fall book list (and first DNF of the year!)
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- Опубликовано: 4 окт 2024
- Books in this video:
Howl’s Moving Castle by Jones
The Halloween Tree by Bradbury
A Wizards Guide to Defensive Baking by Kingfisher
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Irving
Practical Magic by Hoffman
The Ghost in the House by O’Leary
Penance by Clark
The Final Girl Support Group by Hendrix
Pet Semetery by King
The Postmortal by Magary
The Haunting of Hill House by Jackson
Absolutely hate when people don't show what books they're talking about and instead show the pages. That's why you're the best
Haunting of Hill House has one of those openings that is so unbearably god-tier that it makes you angry that you didn't write it yourself. Absolutely perfect.
The mood you set in you book videos is so delightfully appropriate to books being talked about. You do a great job.
She's seriously my favorite booktuber 😭 I want so many more videos lmao
"I'm trying to be booktuber, idk" made me laugh so hard, don't know why :D
You're doing great!
Booktube 🤝 F1 Tube
DNF
🤝 speedcubing
Edge indexing is what the binders have done with that book. If it was a painting they'd call it edge painting. If they'd colored the edges gold they'd call it edge gilding. If they chopped up the edges on a book so it's easier to literally thumb through, that's called a thumb index. My recommendation for a Halloween book is 'Peace' by Gene Wolfe.
The Shining is *absolutely* a winter book. It's set in a place that is snowed in and inaccessible, that's a crucial part of the plot. It's also just a great read. By all means, read it in winter!
Ooh, haunting of hill house! Prepare yourself for comparing every horror and horror adjacent book disfavorably with it for years to come. Thank you so much for the wonderful updates, I think I need to check out the heights!
The Drew Magary thing is wild because I think of him way more as a sports writer than a fiction writer. He was one of the main people at Deadspin (the Gawker sister blog for sports) for like a decade and then founded Defector as its spiritual successor a few years ago. His yearly "Why your team sucks" series is absolutely iconic.
His story about his accident (I only read the article, not the book) is fascinating, too
Around here, Summer is overstaying its welcome, like a drunk guy snoring on the couch at the end of a party.
The Haunting of Hill House has one of the best opening paragraphs in fiction. Peak writing.
I remember when we read Sleepy Hollow as a class in middle school and I was like "that wasn't scary at all" and my teacher was like "yeah, of course it's not!" And I felt betrayed
The Halloween Tree also has an animated adaptation. It's targeted squarely at kids, but it was a fun-spooky when I first saw it as a kid. It's probably got an upper bound of like 12, but it's still fun to watch with a kid of the right age.
A few horror recommendations:
Thomas Ligotti: Currently the best living writer of weird fiction. He writes mainly short stories, which are bleak, creepy, and often strange. Songs of a Dead Dreamer is a good place to start.
Jean Ray: Belgium writer who wrote weird short horror stories and novels.
Malpertus is the mother of all haunted house stories. The first half is creepy and bizarre, and the second half cosmic and melancholy.
And lastly, an anthology: My Favorite Horror Story. A cool premise, in which well known writers of horror and the fantastic choose their favorite horror story and include an introduction as to why. You'll likely have read some of these, but the insights and enthusiasm of the authors who chose them is a lot of fun.
Anthologies are a great way to get a taste of other authors, and if you like a story of theirs's, you can dive in and explore their other works.
My official change of seasons goes from shorts to sweat pants. Those are the two seasons, shorts and sweat pants.
I live in DC, and for 4 of the last 5 years, shorts season has extended into January. I legitimately cannot remember the last time it was cold enough for me to go close-toed shoes.
I love your Saturn V plush!
One of the best things about this channel is that you get to see new books that may or may not be good but it’s better than the “top 10 scifi” slop everywhere else
I recently reread Howl's Moving Castle too! I didn't have any issues with the age range, which actually was a gripe I kinda had with the sequels. But all are worthwhile imo, more than a lot of 'adult' books around these days.
The movie adaptation is kind of an interesting case - it's got a lot of the same elements but a different plot and very different themes, so it's kind of its own thing.
A fall/Halloween recommend: Have you read The Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo? It starts fall semester at Yale, fitting the season, and the premise is that Yale's famous secret societies are really magical societies with different powers, and they routinely do creepy things just this side of totally evil. The woman who is the main character is a serious misfit at Yale, admitted only because of her unique ability to see ghosts. Things only get creepier from there. It was very well-written, and the main character's struggles to both fit in and to figure out who she really is were easy to identify with. Note that my viewpoint may be colored by the fact that I read most of the book while stuck in the Charlotte airport overnight.
