What I read in October
Plus a seasonal writing prompt
I love Halloween. I doubt that’s a surprise. But spooky season in spring is… interesting. There are beautiful jacaranda trees flowering in the streets where I live, and so everything is dusted in a layer of bright purple blooms. Seeing skeletons in peoples’ astroturfed front gardens wearing a layer of lilac flowers is unintentionally very cute.
I was reading something a little while ago about a project Carmen Maria Machado was working on (I cannot find and cannot remember the link, but I’ll update here if I can/do!), and I wrote down a line that jumped out at me:
What do we owe our ghosts?
It seemed fitting for a Halloween prompt, so, see where you go with it.
Books
Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney
Obviously.
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo/Text Publishing)
Based on Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk sends her engineer protagonist Mieczysław, suffering from tuberculosis, to convalesce at a sanatorium in the Silesian mountains. He’s staying in the guesthouse next door, and shortly after arriving there, Mieczysław comes home from a walk to find a dead woman laid out on the dining room table. The owner of the guesthouse, Opitz, apologises for the inconvenience, and bluntly tells Mieczysław that the woman was his wife. That night at dinner, Opitz and his guests ruminate on the idea that a woman’s brain is smaller than a man’s, that women are more emotional, irrational creatures, that possibly they are not entirely human at all. (Tokarczuk notes that these opinions are paraphrased from a vast tradition of male authors, including Jack Kerouac, Ovid, Charles Darwin, and Jean Paul Sartre, among others.)
But something else is not right at the sanatorium. Men die mysteriously every November, and are kept in constant supply of a liquor made from magic mushrooms. There are female spirits everywhere; in the nearby forest, but also in the floorboards, in the walls, in the mushrooms.
It’s a twisty, layered novel — part folktale, part social commentary — written in a similar vein to its 1924 predecessor. Of the Tokarczuk novels I’ve read so far (I have The Book of Jacob on my kindle, but it’s massive and I’ve not got to it yet), I think this is my favourite.
Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey (Granta)
I truly cannot believe I took so long to read this - I’ve had it on my kindle since it came out, so I need to thank
for making me promise I would read it. It’s fantastic, obviously.A woman is writing the biography of her iconic artist/writer/musician/it-girl wife, after an unauthorised biography has fabricated much of her history. As she begins to dig into X’s early life, interviewing those who knew one of her many identities - the novel is set in an alternate USA, with a seceded South divided by a wall and religious fervour - she finds that her wife is more fiction than even she had anticipated.
This month was a big reading month, and I also read: The Premonition, by Banana Yoshimoto; Hagstone, by Sinead Gleeson (this one was a reread for the return of Between Two Books); and I’m halfway through Raedon Richardson’s The Degenerates.
I’ve recently also read Daisy Johnson’s new short story collection, The Hotel, and it’s - unsurprisingly - excellent. It’s the book-form collection (with some changes) of stories she wrote for BBCR4 - which are available to listen to here - and makes for very good spooky listening.
Online reads
You’re reading Sally Rooney wrong, from
. Spot on.
If you’re trying to diversify your reading,
can help. This list is incredible.
More Sally content, but in case you, too, missed out on her conversation with Merve Emre, it’s available to read at The Paris Review.
For November, I’m going to finally read RF Kuang’s Babel with my lovely friend Nat as a little cross-hemisphere readalong. What are you reading this Halloween?
Terri-Jane x