October was the month of heavy books I could not stop listening to. A memoir about a marriage inside a fundamentalist patriarchy movement took me just a few days, a family novel about a little girl named Poppy sent me down five Google rabbit holes, and A Little Life broke things inside me over and over and then somehow made me laugh out loud. Then I went straight into To Paradise, because one Yanagihara was apparently not enough, and on the last day of the month I squeezed in There There. Meanwhile Lonesome Dove sat on my Kindle every evening, and when the clock hit midnight on Halloween I still had about 100 pages to go. This is the table of contents for my month: every book, an honest review, and which ones sent me down a rabbit hole or onto a reading tree.
October by the numbers
Books finished: 6, plus most of Lonesome Dove
Dollars spent on books: 0, all free from the library
Average rating: 4.0 stars
Google searches: 15 rabbit holes, including which fish change sex partway through their lives, a grove of aspen trees in Utah that might be one single living thing, the French word for the dolls Celestial sews in An American Marriage, and whether the internet is wrecking my memory, courtesy of There There
Reading trees growing: 3. My letters tree picked up a new branch, a brand new tree about memoirs from inside a strict religious world started with Educated at the root, and the tree that grew out of Mad Honey picked up a second thread
Stars: one 5 star, one 4.5, one 4, and three 3.5
Format split: all 6 finished books were audiobooks, with Lonesome Dove on my Kindle in the evenings
Narrators: Oliver Wyman on A Little Life, Tia Levings reading her own memoir, Gabra Zackman on This Is How It Always Is, Sean Crisden and Eisa Davis trading the letters on An American Marriage, five narrators on To Paradise including BD Wong, and four voices on There There (Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Cuervo and Kyla Garcia). No Julia Whelan this month.
Listening time: 100 hours 36 minutes at normal speed, or about 67 hours at my usual 1.5x. A Little Life and To Paradise alone were almost 62 of those hours
Pages: about 2,700 across the six finished books, plus roughly 760 pages of Lonesome Dove
Days of my life: about 3.4 days spent with a book this month, though it felt a lot longer than that, since I didn't get to say I finished Lonesome Dove before this recap
Top genre: literary fiction, 5 of the 6
Currently reading: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, about 100 pages from the end
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I picked this up because I saw it on a list of the best audiobooks of recent years, and five stars is the most Goodreads will let me give it. I would give it a million if I could. I don't think any other book has done this to me before. What happens to Jude as a child is hard to sit with, and I was honestly taken aback by it, but the way he's written, you fall completely in love with him and want nothing but good things for him. So you're broken over his past and desperately invested in his future at the same time.
It broke things inside me so often, and then it made me smile, and then it made me cry again, and I'm pretty sure I laughed out loud a few times too. I don't know how Yanagihara pulled all of that off. It isn't just a book, it's a work of art. I'm not going to name the moments that stuck with me, because every one of them would be a spoiler if you don't know what you're walking into. Please check the content warnings before you start, because it goes to very dark places, including child abuse and self-harm. If you want to get emotionally invested and then completely wrecked, this is your book, and expect a major book hangover. When I finally have a shelf, this one gets a permanent spot on it.
Things I Googled: whether it was translated, the same question My Friends sent me to in August, and this time I got the opposite answer. I also looked up who Yanagihara is, what else she's written, and whether any of it was based on true events. All four are in Things I Googled While Reading in October.
Where this book is sending me next: To Paradise, her 2022 novel, which you'll find further down this list. I went straight into it hoping she'd break me all over again.
A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
This one was already on my reading list, and it reminded me so much of Educated, which I loved. Tia Levings tells the story of her marriage inside a fundamentalist Christian patriarchy movement, the abuse that came with it, and the work of getting herself and her kids out. It's a heavy subject, and I still finished it in just a few days, because she reads it herself and tells it so clearly that I kept pressing play. It's easy listening only in the sense that she never loses you, even when what she's describing is hard to sit through. The parts about religious trauma are the ones that stayed with me most. Four stars for a memoir that is brave and honest without ever turning into a spectacle.
