What I read: October edition 🎃👻
Spooky season faves, RSM Reads Book of the Year Finalist, and a couple of book-club-ish picks.
October is one of my favorite months of the year: leaves begin to turn and drop to the ground, amber light shines upon our garden, and the chill in the air refreshes me to the core. We spent a Sunday afternoon at the pumpkin patch and it was a delight. And, I get to enjoy my Poe-inspired decor. I’ve always loved Halloween: the neighborhood is out and chatting, we have our traditional Halloween bash with our Friends-Who-Are-Family Crew, and there is just so much joy and kindness…and a little spook.
I love a good spooky read this time of year, I’m not a horror reader, but I love some Gothic lit.
This year, I reread (listened to) a few of my favorite ghost stories in quick succession: Macbeth and Hamlet. This led me on a path for the rest of the month, and I finished a few books I’d been chewing on for a while.
Outside of my Shakespearean listens, other October reads included:
A feminist retelling of a classic tale (these tend to be some of my favorites)…that wasn’t as feminist as I thought it would be
A murder mystery that started strong…and finished far from it
This month’s book club read, which was a super unserious but fun story
A contender for 2024 RSM Reads Book of the Year!
Double, double, toil and trouble…
This one is an absolute classic that I love to reread every few years. Three witch sisters, Scottish highlands, a strong female lead who is more compelling than the titular character, and some truly beautiful passages. It’s a beautiful listen: Shakespeare truly is best performed, and audiobooks are a close second-best way to experience his words.
Tis now the very witching hour of night…
This play contains some of the most lovely Shakespearean language there is. So many pieces from this play have been committed to my memory. I love this as a listen (or the unabridged Kenneth Branagh film adaptation with Kate Winslet).
…After Shakespeare…I read some more Shakespearean-ish…
Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid
I saw this one on the shelf at a local indie bookstore during our Fall Break trip to Rosemary Beach and it called to me. The cover is gorgeous, it is based on one of my favorite Shakespeare plays (see above), but I always wanted to know more about Lady Macbeth, the famed villainess.
This novel took me on a wild ride through medieval Brittany and I am here for every second! This is historical fiction at some of its best, it is clear Reid did their research and set the unstable scene of these warring fiefdoms with brilliant acumen. Using different languages found within Breton culture, weaving the mythology of the era with its history, Reid cuts to the heart of society at that time. And then they threw in some magical realism for good measure.
There was one critique: This didn’t feel like a feminist retelling. This story took away some of the agency from Lady Macbeth, agency that she has in spades in the source material, where she is never defined by men, but men are instead defined by her. I was thrown by this, I will be honest. It is definitely a looser interpretation of the play, but I did like how the author played with age, parentage, geography, and womanhood to make for some interesting, Gothic storytelling.
Roscille is a seventeen-year-old being traded to a Scottish lord in marriage for alliance power. Rumors have circulated about this girl since she was little, it is said the power of her eyes bewitch men into doing her will. So, she has been wearing a veil in her father’s court to shield weaker men from her power. She finds herself increasingly alone in this new life in a new place as Lady Macbeth, with her situation in society increasingly unstable as the Scottish kingdoms fight one another, and rulers are rarely from the same family from one generation to the next.
But there is a power in the unrest. A power to sway opinions. To pit lords against one another. A power to turn on its head a world that works against women at every turn. To take the power in her words and put it to work for her own ends. And Roscille may look like a youthful and strange beauty, she shows herself to be much more than that. It’s a type of witchcraft, but it’s also just the power of a spoken word. The power of suggestion.
This book, despite my critiques, was un-put-down-able. I read it in approximately two days and I was swept away by the world Reid created. They have made a complex narrative rooted in the actual history of the time, with some fabulous use of mythology (see Les Lavandières)
If you like The Marriage Portrait and are ok with some fantastical elements, this is a read for you!
Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon
This one took me way longer than it should’ve to finish, but I got through it.
Lana Rubicon has it all: a successful career as an LA real estate mogul, a fabulous home, and impeccable taste. But when she finds out she has cancer and cannot care for herself, she moves 300 miles away to a small coastal town in order to live with her estranged daughter. Beth is a single mother working long hours as a nurse in a retirement home, while raising her headstrong daughter Jack along the quiet shores they love. They live a simple life, and Lana’s sudden appearance throws everyone off.
Jack works at an adventure service as a kayaking guide, but when she finds a dead body during one of her tours, everything changes. To clear her granddaughter’s name, Lana takes on some sleuthing of her own. The sleepy town isn’t so quiet, and Lana uncovers generations of intrigue, conspiring, and shady money all come to the surface. When one of Beth’s elderly patients also dies, the circumstances seem unremarkable, but Lana smells something afoul. It will take three generations of women working together to solve this one.
