ten books you should read this early autumn

postcard 23: on books you should read during the season of the early autumn chill

Aug 30, 2024

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

[This post gets cut off on the email, so read it in the app or on your desktop <3]

Transitions between seasons are more exciting and special to me than the seasons itself, and my favorite is the transition from late summer to early autumn. Not much is different, and the weather isn’t either, but there’s this very slight change in feeling and the quiet mornings that make it such a good time to read more atmospheric books.

The very obvious fall reads will be in my reading guide next week (I’m talking The Secret History, The Picture of Dorian Gray, etc). I define the books on this list as more in-between. They are atmospheric, almost summery but a bit colder and a bit more melancholic.

This was supposed to be a paid post but I’ve made it free in hopes that this inspires someone to read or find a book that they end up loving! I think early September is the best time to read as much as you can. I’ve linked the Goodreads link and attached a synopsis for convenience.

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

For years Carmen Maria Machado has struggled to articulate her experiences in an abusive same-sex relationship. In this extraordinarily candid and radically inventive memoir, Machado tackles a dark and difficult subject with wit, inventiveness, and an inquiring spirit as she uses a series of narrative tropes—including classic horror themes—to create an entirely unique piece of work that is destined to become an instant classic.

This is unlike anything I have ever, ever read before. Beautiful, raw, haunting, and innovative. The memoir is written in a way that seems like a manifestation of real memories—fragmented, dreamlike, hazy vignettes that are not quite poems or lyrics or prose, but somewhere in between.

While it is not straightforward like a conventional memoir, Machado writes with devastating vulnerability and a propulsive cadence that makes this book impossible to put down despite the heaviness of the subject. In The Dream House reads like a folklore or fairytale anthology; like the actual process of building a house, each of Machado's kaleidoscopic chapters amounts to a complete account of an intimate history of her life and her relationship with her former partner. This memoir is absolutely perfect. Like one of the chapter titles, this book is an unexpected kindness.

Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offhill

Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

Dept. of Speculation is a paradox—it is sparsely written, told in vignettes, yet overwhelming. Offhill’s novel is a quiet, moving meditation on love, marriage, motherhood, and the fleetingness of being human. She is able to connect all of these short anecdotes and seemingly unrelated pieces, weaving together this tapestry that is so unique and special.

I adore books with characters that feel real, like this could be the story of my neighbor or the woman I see at the bus stop every day on the way to work. Dept. of Speculation is tangible and personal, and sometimes it feels almost untoward to be reading the story of someone in their most vulnerable moments because it is so easy to forget that the characters are fictional.

Don’t Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier

Patrick McGrath's revelatory new selection of du Maurier's stories shows her at her most chilling and most psychologically astute: a dead child reappears in the alleyways of Venice; routine eye surgery reveals the beast within to a meek housewife; nature revolts against man's abuse by turning a benign species into an annihilating force; a dalliance with a beautiful stranger offers something more dangerous than a broken heart. McGrath draws on the whole of du Maurier's long career and includes surprising discoveries together with famous stories like "The Birds". Don't Look Now is a perfect introduction to a peerless storyteller.

While Rebecca is by far her most famous work, Daphne Du Maurier’s bibliography is a treasure trove for cozy, unsettling autumn books to read on a crisp September night. What makes Du Maurier’s stories such captivating reads is that she pays attention to the emotions of the characters, not skimping out on them for the sake of moving the plot along. Because she has such an excellent understanding of her characters and what makes them upset and angry—is it jealousy? Grief? Paranoia?—it makes for a gripping read, where not a single word is wasted, to create a tension-filled short story.

Don’t Look Now is a great collection of her best short stories and a good introduction to her other books if you read Rebecca and enjoyed it. It carries the classic elements of gothic literature while reading like contemporary writing.

Self Help by Lorrie Moore

In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.

Jo March (2019): “Women…”

Self Help, although a short read, is a mighty one. shrouded in Moore’s signature razor-sharp wit and humor, the stories are simply moving, gut-wrenching, and brilliant. Her writing style has a unique balance between clinical and lyrical and it brought a muted sort of melancholy—the kind that creeps up on you and then eventually overwhelms you without realizing it.

Self Help is never too light yet never too solemn. While some parts were so viscerally devastating (What Is Seized absolutely broke me), Moore’s darkly funny narrative makes it bearable and entertaining. Many of the short stories are ironically written in a ‘self-help’ format. None of it is ‘helpful’.

at the core of Self Help are stories about lonely women. none of them have fully formed character profiles; we intrude on their lives during the most pivotal and perhaps most vulnerable moments when their lives are on the precipice of changing forever. A woman becomes the other woman, another deals with terminal cancer and mortality, and a third battles depression. Of mothers and daughters, of daughters and mothers.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

What he hears will change everything. Egged on by his wife, he decides to kill in order to gain the Scottish crown. How many people will have to die in Macbeth's pursuit of power? With armies, ghosts and magic against him, will Macbeth survive in this tale of greed and betrayal? Getting the crown is one thing - keeping it is quite another.

This is Shakespeare’s best and most nuanced play, and along with Richard III, my favorite of his. Macbeth is a platter of humanity’s darkest emotions, but it is also a philosophical rumination on a very complicated man with very complicated ambitions. Shakespeare plays on the concept of the Aristotelian tragic hero, twisting it so that it becomes a character study of a fascinating former national hero who vacillates between corrupt ambition and honor, truly believing that he is fated to act that way. Macbeth is a labyrinth of greed, morals, ambitions, and fate versus free will.

Additionally, Lady Macbeth is one of the most complicated and captivating female villains in literature, as she contributes to Macbeth’s eternal struggle between his conceived fate and supposed free will. The play is purely worth a read (or a reread for closer examination) for her as well.

