The Best Of What I Read in September & October
As usual, I am very late writing this...
As I never got around to writing anything about my September reading, I’ve decided to merge it and October into one post. I won’t be covering everything in depth, just those that stood out for either positive or negative reasons.
5 Star Reads
Ultra Processed People by Chris van Tulleken
September was an incredibly busy month at my dog walking day job, the upside of this being how much time I was able to spend devouring audiobooks. I got through a total of four audiobooks during the month, beginning with Chris van Tulleken’s excellent Ultra Processed People, which digs into the realities of the food most of us in the Western world eat today. Much of this is, as you can probably imagine, horrifying. One line that particularly stood out to me was a quote which stated that UPF - ultra processed food - is in fact “not food: it's an industrially produced edible substance” that is designed and marketed to be cheap, convenient, and easily eaten, and delicious which makes it, to all intents and purposes, addictive. Has this stopped me eating it entirely, no. But I’m absolutely making more of an effort to eat more “real” food and noticing the processed stuff much more.
All Hallows by Christopher Golden
I was determined to spend as much of October as possible reading spooky books (helped along by my participation in Becca’s Spookopoly) and I kicked that off with All Hallows by Christopher Golden. This is a weird book set in suburban America on Halloween night in 1984 when several families on a single Massachusetts Street are dramatically imploding. While the whole street is slowly dragged into their collective mess, four strange children in vintage costumes are mingling with the trick or treaters, begging them for help in hiding from The Cunning Man. It’s a book that built a slow, lingering discomfort rather than outright fear, and it gave me the strongest Steven King vibes I’ve ever felt from a book not by the man himself.
The Black Feathers by Rebecca Netley
I loved Rebecca Netley’s debut novel The Whistling, so when I spotted The Black Feathers available at my library, I immediately grabbed it to listen to during work. This is another gothic style novel set in the 1800s, this time in a slightly bedraggled estate on the Yorkshire Moors. New bride Annie has just moved to Guardbridge to live with her new husband Edward and his sister Iris, and memories of Edward’s tragically lost first wife and son weigh heavily on the house. Iris is a strange soul who never leaves the house, spends her time creating taxidermy figures and hosting seances, and warns Annie to keep watch for black feathers which signify a visit from a spirit. Annie begins to feel haunted from the beginning, while fearing that the devastating secret she is hiding from her new husband will be brought to light. This was a powerful book about the nature of grief and the power of secrets, and I loved the writing style which left you guessing until the end about whether there really was anything supernatural going on or if it was all in Annie’s mind.
Dracul by Dacre Stoker & J.D. Barker
I’m so glad I ended up reading this Dracula prequel, because I had considered giving it away unread. Dracul isn’t a true prequel, instead it has Bram Stoker himself as its main protagonist alongside his sister Matilda and follows their story as both children, and later as young adults. It’s clear from the beginning that there is something odd about their nanny/caretaker Ellen and that something comes to a head the night she mysteriously cures the young Bram of a chronic illness before vanishing into the night. How that story ties into the legend of Dracula is the crux of the book and I devoured it rapidly.
Best of the Four Star Reads
The Pumpkin Spice Café by Laurie Gilmore
The Pumpkin Spice Café was a fairly typical cosy romance and is the first in a series of connected stories set in the town of Dream Harbour. It’s exactly what you’d expect from the genre and light on the spice despite the title!
Cult Following by J. D. Ocker
Another audiobook I raced through (this one courtesy of Blackstone Publishing and Libro.fm), Cult Following is a non-fiction look at some of the most notorious and weird cults in history from the Branch Davidians to the Breatherians. The book explores not only the history and legacy of the cults, but how it is that they can lure in smart, normal people. Some of them are bizarre, others are truly horrifying (if you can think of a trigger warning, it probably applies here) but all are fascinating in their own right.
21st Century Yokel by
I’m not exactly sure how to describe this one! 21st Century Yokel is a sort of memoir/nature study/folklore guide/social history book that looks at the way human beings are tied to the landscape we inhabit no matter what we do. It’s very funny, often poignant, and my Mum would have loved it, which is high praise indeed.