13 Books You Need to Read This Fall

[Karlston]

13 Books You Need to Read This Fall

New movies are few; new TV is fast diminishing. Here are the books we think you should pick up instead. 

Photograph: Ron Rovtar/Alamy

 

 

In 2020, what is the purpose of books? Not in the broader sense, but in the more intimate, everyday one. Are they meant to educate, to pump neurons? Or are they respite, a chance to escape? Ideally they’re both, and even though we struggled at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown to get through a novel, books—especially ones that provide perspective—have become our most necessary lifeline. Also, we all might be running out of new TV shows to watch. With that in mind, it’s time for more tomes to tackle. Below are 13 of the best.

 

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo

 

Available Now

 

Did people identify as nonbinary in Imperial China? I dunno, but Chih, the main character of Nghi Vo’s first novella, does. What’s remarkable about that is how natural it feels. Not forced, or fashionable. (Can’t say the same about a lot of recent SFF.) When an older woman mistakes Chih for female, she quickly realizes her mistake. “Not a girl at all,” the woman says, “but a cleric.” No foofaraw: Of course a cleric—in Chih’s case, one who belongs to a holy order tasked with traveling the land and collecting stories—wouldn’t concern themself with gender. (Or perhaps it’s the reverse: Someone who doesn’t feel particularly genderful might become a cleric.) Though the aims of Vo’s book might be political, “queer,” “feminist,” it’s not message-first in the telling. It’s just a story, neatly told. There was a woman. She lived in a culture that conspired against her.

So she masterminded a conspiracy of her own. And Chih, simply an observer, an agent of history, writes it all down. —Jason Kehe

 

Eartheater, by Dolores Reyes

 

Available November 17

 

Argentine writer Dolores Reyes’ supernatural debut is a tender, aching, sexy thing about ghosts and the people left behind trying to reach them. Spare and rhapsodic, Eartheater is set on the margins of an unnamed Latin American city and follows a teenage clairvoyant who communes with the dead by eating dirt. She takes on the name Earth-Eater, and with it the responsibility of her gift comes into view. “There isn’t much I can do to stop the earth from being the enemy, except eat it,” Reyes writes of her nameless narrator, a reluctant hero who prefers chugging beer and playing video games to helping others with her visions. “I’ll carry some of this earth inside me. So that, in the dark, I can know my dreams.” There’s an intimacy, an intensity that Reyes curdles throughout with an enchanter’s touch. The result is a book about women and power and what happens to the women without it. —Jason Parham

 

Bright and Dangerous Objects, by Anneliese Mackintosh

 

Available October 6

 

Solvig is a commercial deep sea diver who spends weeks working on the bottom of the ocean and bunking in a pressurized cabin. She’s also trying to have a baby with her tender-hearted tattoo artist boyfriend, James. She’s also a finalist in a contest to become one of the first humans to colonize Mars, although James doesn’t know that yet. It’s a one-way trip. Bright and Dangerous Objects follows Solvig as she chases several incompatible dreams simultaneously, questioning what it means to be a mother and whether her impulses to explore the far-flung corners of the ocean and universe are something she should curtail or embrace. Mackintosh drew inspiration from the real-life Mars One project, a highly criticized and even more highly publicized private attempt to colonize Mars. In reality, the outlandish project went bust and never made much sense to begin with. You get the sense reading Bright and Dangerous Objects that the fictional version might be the same load of nonsense, but the book still takes Solvig’s desire to go to space seriously. She hasn’t lost her mind, she just has a lot on it. And while most people would turn down a suicide mission to the Red Planet, Solvig’s struggle—how to make her dreams fit inside her life?—is a universal one. —Kate Knibbs

 

Dark Archives, by Megan Rosenbloom

 

Available October 20

 

I’ve got a new phrase for you, if you’d like to leave people aghast this spooky season: anthropodermic bibliopegy, the practice of binding books in flayed human skin. These grisliest of tomes are the subject of Megan Rosenbloom’s (non-anthropodermic) book Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, which is, against all odds, a delight. Rosenbloom takes you on a morbid sort of treasure hunt, searching for these books wherever they’ve been stashed away from scandalized eyes. Some are the result of horrific medical exploitation and betrayal. Others are the result of bizarre last requests, like when a highwayman asked for his memoir to be bound in his own skin after his execution. Regardless of how wacky or tragic any particular book’s journey has been, Rosenbloom approaches them all with such good humor, solid science, and unerring respect for the dead that Dark Archives manages to be life-affirming amidst all the ethical debate and stinky tannery mishaps. Dark? Always. Gross? Sometimes. But ignoring these books erases the lives literally stitched into them. Just don’t read it at the dinner table. —Emma Grey Ellis

 

Desert Notebooks, by Ben Ehrenreich

 

Available Now

 

