Books-by-the-Month: September

September has a smell—the faintest tang of sharpened pencils, apple skins, and air that is juuuuust beginning to cool. After the looseness of summer, September arrives like a Marian the librarian closing the door with a gentle click. Autumn is creeping in, and with it comes the subtle ache of endings: the end of childhood summers, the end of daylight’s abundance, the end of lazy hours spent doing nothing but listening to the hum of cicadas, and something in us stirs toward introspection. 

But where there are endings, there are also beginnings—syllabi, sharpened pencils, freshly cracked spines and all they represent. And for Jews like me, September on the (solar) calendar often means the end of the (lunar) Jewish year and the beginning of the new one; a month when we can come home to ourselves.
 

Below is a collection of books for this in-between month: a time for introspection, transformation, and gathering the harvest—of thought, memory, and imagination.

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 For the “back-to-school” spirit:

 

1. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman


There is no better companion for a bookish September than Anne Fadiman herself. Ex Libris is a love letter to reading—to the physical heft of books, the quirks of bookish families, the joyful chaos of merged libraries. My first literary agent (and pal!) Louise first introduced me to the great Anne Fadiman, so-much-more-than-an-essayist upon such great subjects as ice cream, early rising, marrying libraries, re-readings, and many others. 

Fadiman’s essays hum with intelligence and delight; she treats language as both playground and cathedral. Reading this collection feels like returning to class under the kind of professors who grades not on correctness, but on enthusiasm. 

This slim (and pleasingly red) volume is not only perfect for all things commuting, but a delightful collection of essays regarding the nature of, character of, reading of, acquisition of, and visceral love of books. Start with Anne Fadiman, and her incredibly smart but still utterly readable prose will win you over, make you laugh and swoon all in one, (again) pleasingly slim, red companion.

A perfect read to reignite one’s lifelong affair with words. 

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2. Give Yourself a Gold Star! by Leslie Jonath 

 

Sometimes? Sometimes you just need some gosh darn approval. Sometimes you need a gold star or two to feel like you aren’t slowly dying from a sense of deep-set contemporary-times-related-melancholy. Leslie Jonath’s charming little book reminds us that before we chase new goals, we should honor the triumphs already won! Give Yourself a Gold Star! is a whimsical, illustrated encouragement manual, part pep talk, part gratitude journal. 

If you’re feeling like you miss the scent of freshly sharpened pencils AND you require a little pick-me-up from Mrs Devine and Mrs Zarider (aka: my first-grade teachers) but are a grown-ass adult, then this is the book you’ve be willing to trade your lunch for. 

Did you manage to wake up on time? 
Remember your keys? 
Do something nice for a friend? 
Adulted like a PRO?

Good job, YOU. 

Celebrate your achievements large and small with Give Yourself A Gold Star!

Rather than a DO list, this book encourages you to keep a DID List (to remind yourself of what you accomplished, instead of just worrying about what you need to do), the book helps you to break things into the tiniest steps (so tiny that just writing the list is one of the tasks) and give yourself a GOLD STAR for doing each one. Believe me: when life gets grim, this book helps you put into perspective just how much there is to be grateful for, and how much you do have going on in this once and only life. 

Give Yourself A Gold Star! is the literary equivalent of a crisp new planner paired with your favorite pen: lighthearted yet oddly profound. It reminds us that self-kindness is also an achievement, and perhaps the first lesson we should re-learn every fall.

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For the Jewish New Year.


3. This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Rabbi Alan Lew
 

Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year—is a glorious and shimmering time of year. Where secular New Year is about fireworks, Rosh Hashanah is all about reflection, self-accounting, and the courage to begin again, renewed. 

There is no greater book on this moment in the Jewish calendar than Rabbi Lew’s modern classic of spiritual reflection, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. Rabbi Lew’s book is the essential guide to entering the Jewish High Holy Days with heart and intention, but beyond the Jewish specificity, this book offers a philosopher’s perspective on existence itself, and is relevant to all, regardless of faith or background. 

He traces the emotional arc from Tisha B’Av (mourning) through Rosh Hashanah (renewal) to Yom Kippur (atonement), revealing how the calendar mirrors the human psyche’s rhythms of loss and return. Lew writes with the warmth of a wise teacher and the clarity of a poet:

“The great journey of transformation begins with the acknowledgment that we need to make it. It is not something we are undertaking for amusement, nor even for the sake of convention; rather, it is a spiritual necessity.” 

