Looking for something new to read? Check out our New and Noteworthy and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy!
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
When Mr. Dashwood dies, he leaves his second wife and her three daughters at the mercy of his son and heir, John. John’s wife convinces him to turn his step-mother and half-sisters out, and they move to a country cottage, rented to them by a distant relative. In their newly reduced circumstances Elinor and Marianne, the two eldest daughters, wrestle with ideas of romance and reality and their apparent opposition to each other. Elinor struggles in silent propriety, while Marianne is as violently romantic as her ideals. Life, however, teaches the girls to balance sense and sensibility in their approach to love and marriage.
Read the book before seeing the movie this month!
Unsayable: A Life in Writing by Michael Cunningham
Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side. At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively collecting the names of things: oak, Chevrolet, finch, tulip, Tupperware…. Each word rendered the world ever so slightly more understandable, more describable, kicking off a lifelong love affair with language — one that would, eventually, maybe inevitably, lead him to become a writer. In Unsayable , Cunningham’s memories spill forth, and with them, reflections on the craft of writing. He is fifteen, in a swimming pool at night with his best friend, trying to decipher the other boy’s mysterious, contemplative silences. He is a new college graduate, setting off for nowhere in a Dodge Dart, hoping to pull meaning (and a novel) from the expanse of America. He is on Cape Cod, regaling an elderly couple with invented tales of youthful escapades. He is in an art gallery, unwittingly having the first in a lifetime of conversations with the man he would marry. A thread ties each beautifully wrought moment to the next: what is unspoken, what won’t yield to language, what is embellished beyond recognition, what is still left to say. Luminous, perceptive, and powerful, Unsayable is an ode to literature, a meditation on craft, and an intimate account of a life spent trying to put into words that which resists depiction. This, it turns out, is the lifeblood of the fiction writer: the impossibility of capturing the human experience, and the relentless desire to try.
Listen to an interview with the author here!
Lost in Curiosity: Field Notes from Scientists’ Adventures into the Unknown by Roberta Kwok
The real story of science isn’t a triumphant breakthrough. It’s messy, mysterious, and deeply human. In Lost in Curiosity, award-winning journalist Roberta Kwok pulls back the curtain on what scientific discovery actually looks like…not a Eureka moment, but a fraught, often chaotic pursuit of truth. Chronicling researchers’ struggles and hopes in the field and lab, Kwok documents it all: fending off relentless snowfall on a remote Greenland glacier, desperately searching for an elusive frog in the rainforests of Borneo, and scrambling to capture fleeting signals of a faraway moon outside our solar system. These are the untold stories of devoted young scientists and restless minds who are chasing nature’s riddles, without knowing what they’ll uncover. Through vivid reporting and moments of unexpected emotion, Kwok reveals the inner lives of researchers who care profoundly about understanding our world and saving what’s left of it. From enigmatic fossils and mind-bending physics to the puzzling behavior of wild animals, Lost in Curiosity is a journey through the questions that keep scientists up at night-and the sometimes strange, always illuminating paths they take to answer them.
Read about the author’s writing process here!
Heather: A Novel by Caitlin Mullen
1990. In the myth-riddled woods of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, sixteen-year-old Annabelle Riley’s twin sister, Sabrina, has been having an affair with a mysterious older man, and Annabelle is determined to uncover what’s going on. Then, inexplicably, both sisters disappear. In this same town years later, newly instated police chief Callie Hauser makes an arrest that unexpectedly resurrects details from a heartbreaking cold case. As she digs deeper, the past and the present collide, challenging everything Callie believes about right and wrong, who she is, and the town she’s always called home.
Find out more about the book through this review or use your NYT access to read this article! (And if you want to get a feel for the setting, check out these pictures.)
The Devil’s Done Come Back edited by Ed Southern
North Carolina ain’t what it once was: forests and fields have given way to suburbs and vacation homes, textile mills to high tech, tobacco farms to tourism. That doesn’t mean, though, that the ghosts of the Old North State have gone away.
In this anthology, readers might glimpse some of the ghostly apparitions, headless fiends, and creepy hollers they heard about around their childhood campfires. Now, fifteen of the state’s finest contemporary prose writers and poets have reimagined these stories—bringing us fresh tales that are bound to scare the living daylights out of us all over again.
It wouldn’t be an October reading list without something spooky! Find more options here, and read about Duke’s own ghosts here.
The post What to Read this Month – October appeared first on Duke University Libraries Blogs.
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