If you’re reading this article you must genuinely want a good fall read to enjoy this chilly, spooky season, so grab your coziest blanket and a nice cup of coffee (or hot chocolate, if that’s what you prefer). Maybe even make it a pumpkin spice latte if you want to go autumn crazy. Enjoy this list of fall reads you might want to take a look at before fall ends and winter emerges.
- “Perfume” by Patrick Suskind
“Perfume” is a third person narration novel that tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who creates the finest perfume in Paris. His work, however, takes a dark turn as he searches for the ultimate scent. He’s born with an extremely high sense of everything. He becomes obsessed with finding the perfect scent specificity from an innocent young lady. This novel is based on the real-life story of the Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta, also known as the “Tallow-Man”, who killed women and children, sold their clothes, and extracted their body-fat to make soap, resembling some of Grenouille’s methods in some capacity.
2. “I who have never known men” by Jaqueline Harpman
Once I started this book I could not put it down. Not only will this book make you rethink your life, but also appreciate it. “I who have never known men” is a 1995 novel written by a Belgian author, Jaqueline Harpman. In the book there’s a group of 39 women that are held in a cage underground for many, many years, and they don’t know how long they’ve been in there. The youngest girl of the group is the novel’s narrator. All of these women are watched over by guards, the guards keep these women just healthy enough to survive in this prison, but they’re also living this disoriented life because they have no sense of time. One day a siren goes off and one of the guards puts a key in one of the locks and then just leaves it there, so the women get a chance to escape and find freedom. There is much more that happens, which is connected to why they were held there in the first place. This one girl who’s basically lived their whole life in captivity grew up and experienced this world where all of society’s rules have been tossed out the window and everything she’s ever known has been taught to her by women.
3. “Angel” by Elizabeth Taylor
“Angel” by Elizabeth Taylor is a 1957 novel written by the English author. This tells the story of a woman named Angelica, though her family calls her “Angel”. She is described as an imaginative fifteen year old girl who dreams of having a life of lavish opulence. She is frequently made out to be pathetic due to her young age and big dreams. She gets a taste of this kind of life, a life of lasciviousness, when she starts writing stories and becomes a published author. She then refuses to let go of her new-found riches, which starts within Angel a sense of determination to be able to prove herself in this society.
4. “Lolly Willowes” by Sylvia Townsend Warner
“Lolly Willowes” is a 1926 novella, highly original for its time, that is a classic of feminist fiction and nowadays is often included in lists of the best English novellas of the last century. This is about a young woman named Laura Willowes moving from Somerset to London to live with her brother and his family. Laura also know as “Lolly” wants to break free from her stifling life by moving to a small village in the Chilterns where she embraces who she is and finds the need to explore her hidden powers more than within herself; she then finds her way to witchcraft allowing her to finally live out the life she deserves. The novella symbolizes the expectation of that of a woman and how Laura “Lolly” wouldn’t stand for that.
5. “Ghost” by Edith Wharton
If you’re looking for a book more on the spooky side to read for this October, I would definitely pick up this one. “Ghost” by Edith Wharton is a novel full of short stories curated by the author herself that may I say are just hits after hits. These are not your ordinary ghost stories that you can hear anywhere, but are instead terrifying and chilling stories that will leave you awake at night. Some of my favorites in this collection are “All Souls“, “Miss Mary Pask”, “Pomegranate Seed” and “The Eyes”. These stories have a bone chilling background that makes your skin crawl.
6. “The Bird’s Nest” by Shirley Jackson
No fall “TBR” is complete without one of Shirley Jackson’s books. There’s a narrator, a twenty-three year old woman named Elizabeth, starts suffering from headaches, so her aunt takes her to a psychologist to be examined. Eventually the reader finds out Elizabeth is not just one person. This book is a chilling horror story that everyone needs to read; it is THE perfect spooky read for this season.