Rosh Hashanah invites us to reflect not on how much we’ve achieved, but on how much we’ve become — to count our days not by their product, but by their presence. Even if you’ve read it before, it’s worth revisiting each year—like the liturgy itself, it changes as you do.

Sit somewhere quiet, and revisit it. The page, like the year, is waiting for you to turn it.

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For Autumn, creeping in…

3. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
 

I have a family friend who recently told me he re-reads To Kill a Mockingbird every couple of years, and does this consistent "return reading" with no other book. Why? I'd wager a perfect mix of school memories, themes of justice, awakening, and childhood coming to an end always ring true, and become truer each day. 

 

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable coming-of-age tale in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage iniquities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime. 

For me, there is something exquisitely September-like about To Kill a Mockingbird: its slow, sideways sun-dappled afternoons, its moral awakenings, and the ache of innocence giving way to understanding. Through Scout’s eyes, we experience both the wonder and the cruelty of a small Southern town—and the bittersweet passage from childhood simplicity to adult conscience. Plus, Harper Lee’s prose and exquisitely fleshed out characters feel like the turning of leaves: golden, crisp, edged with the inevitability of loss. 
 

I love a re-reading (I myself try to do this with East of Eden every few years) because the exercise displays a level of growth and expansion within ourselves. The book remains steadfast: changing not-at-all, but we do. As a child whose childhood came to an end prematurely, and as a young girl with a lawyer for a father I so revered, To Kill a Mockingbird teaches me new things with every re-examination.  

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For September as Self-Improvement Month.

 

5. Rising Strong by Dr. Brené Brown 

 

If September is the season of reevaluation — of checking in with one’s courage, direction, and heart — then Dr. Brené Brown’s Rising Strong is its perfect anthem. The reason I love Brené Brown so much is because she is a researcher above all else—her brilliant writing, story-telling and humanity is all supported by her exhaustive scientific research studying shame and vulnerability. 

 

With her signature mix of research, empathy, phenomenal storytelling ability and razor-sharp wit, Brown explores how we recover after failure: how we reckon with our own stories and transform shame into resilience. It’s the perfect book to accompany the early fall impulse to start again—to turn over a new leaf (literally and figuratively).

 

Dr. Brené Brown is a Texan-born researcher, storyteller, professor, and public thought-leader who has carved out a unique space at the intersection of rigorous qualitative social-work research and deeply personal, widely accessible storytelling. Brown’s academic and applied research focuses on the dynamics of courage, vulnerability, shame, empathy, and human connection. She describes herself as a “researcher-storyteller” who collects qualitative data (interviews, narratives) and uses those stories to uncover patterns of lived experience. Her 2010 TEDx Houston talk “The Power of Vulnerability” quickly became one of the most-watched TED talks in the world, thrusting her research into mainstream conversation:  

She has authored multiple New York Times best-sellers (e.g., The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, Atlas of the Heart) that have reached massive audiences far beyond academia. But my pick for September's "Self Improvement Month" has to be Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, in which she presents what she calls the "Rising Strong process"—a three-phase journey through struggle, truth-telling, and transformation. 

The phases are:
    1    Reckoning
    2    Rumble
    3    Revolution
 

Brené Brown is a voice bridging research and lived experience—someone who invites us to embrace vulnerability, examine shame, and rebuild toward wholehearted living. Rising Strong offers a grounded, generous, and richly actionable entry into that world. It doesn’t just tell you why courage matters—it shows you how to live it when you’ve already stumbled. 

For anyone seeking renewal (and that’s maybe you), this book offers more than insight: it offers initiation. Read it with a pen in hand, ready to underline every sentence that sounds like it’s been waiting for you.

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6. Still Life by Sarah Winman
 

If September is about returning home to oneself, Still Life is a perfect companion. This 2021 novel— really a parade of small stories (my favorite!), is set across decades predominantly in Florence and London. 

 

It is a luminous, big-hearted novel about found family, art, history, and the quiet heroism of living fully. Winman’s character—an art historian, a soldier, a parrot named Claude—linger long after the final page. 

This is a book to read as the nights lengthen and the air smells faintly of crisp leaves and nostalgia. It’s a promise that beauty survives, even as seasons change. Make yourself a “proper cuppa” and enjoy this one for the love of warmth, art, and the beginning of cozy season...

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A Season for Turning Pages

September is when reading becomes ritual again—the attentive, nourishing act it was meant to be. It’s the time to trade poolside paperbacks for well-loved hardcovers, iced coffee for tea, and to rediscover the quiet companionship of books that teach as much as they comfort. 