It got less and less compelling throughout the novel. At first, you are annoyed by Lana, then you are rooting for her, and then you just don’t care. There was a flatness to the characters and no real plot propulsion to make up for it. All in all, would pass on this Reese’s Book Club pick.
Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen
This month’s book club pick was a fun and frivolous read. Just what I didn’t know I’d need.
Winnie, a Chinese national who lives in the US after flunking out of Stanford after her first year under a cloud of scandal, has an eye for business. She uses her contacts across the ocean to procure high-caliber “super-fake” handbags through the black market wings of legitimate businesses. She just needs women to carry out the shopper role, which includes the following steps:
Buy a real designer bag from an upscale department store
Return the counterfeit bag instead
Sell the real bag on eBay
Enter Ava, a devoted Chinese-American mother, wife to a successful surgeon, and former corporate lawyer. It also doesn’t hurt that she was Winnie’s freshman year roommate. Winnie has found her shopper: a woman no one would suspect of any shady dealings. What follows is a story of intrigue spun out in the most fashionable of ways.
Told through the lens of Ava’s confession and flashbacks, this unreliable narration left me guessing at every turn. Definitely recommend it for a fun romp!
I also finished up one that is a serious contender for RSM Reads Book of the Year 2024.
(My 2023 pick was Demon Copperhead…see more on my first Substack post below…though these two books could not be more different.)
Deep Water: The World in the Ocean by James Bradley
This series of essays was part biology and anthropology courses, part memoir, and part philosophy. And it was a wonder. This read is a serious contender for book of the year. Bradley travels the world: from the plastic-ridden Cocos Islands to Antarctica’s krill researchers.
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“Beaches are sites of encounter, where sea meets land and land meets sea, each altering the other as the energy of the ocean is released.”
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Bradley takes us on a journey from creation through old time to the warming waters of today. He takes on the “inkling of infinity” that is our Earth’s ocean, the impossible depths and worlds we continue to uncover. The act of swimming into the ocean, Bradley posits, is to understand a certain duality, that we are both contained within our bodies and also part of something much larger.
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“When we swim our bodies become part of the tidal flow and movement of water, the great pulse of the planet’s systems, the act of giving ourselves over to their rhythms, a form of communion, of embodied connectedness.”
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I learned so much about the movement and vast life in the ocean. From the diel vertical migration (Which is the single largest movement of life on Earth. And it happens every night!) to how vital Antarctic krill are to the survival of their ecosystem and our world.
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“We are connected to that deep future, just as we are connected to the deep past.”
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Bradley also had so much to teach me about the impact on our modern world by our commoditization of this seemingly infinite resource:
The impact of sugar on global trading systems, as a business built on the backs of enslaved laborers and with incredibly harmful ecological impacts on farming land,
The anthropological effect of the slave trade on national economies (both crafting the bedrock of economies such as that of the American South and devastating the economies of West African nations through colonial extraction in ways these nations have yet to recover from),
The advent of the shipping container and how it transformed international maritime trade, while also speedily becoming a dangerous emissions sector, and
The effects of illegal and underreported fishing in the Pacific by global world powers on local communities that depend on this livelihood from Ecuador and Chile to Sierra Leone and Ghana.
Bradley contends that this Western way of being and dominating the ocean is in direct contrast to the indigenous cultures, such as the seafaring, nomadic Pacific Islanders who read stars, sky, waves, and currents better than any map, and the Australian Queensland people’s ceremonies tied to the annual arrival of the humpback whale. The author travels to the Cocos Islands and works with survey teams to understand the impacts of plastic on beaches in the middle of nowhere that are overrun by plastic. And it is not simply beaches that are being impacted by human industry, there are troubling truths in the deep-sea mining techniques of blasting the sea floor in the search for critical minerals (e.g., nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese) and the destruction of reefs and ocean floor ecosystems by industry-scale fishing trawlers.
I’ll let Bradley give the best advice to those feeling paralyzed with anxiety in a rapidly changing world:
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“To bear witness in this way is to make ourselves vulnerable, to open ourselves up to the loss and sadness around us…This act of openness creates the possibility of love and joy and—improbably—wonder…and I have realised that however much has been lost, the world still hums with beauty and astonishment.
We share the planet with whales that sing across oceans and navigate by watching the stars, with fish that pass ways of knowing across generations, in webs of culture spreading back millions of years, with turtles that follow invisible patterns of magnetism back to the beaches where they were born.
To contemplate the strangeness and wonder of these other ways of being is to begin to understand our place in the world very differently, to be reminded that we are not separate, or different, but part of a much larger system of impossible magnificence and complexity.”
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May we uncover that wonder and that sense of our small part to play, all while grieving the depths of the destruction we have wrecked upon our planet home.
So I haven’t done a TBR pile over here on Substack in a while, so here are a few of the titles I’m working my way through in November…
Thanks for joining me here for another month, dear readers. Happy Spooky Season to all who celebrate!
From my shelves to yours,
-RSM