RECOMMENDS ROUND-UP: OCTOBER BOOK PICKS
We like books. You like books. Maybe we should talk about books?
Or better yet, we’ll let Laura Jaye Cramer - person-who-reads-books - lead us both through the best and brightest of September’s release schedule. It’s a month of Halloween and it feels like Laura Jaye Cramer has dug into some deeply weird books - Gone Girl meets the Room, a woman falls into hole, Tana French does American cops in the wilds of Ireland and much much more.
OCT. 6th
Bright and Dangerous Objects
Anneliese Mackintosh
Tin House
Having a baby is...cool, right? And, um, it’s cool if we don’t think it’s cool, too, right? If you couldn’t tell, I’m a woman in my thirties, and babies are a whole thing. Which is why Anneliese Mackintosh’s Bright and Dangerous Objects is bound to strike a cord with its audience. Solvig, a commercial deep sea diver, aspires to be one of the first humans to colonize Mars—which would obviously get in the way of her plans to start a family. It’s a premise as ridiculous and scary as planning parenthood itself.
Daughter of Black Lake
Cathy Marie Buchanan
Flatiron Books
I’d like to be transported to any time aside from the present. Not permanently, just, you know, long enough to ride all of this out, or to get some perspective. And Daughter of the Black Lake delivers just that: Set during the Roman occupation of Iron Age Britain, Buchanan’s third novel (following The Painted Girls and The Day the Falls Stood Still and —both New York Times Best Sellers) is equal parts historical fiction, mysticism, and October-worthy pagan rituals.
Dear Child
Romy Hausmann
Penguin Books
I have very complicated feelings about anything even the tiniest bit scary, so book releases in October tend to be a real mixed bag for me. But since I’ve dipped my toes in the pitch-black swamp that is reality-based-quasi-horror with Kate Reed Petty’s True Story, I can (almost confidently) say I’m good to give another chilling read a shot. Romy Hausmann’s Dear Child bills itself as Gone Girl meets Room, and since trick-or-treating is canceled this year, on Halloween you can find me hunkered down with a copy and a bowl of candy considering my impending death instead.
Little Big Bully
Heid E. Erdrich
Penguin Books
If 2020 could be summed up in one phrase, it would be how did we come to this? That’s exactly the question Ojibwe author Heid E. Erdrich explores in Little Big Bully, her seventh book of poetry, and it couldn’t feel more timely. Add it to your shelf on Monday the 11th, Indigeonous Peoples’ Day.
The Hole
Hiroko Oyamada
New Directions
During a particularly angsty rut in my teens I didn’t read much. I didn’t read at all, actually, which confused and concerned anyone who knew me well. A friend pulled a type of book-nerd “intervention” and lent me a copy of Haruki Murukami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle—which I ate up in a single sitting. Presumably because a large chunk of the plot involves the protagonist sitting alone at the bottom of a well, I was next recommended Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes, which solidified my thought that Japanese novels about seeking out or being trapped in pits might be my genre of choice. So with Oyamada’s The Hole, a story whose plot revolves around a woman falling into a hole, I’m already hooked.
Tana French fans like to describe her writing with the type of fervor usually reserved for sports cars or Rihanna. No less than three times I’ve been cornered at a party by a slightly wine-drunk Tana Francophile demanding of me, “but seriously, have you even read In the Woods?” For them: The Searcher, French’s latest crime-fiction-come-psychological-thriller.
Laura Jaye Cramer is an outspoken advocate for Dolly Parton, baby orangutans, and free refills.