This is the month of beginnings disguised as endings: of new notebooks and second chances, of self-reckoning and self-kindness. In honor of this shift, here is a list of books that suit September’s temperament — nostalgic yet hopeful, warm but clear-eyed, and perfect for curling up beside the first mug of tea of the season.

Whether you’re returning to work, to school, or simply to yourself, may these stories accompany you into the golden hush of early autumn — one page at a time, as the world turns gently inward.

 

Books-by-the-Month: August

August is the month when summer begins to exhale. The days are still golden, but there’s a subtle shift in the light—a slant, a softness—that suggests we are quietly tilting toward autumn. 

It is a month of in-betweens: the last stretch of vacation before the return of structure, the heat that still clings while shadows grow longer. 

Reading in August is tinged with this same gentle melancholy. It is still the season for sprawling, immersive books—but it is also the moment for reflection, for voices that have been overlooked, for stories that stay with you as the season wanes.

In honor of August’s particular beauty—and its lesser-known holidays like Women’s Equality Day, Left Handers Day, and International Cat Day—here is a curated list of books to savor as summer leans toward its close.

1. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

For Women's Equality Day (August 26)

 

There is no better time to revisit—or discover—The Awakening, Kate Chopin’s quietly revolutionary novel about a woman’s search for autonomy in the stifling social climate of late-19th-century Louisiana. Edna Pontellier’s journey toward selfhood, sensuality, and artistic freedom was scandalous upon publication in 1899, but today it remains hauntingly fresh. Chopin’s language is luminous as heat rising off the sea, and her portrayal of a woman determined to live life on her own terms makes this a perfect reflection for Women’s Equality Day. Read it by the water if you can! Let the waves echo Edna’s restless longing.

 

Behold the multitude of covers!

2. Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
For Left Handers Day (August 13)

The sly nod to Left Handers Day is intentional, but The Left Hand of Darkness earns its place here not just by title but by brilliance. Le Guin’s groundbreaking sci-fi classic, set on a planet where gender is fluid and changeable, explores themes of otherness, empathy, and the slipperiness of identity. The cold, strange beauty of her world-building contrasts deliciously with August’s warmth, making it an ideal read for late-summer nights when you find yourself craving big, mind-expanding questions. It’s also a quiet celebration of non-conformity—something every left-hander can appreciate.

 

 

3. The Traveling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa

For International Cat Day (August 8)

 

To honor International Cat Day (which, of course is everyday in the home of Tatiana Angela Lansbury Romanov!!!), there is no better companion than The Traveling Cat Chronicles, a tender Japanese novel that follows a man and his beloved stray cat Nana on a journey across Japan. 

 

Told partly from the cat’s point of view, the story is suffused with gentle humor, emotional depth, and a profound meditation on friendship, memory, and letting go. It’s the kind of book that wraps around you like late-summer twilight—soft, a little sad, but immensely comforting. 

 

Top tip: best read with a real cat nearby. 

 

 

4. The Hours by Michael Cunningham

For the Bittersweetness of August
August is a month that tastes of endings, and The Hours—with its interwoven narratives of Virginia Woolf, a 1940s housewife, and a modern New Yorker—beautifully captures the delicate tension between life’s small domestic moments and its seismic emotional shifts. Cunningham’s language is lyrical without excess; his characters are complex and achingly human. The novel pulses with the weight of time, memory, and the choices that shape us. As summer begins to slip through our fingers, this novel reminds us of the exquisite, painful beauty of impermanence.

 

The Hours was made into a motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman, but my personal favorite subsequent artistic rendering inspired by this novel is the 2022 opera in two acts with music by Kevin Puts and libretto by Greg Pierce. I was fortunate enough to bear witness to its world premiere, and while the three leading female performances were indeed formidable, my favorite aria and performance belonged to Kyle Ketelsen as the poet Richard, dying of both AIDS and, possibly, despair. 

 

Enjoy this snippet of his aria. Beyond masterful.

 

    

 

5. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

For Sultry, Late- Summer Suspense

For those who like their Augusts with a dose of heat and danger, The Talented Mr. Ripley is the perfect noir-laden choice. Highsmith’s elegant psychological thriller unfolds in the sun-drenched landscapes of Italy, where charm, envy, and amorality blur together in the figure of Tom Ripley. 

 

Oooooo the sweltering days, the lingering sense that something is ending, the slanted golden light, the subtle menace that lurks beneath surface perfection. It’s a brilliant exploration of desire, deception, and the masks we wear.

