for, which is a new release, was lendable through the library. Interestingly, my library had the hardback version of the book and I could have borrowed it, but they charge a fee for new releases and they don’t for e-books. Yay!

It was pretty easy to download—of course, tech-daughter has already done it so she said, “Click there, click here, click that. Now turn on your Kindle so it can download the book.” Voilà. Now I have the latest Daniel Silva book to read while I run the treadmill this afternoon.

A brave new reader’s world. No more driving to the library, trying to remember which days they are open. No more overdue fees. I’m loving it.

As for Walter the squirrel, someone gave us a humane trap (Thanks, Ken) so we're going to try catching him again. In the meantime, Walter has been a busy boy. Here he is attending a Cardinals game this week. Click here to take you to MLB and watch the video.

Friday Five

I’m no longer keeping track of how many days I’ve been sick—it’s a ridiculous number. Anyway, I’m back to reading after having my fill of Netflix, synopsis writing, and query tidying.

I finished Jane Eyre yesterday. I had plowed through most of it very quickly. And then I hit the section where Jane meets St. John (if you haven’t read the book, it’s the name of a man who’s her cousin and wants to marry her). Ugh. That section dragged on and on. I had to force myself to read it. Of course, as soon as Jane bailed on St John, the narrative picked up and I was hooked again. I suspect Ms. Bronte could have used a bit of judicious editing at that point. (I know, I speak sacrilege to some—sorry.)

Now I’m trying to decide what to read next. My only two rules are:

1. It has to be a classic.

2. It can’t be Russian. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Russians. But they make me so depressed, and that’s not fair to my family. My plan is to read the Russians when the kids are grown.

I’ve read a ton of classics—I was a lit major back in the day when each class required the reading of one to two novels/oeuvres per week. It was like drinking from a literary firehose. But there are still so many great books that I haven’t read. So in the manner of the Friday Fives, which I haven’t done in a longer time (Sorry, Andrew), here are the choices that I’m considering:

1. Don Quixote—Cervantes (When Ariel was assigned this for a class, she read portions aloud to me. Hilarious and clever.)

2. Vanity Fair—Thackeray (I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Thackeray.)

3. Tender is the Night—Fitzgerald (I’m a FSF fan, but I haven’t read this one.)

4. The Moonstone—Collins (Arguably the first mystery novel ever written)

5. The Picture of Dorian Gray—Wilde (I love Wilde’s wit.)

Readers, help me, which shall I read? BTW, if you have a personal favorite that’s not up here, feel free to list it. If I haven’t read it, I’ll consider it.