The next Book Fairies book of the month is The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow!

Get it on amazon, kindle, or audible here.

Get it from my favorite women-owned indie bookstore here.

If you are not yet a Book Fairies member, you can upgrade your membership in your Bindery account. We hope to see you inside!

Happy reading!

October Book Club Options

Hey folks,

It's time for us to vote on what we'll read as a community throughout October!

We read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller for our September read, and I found it to be a well-written, satirical look at war, bureaucracy, the military-industrial complex, and the American psyche.

If you haven't read Catch-22 and are a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, I think you'll really enjoy it.

We've got six titles up for vote in October. As always, I combed meticulously through my personal collection to find stories that felt curious and intentional and would spark broad discussion in the community Discord.

The ability to vote, and tkae part in the discussion channels unlock at the paid tiers, so if you're a "Follower", you'll need to upgrade to join in with the rest of the community to discuss the book throughout the month.

Along with the book club discussion, becoming a paid member gives you access to the full Discord experience where we share book recommendations, set up buddy reads with fellow members, talk about pets, sports, and everything else cool humans chat about!

All that said, here are the titles we'll be voting on for our October book club read.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.

Ginster by Siegfried Kracauer

Ginster is a war novel about not going to war; about how war, far from the front, comes to warp every aspect of outer and inner life and to infect the workings of language itself. The subject is World War I, but this novel by the brilliant twentieth-century sociologist, journalist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1928, has as much to say about what it means to live under the sulking great powers and blood-imbrued satrapies of today as it does about the inflamed self-righteousness of late imperial Germany. In Ginster, as in Greek tragedy, massacre occurs offstage, arriving only as "news," but the everyday horror of a society engineered for the continual production of violence is not to be denied. Ginster, the Chaplinesque antihero, intent chiefly on saving his own skin, works hard to keep his distance from the war machine, and yet making a living, he discovers, is all about keeping it running. How different, in the end, is his dreamy self-absorption from the empty military language that has come to pervade every aspect of civilian life in the homeland?

May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry

A curator spends her days reconstructing the past—selecting and carefully arranging furniture, fabrics, and fragments of daily life to bring medieval rooms back to life. Whether it’s a feast with spilling platters or a table for two littered with small hints of intimacy, it must appear as if the people have just left the room.

After accepting a commission to work on the private quarters of a medieval palace, the curator becomes absorbed in the story of a king almost forgotten by history. As she studies the traces he left behind, the boundary between her own life and his begins to blur.

The King is an unlikely ruler: a man with little appetite for power, hurried to the throne after the sudden deaths of his brothers. At court, doubts about his judgment are whispered from chamber to chamber. Then an unthinkable possibility emerges among the gossip: maybe someone else will take the crown.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, some with sex or drink, and some—like Mick—with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by Emma Southon

In A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Southon examines a trove of real-life homicides from Roman history to explore Roman culture, including how perpetrator, victim, and the act itself were regarded by ordinary people. Inside Ancient Rome's darkly fascinating history, we see how the Romans viewed life, death, and what it means to be human.

Romulus killed Remus to found the city, Caesar was assassinated to save the Republic. Caligula was butchered in the theater, Claudius was poisoned at dinner, and Galba was beheaded in the Forum. In one 50-year period, 26 emperors were murdered.

Part cultural history, part true-crime investigation, and part portrait of everyday life in the ancient world, this entertaining bestseller explores everyone from emperors and aristocrats to slaves, gladiators, spouses, parents, and children, uncovering how Romans understood murder and why some deaths mattered far more than others.

The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz

In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is assigned to write a routine German lesson on the “The Joys of Duty.” Overfamiliar with these joys, Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, a constable, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist artist from painting and to seize all his “degenerate” work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, “where the joys of duty could lead a people.”

How To Vote

Voting will be live through Sunday, October 28th. We'll be using ranked choice voting to determine what book we'll be reading, which you can vote on here.

Have I read all the books listed in my September most anticipated post? No! Am I still going to get overexcited about October publications? Yes! Buckle up, because it's another massive month of releases.

What Feeds Below by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne (10/6) - For orphaned best friends Petra and Jade, guiding treasure-seeking tourists down into the Void is the only way to earn enough to pull themselves up out of the slums for good. Petra prefers to play it safe and take jobs only in the Void's upper levels, where the dangers are better understood, while Jade wants to risk a descent to the deepest and most mysterious Sixth Layer. Because the deeper they go, the better the payout, and the sooner their dreams can become reality. Bonus - this is a Bindery book, published by @Naomi Darling!