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August is a threshold: still steeped in summer’s sensual pleasures, but with the first whispers of change. The books we choose in this month carry some of that duality—light and dark, freedom and reflection, motion and stillness. 

 

Whether you find yourself drawn to bold women, speculative futures, philosophical felines, or moral ambiguity, may these selections accompany you through the golden hours ahead. 
 

There is time yet for one more story before the season turns.

Books-by-the-Month: July

July is the month when time both expands and disappears. The days are thick with heat, the air smells of grass, salt, and sunscreen, and the hours unfold like an old quilt—faded, but beloved, patched with both stillness and motion. 

July is made for reading the way winter is made for soup: the two seem biologically destined for one another. It is the month when reading can happen anywhere: under a striped beach umbrella, in the stifling cocoon of a tent, on a rickety porch swing, or simply sprawled across the cool floorboards.
 

Unlike the frantic lists of “New Year’s reading resolutions,” July’s books ask nothing of you but attention. They don’t care if you finish them. They only ask to be carried along—dog-eared, sun-warmed, cat-chewed, maybe a little sandy? In that spirit of gentle adventure, here are six books that feel particularly right for July’s slow, golden hours.

 

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1. The Aliens by Annie Baker

A play may seem an unusual choice for summer, but The Aliens is the kind of quiet, exquisite work that fits perfectly into the languor of July. Set behind a Vermont coffee shop, it revolves around two aimless but endearing friends who spend their days talking about music, Bukowski, and nothing at all—until a high school student enters their orbit. Baker’s dialogue hums with the rhythms of real life: silences, false starts, digressions. It’s a play about not much, and yet it glows with the ache of being young, lost, and alive in the sticky warmth of early summer. Read it on a porch with a sweating glass of something cold, and let its gentle melancholy wash over you.

 

 

2. Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck

There may be no better companion for a July road trip—real or imaginary—than Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. In 1960, the great American author set off across the country with his poodle Charley, searching for the soul of a nation on the brink of seismic change. The result is part travelogue, part meditation, part love letter to the vast, strange beauty of America. Steinbeck’s observations are sharp but generous; his affection for people and landscapes alike makes every dusty roadside café, mountain pass, and highway motel glow with literary grace. Even if you’re only traveling as far as your backyard, this book makes you feel like you’re in motion.

 

 

3. John Adams by David McCullough

For those craving something weightier amidst July’s breezy distractions, David McCullough’s magisterial biography of John Adams is a feast. History in McCullough’s hands is not dry; it is alive, intricate, and vividly human. Adams—brilliant, irascible, deeply principled—emerges not just as a Founding Father, but as a fully-fleshed character with passions, flaws, and profound loneliness. The Revolutionary War crackles in the background, but it’s the private letters between Adams and his beloved Abigail that linger. "Sit down, John" and read it in the stillness of a July afternoon, when the echoes of America’s birth feel especially poignant in the summer air.

 

 

4. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

No July reading list would be complete without this fizzy, restless anthem to freedom. On the Road is a book for hot nights, for dusty highways, for the perpetual ache of wanderlust. Kerouac’s prose is alive with speed, jazz, poetry, and desperation—the desire to find something, anything, that makes life burn brighter. Even if you’re not setting off cross-country in a beat-up car, reading this in July stirs up the feeling that you could. The open road is always waiting, just over the next hill.

 

 

5. SWAMPLANDIA! by Karen Russell

If July is for humidity, weirdness, and family legends, then Swamplandia! is the perfect literary match. Set in the swamps of Florida, this novel follows thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree, whose family runs a run-down alligator-wrestling theme park. After her mother’s death, Ava embarks on a surreal odyssey through mangroves and the underworld, crossing paths with ghosts, birdmen, and con artists. Russell’s language is lush and playful, but the heart of the book is tender: it’s about grief, growing up, and the mythologies we build to survive. Best read on a summer night when the air feels thick with stories.

 

 

6. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

A jewel of stillness and light, The Summer Book is composed of small vignettes set on a tiny island off the coast of Finland, where a six-year-old girl and her grandmother spend the summer together. Nothing much happens—except, of course, everything. Jansson captures the quiet miracles of the natural world and the tender negotiations of family love in prose so clear it feels like sea glass. This is the kind of book you can read in fragments, setting it aside and picking it back up without losing the thread. It is a perfect July companion: gentle, wise, and suffused with the hush of long, golden evenings.