Autumn by Ali Smith

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.

Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.

Perhaps the most obvious one on this list, Autumn is a self-explanatory read for fall. This was one of my favorite books to read last year, so much so that I questioned how I had just read it when I had seen it in bookstores and on Goodreads for years. The flow of this book is so effortless and feels like it simply just latches onto your brainwaves (this book got me out of a massive reading slump). Autumn is the first book of Smith’s seasonal quartet series, so it’s nice to start with this one and work your way through the seasons (ending with Summer).

I’m not sure how exactly to describe this book, because it’s such an amalgamation of subjects and themes, with no linear timeline. It’s more of a vague rumination of life’s biggest questions—about friendship, aging, love, and how to treat life with kindness even in times of bleakness. Smith’s writing is unadorned yet profound, and it is up to the reader to be able to read between the lines and find a deeper meaning. This is such a lovely and thoughtful book to start the season with.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

the virgin suicides

Elle

Mar 18

"Obviously, doctor, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

Read full story

The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time.

The Virgin Suicides is a tale of the obsession and immortalization of five teenage sisters by a Greek chorus-esque group of boys. Amid the lyrical beauty in the prose, there is an underlying sinisterness, an impending sense of doom. Everything feels sticky, humid, and suffocating—from the insular, mass-produced homes in the suburb where the sisters live, the claustrophobic and uniform male gaze, to the physically decaying neighborhood covered in dead flies and a rotting smell.

This book is best read at the tail end of summer or the very start of autumn. Like the changing leaves and the chill in the weather, The Virgin Suicides is beautifully written but is drenched in anticipatory dread. Eugenides is excellent in conveying this claustrophobia and anxiety to the readers.

Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

In an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura leads a solitary life with only her ailing father for company. Until one moonlit night, a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view, carrying an unexpected guest – the beautiful Carmilla. So begins a feverish friendship between Laura and her mysterious, entrancing companion.

But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day… Pre-dating Dracula by twenty-six years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in sexual tension and gothic romance.

Carmilla is a lesser-known gothic classic, but a 19th-century gem nonetheless. A sapphic vampire classic (most likely the first or one of the first of its kind in both genres), Carmilla is adorned in effortless poetic writing and macerated in anticipatory dread, which makes for the best early autumn classic. While Dracula exemplifies a late October evening, Carmilla feels more like a 3AM September night.

The short read follows Laura, who is enchanted by the sudden appearance of Carmilla, a mysterious young girl who becomes a guest in her house. They soon become close friends, and a mysterious plight begins to affect young women in her town. Le Fanu’s novel is thrilling, erotic, and impossible to put down. If you also rewatch The Vampire Diaries every fall like me, you will love this.

The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer

Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived at her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for the big, impersonal city. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. Natalie doesn't know what she wants. She reads advice listicles and watches videos online and thinks about how to fit in, how to really become someone, who that someone even is.

Just as she is trying to find her footing, she meets Nora, an older woman who takes an unexpected interest in her. Natalie is drawn magnetically into Nora's orbit. She begins spending more and more of her time off-campus at Nora's perfect home living in her beautiful, quiet world. She lies to her floormates about her absence, inventing a secret boyfriend called Paul, and carefully protects this intimate, sacred adulthood she is building for herself. But when it becomes clear that Nora is lying, too, her secrets begin to take an insidious shape in Natalie's life, even as Natalie tries to look away. What, or who, is Nora hiding?

There has been an abundance of 'sad girl' coming-of-age novels about women in their twenties navigating life. many times, they follow the same formula and do not add anything to the general discourse. Fischer's book was different. She has a unique ability to spin the mundane into something so tender and beautiful.

I feel like the cusp of your twenties (the last year of being a teenager) is something so fragile in how long it lasts and how it feels. The Adult manages to exactly encapsulate these elusive feelings of insecurity and longing, almost desperation, for stability. the writing was crisp but the characters were handled with empathy and depth. even in the moments that feel more ‘slice-of-life’ than plot-heavy, the tension is still there; the dialogue and introspection are still razor-sharp. Just such a great coming-of-age story all around.

On The Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel

Arcade and Daffodil are twin sisters born one minute apart. With their fiery red hair and thirst for an escape, they forge an unbreakable bond nurtured by both their grandmother's stories and their imaginations. Together, they create a world where a patch of grass reveals an archaeologist's dig, the smoke emerging from the local paper mill becomes the dust rising from wild horses galloping on the ground, and an abandoned 1950s convertible transforms into a time machine that can take them anywhere.

But the two sisters can't escape the generational chaos that grips their family. Growing up in the shadow of the town, the sisters cling tight to one another. As an adult, Arcade wrestles with these memories of her life, just as a local woman is discovered drowned in the river. Soon, more bodies are found. While her friends disappear around her, Arcade is forced to reckon with the past while the killer circles ever closer. Arcade's promise to keep herself and her sister safe becomes increasingly desperate while the powerful riptide of the savage side becomes more difficult to resist.

The narrative of On The Savage Side is brutal and unforgiving. The novel follows the twins, Arc and Daffy, as they navigate destitute poverty while trying to escape generational trauma that haunts the women of their family. Told in a dual time frame of when the twins are 10 and 20, McDaniel brilliantly portrays the horrors of girlhood and being a woman through Arc and Daffy's bleak lives while showing them authorial kindness.

This book is not so much a whodunit as it is an empathetic tale of the victims and by extension, the women in the town. Every man in the book has the capability of committing the grisliest of crimes and has already done so. Instead of writing a classic mystery/thriller formula, McDaniel makes the main focus of her book humanizing the women who are historically always scapegoated and ignored in society.