reading list: october - december

Eli Cranor, Mississippi Blue 42. NY: Soho Crime, 2025. This is the second time I’ve read it since August, which means I either really love it, or it’s totally forgettable. Either one if fine; it’s a beach read for the bros. Arthur C. Brooks, Happiness Files. Boston: Harvard Business Review, 2025. I don’t need to read this to endorse it whole-heartedly, since it is, as the cover explains, a curated collection of columns. I have already read much of it upon original publication. Dr. Brooks has studied his subject carefully and closely, and always offers good advice, based on the good advice of our predecessors. And since I didn’t need to read it, I can immediately give it to someone who does -- which would be almost everyone. Maxine Kumin, And Short the Season. NY: Norton, 2014. This book is full of death. It is beautiful It is goodbye. P.D. James, Death Comes to Pemberly. NY: Knopf, 2011. In which Jane and Bingly, Elizabeth and Darcy, &c, are happily preparing or the annual Pemberly ball when Lydia arrives, screaming: Wickham may be dead. But no, it’s their traveling companion, and Wickham is held for his murder. Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faries. NY: DelRey, 2023. Ostensibly the journal of a Cambridge academic from 1909, this enemies-to-lovers romance hiding in an adventure tale is a lot of fun. Franz Kafka, The Trial. NY: Schocken, 1998. Kafka’s brutal bureaucracy is a perfect mirror for the current moment. Ali Hazelwood, Bride. NY: Berkeley, 2024. Paranormal romance, it says on the cover. Vampyre and werewolf. Is that even possible?