 

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July is a month made for reading that isn’t hurried, strategic, or guilt-ridden. These are books to be savored in slowness, to accompany you through afternoons when the only plan is to follow your curiosity wherever it wanders. Whether you’re stretched out under a tree, half-awake in a hammock, or traveling across states with a paperback in your bag, let these stories keep you company. July, after all, is one of literature’s favorite months: expansive, sun-drenched, and gloriously unhurried.

Books-by-the-Month: June

June is the month when books begin to breathe again. After the frantic ambitions of spring and before the scorched lethargy of high summer, June offers a kind of golden intermission— one where reading feels less like an activity and more like a conversation with the season itself. The air is forgiving; the days are long enough to lose track of time entirely; and there is a distinct pleasure in letting a novel sprawl open beside you on a picnic blanket or the cool tile of a shaded porch. This is not the season of required reading, but of elective affinities— books chosen not out of duty, but desire. 

In the spirit of such gentle indulgence, I offer a reading list for June: three books that feel particularly at home in this lush, lingering month.

1. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

We’re all mad here. And June, after all, is a month that is more than a little mad. The bees are drunk on nectar, the birds wear ridiculous plumage, and the earth’s geometry has gone squishy. And these tales all take place in “the golden afternoon,” of course; that glorious golden afternoon of Lewis Carroll’s seemingly infinite imagination: all elasticity, upheaval, surprise, and possibility.

‘Lewis Carroll’ was the pseudonym of Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, who lived from 1832 to 1898. Carroll’s physical deformities, partial deafness, and irrepressible stutter made him an unlikely candidate for producing one of the most enduring children’s fantasies in the English language. 

Carroll felt a debilitating shyness around adults but became animated and fully himself around children. His crippling stammer melted away in the company of children as he told them his elaborately nonsensical stories. Over the course of his lifetime he made many child friends whom he wrote to frequently, mentioned in his diaries, and (as a gifted amateur photographer) took numerous portraits of throughout his life. 

 

[And! PSA! Just to be clear before imaginations run rampant: while Carroll’s friendships with children might have been unusual, there is ZERO evidence to suggest that Carroll’s friendships with, or photographs of, children were in any way inappropriate or nefarious. All evidence suggests he simply felt most at ease in their presence considering his many limitations in the adult world.]

 

In 1856, classics scholar Henry George Liddell accepted an appointment as Dean of Christ Church (one of the colleges that comprise Oxford University), and brought his three daughters to live with him at Oxford.

 Carroll quickly became close with Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell, and during their frequent afternoon boat trips on the river, Carroll told the Liddells fanciful tales. Alice quickly became Carroll’s favorite of the three girls, and he made her the subject of the stories that would later became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Almost ten years after first meeting the Liddells, Carroll compiled the stories and submitted the completed manuscript for publication.

But, as is the bittersweet truth of life, time marched on. By the time the books were published, Alice and her sisters had grown into young women, and their parents were more interested in their daughters pursing suitable marriages than in playing childish games and spending “golden afternoons” on the Thames with Carroll. Carroll was heartbroken, and just as Through the Looking-Glass was published, he completed an acrostic poem titled “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” comprised of Alice’s full name that was an ode to her, her sisters, and the golden time in which their lives all intersected.
 
To read Alice is to follow a talking rabbit into a rabbit hole. It is to remember that childhood—like spring— is not only growth, but change, expansion, and wildness.  The tulips, like the Queen of Hearts, are imperious. The mushrooms might alter your size. And the language! Carroll’s linguistic play is like a garden in itself: fertile, looping, delightfully ungovernable. Alice is always teetering on the edge of what makes sense, and she meets each absurdity with the kind of dry resolve that is, in its way, heroic. Wonderland does not reward logic—but it does reward nerve.

 

2. The Overstory by Richard Powers

In June, trees are full, heaving with life, and everything feels lush and vital. Reading this novel while immersed in the sights and sounds of summer turns your surroundings into part of the experience.  The Overstory is a sweeping, powerful, sprawling, and deeply resonant novel about the secret life of forests will deepen your wonder (and guilt) every time you pass a tree. As June offers longer days that give us the opportunity to slow down and think deeply, this book beckons for your deepest attention.

 

Without being preachy, the book quietly (and sometimes loudly) shifts the reader's perspective toward the environment. It deals with eco-activism, ethical protest, and the desperation that arises when nature’s majesty is treated as disposable. By the end, many readers find themselves changed in how they see nature — and humanity’s place in it.

