For the longest time, autumn has been my favorite season. It’s not crazy warm or crazy cold and it’s much more socially acceptable to stay inside and read a book all day. And since I forgot to do Summer Reading Recommendations this year, I figured I’d recommend you books to read this Autumn instead. Be prepared for all the autumn essentials to keep you company through the best season of the year.
Pumpkin Spice Latte
It’s the staple of autumn, so these are the books not to be missed
Unsheltered
Barbara Kingsolver
Read if you enjoy: Historical fiction that’s heavy on the emotion.
What is it about: Willa always thought of herself as responsible, but when she reaches middle age, she has nothing to show for it. Her house is falling apart, she and her husband recently got fired and her kids are back living at home. To at least keep her home, Willa starts to research its history in hope of getting the preservation society involved. Through this, she meets a kindred soul in scientist Thatcher, who had plenty of troubles of his own in the 1880’s.
She Would Be King
Wayétu Moore
Read if you enjoy: Magical fiction about actual historical events.
What is it about: Reimagining the early years of Liberia, She Would Be King centers around three characters who meet in a settlement and a nation forms around them. Besides them, there a magical realism element in the voice of the fleeting wind that holds an ancient wisdom.
Cozy Sweater Weather
In autumn, all I want is to wear a comfy sweater with sleeves pulled over my hands and dig into some dark YA
A Sky Painted Gold
Laura Wood
Read if you enjoy: I Capture the Castle and the dreamy British countryside.
What is it about: Growing up in a sleepy Cornish village, Lou is sixteen and dreams of being a writer. When the house next door finally has new owners, she gets swept off her feet by the new glamorous owners and drawn into their Gatsby-esque world. But is Lou abandoning her own dreams for this and are her neighbors as dreamy as they look?
The Loneliest Girl in the Universe
Lauren James
Read if you enjoy: Space Opera’s that have romance and twists coming left and right.
What is it about: Ronny is the only surviving member on a spaceship on its way to a new planet. During the trip, she figures out how to communicate via email with a boy on another spaceship. And even though it takes months to send and receive a single email, Ronny finds herself falling in love.
Thick Wool Socks
Put on your warmest socks and settle in to read some big novels
The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead
Read if you enjoy: Jonathan Franzen recommendations
What is it about: A brutally honest examination of domestic life and family. Sam and Henny have too much contempt for each other, have too many children and too many obligations. Henny watches on desperately, while Sam torments his children by manipulating their seemingly endless love.
The Sea, The Sea
Iris Murdoch
Read if you enjoy: A more literary version of the lives in Big Little Lies.
What is it about: When Charles Arrowby retires from his glittering career in the London theatre, he buys a remote house on the rocks by the sea. He hopes to escape from his tumultuous love affairs but unexpectedly bumps into his childhood sweetheart and sets his heart on destroying her marriage. His equilibrium is further disturbed when his friends all decide to come and keep him company and Charles finds his seaside idyll severely threatened by his obsessions.
Halloween
Autumn isn’t all cutesy, it’s also spooooky
We Eat Our Own
Kea Wilson
Read if you enjoy: Realistic horror like Heart of Darkness
What is it about: A struggling actor gets a call from an important director to come to the Amazon for a film. There he quickly realizes that he’s second choice and the first actor quit after seeing the script. Stuck in the jungle, the whole project is close to falling apart, but what the actor doesn’t realize, is that the greatest threat might actually be the small town they’re staying in.
Nyctophobia
Christopher Fowler
Read if you enjoy: haunted house stories and don’t mind losing sleep over them.
What is it about: There are two things you need to know about haunted houses. One, there’s never been an actual authenticated haunted house. Two, it’s not the house that’s haunted, but the person. Newlyweds Callie and Mateo move into a grand house in southern Spain. It has all the makings of a haunted house: a mute gardener, a sinister housekeeper and a sealed room no one has a key for.
Cinnamon Scented Candles
Smells can transport you back into fond memories, so why not back in time with historical fiction?
As Meat Loves Salt
Maria McCann
Read if you enjoy: Some MM erotica in your historical fiction.
What is it about: It’s the 17th century and the English Revolution is underway. Jacob Cullen and his fellow soldiers dream of rebuilding their lives when the fighting is over, but then he meets a man and falls in love. Jacob’s an angry man and his passionate relationship could be the end of him, especially since being gay is a hanging offense.
