3 More Halloween Reading Recommendations
+ 1 current (and fall) read!
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If you’re like me and like a challange here are a couple books to read for continue the halloween spirit and into November fall (which is an entirely different fall than October).
Not traditional spooky recs but these boast a set of strange and grotesque in some way, shape or form stories.
I’m reading Small Things Like These right now (hopefully finishing it today) and loving it. Claire Keegan writes quiet sorrows and hopes like no other.
Here’s the bookshop playlist.
Kappa by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Satire of Japanese society
Japanese folklore
Examines capitalism, philosophy, and religion
Strange, uncanny
Summary:
“From the author of Rashomon comes a Swiftian satire of Japanese society thinly disguised as the fictitious Kappaland. Peopled with creatures from Japanese folklore, Kappland serves as a vehicle for the humorous examination of the moral foibles of Japanese society in the early 20th century.”
Quotes:
“Pride, lust, doubt — for three thousand years, all our sins have stemmed from these three things. As well as all our virtues.”
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Abuse and complicitness
Forrests and ancient places
Nostalgia
Stream of consciousness writing style
Summary:
“For two weeks, the length of her father's vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan; they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are fulfilling their coursework; Silvie's father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs—particularly their sacrifices to the bog. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind.
The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice?”
Quotes:
“I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.”
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Devotion, love, temptation, and betrayal
Victorian bleakness
Coming of age and into yourself
Morality and social class
Summary:
“Bronte's infamous Gothic novel tells the story of orphan Jane, a child of unfortunate circumstances. Raised and treated badly by her aunt and cousins and eventually sent away to a cruel boarding school, it is not until Jane becomes a governess at Thornfield that she finds happiness. Meek, measured, but determined, Jane soon falls in love with her brooding and stormy master, Mr Rochester, but it is not long before strange and unnerving events occur in the house and Jane is forced to leave Thornfield to pursue her future.”
Quotes:
“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!”
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Family
Complicit silence
Moral awakening
Acts of kindess
Summary:
“It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man, who is father to five girls, faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.”
Quotes:
“Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.”