Deserts burst with beauty, in between bouts of misery. Ditto a new book-length essay by Ben Ehrenreich, whose writer’s journey through the American Southwest prompts writerly writings about myth, time, and—inevitably—writing. Page speedily through anything concerning the latter. Anything, that’s to say, in the first person—Ehrenreich’s politics are as dreary and uninteresting as his self-serious self-flagellations. (“Is it possible to write without plundering?” he wonders, too often.) But slow down for the rest, soaking up the heat of his mythico-historical illuminations. Why we’re here, where we’re going: Ehrenreich’s good for a grand insight, modestly made. With minimal exertion, he skips across far-distant geographies, cosmogonies, and temporalities, eyes peeled for the just-right detail, the flecks of cultural glue, and any mention whatsoever of his constant guide, the owl. When he makes a connection, it’s for all of us, thankfully—not just his fellow writers. —Jason Kehe

 

Luster, by Raven Leilani

 

Available Now

 

Early on in Luster, Raven Leilani’s heroine, Edie, gets fired, goes to the bathroom to take a shot of gin, and then walks into the office of Mark, a colleague with whom she’d previously had an affair. She believes he’s the reason for her ouster, even though, she says, “I did everything you asked. Even that thing with the tengu mask”; he contends that’s not the case. “My love,” he says, “this is the problem with your generation. Instant gratification.” It’s the kind of patronizing comment often thrown at young women—Leilani is 29, her book’s narrator 23—who are unafraid of speaking what they desire. It’s also the kind of dismissal thrown at so many novels about women trying desperately to navigate their twenties. In either case, the assessment is wrong. Also, the Messy Millennial bit is only the setup. Luster morphs quickly, sending Edie from Bushwick, Brooklyn, to the New Jersey suburbs, where she moves into the home of Eric, a married white man she was dating. Soon, Edie, who is Black, finds herself helping Eric and his (also white) wife Rebecca raise their adopted Black daughter, ultimately turning Leilani’s debut novel into a story about race, class, and everything else that eviscerates people’s ability to live and connect. Luster is bled through with an honesty about the subterfuge of survival that is both gripping and often hilarious. There is no problem with Leilani, or her generation; she’s gratifying, instantly. —Angela Watercutter

 

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

 

Available Now

 

Ursula Le Guin tells—well, told, but she’s immortal—a story about reviewing a bad book. The book was so bad she didn’t know what to say about it, until a friend came through with a solution: Just summarize the plot. Because that’s the way to tell whether a critic truly likes something, isn’t it? Look at how much of their review is spent in mindless recapitulation. To that end, I offer here exactly none of the plot of Susanna Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi, in the hope that my doing so will prove to you the extent of my belief in it. (OK, so I got a little plotful in my actual review—it’s hard to be this coy in 1,500 words.) All you need to know is that Piranesi is a work of pelagic depth and wisdom, a 250-page mini-miracle of architecture fantasy that rearranges the layout of your head. There’s great joy in it, but such joy as can only be won from great sadness: perhaps the realest kind. Shelve it alongside Atwood, N. K. Jemisin, and the great Le Guin herself, who once said of women writers in particular that, from them, “we learn how to be human.” —Jason Kehe

 

Billion Dollar Loser, by Reeves Wiedeman

 

Available October 20

 

It’s autumn, but scam season is never over. Reeves Wiedeman’s book about the rise and fall of WeWork and its founder, Adam Neumann, is a frisky dissection of how a rickety real-estate leasing company tricked the world into seeing it as an immensely valuable, society-shifting tech unicorn. (As it turns out, it helps to have a well-connected, supremely confident, and extremely tall man running around insisting he’s about to change the world and handing out tequila shots.) Like John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood and Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped before it, Billion Dollar Loser traces the turmoil at a startup driven by a charismatic, arrogant founder and a business model fueled more by venture capital’s whims than common sense. Rather than offer his own armchair psychoanalysis on Neumann and his wife Rebekah, Wiedeman arranges the absurd details of their high lives in the C-suite into a pointillist portrait of wild hubris. We learn, for example, how Adam spent more than $13 million on a random Spanish wave pool business after receiving a huge investment, and how Rebekeh tried to parlay her affiliation with WeWork into launching a podcast inspired by Dax Shepherd. While the book would’ve been worth reading as a dive into the Neumanns’ chaotic world alone, it also contextualizes how the pair ended up rising so high despite their near-constant foibles, providing a pocket history of the puffed-up startup marketplace of the 2010s. Wiedeman boils WeWork’s complex financial fiasco down to its juiciest parts—for a book so concerned about SEC forms, it is never, ever a slog. —Kate Knibbs

 

Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse

 

Available October 13

 

Rebecca Roanhorse isn’t here to write another fantasy novel set in medieval Europe. Instead, she’s in lock step with a wealth of visionary writers reimagining the genre entirely. Black Sun takes place in a world that draws on the civilizations and culture of the pre-Columbian Americas, a world largely lost to the pillagers of history. The city of Tova is the religious and political center of the Meridian continent, populated by members of four different tribes united under a sun priest and her fellow Watchers, who chart the motions of stars and heavenly bodies to divine fate. Gods and monsters populate the land, along with drunken, debaucherous mermaids and crows large enough to carry passengers over great distances. But Tova is a society stitched together with loose threads, and a fast approaching total solar eclipse threatens to destabilize their fragile peace. Black Sun is the first installment of Roanhorse’s Between the Earth and Sky trilogy, and the ending is nail-biting enough to have us clamoring for the next installment. —Meghan Herbst