A Wall Is Also A Road by Annalee Newitz (10/6) - Gardenpath is a graduate student in biology who desperately wants to pass their exams with the highest honor possible: a prize given to scholars who discover something truly novel in the universe. Gardenpath also happens to be an amoeba from an ancient civilization that dwells in a vast network of towers between the stars. Seeking their prize, Gardenpath heads to a remote, dangerous planet that other researchers have dismissed as dead and uninteresting. There, they are surprised to discover a complicated ecosystem unlike anything they've ever encountered.

Strange Lights by Mira González (10/6) - Paranormal investigator and cryptozoologist Reggie has embraced her fate as parent to an adopted toddler, Eldi, a blood-sucking chupacabra with a fondness for goats. A rash of UFOs in the night sky and a couple of crop-circle-carving Roombas force Reggie into an investigation that attracts the attention of an old enemy, an anti-supernatural agency hunting for creatures like Eldi. To outwit them, Reggie must team up with Calvin: a podcaster-turned-werewolf whose charm is a real threat to Reggie’s rule against romantic attachments. Bonus - it's another Bindery fall release, from @Jaysen Headley!

The Girl Who Became King by Melissa King (10/6) - From award-winning chef, author, television personality, and activist Melissa King comes an intimate, captivating memoir about family, food, and finding her voice as a queer Chinese American chef.

The Four Wives And Five Deaths Of Richard Milford by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (10/6) - On the brink of the Great Depression and at the height of Prohibition, Richard Milford was an infamous moonshiner and womanizer who, it seems, finally crossed the wrong person at the wrong time. He’s dead and buried with only his women to mourn him, but a question remains: Who killed him, and why? Top suspects are his four “wives,” Lally, Sophronia, Georgette, and Vivianne. But as their stories burst to light, the very idea of a true story comes apart before our eyes.

As You Wake, Break The Shell by Becky Chambers (10/13) - Life on the resource-poor planet of Fortune is challenging, but for its inhabitants, it’s home. For two of them, Signy and Cora, this home might no longer be enough. Cora is a rorqual pilot, one of the few with the unique ability to navigate the massive, living ships that connect the scattered settlements of their solar system. Her bond with her rorqual, Colibri, is profound—a connection that is both her greatest gift and a threat to her career. It is that threat—the “mindbleed,” a dangerous side effect of her piloting—that brings her to Signy’s shop, and her appearance puts Signy in the danger she so fears.

Another Name For Red by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala (10/13) - Middle Sister is haunted by everyone in her community who has disappeared, as well as those who remain. With local authorities proving useless, Middle Sister decides to start an investigation of her own, beginning with the mysterious “Eric,” a white man from a neighboring town who Older Sister claimed to love, and who she swore loved her. Attempting to hunt down the correct white Eric in the haystack of Minnesota forces Middle Sister to seek help from the community from which she’s grown alienated.

Rottenheart by Kat Dunn (10/13) - Odette and her best friend, Cecilia, grow up between two grand homes, one in Hampstead and one in Suffolk, the ancient and imposing Herne House. Odette’s mother, Lydia, is almost parasitic in her neediness, but despite her, Odette and Cecilia come of age together—free to roam, to learn, and to love. When Lydia inexplicably sickens and dies, a dark veil falls. Odette’s father retreats to his study, while her aunt—the cold and cruel Claudine—increasingly takes charge of the household.

Stellar Smoke by Tanaïs (10/20) - Qamar is a musician hustling in a near-future metropolitan city. Struggling to pay rent and heartbroken after a breakup, she decides to return to the island ashram of her childhood. It’s time to finally settle the rift she has with her estranged mother, Veda—a brilliant scientist, actress, and one of the leaders of a now-dissolved cult called the Endless Temple. But when Qamar arrives, the land is verdant yet neglected, and, most troubling, there are no signs of her mother or sister, Palo. Behind a retina scan–locked door, Qamar encounters her mother’s last opus, a machine consciousness called VEDA (Virtual Experiences, Dreams and Afterlife), designed to reveal the story of Veda’s life.

Welcome back to If You Like This, Read That: Part 3. In this series, I pair books with similar vibes/content.

If you like Let The Right One In, read The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-ran.

Why? Both translated novels center on vampires. They feature kids making bonds with these vampires.

If you like Maeve Fly by CJ Leede, read Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

Why? Both feature unhinged women who aren't afraid to act out their darkest fantasies.

If you like Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, read Dear Laura by Gemma Amor

Why? Both center on stalking targeting children.