Things I Googled: a passage about aspen trees and how their roots run together underground. That one is in Things I Googled While Reading in October, and it sits right next to the redwood rabbit hole The Fall Risk sent me down this summer.
Where this book is sending me next: Eat Pray Love, because Levings mentions reading it, and I want to follow the books named inside a book the same way I'm doing with The Correspondent. There's also a passage about going back into the rooms of a house that don't want her there anymore, and it landed right on top of what I wrote in Whistler and the Houses I Can't Walk Back Into.
Reading Trees: nothing in Educated handed me this book, it was already on my list, but the two belong together, so A Well-Trained Wife is the first book on a brand new branch about memoirs from inside a strict religious world, with Educated at the root.
This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐½
I'd seen or heard somewhere that this one was good, and it was sitting there on Libby the day I needed a new audiobook. It follows a family with five boys, and the youngest, Claude, knows early on that she is really a girl named Poppy. A lot of the book is about her parents trying to do right by her and what their choices end up costing everyone. I wouldn't call it an easy listen because of the subject matter, but it never felt like a chore. The narration was good, the story kept pulling me back every time I had a few spare minutes, and I sped through it, invested in this family the whole way. This was my first Laurie Frankel, and it won't be my last.
Things I Googled: five things, more than any other book this month, and they went places I never expected from a family novel, from fish that change sex all the way to temples in Thailand. The fish and the colors are in Things I Googled While Reading in October, and the rest will be featured in a future piece on the rules various faiths make.
Where this book is sending me next: more Laurie Frankel.
Reading Trees: this one wasn't sparked by anything, but it lands as a branch on the tree that grew out of Mad Honey, for a reason I won't spoil if Mad Honey is still on your list. It gives that tree a second thread to grow along.
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐½
I read this because it was available at the library when I needed one and the description sounded good. Celestial and Roy are newlyweds in Atlanta whose life gets split in half when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. It grabs your attention fast and you're invested right away, and on audio it was a quick listen. Part of what kept me hooked was the way it handles racism, not the everyday kind you see in a lot of contemporary fiction, but the kind that lives inside the justice system and takes years from a man while expecting his marriage to just wait.
The letter chapters were a highlight on audio, set up so you always know who each letter is to and who it's from. Where it lost me was Celestial herself. About three quarters of the way through she started to feel wishy washy to me, going back and forth in a way that just didn't seem realistic, and that's where the half star went.
Things I Googled: one French word, poupées, because I needed to picture the dolls Celestial makes. It's in Things I Googled While Reading in October.
Where this book is sending me next: nowhere new. It also sits close to Such a Fun Age for me, since both deal with racism in really different ways, the everyday kind in one and the justice system in the other.
Reading Trees: looking back, this one belongs on my letters tree. The Correspondent didn't send me to it, but those letter chapters, set up on audio with who each one is to and from, kept reminding me of it, so I'm counting it as a branch I only noticed once I was standing under it.
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐½
I went straight from A Little Life into this one hoping it would break me the same way, since they're by the same author, and it didn't. Not breaking me doesn't make it bad, it just made it different, and it isn't one of my standouts this year.
It's three stories set a century apart, in an alternate version of New York in 1893, in New York and Hawaii in 1993, and in a sick and controlled New York in 2093. The first two felt short next to the last one, which takes up about half the book, and I spent a lot of it wondering whether I'd missed how they were all supposed to connect.
The last story hit a little close to home for me. A world shaped by one pandemic after another, with odd rules and logic that seemed skewed, felt less like science fiction and more like what the future could look like if pandemics keep happening the way the last one did. And in the middle of all that, with everyone wearing a suit just to go outside, temperature checks every day and nobody allowed to leave the country, a group of kids goes out and gets a whole bunch of tattoos. I had to chuckle. Are tattoos really still a thing in that world?