I like the "you're doing great" at the end. My day is improved knowing you are encouraging yourself, I'll do the same at work today. You're doing great.
Nice that you enjoyed howl's moving castle!! I haven't read it but i watched the ghibli movie and have read the sequel book.
My absolute favorite book as a child was another by diane wynne jones, called "the lives of cristopher chant", i must have read it 10-15 times. It follows a character from the start of his life, and he travels to fantasy lands in his dreams, and is able to bring objects back with him into the waking world, but when he's little he thinks this is just what dreams are like. The story really gives a feeling of his living situation and the people in his life, and kinda explores several worlds in a multiverse and gives such a strong sense of different locations. It is part of her chrestomanci series, which can be read out of order :)
Of course i now notice many problems in her books that i didn't as a child... she does always wrap things up very conveniently as you mentioned, though when i was a kid i indeed absolutely loved that about them haha
The Chrestomanci series was one of my favourites growing up! Especially Conrad's Fate and Witch Week
RUclips has just been silently recommending these videos to me, and I just now noticed that it's a different channel! Doh! Subscribed to the new one.
My book club read Howl’s Moving Castle just last month! I liked it quite a bit, but have pretty similar reservations to you. I also love Shirley Jackson - she’s probably one of my favorite authors.
19:00 I know exactly what you mean. Even though I know it doesn't smell like that, I swear I can _smell_ those pages through the computer monitor, and they smell like singed paper and burnt toner, the kind you'd get when you printed a 100-page article on the college department printer, the one that _clearly_ needed to be serviced, but no one wanted to take the initiative to call IT.
I don't necessarily recommend, because I'm whatever the opposite of an expert is on this front, but John Darnielle's books are very spooky. Not very plot-y or, let's say, narratively satisfying, but very spooky. And not just spooky; there's a sincerity that pushes past Stephen King's "isn't this all so very bad" book vibe. Exactly the kind of earnestness that you might expect if you've listened to The Mountain Goats. Basically, the guy from The Mountain Goats writes some spooky (kinda weird) books. Also, the cover of The Devil House is EXCELLENT.
I love Pet Semetary, but it is an amazing story built in top of a lot of people's deal breaker content warning topics.
I genuinely enjoyed the Netflix shoe for Haunting of Hill House! It has similarities to the book, like character names and some backstories and events, but it's a unique telling of a haunting. You mentioned liking the sibling love in books, and this show has a tremendous focus on childhood and adulthood sibling relationships. The show is also fully coherent and standalone without any book knowledge. After you finish the book, I do highly recommend trying out the show!!
I read Pet Cemetery when I was ... 10? Around then. My father told me he couldn't finish it, either. I feel like that's the sort of book you have to read before you know things. Because I don't remember finding it all that horrible, at the time, but I'm not sure I could read it, now. When you understand things the way an adult understands them, everything in that book just becomes horrifying.
If that's a line you don't want to cross, there actually aren't a lot of books by King that are entirely safe. Misery is pretty good and I don't recall anything like that. The Tommyknockers is King at his most coked up, and is notably his worst book, but I actually liked it, I think it's charming. And it's pretty safe. Unless you're afraid of nuclear power.
There's a lot of content warnings attached to every book he writes, because he's not really in it for spooky. He wants it to hurt.
Kingfisher does seem to do the snarky. The only book I've read of hers in The Hollow Places, which is super weird, and involves body and cosmic horror, and it also has characters with some snark. I actually enjoyed it, and plan to read more, but if that puts you off, I'll just confirm -- The Hollow Places also has it.
Thanks for posting, you're the reason ive read a book this year
At least you recognized the groundbreaking value of Washington Irving's stories.
For your winter tbr you should add Anna Kavan’s “Ice”. Only 240 pages. Surreal impactful speculative fiction that is often classified as SciFi.
If you haven’t read it yet LeGuins Left Hand of Darkness is a great winter read.
Same. I also to into books knowing nothing. Don't even read the blurb on the back.
wow, reddit, Tumblr, crichton, we would've been best friends in high school
ive read penance and howls moving castle this year. they were both great and penance got me out of a long reading slump. it was such an interesting concept and very well executed.
