September Reading

This is my monthly wrap up where I talk about some of my favourite things from the last month. What I’m reading, enjoying, looking forward to—sort of anything floating my boat.

On My Bedside Table

We’re doing things a little differently this month because this dispatch from my bedside table is sponsored by Book of the Month!

Book of the Month took the guesswork out of my TBR this month. Their monthly selection never ceases to amaze me with its ability to fit everyone’s taste. I picked a buzzy litfic I was already excited about and a bone-chilling horror that sounds perfect for spooky season.

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers is the story of two already married people meeting, told through parallel timelines. In one, they explore their budding romantic connection, and in the other, they resist it. I love a sliding doors narrative, so this is right up my alley.

The Haunting of Paynes Hollow by Kelley Armstrong is a supernatural horror about a woman spending a month in her family’s haunted lakeside property. Dark family secrets, a creepy cottage, and things that go bump in the night… All things I look for in a perfect October read.

You can click here to join me and get your first Book of the Month book for just $5 and a free hat of your choosing with the code CANDY!

Here is an overview of how my month went:

• Got invited to NYC to see Dua Lipa speak to David Szalay about his novel Flesh

• I went camping and I enjoyed it

• Made a little video about both of those things, which you can watch here

• Spruceton Inn announced their 2025 Artist Residents, and I’m one of them!!
  So excited and honoured to be part of the residency 😇

• Bought one of my fall wishlist items… a gorgeous navy leather bag from Chloé!
  I got it on eBay, and I’m obsessed with it

• Chatted with Petya K. Grady about taste which you can read here

What I Read

Below is a rundown of every book I read last month. I’ll be adding a star next to my standouts, like a starred review where a star isn’t a 1 to 5 scale, it just means good!

Before the written ramblings, here is a video version of my monthly wrap up if you’re more of a visual person:

Best Woman by Rose Dommu ★

I don’t read romance often, so when I do, it’s because it’s special. Best Woman is special.

It’s the story of Julia, a twenty-something living in NYC, whose brother is getting married in her home state of Florida. She’s the best woman in the wedding, and the maid of honor happens to be a girl she crushed on all through high school. What follows is something straight out of a 90s Julia Roberts romcom.

The book reads like butter. I dove in headfirst and could not put it down. It’s quippy like a perfectly calibrated tweet, but balances the tugging of the heartstrings too.
It explores siblings, parents and family, specifically as a queer and trans person. What does going home look like for someone who has many big feelings tied up in the place? It’s also about what it’s like to navigate identity in Florida.

Just like a 90s romcom, it’s fluffy but there’s substance too. It sent me into a Notting Hill, Pretty Woman, My Best Friend’s Wedding marathon, which is the best way to spend a crisp September day.

The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont

Every September rolls around and I have an urge to reread The Secret History. This year, when that itch arrived, I realized I had this book on my shelves and it would do the trick.

The Starboard Sea is set in the late 1980s in the world of elite prep schools on the East Coast of the US. It’s an exploration of class, privilege, morality, desire, consequence, and a heavy dose of sailing.

Jason has conflicted feelings about his family, his wealth, his circumstances, his sexuality, and his past. When he gets to a new school (the only place to accept him after getting kicked out of his last school), his conflicts bubble up to the surface as he’s surrounded by boys who wear their privilege like it’s the overpriced cologne they douse themselves in.

There are twists and turns and reveals throughout this novel. In part, it’s a murder mystery (two in fact), but where I found it most interesting was the power struggle and social dynamics it leans into. The characters are vivid and violent, they leap off the page for better and for worse.
In high school, I went to a prep school in Connecticut for two weeks under the guise of sociological research (student exchange) and this novel brought me right back there. Sneaking by security, drinking in a deserted wing, mean jocks, nice weirdos, etc.

This gave me the right amount of intrigue and academia, and I think more people should read this instead of a tenth pass at Donna Tartt.

We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (tr. by Robin Myers)

This novel is about Antonio, a Basque nun who transitions into a war lieutenant in the 17th century Spanish conquest of Argentina. On oddity of premise alone, I had to read it.

