Seasons change and so do your reading preferences

Literature comes and goes with the seasons — the languidness of summer beach reads falls away into yellowed leaves and yellowed pages, possessed by the fervor of autumn. Eventual snowfall will intertwine with ink, spinning lyrical prose upon the page. Spring brings new, fresh book releases, brimming with light and poetry before we return to summer, and the cycle continues as the shelves are filled with wonderful words, each with their own associated season. 

Mood reading is when one’s environment and surroundings, including seasons, heavily influence one’s ability to consume literature. When the air feels slightly crisper, it might finally be possible to pick up that one literary fiction novel you’ve been putting off, whereas a summer day on the beach might encourage you to sit by the sea with the newest Emily Henry rom-com. 

Reading for the season is not a foreign concept; we see it often in the movies. Humans love to categorize things, and the category of a season is the easiest way to capture a “vibe” and assign media to it accordingly. In burrowing ourselves into the ideal version of that season, we allow fiction to transport us. Our summers, rather than being spent on vacation, could be spent working. Reading our favorite books from the summer reading list might allow our minds to float, instead, to an island, where we can relax and fall in love with yet another fictional world. 

As August now transitions into September, and soon October, readers will turn to their autumnal books to find words that align with the world they see outside. Looking at my shelves, some books call to me more strongly than others. Since feelings toward autumn typically align with the beginning of school, it makes sense that classic campus novels capture the literary energy I aspire for. Halloween paints the whole month in a dark orange hue; as jack-o-lanterns begin to line the streets, our movie choices shift in favor of horror and mystery, even though there may not be anything inherently scary about October.

Three novels highlight this season for me. The reading experiences these novels provide are already magnificent; however, if you read them during the next few months, the ink will spring from the pages and wrap itself around the soles of your feet, dragging you into the novels to experience their worlds for yourself.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion

Whether this memoir makes its way to your autumn reads or not, everyone should get to it at some point in their lives. Joan Didion’s memoir follows her life in the year after the passing of her husband, reflecting on grief, loneliness, literature and the devastating truth that we are all more (and less) alone than we think we are. Stunning the reader with brutal yet witty honesty, Didion slowly makes sense of her own feelings and allows the reader to come to the same conclusions as they read her words. 

Autumnal reads feel highly academic; they’re meant to teach you something, though not necessarily in the traditional sense. They tug at your heartstrings, and, by the end, you have a more complete feeling of what it means to be human — to experience the wonderful and horrible things that every person encounters. This book achieves that feeling.

“Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A twisted tale told with hauntingly beautiful imagery, “Mexican Gothic” follows our protagonist, Noemí Taboada, in her frantic quest to save her cousin from a family and home that seem unsettlingly perfect and undeniably terrifying. “Mexican Gothic” is a novel best read blind: That way, the reader can truly experience the ambiguity that Garcia creates in her writing.

Moreno-Garcia’s novel is primarily included in this list due to the word “gothic,” which is used in the title of the novel and also captures its horror and supernatural elements. After all, you can’t hint at autumn without calling to the (un)dead. Though the horror itself will catch your attention, the mystery of the book is satisfying, lulling you into a sense of faux-understanding before it all comes together in the perfect autumn read.

“A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman

My final recommendation highlights complicated relationships, specifically, familial relationships, which are not only difficult to navigate but oftentimes shape our real-life actions. Relationships can be perplexing, but Fredrik Backman simplifies them in beautiful, awe-inspiring sentences. The standalone novel follows an older man, Ove, who is grumpy and unwilling to accept affection from anyone since the passing of his wife. In time, his heart begins to thaw; with a new family that weasels their way into his life, he finds true and unconditional love.

Though these recommendations are distinct from one another, reading them will encourage you to think: What is the string that connects them all? What makes them perfect reads for autumn? I hope that these books will take you right where you need to be this fall — maybe even inching their way into your favorite reads of the year. 

With autumn’s inevitable departure will come the promise of new reading. Each season holds something different and equally beautiful. Each change in the weather can be appreciated in its own way, until the complete year is a mess of snow, hail, rain, sunshine and the best books you could possibly imagine.

Daily Arts Writer Archisha Pathak can be reached at archpath@umich.edu.

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