Just FYI, Drew Magary is most well-known as a sports columnist, most famously with a very long tenure at Deadspin (before it was gutted); but his columns tended to be very wide-ranging, covering a lot of different interests. So that’s why his online presence is so sports-forward but why he has such a strong presence outside of that.
I have no interest in sports, but the golden age of Deadspin had some really strong reporting about the intersection of sports, culture, and politics, so I often stopped by to see what they were cooking up.
I have a weird Halloween pull for you: Dead Wake by Erik Larson. It's about the Sinking of the Lusitania through surviving letters, diaries, and witness accounts. But it's told less like a traditional history novel and much more like a horror novel. Erik Larson's use of supremely effective imagery in writing about the actual event set literal shivers through my spine when I was reading it at work. Highly recommend.
Yes, I agree. You’re doing great.
But you absolutely must see Howl’s Moving Castle
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle is good and creepy. It's sort of horror and sort of mystery, very much depending on how you read it and which characters you choose to trust.
If you like fall/autumn going from August to October you'll like the Irish seasonal calendar which uses astronomical timing
There's an anthology of short stories inspired by Shirley Jackson called When Things Get Dark, edited by Ellen Datlow, that came out a couple of years ago and has some amazing stuff in it (the last two stories, "Tiptoe" by Laird Barron and "Skinder's Veil" by Kelly Link, are two of my favorite horror/horror-adjacent stories ever). If you're looking for horror writers it's a great introduction to lots of people!
If you like stories about weird houses, there's a short story by Robert A. Heinlein called "And He Built A Crooked House" where an architect designs a a 3D projection of a 4D cube and after an earthquake it becomes 4D. It's Heinlein, but early Heinlein, so no weird stuff.
Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Technically a YA book but better than many/most adult novels that tread in this territory.
Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of my favorites.
The first half of Salem’s Lot is one of the only books to have ever really scared me.
Also, the Haunting of Hill House show is almost entirely different from the book. I enjoyed both, but actually preferred the show. It’s fantastic
I read Salem's Lot in high school. It made me realize that vampires can be sexy characters. It's always been that way, but reading that book made me realize it. As a kid it's just "Bleh! I vant to bite your neck!". Can't remember enough about it to know what part Angela found objectionable, but I remember there were ample gross-outs. Steven King, and all.
+1 for being a booktuber now.. -- cheers
"from my tumblr days" YOU WERE A TUMBLR USER thats great that made me quite cheered
It's not especially autumny, but if you like classics, The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard was one of my favorite readings from my English degree. Possibly my favorite of the "people from the 1800s living sad existential lives" genre.
If you haven't discovered it yet: The Gone World, by Tom Sweterlitsch. It's science fiction/horror with time travel, parallel universes, and crime! The quantum stuff is (IMHO) excellent, especially for mainstream SF. There is body horror, and Clive Barkerish levels of straight up regular nightmare horror. But it's a compelling read, with a strong (amputee!) woman protagonist. Kept me guessing until the very end. An ending WHICH is extremely satisfying. Amazing book from an amazing writer.
If you haven’t read it, This Is How You Lose The Time War is GREAT.
Ooh. Just pulled up the synopsis. Sounds like it would be right up my alley.
I liked a Wizards Guide to Defensive Baking it was interesting.
It's good but you need ADHD to relate to the characters (not as much as Illuminations or Dragonbreath, but some)
I would love a version of "Final Girl Support Group" where it literally is all therapy sessions, like go all in on the dark comedy angle. It feels like a really talented writer could have a lot of fun with the concept, it begs for a wickedly witty take.
Try 'We Are All Completely Fine' by Daryl Gregory (this is what Grady Hendrix ripped off - and butchered - when writing Final Girls... in my head canon, anyway. Short, sweet and scary)
I haven't read Haunting of Hill House but I love the Netflix show by Mike Flanagan. It's more of a family drama with sharp horror elements than a standard horror show. I _have_ read The Shining and although I like most Stephen King books I thought the movie was better, haha.
IMO Salem's Lot is a really good Halloween book. Spooky but not too troubling, generally just pretty fun.
So glad you mentioned Annihilation by Vandermeer! Read it in two days because of how creeped out I was - just couldn't put it down
You should read the play "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller (ex-husband of Marilyn Monroe). It's about the Salem witch trials. A perfect fall book. In keeping with liking 'classics'. "The Plague" by Albert Camus should be on your list.
