october is (very) over and I’m another month behind my deadline for my novel draft, hurrah! what was I doing? having anxiety and reading! did you see any good literary halloween costumes? I mostly had a lot of very good “halloween or just nyc” moments. it’s almost december and I’m sending this so late because all I’ve been doing is wondering where the time went. anyway, here’s my book list for the month:

here’s what I read in october 2025

*denotes favorite

denotes book club

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

*Regiment of Women by Clemence Dane

• written in 1917, contemporary appraisals note this as an early entry in the lesbian lit canon. it is about two women who teach at a girls’ school, and develop an an all-consuming connection. the older teacher may just be enjoying her power to manipulate though there’s always the chance that she’s really in love. a lot of this is couched in suggestive language (it was 1917!) so don’t expect straightforward queer lit. expect magnificent sentences and poignantly observed, imperfect characters. bizarrely, the afterward of this book was written by someone who seemed to me to dislike it, but I thought she was less interested in the characters’ failings than I was.

The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar

• this is marketed is Louis Sachar’s (the author of Holes and the Wayside School series) first novel for adults. I suspect this is because it acknowledges the existence of sex and not because of any particular difference in the writing. this is a sweet little fairy tale! it’s also primarily for tweens and teens, imo.

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling

• great premise: what if a castle of people trapped in a dire siege situation, close to starvation, were visited by saints promising to feed them? middling execution: almost immediately the reader knows what the food actually is (spoiler alert, highlight to read: it’s people).

*One of Us by Dan Chaon

• this is less of a thriller than Chaon’s previous novels — it’s a wacky circus western with a haunting metaphysical aura. contains one of the most gleefully unhinged villains I’ve encountered in a while.

The Satisfaction Cafe by Kathy Wang

• best possible version of Mom Book Club book!

*Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

• an 1859 novel about a mid-tier Russian civil servant and aristocrat who doesn’t want to get out of bed. there’s a scene where Oblomov remembers learning that he has go to work every day, even when it’s raining, even when he’s sad. “But when will I live?” he says. “When will I live?”

Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

• academic work about conflicting opinions before and after the industrial revolution re: technology messing with natural resources. in short, climate change is not a new idea and we should stop pretending we couldn’t have known better.

Revelator by Daryl Gregory

• fun, atmospheric monster thriller with a great premise. in an isolated town, a family worships a strange creature as an avatar of the Christian god, though the creature pursues its own ends.

Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov

• the darkest, darkest comedy about a man, his mistress, and her man…stress. it’s an earlier work, and so lacks some of the humanity and complexity that his more fully-formed novels show, but it’s Nabokov so nearly every single sentence is infuriatingly perfect. wild that he seemed to write less cynically as he got older.

*The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine

• hey this just won the National Book Award! I think that’s great. you know I love any novel that’s set up as a series of digressions. anyway, please look at Rabih Alameddine’s author photo. this novel is funny and warm without leaning on sentiment, and actually I think this would have taken the best version of a Mom Book Club book if it weren’t for the amount of sex and cursing. maybe if you have a Cool Mom, like Raja’s.

A Day in the Country and Other Stores by Guy de Maupassant

• you want to meet a cynic? read any of Guy de Maupassant’s stories. the craft is undeniable but wow he did not like humanity very much at all! to be fair, syphilis did drive him mad and he very much died of it.