Bone Talk
Candy Gourlay
Read if you enjoy: beautiful covers and stories about the American Filipino war.
What is it about: A boy named Samkad thinks he knows everything about the world. He wants to become a man and a warrior. His friend Luki wants the same, but she’s a girl and that has never happened before. But everything changes when a new boy arrives in the village. He knows none of the things Samkad and Luki do but does bring news of a people called Americans and their destruction.
Autumn Colored Leaves
Autumn just looks great in pictures, so these are some covers worth photographing.
The Overstory
Richard Powers
Read if you enjoy: interlocking stories with a message and a hint of the supernatural.
What is it about: An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.
Everything Under
Daisy Johnson
Read if you enjoy: Retellings of classic myths with modern and magical twists.
What is it about: Gretel grew up on a canal boat with her mother, inventing a language together that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, but then a phone call interrupts Gretel’s isolation. She begins to remember their old language, but also stranger things from their time on the boat. To find out what was actually going on, Gretel has to go back.
Turn up the Heat
Some steamy romance novels to read inside when it’s cooling down outside
Call Me By Your Name
André Aciman
Read if you enjoy: LGBT romances, or of course, the recent adaptation of this book.
What is it about: Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime.
The Light We Lost
Jill Santopolo
Read if you enjoy: The kind of romance story that needs lots and lots of tissues to stop you from ugly crying.
What is it about: Lucy and Gabe meet as seniors at Columbia University on a day that changes both of their lives forever. Together, they decide they want their lives to mean something, to matter. When they meet again a year later, it seems fated—perhaps they’ll find life’s meaning in each other. But then Gabe becomes a photojournalist assigned to the Middle East and Lucy pursues a career in New York. What follows is a thirteen-year journey of dreams, desires, jealousies, betrayals, and, ultimately, of love.
Umbrella’s Galore
Honestly, umbrella’s have nothing to do with graphic novels, but I was out of ideas, so just let me have this one
Beverly
Nick Drnaso
Read if you enjoy: Black comedy like those of Daniel Clowes and Todd Solondz. Also read if you were disappointed that Drnaso didn’t make it to the Man Booker Short List.
What is it about: A group of teenagers pick up trash on the side of the highway–flirting, preening, and ignoring a potentially violent loner in their midst. A college student brings her sort-of boyfriend to a disastrous house party with her high-school acquaintances. A young woman experiences a traumatic incident at the pizza shop where she works and the fallout reveals the racial tensions simmering below the surface. Again and again, the civilized façade of Drnaso’s pitch-perfect suburban sprawl and pasty Midwestern protagonists cracks in the face of violence and quiet brutality.
Days of Hate
Aleš Kot
Read if you enjoy: Dark visions of the future with stunning artwork.
What is it about: The United States of America, 2022.
The loss that ripped them apart drove Huian into the arms of the police state and Amanda towards a guerrilla war against the white supremacy. Now they meet again.
This is a story of a war.
Pumpkin Pie
Pie is better in slices and so are these short story collections
The Lonesome Bodybuilder
Yukiko Motoya
Read if you enjoy: Japanese weird that will make you go, what did I just read?
What is it about: Stories about the bizarre, grotesque, fantastic and alien. A housewife takes up bodybuilding, but her workaholic husband fails to notice the change, a woman working in a clothing shop waits for something to finally come out of the fitting room and a wife notices her husband’s face is starting to look like her own.
The Age of Perpetual Light
Josh Weil
Read if you enjoy: Collections with a clear theme, if you’re really into electricity or if you like very sad stories.
What is it about: A collection of short stories starting at the early days of electricity and moving towards an imagined future in which the world is lit day and night. Weil moves through the decades, telling stories of light and shadow.
Wrap Yourself in Blankets
You’re too comfortable, all wound up in your blanket, to hold a book. So listen to one instead.
Live Work Work Work Die
Corey Pein
Read if you enjoy: workplace journalism that will turn your vision of Silicon Valley upside down.