What a weird coincidence. I was just watching Popcorn in Bed's newest reaction to the first two episodes of The Haunting of Hill House last night.
With your love for westerns I know you'd love God's Country by Percival Everett. It's my second favorite book right after his other banger Erasure. Most all his shit SLAPS.
Offhand I'd say The Shining is a winter book as it takes place during the winter, which is a predominant part of the plot.
For me, fall starts in September because in my first language, its in the name of the month. And same with summer starting in June.
My copies of The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia have shiny gold and silver page edges (respectively). I think that's the only kind of page edges like that that I'd want.
Agreed: fall (or autumn as we Brits call it) is September 1st until November 30th exactly. Seasons should know how to behave properly, and part of that is respecting the arbitrary calendar we invented!
Huh, DNF is a booktube term? I know about it from the running world. I wonder how much overlap those two worlds has.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is spookier than Hill House, but idk your mileage may vary. (You *are* doing great, by the way. I don't even watch Booktube for the most part, but your ability to hold a conversation with a camera is top-tier.)
We do a family book club and read the haunting of hill house last year. It wasn't my favorite, but its not my style of book. We also read A Wizards Guide to Defensive Baking and I liked that one. You could try Mort by Terry Pratchett. Its not really spooky or fall themed but it has death in it and I thought it was quite enjoyable. If you want another Stephan King, you could read Needful Things. I thought that was pretty good.
I wouldn't say it has fall vibes necessarily but Chevy in the Hole by Kelsey Ronan has a (complicated) sibling relationship at its heart.
Nailed the ending.
Didn't finish Pet Sematary, either. I started reading it in middle school and when the terrible part happens, I threw it against the wall and that was the end of that... I did read *It* years later and liked it. I love Shirley Jackson. Domestic short stories, horror novels or short stories, combinations of the two (*Charles* falls into that category)... all good. The Haunting of Hill House is (unfortunately) my least favorite novel (but still excellent, if kind of run of the mill in the haunted house department). Oddly, I found the 1963 film adaptation starring Julie Harris more satisfying. *Hangsaman* is the best in my opinion. It is a great deal more insidious than the rest due to some implications it does not spell out, but the narrative perspective is mind bending... makes James' *Turn of the Screw* and *What Maisie Knew* seem basic in this regard (though James was writing a half of century earlier). Pleasant reading
0:23 well that would bait some people into clicking on the video to see what books their going to mention, too 🤔
I don't think you will like "Salem's lot" if you're skipping "Pet Semetery" for the reason I believe.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
I don't remember all of it, because there's a lot, but it had a lot of Norse gods who'd ended up in the 20th century. One of them was living there as a "Mr Odwin". He was in a sanitarium (delusions of grandeur and so on) and was obsessed with the smell of freshly laundered linen. I think the head nurse wasn't having any of his nonsense, and he was happy to just be tucked in and allowed to sleep in the glorious linen.
I suppose you've read it? Not at all Halloween, unless you include abandoned gods getting stuck in secular times as sort of ghostly.
Here's a recommendation: A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny and read the chapters on their corresponding dates (the chapters are helpfully named by the dates).
You're an excellent booktuber!
In Sweden, August is definitely summer. Fall starts in September. We don't have much summer to begin with, so we need every bit we can get. 😐
OH MY GOD HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE BOOK
You have no idea I've been obsessed with this book for years. OBSESSED
I'm running around my room
I PREDICTED THE ONE CRITICISM CORRECTLY I HAVE READ TOO MANY GOODREADS REVIEWS OF THAT BOOK
You should read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, short and a classic. And it can be read for winter OR fall.
Great update on the book journey. Cheers.
For the scary season, I'd be very interested in your take on the following:
'Echopraxia' by Peter Watts (vampires and zombies and genetically-altered-viruses, oh my! But for scientifically sophisticated grown-ups. Thank me later for introducing you to Peter Watts if you don't already know of him)
'American Elsewhere' by Robert Jackson Bennett (contains a couple of riffs on a particular element that you mentioned finding scary...and so much more. Another frightening/intelligent read)
'We Are All Completely Fine' by Daryl Gregory (this is what Grady Hendrix ripped off - and butchered - when writing Final Girls... in my head canon, anyway. Short, sweet and scary)
'GBH' by Ted Lewis (needs to be read to the end and there's some tough going on the way. But, hey, if you don't make it through this, you'll never make it through 'Boy Parts'. This is a ghost in book form. It may well decide to haunt you)
Looking forward to the next installment.
