What was the best book you read in October?
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What was the best book you read in October?
Plus the Anderberg family's favorites for the month.
Hey there, readers!
These Tuesday emails originally started a couple of years ago as a paid subscriber benefit. Since I’ve changed my approach to paid subscriptions, I’ve also been rethinking what the Tuesday edition looks like. In general, I’m going to make these updates shorter and more interactive (the comments section on discussion posts can form your TBR for years to come).
It’s in the comments that this incredible community comes alive and I’d love to see even more of that. Ya’ll are awesome readers and I love hearing about the diverse range of what everyone is reading and enjoying.
Today I’m sharing our family’s favorite reads for October — be sure to let me know yours too!
The Anderberg Family’s Favorite Reads of October
Jeremy: Zero Fail was a delightful surprise that perfectly balanced apolitical reporting with political history. I also read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment for the first time and was totally enthralled. (The translation I read was fine, but I’ve heard great things about this new one.)
Jane: In a big month of reading (thanks, COVID), Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting stood out for Jane. This uplifting story about strangers who meet on their daily train commute hit all the right notes.
Graham (8 years old): Our oldest kiddo has been making his way through the Colorado Children’s Book Award nominees; B. B. Alston’s Amari and the Night Brothers — as well as the sequel — has been his favorite so far.
Willa (5 years old): Our journey through DK’s children’s anthologies continues. The Mysteries of the Universe, which is all about our solar system and outer space, is really fun and might be my personal favorite.
Bo (2 years old): Any “touch and feel” book is great for the 2-year-old set. Touch-and-Feel Tower Animals is on our bookshelf, so it’s currently Bo’s favorite.
Your turn! What was your favorite read this month?
-Jeremy
What was the best book you read in October?
I had major surgery two weeks ago, so I've been spending A LOT of time reading. It's been a great month for books — and my body is coming along nicely, too :-)
The best book I've read this month is definitely 'Unseen City' by Amy Shearn. I haven't seen a lot of people talking about this one, and I loved this mashup of literary ghost story and historical fiction set in modern Brooklyn.
Our girl is Meg Rhys, a self-proclaimed Spinster Librarian. She's 40 and has a satisfying existence. She rides her bike around the city and works in the archive of the Brooklyn Central Library. She lives with her cat Virginia Wolf and has a pretty good relationship with her younger brother.
This is a bit from early in the book:
'All her heroes had resisted wifehood: Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Lolly Willowes. Okay, so Lolly Willowes was a fictional character and eventually became a witch, but still, Meg reasoned, better a witch than a wife. Just look what had happened to Sylvia Plath, to Dorothea Brooks. You couldn't say that, though. It rankled. It offended married people because you were implying that their own carefully constructed lives had snags woven into them... no one wanted to hear this. So she had a stock response: 'If I ever married, I would love my Spinster Librarian card.' She'd said it so many times she'd begun to imagine the card was an actual object, providing access to books no one else knew existed, which, she felt, would be a much more useful resource than a spouse any day.'
So, Meg doesn't much believe in love, but she does believe in ghosts. Mostly because she has daily conversations with her sister Kate, who died ten years earlier.
At the start of the story, two things happen that upset Meg's equilibrium. First, she learns that the cozy, rent-controlled apartment she's made her home is about to be sold out from under her. And second, a very attractive man named Ellis comes to the library with a compelling historical mystery he needs help solving.
Meg is soon distracted by her investigations into Brooklyn's history, and she has a growing attraction for Ellis, even though he, too, is a bit haunted.
I don't want to give anything about the plot because it would ruin the fun of reading. But I can tell you a few other things I loved:
As you might expect from a librarian, Meg drops book titles all over the place. And I really appreciated that they are accessible. She's not a snobby reader — she's a book lover. So she talks about Jane Eyre and The Wide Sargasso Sea, A Christmas Carol, The Haunting of Hill House, The Turn of the Screw
This book also taught me a lot about New York City history and the Civil War that I didn't know anything about. It's all woven into the story in a way that makes it integral to the plot — that is my favorite way to learn.
There's a fascinating story about the real-life town of Weeksville. It was a village with farmland founded by free African Americans in the 1830s in what's now Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Today, it's home to the Weeksville Heritage Center where four houses from original Weeksville residents have been turned into a museum, so you can walk through the houses and learn what life was like for Black Americans in the late 1800s.
This is a beautiful, entertaining, non-scary story about the things that haunt us, of both the emotional and the supernatural variety. It's about grief and longing and how we move on after tragic losses. And with Meg the librarian as a companion, it's also very funny, sweet, and relatable.
I also really enjoyed a COMPLETELY different read: 'Very Old Money' by Stanley Ellin. It's from 1985 (!). Imagine Gosford Park or Downton Abbey, but instead of British nobility, it's an extremely wealthy American family in NYC. A married couple, both teachers, lose their jobs and are hired to be a personal secretary and chauffeur for the family. We get an inside look at the logistics of serving a family of this caliber — and the mental gyrations our main characters have to do to be OK with being 'servants.' Not much happens — we see their day-to-day experience — until SOMETHING SURPRISING HAPPENS. If you like British manor house stories (I love them!), this is a fun counterpoint.
Mine is “Why We Love Baseball” by Joe Posnanski. He talks about 50 moments from baseball history that are incredible and have made people love the game. I’ve had to force myself to slow down to not just read the whole thing in one sitting. I have thoroughly enjoyed it