We float between different forms and different timelines—at times it’s dreamlike, other times it’s solid and sturdy. Half of this novel is a life recollected in a letter he’s writing to his aunt, and the other half is his experience in Argentina from the moment he touches down. Because of this we oscillate from an exploration of trans identity and an inside look at colonization. There’s also this through-line of an almost meditation on existence and impermanence through memory that I found fascinating.

How do we experience something that was there, but remained unseen? Is it part of our life? What we allow to pass us by as if it had not existed? What we glimpse today for the first time but which transpired some forty years ago; did we indeed live it all? Is it true, what I’m telling you now?

p.29, We Are Green and Trembling

The displays of violence and carnage towards indigenous people in this was sobering. Even Antonio, the narrator we are meant to sympathize with, attempts to push his beliefs and ways of life onto two young indigenous girls he saves from death. At points this act feels heroic, and then we’re reminded he respects the monkeys accompanying them as much as he respects these girls.
To me, this points to a writer making sense of her country’s fraught history. She paints the evils with nuance and doesn’t erase the places where her hero falls short.

We Are Green and Trembling is queer in subject matter and in shape. It’s a great reminder that queer people have always and will always exist.

Herculine by Grace Byron (Out October 7th)

This book is not for everyone, and that’s why I enjoyed it.

In part, this is a jagged literary fiction exploring trans identity, mental health and trauma, and none of it in a sterile way. Its other part is a twisted and rotten horror with demonic possession that reminded me of watching The Exorcist for the first time.
These halves don’t really make the whole you might expect, their respective edges start to blur into each other until it’s a mash of literary horror.

We follow an unnamed narrator, a trans woman living in NYC, as she faces her demons: traumatic past, shitty job history, looming surgery pressure, a slew of exes, and an actual demon of the sleep paralysis variety. She decides to follow the pull of her ex’s all trans girl commune and treks to Indiana to join. She faces a community that isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in a subversion of the very queer desire to ‘just all buy a farm together and make it a queer utopia.’

Major standouts for me are the lengths people will go to for community and the incredibly real pressures a trans person faces in a predominantly cis world. Being in the grips of this novel and its many flawed, unlikable characters was like falling into quicksand except I wanted to fight it and sink deeper.

I love horror, I love queer horror, and this is just crazy enough that it works.

The South by Tash Aw

I spent two months telling Martha we would read this together. She patiently waited for my library hold to come in, and I ended up finishing it before she had even cracked 20 pages. As much as I wanted to wait and discuss it with her, I just had to push through and finish it.
We have a bad track record of tandem reads this year, and this didn’t break the streak.

This is a The Booker Prizes longlist title from this year, and it’s a queer coming of age set in rural Malaysia in the 1990s. We follow Jay over the course of one summer when his mother inherits her family’s farm and they move there from the city to tend to the struggling land. Jay meets Chuan, the farm manager’s son and the two grow very close. Meanwhile, the family is slowly drifting apart.

This should work for me. This should be a standout. But it wasn’t. It’s extremely slow-moving and contemplative instead of felt—something quite odd to be left with when reading a mostly first person narration.
A way I can contextualize how it slowly winded enjoyment for me is the very start of the novel: It kicks off with a violent sexual encounter, and the rest falls flat compared to its opening pages. We never get back to that height of feeling or saturation.

The parts of this I loved were the discussions of race, the differences between city and country, and an awareness of difference so great it allows our narrator to calibrate his erasure of it. The setting was extremely vivid, and that was definitely a strength. But cinematic can only go so far for me when I’m reading a book and not watching a movie. It feels to me like this book goes a long way on idea alone, but doesn’t quite stick the landing on execution.

Despite all of this, I’m interested to read more from Tash Aw (not necessarily the next three instalments in this quartet, but maybe his earlier work). The Malaysian setting was extremely interesting, and I’d look for more of that in my next pick from him.