What is it about: At the height of the startup boom, journalist Corey Pein set out for Silicon Valley with little more than a smartphone and his wits. His goal: to learn how such an overhyped industry could possibly sustain itself as long as it has. Determined to cut through the clichés of big tech—the relentless optimism, the incessant repetition of vacuous buzzwords—Pein decided that he would need to take an approach as unorthodox as the companies he would soon be covering. To truly understand the delirious reality of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he knew, he would have to inhabit that perspective—he would have to become an entrepreneur.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman
Read if you enjoy: Reese Witherspoon’s book club.
What is it about: Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions. Everything changes when she meets Raymond, the bumbling IT guy from her office. They save an elderly gentleman who’s fallen on the sidewalk and the three become friends.
Layers Upon Layers Upon Layers
We wear layers and read book series in autumn.
CoDex 1962
Sjón
Read if you enjoy: Experimental fiction that’s very strange and confusing, but rewarding at the end.
What is it about: A Jewish fugitive has an affair with a German maid during WWII. Together, they form a baby made from clay. The first part of this series is a love story, the second a murder mystery and the final part a science fiction story.
Outline
Rachel Cusk
Read if you enjoy: Thoughtful novels about real life that will transport you to wonderful cities.
What is it about: A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives.
Warm Sun on a Crisp Autumn Day
The sun is fleeting though, but it will be around long enough to finish these novellas.
Dog Symphony
Sam Munson
Read if you enjoy: Another strange novella called Fever Dream, but also Borges and Kafka.
What is it about: Boris is a professor specializing in the history of prison architecture. He gets invited to Buenos Aires and will be reunited again with his colleague – and sometimes lover – Ana. Once arrived, Boris encounters one obstacle after another. He can’t find Ana, gets locked out of his room and discovers dog-feeding stations outside every house. With night approaching, he finds himself lost and alone in a foreign city filled with stray dogs, all flowing with sinister, bewildering purpose through the darkness.
Jillian
Halle Butler
Read if you enjoy: The literary equivalent of tv show You’re the Worst.
What is it about: Megan, recently out of college and working a meaningless job as a gastroenterologist’s secretary, openly hates all of her friends for being happy and successful. She makes herself feel better by obsessively critiquing the behavior of her coworker, Jillian, a rapid cycling, grotesque optimist, whose downfall is precipitated by the purchase of a dog.
Hot Apple Cider
A classic autumn drink that pairs well with some classic literature.
The Tartar Steppe
Dino Buzzati
Read if you enjoy: Kafka, Italian literature and absurdist existentialism.
What is it about: A scathing critique on military life and a meditation on human thirst for glory. It’s the story of Giovanni, who’s posted to a distant fort overlooking the Tartar Steppe. Not intending to stay, Giovanni suddenly finds that years have passed, almost without his noticing. With the others, he waits for an invasion that never seems to happen.
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Joan Lindsay
Read if you enjoy: BBC series (yes, it’s adapted), and old mystery novels.
What is it about: It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three of the girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared.
Pine Cones
Because honestly, these things are so weird, they might as well come from space.
The Sparrow
Mary Doria Russell
Read if you enjoy: a book that questions both our humanity and religion and is underrated sci-fi written by a woman.
What is it about: In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet that will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question what it means to be “human”.
The Poppy War
R.F. Kuang
Read if you enjoy: Fantasy with rich worldbuilding that will completely pull you in.
What is it about: Rin aced the Keju, an Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to study at the Academies. It was a shock to everyone, as Rin is an orphan from the poor part of the Empire. She gets into the most elite military school but finds that life there is hard and is targeted because of her color, poverty, and gender. Rin figured out she has an aptitude for the mythical art of shamanism and that gods long thought dead, are very much alive.
Back to school
Autumn also means going back to school, which isn’t a bad thing as long as you have good non-fiction books!
This is Going to Hurt
Adam Kay
Read if you enjoy: Hospital TV shows, with less soapy drama and more real-life problems.
What is it about: Adam Kay was a junior doctor for six years before a devastating experience caused him to reconsider his future. Keeping a diary during his training, the book shares stories from the front line and reflects on the current crisis.
The World in a Grain
Vince Beiser
Read if you enjoy: Fascinating facts about very mundane things and if you’re environmentally conscious, but didn’t yet know about sand being an issue.
What is it about: After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other–even more than oil. And we’re running out of it. The World in a Grain is the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with it–and sometimes, even kill for it.
Bored to Death book club 
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