Fall Into These Reads: My Autumn Booklist

we've got fantasy and fairytales and tragedies, oh my!

Oct 03, 2024

Spooky season, with all its glorious golden and red foliage, is upon us, and I’ve tailored my autumn booklist accordingly. Just like setting out pumpkins and ghost decor (and obsessively rewatching Charmed), my stack of books embraces the season.

This list also doubles as a wishlist. It’ll be a feat if I get through it all, but I’m ambitious. Along with new titles, I’ve included some rereads — can we talk about how wonderful it is to revisit favorite books more often?

I’m curious: What books do you love so much that you keep coming back to them? The ones you return to for inspiration or to revisit cherished ideas? While we often recommend new releases, I’m interested in the books you’ve kept in your library, the ones you eagerly anticipate reading again.

I’ll be practicing what I preach and including more rereads in my future booklists.

Let’s fall in…

Currently reading

Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas

Description: Celaena Sardothien won a brutal contest to become the King’s Champion. But she is far from loyal to the crown. Though she goes to great lengths to hide her secret, her deadly charade becomes more difficult when she realizes she is not the only one seeking justice. Her search for answers ensnares those closest to her, and no one is safe from suspicion — not the Crown Prince Dorian; not Chaol, the Captain of the Guard; not even her best friend, Nehemia, a princess with a rebel heart.

Then, one terrible night, the secrets they have all been keeping lead to an unspeakable tragedy. As Celaena’s world shatters, she will be forced to decide once and for all where her true loyalties lie . . . and what she is willing to fight for.

The second book in the #1 New York Times bestselling Throne of Glass series returns readers to a land destroyed by liars, where one woman’s truth is the only thing that can save them all.

My thoughts: Fantasy is a key to autumn and spooky season. I’m skeptical of popular (cough, Booktok) recommendations, but Maas’s series have provided good escapism and compelling characters. I am especially enjoying the Throne of Glass series because of the protagonist, Celaena. We have so many tales of male assassins, superheros, and spies, and it’s refreshing to read about a lethal, unapologetic, and feared female character.

Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens by John E. Mack, M.D.

Description: A Harvard psychiatrist, the author of A Prince of Our Disorder, presents accounts of alien abduction taken from the more than sixty cases he has investigated and examines the implications for our identity as a species.

These mesmerizing and thought-provoking stories of alien encounters from a Harvard professor take you through actual case studies of people from all walks of life and ages who have had challenging, sometimes disturbing, and in every case, life changing experiences of alien abduction.

“John Mack explores evidence of nonhuman intelligence like an attorney preparing for the ‘trial of the century’…As a story of one man’s determination to bear witness to cosmic mysteries with extraordinary implications for the human future, Abduction is bound to become a modern classic.” (Keith Thompson, author of Angels and Aliens)

My thoughts: I am currently working on a sci-fi thriller, and while I’m reading this for research, it’s (thankfully) absolutely fascinating. I think it’s appropriate that alien abductions fall into a spooky-autumn-Halloween season category.

The Eyes on Cinema Youtube channel has an entire playlist with John Mack’s talks if you’re interested in dipping your toes into this topic but don’t want to commit to an entire book.

Autumn booklist

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Description: This unique series features newly edited texts prepared by leading scholars from America and Great Britain, in collaboration with one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare authorities, David Scott Kastan of Columbia University.

The only Shakespearean tragedy that has a villain as its hero, Macbeth presents a stark and disturbing view of the psychology of wickedness and guilt. The editor, Jesse M. Lander, draws on the early modern literature of witchcraft and demonology to provide an illuminating context for the play.

My thoughts: Macbeth has witches and ghouls and murder conspiracies and haunts, and it’s my favorite Shakespearean tragedy. I’ve always loved Shakespeare, but I’ve taken a break — about a decade, so quite a long break — from reading any of his work. I’m curious how I’ll digest it now. This play definitely gives spooky season vibes.

The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young

Description: In the small mountain town of Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is waiting for fate to find her. The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm—and the mysterious curse that has plagued their family line. The whole town remembers the madness that led to Susanna Farrow’s disappearance, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother and haunted by rumors.