Stoner by John Williams ★

I’ve wanted to read this book for years. I kept hearing amazing things about it, and fall felt like the right time to dive into an academia-heavy story like this one.

William Stoner grows up poor on a farm in Missouri in the early 1900s. When he gets the chance to go to school for agriculture, he instead falls in love with literature and diverts from the path he was meant to follow. The rest of the novel tracks his life through academia, marriage and parenthood with a quiet precision.

Reading this was such an interesting experience because for about 75% of it, I was convinced it was just fine. But when I finished, I realized that everything had shifted beneath the surface and it really affected me. Petya K. Grady called it a “slow trickle that leads to a flood” when we talked about it, and that’s exactly how it feels.

There’s so much bleakness in this book. I found myself constantly having to reckon with my feelings of pity for this man, his loneliness, his powerlessness, his inability to be in the driver’s seat of his own life. His change to literature is the only real choice he makes, and he seems almost surprised to be making it. The rest of the things in this novel happen to him and he can rarely muster up the courage to impact his circumstances in any way.

It reminded me of the movie The History of Sound, which I recently saw and really enjoyed. There are many similarities in the main character’s life story and the setting they inhabit, but the touching simplicity is also a commonality.

This novel is just magnificent. A perfect character study.

Heart the Lover by Lily King ★

Lily King is such a special writer. Her writing is the perfect amount of literary in that sentences beg to be reread, but none of it feels pretentious.

Heart the Lover is a companion novel to her beloved Writers & Lovers. They have the same spirit, but the way it is shaded in is quite different. This new book is told in two parts: In the first, the protagonist is in college and falls into a complex love triangle with two friends; in the second, we see them twenty years later as their lives have unfolded.
There is so much bright realism to these characters, their dynamics, their dialogue, it almost felt like diving into memory rather than reading a story.

My current novel-in-progress has me thinking a lot about memory and a present being shaped by the past, so I was very taken by this story. The choices she makes in telling it here work so well. Highlighting the right moments and only giving glimpses of others. Lily King gives us just enough to be able to land devastating blows, but it never feels dramatic or heavy-handed. Her pen is so light on the reader’s lead.

It’s hard to say anything about this novel without giving too much away. I want to keep its magic for any future reader, so I’ll just leave it at highly recommending it.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (tr. by Sophie Hughes)

I have previously worked in a nebulous marketing role at a tech company with very loose vacation and remote work policies. So has my boyfriend. This has allowed us to have stints as digital nomads in different cities.
This context should tell you a lot about how I felt reading the story of a generic couple living in Berlin as digital nomads with generic jobs for generic companies living generic lives. A satire of the modern millennial that felt like it was peeking into my past.

Every chapter explores a different facet of their life like social media, activism, decor, sex, and every segment feels like it was trying to hold up a mirror to behaviours/practices/beliefs of the same specific set of people. This book felt like a thought experiment pushed all the way to the extreme, like it was intentionally non-specific in order to incite reader transference. It was really fun to be pulled apart by the common denominators in here.

I flew through this and enjoyed it quite a bit. Anyone who feels like this book might be about them should read it.

Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (Out November 4th) ★

What to say about Patti Smith that hasn’t already been said?
Her voice is singular. Her writing fills the well. This newest addition to her canon is no different.

Bread of Angels is a memoir that chronicles her life from birth to today, and all the way back again in what felt almost like a loop. She takes us through her childhood riddled with illness and poverty, into an adult life as an artist, lover, parent, friend.
Her ability to recollect with such emotional precision is astounding. She excavates moments of grief and love to trace her own trajectory to the present. I loved how this really felt like someone taking stock and noticing the passage of time.

Most of the writing here feels extremely dropped in. The moments of poeticism feel earned and flowed really nicely for me. Reading this made me dive into the world of her music all over again.
The breadth of her artistry is unlike any other, and this is a shiny new piece of that puzzle.

How’s your fall going so far?

What did you read and love in September?

Tell me what you think in the comments!

That’s been my month! Typos (if any) were made on purpose.

Until next time 🤠