Things I Googled: whether the three stories were even supposed to be connected. They are, just not the way I expected. That one's in Things I Googled While Reading in October.
Where this book is sending me next: The People in the Trees, the one Yanagihara novel I haven't read yet, but I think I'll wait a while before I pick it up.
There There by Tommy Orange
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐½
I picked this one up because it came highly recommended on audio, with multiple narrators trading the voices. It was available, and it was a shorter listen, which is exactly what I needed to squeeze one more book into October. I finished it on Halloween.
Twelve Native characters living in and around Oakland, each carrying their own reason for heading to the same big powwow, with four narrators trading the voices on audio.
It was pretty good. By the middle you can tell where it's going and how everything is going to come to a head. What disappointed me was the ending. It just stops, without resolving most of the storylines it spent the whole book weaving together, and I wanted to know what happened to these people.
Things I Googled: three things, from 3D printed plastic guns to whether the internet is making my memory worse to how Oakland ended up with such a big Native community. All three are in Things I Googled While Reading in October.
Where this book is sending me next: Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange's 2024 follow-up, because I need to know what happened to these people.
Still on the trail: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
The Correspondent kept mentioning Lonesome Dove, so that's where I went next, and it's been my evening read on my Kindle all month. Two retired Texas Rangers, Gus and Call, decide to drive a herd of cattle from Texas all the way to Montana, and it's every bit as long as that trip sounds. I honestly don't know why this book has taken me over a month to finish. I'm so close, and I badly wanted its review and the things I googled to make it into October, but alas, I have 100 pages left, so you'll have to wait until next month. What I can tell you right now is that it's going to be a 4 or 5 star read for me, and it already sent me to Google at least once.
It's also the first branch I've actually followed off The Correspondent's list of books, which makes my letters tree look like Such a Fun Age, then The Correspondent, then Lonesome Dove, with An American Marriage hanging off the side.
All six of these got a full review on Goodreads too, along with everything else I finish, including the books that never turn into an article here. If reading the reviews is the part you like, that's where all of them live. Come follow me over there.
The thread running through October
Almost everything I read this month was heavy, and almost all of it went fast. I finished a memoir about abuse inside a fundamentalist marriage in a few days and kept stealing spare minutes for a family novel I'd never call an easy listen, and A Little Life put me through more than any book I've ever read while I kept pressing play anyway. I keep wondering why the hard ones are the ones I can't put down, and my best guess is that heavy and slow are not the same thing. When a writer makes you care about the people, you'll follow them almost anywhere. Lonesome Dove is the exception that proves it, slow on purpose and worth every evening, even the ones that ran out before the book did.
The best book I read in October
A Little Life, obviously. I'd give it a million stars, and I'm still grieving it.
Also new on The Shelfless Reader in October
In case you missed any of them:
Reading Trees
A reading tree starts with one root book and the itch it leaves behind, a topic, a place, a feeling you are not done with yet. From there it grows branches, other books that connect to that same thread, whether it's a direct mention in the text, the same region, or just chasing the same gut punch. It isn't a genre list and it isn't an author's backlist, which is why A Little Life and To Paradise don't count as a tree no matter how much I loved one of them. It's a line you can trace from root to newest branch.
Three trees grew this month, and one of them, the letters tree, is the first time I've followed a book straight off another book's list of what its characters were reading.
Free and paid
This recap is free, always will be. The reading trees are the one thing that lives behind the paywall, one new tree a month plus the full growing vault, and founding members get a personalized tree of their own once a year. Everything else, the Google rabbit holes, the essays, all of it, stays right here for everyone.
I don't have a shelf yet. I have a map.
A note on my links: I'm a library person first, always. If you can borrow it, borrow it. But if you're a book buyer and you're going to own a copy anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and send a little back my way. Both can be true.
Tell me in the comments: what's the heaviest book you've read that still went by fast?