....
EDITED for the mis-spelling of an author's name or two and got rid of the TL;DR at the end
The scariest novel I ever read is The Collector, by John Fowles. The book came out in '63, so it also counts as a classic!
Angela is having such a good time and its infectious. "Pet Cemetery" is more like a Does Not Qualify, DNF should be something so bad or dull even she can't plow through.
as someone who rarely reads horror but is also morbidly curious, what made her return the book do you think? I skimmed the wikipedia page and I noticed there was a cemetery on a Mi’kmaq burial ground, is that what she means?
I would also like to know
@@jawnvaljawnI’m assuming the dead kid angle as she’s a parent
@@dakotadalton2536I understand Mr. King himself was bothered by this book because of the dead kid angle and the traffic in front of where he lived.
Have you read the His Dark Materials books by Philip Pullman? it's been a long long time since I've read them, but they're my favourite YA books. They have fantasy with a splash of sci fi, and i believe they were banned in some places in America or something due to its religious allegory. Kind of wintery vibes.
I feel like you would be a big fangirl of Studio Ghibli. The inner discussion of about thumbnails is part of what keeps me from making videos.
No one can convince me that The Hollow Places isn't T. Kingfisher's best novel because I agree with you dude, Good Bones and Baking were just not it for me at all lol
I'm in Louisiana. Fall starts the third week of October. Winter starts sometime in December and ends in mid-February.
If we’re lucky and it comes at all. I live on the Northshore.
Hill House Netflix series was really dull. Never been interested in Pet Cemetery as I like pets. I like true crime, Killing for Company by Brian Masters is very good. Nice wrap up.
Have you read Fire and Blood? I saw on one of your videos and the shelf behind you had the 5 Game of Thrones books. I don't know how you felt about them but if you enjoyed them and have not yet read Fire and Blood. Please do so.
Finally! Someone else who also hates Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Maybe try "A Night in the Lonesome October" by Roger Zelazny for another spooky-season read. I'm only part-way through it as a between-pod-books read, but it is delightful.
I loved that book. Such a banger. Also, the princes of amber is a lot of fun.
Title is from a line in Edgar Allan Poe's Ulalume, my favorite spooky autumn poem.
Followed Magary. Thanks!
I'd be curious of what you would think about highly suggested non king horror books ala off season / the girl next door by jack ketchum, the wasp factory by Iain banks, the troop by nick cutter, the ruins by Scott Smith, or tender is the flesh by Agustina Bazterrica. These are all highly discussed and widely praised horror books in online book discourse (but have more mixed results in traditional circles lol)
I am here for the Acollieralso book club, 1000%
Nice balance. In the background.
watch SPIRITED AWAY you would love it!
I just read Final Girl Support Group today, and I'm glad you bounced off of it as much as I did. It was ... not great. I found the pace and actions of the characters to be utterly bizarre and devoid of believability. The characters were as thin as they could possibly be. Nothing felt earned or deserved or built to. It just....kinda happened to happen. And that was it. And it was nothing like what I wanted out of it. The entire book should have been them in a long therapy session that started to turn vaguely sinister into outright sinister.
Try playing Alien:Isolation for scary...im litterally too scared to play that game alone in dark (even though im a huge Alien fan)....and my sister would probably say that game is boring...i mean its like we live in two different worlds.
August? Fall? August is so, so summer. I’m questioning everything now.
Cool, thanks!
I liked Haunting of Hill House very much (Stephen King is also a big fan of it); I hope you enjoy it.
I only know of Drew Magary though sports. He wrote for the sports website Deadspin for a long time, I don't think I even knew he wrote books also.
My parents read Salem's Lot when it came out and my mom is still creeped out by the idea of vampires outside of windows like half a century later.
So... recommendation, I guess?
Halloween book recommendation: Beetle & the Hollowbones by Aliza Layne, set in the spooky season of Aug-tober. YA graphic novel with queer romance.
I just finished Pet Sematary, which I first read years ago as a teenager and could barely remember it. I don't blame you for DNF'ing it. It's not a novel that really rewards the reader for what it puts you through.
Very well written, though. I and my sister forbade our mother from reading it (for the obvious reasons) back when it first came out, even though she was a big Stephen King fan.
A tour on the prairies is all right, if you want to learn about Oklahoma in 1830 from Washington Irving