Recommended Books: October 2026

Hello Readers,

BlueSky, the app for books! Welcome to my new subscribers and welcome back all my old friends. I have to say it’s a fortuitous time for a subscriber bump as I’m in the midst of a little paid subscriber drive, but I’ll talk about that at the end of the newsletter, after all the books. You’ll also definitely want to get through the “Forever” book for a lovely little bit of shelf-witchery, which is very appropriate for the book in question.

I met most, if not all of you new folks, through a post about this excellent article in Elle about the rising monoculture in publishing. It’s an excellent piece, certainly worth a read, but I had a couple more thoughts about this. First, I don’t think this is actually a new problem, but rather, what we’re seeing is a long process of media consolidation and contraction that might be reaching a kind of critical mass. Publishing has always thrived on its bestsellers, but now it might be surviving on them, if you know what I mean.

Second, the article doesn’t quite articulate how self-reinforcing the problem is. Publishers seem to rely on smash hits, so they end up paying massive advances on books they think will be smash hits, so they end up devoting massive amounts of marketing money to those few books, so only those few books really get the kind of support needed to become bestsellers, so publishing has to survive on smash bestsellers, so they end up paying massive advances…well, you get it. At least at the big 5 of course. Indie and smaller presses tend to focus on slowly building up catalogs of titles that endure over time, which, I think, at least, results in much better books and often, despite having far less money, a much more supportive ecosystem for authors.

That is one small part of why I focus so much of my work, both at the store, and in this newsletter on small and indie presses. By and large, they’re publishing books I want to read, books I’m proud to support with my recommendation, and doing so in a sustainable way.

If you’re new here, I recommend four books a month; one more than a year old (Yesterday), one that’s come out in the last few months (Today), one that’s forthcoming (Tomorrow) and one that, for some reason, I haven’t finished reading yet (Forever). Let’s do the four I’m recommending for October.

Josh

YESTERDAY

A Book That’s Over a Year Old

I think Aurorama might have the most beautiful setting in any book I’ve read. And when I say “setting,” that includes the landscape, of course, but also the architecture, the fashion, even the drugs. I mean everything that the characters move through, everything action takes place in, and everything that gives vital context to those characters and those actions. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that Valtat set Aurorama in the Arctic so he could leverage the language of ice, crystal, glitter, dazzle, glamour, sharpness, blinding, crispness, starlight, contrast, expanse, silence, and the visual and audible energies we create when faced with arctic expanses and silences, but he sure made the most of it.

The plot is great too, such as it is, the kind of swirling, cascading series of events that never really gives the reader a chance to find their footing. I’ve enjoyed books that tell coherent point A to point B stories and their certainly can be space to explore in even the tightest plots, but, in general, I prefer books that let you look out the window as you travel, whether the route is straight like a train or twisting like a trek through the jungle.

Alas, Aurorama seems to be quite out of print, (The ISBN is no longer even in Ingram for those of you who speak the lingo) which is sad to me on a couple of different levels. First, of course, is that it is not available at PSB or Bookshop, but also, on a more personal level, my love for this book might have been the beginning of my relationship with Melville House. And a lot came from that. As with everything in publishing, the quality of the book is only one facet to consider when deciding to let a book go out of print, but, well, it’s still a bummer about Aurorama.

Buy Aurorama from Biblio.com

Buy Aurorama from BetterWorldBooks.com

TODAY

A Book Published in the Last Few Months

Wickhills by Premee Mohamed

If the setting of Wickhills isn’t quite a beautiful as Aurorama I think that is more about intention than execution. Wickhills is more gloom than glitter, more lichen than snow, more bestiary than pharmacopeia. Where Aurorama seeks to dazzle, Wickhills seeks to awe. There is also, now that I’m thinking about the setting a bit more directly, an eldrich-ness to it that Aurorama very much lacks.

Wickhills, the titular city, is old and contains the architectural palimpsest of any city that has been occupied for ages, except with more shifting ground, stone spires that seem to snap shut like great carnivorous plants sensing the presence of a fly, a society beneath the sewers far grander than even the catacombs of Paris, and, perhaps, a relationship to walls that could be exploited or stumbled upon in such a way as to destroy everything. When a refugee from an even more authoritarian city might have discovered or invented a tool that speaks to that relationship to stone, a version of your classic band of misfits, including a manticore, a vampyr, & another semi-magical creature I didn’t recognize, along with the seemingly invincible world-weary veteran of the trade, the librarian forced to use a gun, the plucky thief, and the young fellow way over his head, must secure the refugee, recover his discovery, and figure out who is trying to kill them.

It is a ripping plot and I don’t want to take away from that, but, for me, the prose is so redolent to just “look at,” that I almost don’t quite care what is happening as long is it keeps happening to them in this prose, in this setting.

If you were into Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup series you will definitely dig this and though it’s not really the same project, this might be what all of you Gene Wolfe fans have been looking for all these years.