 

Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam

 

Available October 6

 

Leave the World Behind opens like a domestic comedy. An upper-middle-class white Brooklynite family is driving toward the fancy vacation home they’ve rented on Long Island, and they are already annoying one another. They’re successful, but not so successful that the matriarch, Amanda, doesn’t long to be the kind of person who owns a newly remodeled summer getaway. Clay, her professor husband, cares more about sneaking cigarettes than ascending the class ladder, and their kids are just relieved the Wi-Fi works. I probably would’ve enjoyed the version of Leave the World Behind that focuses solely on Amanda and Clay’s failings, but the book veers into a much stranger territory when the rental home’s owners, Ruth and GH, show up in the middle of the night and ask to come inside. The wealthy, elderly Black couple are flustered and vague—they’ve driven for hours from Manhattan after witnessing an eerie, citywide blackout in New York. Amanda and Clay can’t verify anything they say, because the phone and internet have stopped working. The two families cohabitate uneasily as they try to figure out what has happened and what they should do next. As the adults circle each other warily, youngest child Rose notices something strange: The local animals are leaving in droves. We’re living in a boom time for postapocalyptic novels, but Leave the World Behind is something less common, a foreboding peek into how people would really behave during an unprecedented crisis. There’s already a movie adaptation in the works starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington, which is no surprise: By writing a story about sheltering-in-place and race and class tensions, Alam managed to craft the most of-the-moment apocalyptic novel possible. —Kate Knibbs

 

Viral, by Matthew Sperling

 

Available Now

 

It’s 2015. Alice and Ned, exes-turned-cofounders, have just moved to Berlin to kick-start their social media marketing agency, the Thing Factory, producing groundbreaking digital content like Astrology for Bros (“Mercury is heading retrograde for you this week, Aries bros”). If this sounds like a dubious prospect, well, it is! Matthew Sperling’s novel Viral follows the two as things go from bad to worse. With business booming, Ned feels himself losing sway within the company and takes it upon himself to diversify by building an app he sees as Uber, but for the escort industry. Before long, they’re messing with the wrong people in a city no one knows well. At this point, so much of startup culture has been satirized and tropified half to death: the single-minded fixation on traffic, the unlimited paid-leave policy that just leaves everyone working more, the complimentary energy drinks. Viral starts as a send-up of all of this. But it winds up someplace weirder, darker, and more interesting. It’s 2020, after all. We know well enough that the internet is real life and grubbing for clicks doesn’t always end well. Founding a business with your ex? Well, that was always a bad idea. —Eve Sneider

 

Red Pill, by Hari Kunzru

 

Available Now

 

It’s easy to get caught up in America right now. The country has grown only more insular under President Trump and under lockdown, so a clear sense of what’s happening in politics elsewhere can be hard to acquire, let alone retain. Hari Kunzru’s new novel, Red Pill, offers a memorably unpretty glimpse into suburban Germany, a place rocked by the same strain of bleak, post-truth right-wing extremism that fills up Trump rallies and Blue Lives Matter protests. Kunzru’s protagonist is a disconsolate writer failing to live up to a prestigious fellowship. He wanders the the town of Wannsee, where Nazis planned the Holocaust in a villa that looms over him from the other side of a lake. He becomes obsessed with a television program called Blue Lives (imagine a cop show directed by Alex Jones) and starts to believe that he is locked in a spiritual battle with its creator. He also begins to wonder if he’s losing his grip on reality. Sound familiar? No? Just me? —Emma Grey Ellis

 

Earthlings, by Sayaka Murata

 

Available October 6

 

Natsuki’s life is full of extraterrestrials. Her cousin Yuu claims to be one, and her best friend, a stuffed hedgehog named Piyyut, is an alien from the planet Popinpobopia, here to guide her on a quest to save the Earth. Piyyut can’t speak for himself because he’s been cursed, but Natsuki drops the alien plushie bombshell on page two of Earthlings, and it sets the tone for the whole novel: intimate, deadpan, and unflinchingly unhinged. Eleven-year-old protagonist Natsuki navigates through a brutal and lonely childhood to arrive in an adulthood spent raging against the system and descending into what might be madness, all to the (distinctly off-) beat of Murata’s exceptionally fun prose. Earthlings is Japanese author Sayaka Murata’s eleventh novel, but this may be the first you’ve heard of from her, unless you read her international breakout hit Convenience Store Woman (which you should). In Japan and now across the globe, Murata has built a reputation for incisive, madcap portrayals of social outsiders, and Earthlings is no exception. Amid all the hedgehog and alien talk is a novel that asks how happiness and freedom can be possible inside a stiflingly anxious world, and it’s answers, while grotesque, are worth reading. —Emma Grey Ellis

 

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13 Books You Need to Read This Fall

 

[funkyy]

I have to confess (to my eternal shame) that I've never been an avid book reader.

The last two books I read were "Rambo" (before Stallone made the first movie!!),

and Sharkey's Machine (before Burt Reynolds made the movie!!). I enjoyed both of

these books, but I didn't continue with the habit.