Things I’m Looking Forward to This Fall

Pumpkins.
Apple cider.
Sweaters.
Tights.
Boots.
Soups and chowders.
Knit hats.
Halloween.
Rustling leaves.
And reading!

I always love reading, but autumn is my favorite time of year to do so. There’s something about the cool, dark nights that make it so comforting. I’ve been trying to catch up on my backlist reading, as well as keep up with upcoming releases. That is what the following list is: a mix of the two. Will I get all of the following read? No, probably not, but it’s a good place to start.

In no particular order:

10. Blood and Salt // Kim LIggett. September 22, 2015. “Romeo and Juliet meets Children of the Corn in this one-of-a-kind romantic horror.”

09. Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky // David Connerley Nahm. “Leah’s little brother, Jacob, disappeared when the pair were younger, a tragedy that haunts her still. When a grown man arrives at the non-profit Leah directs claiming to be Jacob, she is wrenched back to her childhood, an iridescent tableau of family joy and strife, swimming at the lake, sneaking candy, late-night fears, and the stories told to quell them.

Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky reads as though Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson wrote a more focused Antwerp and based it in central Kentucky. A gorgeous, haunting, prismatic jewel of a book.”

08. She Came From Beyond! // Nadine Darling. October 13, 2015. “A darkly comic debut novel, a hilariously told story of love, attachment, anxiety, and nerd culture.

Easy Hardwick has it made. At just about thirty, she’s got a tumbledown cottage in small-town Oregon and an uncomplicated acting gig as the space-babe eye candy on a sci-fi parody show. She spends her downtime online, bickering with fans and fellow culture vultures about film trivia and relishing her minor-but-satisfying celebrity.

Enter Harrison. What begins as a jocular online flirtation spills into a messy IRL affair, and Easy finds herself pregnant with twins and sharing her home with the love of her life…plus the teenage daughter, baby son, and slightly unhinged, soon-to-be-ex wife she kind of didn’t totally know he had.”

07. Haints Stay // Colin Winnette. “Brooke and Sugar are killers. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles, there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people.

The story follows the middling bounty hunters after they’ve been chased from town, and Bird, each in pursuit of their own sense of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West’s first one-armed gunslinger.”

06. Calf // Andrea Kleine. October 13, 2015. “Part Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret and part Taxi Driver, this creepy, unsettling, and absolutely addictive novel is at once a penetrating character study, a meditation on the zeitgeist of the ’80s, and an unflinching depiction of violence, both intimate and sensational.”

05. Avenue of Mysteries // John Irving. November 3, 2015. In Avenue of Mysteries, Juan Diego—a fourteen-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Mexico—has a thirteen-year-old sister. Her name is Lupe, and she thinks she sees what’s coming—specifically, her own future and her brother’s. Lupe is a mind reader; she doesn’t know what everyone is thinking, but she knows what most people are thinking. Regarding what has happened, as opposed to what will, Lupe is usually right about the past; without your telling her, she knows all the worst things that have happened to you.

Lupe doesn’t know the future as accurately. But consider what a terrible burden it is, if you believe you know the future—especially your own future, or, even worse, the future of someone you love. What might a thirteen-year-old girl be driven to do, if she thought she could change the future?

As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. As we grow older—most of all, in what we remember and what we dream—we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present.

Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past—in Mexico—collides with his future.

04. The Lake House // Kate Morton. October 20, 2015. “Living on her family’s idyllic lakeside estate in Cornwall, England, Alice Edevane is a bright, inquisitive, innocent, and precociously talented sixteen-year-old who loves to write stories. But the mysteries she pens are no match for the one her family is about to endure…

One midsummer’s eve, after a beautiful party drawing hundreds of guests to the estate has ended, the Edevanes discover that their youngest child, eleven-month-old Theo, has vanished without a trace. What follows is a tragedy that tears the family apart in ways they never imagined.

Decades later, Alice is living in London, having enjoyed a long successful career as an author. Theo’s case has never been solved, though Alice still harbors a suspicion as to the culprit. Miles away, Sadie Sparrow, a young detective in the London police force, is staying at her grandfather’s house in Cornwall. While out walking one day, she stumbles upon the old estate—now crumbling and covered with vines, clearly abandoned long ago. Her curiosity is sparked, setting off a series of events that will bring her and Alice together and reveal shocking truths about a past long gone…yet more present than ever.

A lush, atmospheric tale of intertwined destinies, this latest novel from a masterful storyteller is an enthralling, thoroughly satisfying read.”

02. The Tsar of Love and Techno // Anthony Marra. October 6, 2015. “This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents. “

01. Carrying Albert Home // Homer Hickam. October 13, 2015. “Carrying Albert Home is the funny, sweet, and sometimes tragic tale of a young couple and a special alligator on a crazy 1000-mile adventure. Told with the warmth and down-home charm that made Rocket Boys/October Sky a beloved bestseller, Homer Hickam’s rollicking tale is ultimately a testament to that strange and marvelous emotion we inadequately call love.”

What is on your autumn reading horizon? Do you look forward to this season all year (as I do)? For more lists, go here.

Beautiful photo found here, and what a gorgeous date it is.