I am feeling a lot more work-related malaise than usual these days, and bemoaning the fact that I can’t spend my fall with the window open under a light blanket sipping tea and reading books. however I did still manage to get some reading done in september! let me know what you read and liked in the now-departed best month of the year.

here’s what I read in september 2025

*denotes favorite

denotes book club

*Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi

• I just love everything this woman writes. I would not call her formally experimental but especially in her later work she has wholly dispensed with the conventional structures of plot. the sentences hum along and in sequence, but the events they convey to you are less events that atmosphere so rich it creates forward motion. this book, kind of narrated by the sentient city of Prague, throws a lot of balls in the air. some of them are caught and juggled, some fall into the void, and some explode into birds and confetti. the tools of realistic fiction are here employed in the creation of a series of surreal images knit together by one thing: the reader’s mind. (not, notably, the author’s strong hand. this is especially delightful because one of the things that pops up in this book is a novel whose insides change with every reading.) I truly aspire to write this kind of energetic, playful fiction.

Death and the Seaside by Alison Moore

• summer ghost story! it kind of felt like an episode of Inside No. 9.

Assassin’s Quest by Robin Hobb

• read this series along with my friend Kelly. love a good dip in the high fantasy pool every now and then, though I wonder if it’s possible to write a world in this genre that doesn’t dream of monarchy…

Flashlight by Susan Choi

• Susan Choi is a master of controlled realism. her characters do not always make wise or relatable decisions, but they are all decisions that feel human. in past novels, she’s employed some sort of formal challenge to this realism (always compelling!), but this book reminded me more of her novel American Woman (2003). it’s uncut scene and character work, people living from moment to moment and very much trapped in their personalities. like American Woman, it is also engaged with a specific piece of the twentieth century, though I won’t tell you which — that’s for you to read. suffice to say that I thought about this novel a lot after I saw One Battle After Another in the sense that it too uses the tides of history less for themselves than to be metaphors for specific, fraught, mixed-race father-daughter relationships. (whether or not invoking these tides is entirely successful is a conversation I would love to have, text me.)

*My Death by Lisa Tuttle

• this novella, from 2006, is a perfect little haunting. it’s not scary — it’s meditatively unsettling, poking at the borders of self and consciousness. it seems like most of Tuttle’s novel-length work is more conventional fantasy, but this little book is to me the dream of what genre can do.

Isola by Allegra Goodman

• I already went on a long rant about historical fiction last week, and this novel, set in the fifteenth century, also suffers from the no jokes problem. another nit I tend to pick with historical fiction is what I call the Creative History Class Project. perhaps at some point in your life you were given an assignment in a history class to address the material creatively, maybe by writing some form of fiction about the time period you were studying. the key to getting a good grade here was showing that you had done the research (unlike some dumbasses), often by mentioning specific incidents, documents, or historical figures. while this makes sense for a school project, it does not really make for rich fiction. it reduces the atmosphere to a list of facts instead of lived details. even when this novel ventures off the map (quite literally, as it is about a French noblewoman marooned on a Canadian island), the prose floats above what is actually happening, and things that should be visceral and deeply felt happen at a textbook’s distance. somehow going on a walk in the garden, learning to play the virginal, giving birth, and shooting and butchering a polar bear all carry the same emotional weight.

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner

• charming fairy tale and crucially not about upholding a monarchy! if you like a light fantasy of manners, this is for you.

*Darkenbloom by Eva Menasse

• this novel, about an Austrian town’s refusal to reckon with its Nazi past, is a masterclass in trusting the reader. there is not just one thing that the people of Darkenbloom are covering up — there are many incidents of shame, collaboration, violence, and even heroism. the reader learns about these not from some villain’s monologue but from what is implied, from the actions characters to take to reveal or hide what they know. often the reader observes an action that only makes sense many pages later. characters may not get the same chance as the reader to understand what is happening, and this mismatch is another vein of emotion to mine. I’m compelled by this from a craft perspective but also from a thematic one — evil, such as it is, is not as neat as true crime, and all its tendrils may never be exposed to the light.

**Orlando by Virginia Woolf

• book club theme for this one was “back to school” and we read high school assigned reading that we had perhaps given short shrift to in our teen years. Orlando was never assigned to me but I wish it had been because WHAT A BANGER. Orlando lives 300 years and changes professions and genders, all while having history’s greatest pair of legs. at the time of its publication, it was widely understood to be something of a love letter from Woolf to Vita Sackville-West. tbh makes a love token like the Petit Trianon look dinky.

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett

• I read Terry Pratchett books when I need to calm down and feel like I’m a teen with no responsibilities again. also, this is a fantasy novel that is VERY into decapitating kings!

**The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

• recently I was talking to my friend Brittany about my lack of confidence in contemporary “political” novels. I wondered if it was even possible to write one that succeeded both in genuinely exploring a political cause and at being a novel populated by real characters with human complexity. no, I thought, or at least I haven’t read one in a while. turns out I’m an idiot and also that a lot of writers (myself included) simply do not have the scope of imagination that Le Guin had. she did not simply dramatize a political snarl and then throw her hands up as if to say “see how bad things are?” she imagined a world where some of capitalism’s intractable problems have been solved. what might a mind shaped outside of these forces look like? what new problems might arise? this is more powerful to me than any list of contemporary miseries. it is an act of belief in a better future and also a challenge to the shape of that future.