Buy Wickhills from Porter Square Books

Buy Wickhills from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

A Forthcoming Book

Every myth started with someone telling a story. Every legend. Every origin story. Every urban legend. Someone had an idea or asked a question or observed something or had to tell a lie to save their ass or someone else’s ass. Depending on the story, depending on the listener, depending on the technology available, depending on the culture, depending how many permutations of that story move through a culture before it becomes fixed in some way, the myth can be separated from that original storyteller, sometimes so completely that it feels as though it came from the gods.

Honestly, I’m not sure how important it is to find the original storytellers for any of our myths. In a culture with so much toxic individuality, we could all do with a lot more communal authorship. But it certainly is interesting. Furthermore, finding the original storyteller for Aladdin and the process of his separation from his narrative, could also offer a case study in the impacts of colonialism and specifically Edward Said’s Orientalism. And though I won’t say discovering and attributing the story of Aladdin to Hanna Diab is, itself, a corrective, it certain has a relationship with or is perhaps a part of that contemporary process of returning stolen artifacts to their homes.

It also is a classic adventure story in and of itself! Young man flees an oppressive fate, gets swept up by a mysterious (perhaps even magical!) stranger, survives a myriad of challenges, meets a few princesses, and lives long enough to dictate his own memoirs. I mean, Finding Aladdin, essentially starts with the discovering of a journal in the Vatican, which “narrator discovers adventurer’s journal” is how, like, half the early European novels start! Broader anticolonial narratives aside, it’s a fun read, and something you could definitely give your nonfiction only reading dad. (To sneak him some light anticolonial narrative of course.)

Preorder Finding Aladdin: The Hidden History of a Syrian Storyteller from Porter Square Books

Preorder Finding Aladdin from Bookshop.org

FOREVER

A Book I Haven’t Finished Reading

Maybe this is just the marketing director talking, but it seems like the whole “weird girl lit” creates a perfect environment for a Mary Butts revival. Her essentially lost memoir is coming out in the Spring (which, given the way media blows through trends, we’ll probably be talking about, I don’t know “briefcase fiction” or some other such nonsense), but the paperback edition of Ashe of Rings and Other Writings is out now!

Ashe of Rings is the Weird Great Aunt to Weird Girl Lit at least some of you are looking for. Antiwar, feminist, deeply connected to the land, a little witchy, a lot pagan, and also, powerfully concerned with the impacts of broader systems of power on the emotional lives of the people caught in their machinations. There’s a fair amount of Virginia Wolffe and a bit more Sylvia Townsend Warner, and, of course, the burgeoning sense of humanism that, to me at least, was Modernism’s most important contribution to human culture.

Not to go all hard sell on you, but China Mieville, used this line from Ashe of Rings for his latest magnum opus The Rouse: “A worm slipped under the arch of her neck, a red tube for the excretion of earth, tolerable as a machine. But it was not a machine, and further distressed her.”

I hadn’t decided I was going to buy The Rouse until I saw that epigraph and then I had to. It’s funny, I had intended to publish this newsletter on Tuesday morning, but when as I was finishing it up on Monday night I realized my copy of The Rouse was in my bedroom where my partner was and since I didn’t want to disturb her I decided to just put it off for the next day. And that next day had, one of, if not the biggest jumps in subscribers I’ve ever had. If you love books hard enough, sometimes they’ll love you back. Told you there was some shelf witchery.

Buy Ashe of Rings and Other Writings from Porter Square Books Though you’ll need to call us (617-491-2220) and it’ll take a bit, but we can get it.

About that paid subscriber drive.

Thanks to everyone who became a paid subscriber last month! The good news is that I’ve covered the cost of Buttondown, so at least I’m not losing money. But I am still short of where I need to be to keep this going indefinitely. The monthly monetary goal is $60, however many subscribers that takes. (20 at $3 just seemed a reasonable way to pitch it, initially.) If you’d like to juice the numbers but can’t spend the money, let me know as I have a few gift subscriptions available. The next best thing you could do is share this newsletter with other readers in your life. The more subscribers I have in general, the better the odds that I hit my goal. (You can upgrade to a paid subscription here.)Finally, if we hit $100 and/or 50 paid subscribers, I’ll start doing a second paid-subscribers-only newsletter once a month as well, which will probably be a mix of longer form reviews, essays about the book world, and maybe even some interviews, but that bridge shall be crossed upon arrival.

Oh, and if you’re curious where the $60 number comes from it’s my Buttondown fees, plus my Mudwater subscription (your boy can’t drink coffee anymore sad face), plus my subscriptions to The Handbasket, Ravenous, and maybe couple other cool indie media. The household also started paying for preschool in September, but, I don’t see this newsletter ever making “meaningfully contribute to preschool” money.

Thanks again for reading!

(And here’s that pitch about paid subscribers again in an automatic footer..)