It’s been a year since June started seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. Faint wind chimes, a voice calling her name, and a mysterious door appearing out of nowhere—the signs of what June always knew was coming. But June is determined to end the curse once and for all, even if she must sacrifice finding love and having a family of her own.

After her grandmother’s death, June discovers a series of cryptic clues regarding her mother’s decades-old disappearance, except they only lead to more questions. But could the door she once assumed was a hallucination be the answer she’s been searching for? The next time it appears, June realizes she can touch it and walk past the threshold. And when she does, she embarks on a journey that will not only change both the past and the future, but also uncover the lingering mysteries of her small town and entangle her heart in an epic star-crossed love.

My thoughts: I’m in need of a cozy, easy Halloween read, and stumbled across this on Carter Sullivan’s all of the books I want to read this Fall video. She mentioned it gave small-town-Gilmore-Girls vibes, which I’m here for.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Union Square Signature Classics Edition

Description: For most children, reading the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm is an essential experience; but when these stories were first collected, fairy tales were considered entertainment for adults as well. This edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales brings together the best-known fairy and folk tales set down by the Brothers Grimm, including “Sleeping Beauty,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Frog-Prince,” and “Rumpelstiltskin,” in a package aimed at readers returning to the beloved stories of their youth.

My thoughts: Fairy tales are magical, and therefore, they have made my autumn booklist. I absolutely won’t get through all of them, nor am I going to try, but I’d like to read at least one classic fairytale this season.

What I’m rereading

Heal the Witch Wound: Reclaim Your Magic & Step Into Your Power by Celeste Larsen

Description: You were born to live a magical life. Deep within your soul, you know this; it is why you picked up this book. But there is another reason why you now hold this book in your hands: because some part of you feels it is unsafe to fully embrace the magic that exists within and around you. This part of you carries an age-old wound— one that keeps you from claiming your magic, owning your power, and shining fearlessly in your truth. This is the “witch wound.”

Healing the witch wound is not about going back in time or dwelling on the atrocities of the past — quite the opposite. This work is about taking steps now to reclaim your power, live a more magical life, and embody your most authentic self.

My thoughts: I’m probably not going to reread the whole book… but who knows. I’m definitely going to revisit specific sections and included rituals. If you’re into witchiness and feminism, I recommend.

Let Us Believe In the Beginning of the Cold Season by Forough Karrokhzad

Description: In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a feminist trailblazer of Iranian literature and as an iconoclastic figure of contemporary world literature. As Mehdi Jami writes in the Guardian, “In every culture you have cultural icons, like Shakespeare in Britain. Farrokhzad was like that for contemporary Iran, someone who formed the identity of our contemporariness.”

Thoughtfully curated and deftly translated by the poet Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., this selected poems gathers work from Farrokhzad’s whole writing life, early to late, including the entirety of her posthumous book Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, which gives this collection its name. Readers can thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of desire and loss, of classical reinvention, of lexical variation and sonic beauty, of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.

My thoughts: I’ve been craving a good reread of Karrokhzad’s work, and the collection’s title is fitting for autumn. We love a feminist, trailblazing poet. It’s a crime that we lost her so early.

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg

Description: With insight, humor, and practicality, Natalie Goldberg inspires writers and would-be writers to take the leap into writing skillfully and creatively. She offers suggestions, encouragement, and solid advice on many aspects of the writer’s craft: on writing from “first thoughts” (keep your hand moving, don't cross out, just get it on paper), on listening (writing is ninety percent listening; the deeper you listen, the better you write), on using verbs (verbs provide the energy of the sentence), on overcoming doubts (doubt is torture; don't listen to it) — even on choosing a restaurant in which to write. Goldberg sees writing as a practice that helps writers comprehend the value of their lives. The advice in her book, provided in short, easy-to-read chapters with titles that reflect the author's witty approach (“Writing Is Not a McDonald's Hamburger,” “Man Eats Car,” “Be an Animal”), will inspire anyone who writes — or who longs to.

My thoughts: My sister bought me this, and I loved it when I first read it. I need a little refresher as I work on my own projects. It’s a permanent staple in my books on the craft of writing.

Let me know if you’d like me to do an in-depth review of it in the future, like I did for Devotion: Why I Write in my Patti Smith’s Literary Masterclass post. I’m thinking a craft series is in the works!

What are you reading this season? Let me know in the comments!

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