 

At its heart, The Overstory is a love letter to trees — their intelligence, longevity, memory, and the way they communicate underground through roots and fungal networks (what scientists call the "wood wide web"). Powers takes something we see every day and reframes it as ancient, majestic, and nearly sentient. The novel isn’t told through a single protagonist, but rather through nine interwoven characters, each with their own unique path that eventually intersects with the others—much like the highway of tree roots beneath the soil. It feels like watching a forest grow: each branch (or character arc) matters, but it’s the total ecosystem that stuns you.

 

3. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

 

Ah, June. Our gal. 

 

For my money The Handmaid’s Tale is evergreen, resonating cataclysmically int he modern era, making it an essential read 365 days of the year. Atwood’s dystopian novel imagines a future in which women’s rights have been stripped away, and fertile women are forced into the role of child-bearers in a theocratic society. 

 

Atwood’s writing is chilling in its precision—her prose spare, her world-building rich with haunting detail. But a sneaky literary truth is that our protagonist’s name (now erased in Gilead, as she goes by the name of her master Offred, meaning Of-Fred) very well might once have been June, making the book make the June list this month. Of course.

 

The “fact” of her name emerges in a chilling passage in Chapter 1 of the book. The passage describes the “Rachel and Leah Center” (a pro-natal birthing center where fertile women are kept for breeding) where the narrator of the story known simply as “Offred” has been sent for reeducation, along with other potential child-bearing women. The chapter ends with:       

 “We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semi-darkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren't looking, and touch each other's hands across space. We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed:

        Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.”

All the other women named in this passage, all of them except June, appear later in the story. If those were the only five women present, then by process of elimination, “June” must be the rightful name of our narrator, now known as Offred.

There are no other unidentified women's names in the rest of the book, so "June" is the only possibility for the narrator's first name for which there is any evidence. (The television series took this and ran with it, creating a vibrant backstory for Offred, developed into June Osborne.)

 

Read it. I also heartily recommend the audiobook narrated gorgeously by Clare Danes— who is a singular talent at audio narration. The novel’s exploration of power, gender, and control feels MORE urgent today than when it was first published in 1985.

 

A provocative, unforgettable exploration of what happens when women lose control over their bodies, minds and autonomy, The Handmaid’s Tale remains a crucial read for understanding the fragility of rights and the strength of resistance.

 

Books-by-the-Month: May

Each May, the world is reborn— its hues sharp, the air narcotic with growth. 

 
I like to turn to books that speak — in their vastly different languages—to the alchemy of spring.
Because though full of warming days and the promise of jacket-free softly lit days, May is delightfully deceptive. On the surface: sunny, sprouting, slightly unhinged from the pollen. Underneath: existential dread with a side of compost.

So here is a varied collection that hums with May’s energies: growth, mystery, intellectual fertility, and the shivering joy of the irrational.

And what more can we ask of Peak Spring than that it remind us, gloriously, that we have not yet read ourselves to the end?


1. The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

 
A poetry collection for when the world is turning green again. Glück’s poems are spare, clear, and full of the voice of flowers—serious and quiet and somehow thrilling. Reading Glück’s The Wild Iris in May is like walking barefoot through cold dew: it arrests, it cleanses

The poems, spoken in turns by gardener, flower, and G-d (Herself!) create a polyphony in which voice and silence, blooming and burial, despair and redemption, are not opposites but connected, natural realities. Glück’s garden is a battleground of consciousness, where the soul grapples with its mortality and the silence of the divine. And yet, the book shimmers with hope.

The iris, that May bloom with its blade-like leaves and solemn faces, becomes a totem of persistence.

“It is terrible to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth,” 

she writes in the title poem.
 

But survive it does. The plants, anthropomorphized but never sentimentalized, speak in the dry, luminous diction that is Glück’s signature—each line tight as a root. Her flowers are not metaphors—they are selves speaking from the dirt.
 

In May, when the garden is both promise and proof, The Wild Iris is the most honest prayerbook I know. Read it with the window open.

 

2. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
Why: May can feel mischievous — a perfect time for this surreal, hilarious story about a 92-year-old woman uncovering a mystical conspiracy at her retirement home.
And that? Is all I shall say lest I spoil the mischief.

 

3. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
A play about gardens, chaos theory, and the collision of past and present? Sounds like May to me!
As Guenevere famously touts in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot— the “lusty month of May” is “that darling month where everyone goes wistfully astray.” The month of May is a kind of c h a o s.

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia takes place in an English country house where past and present slide over each other like water over glass. The play toggles between 1809 and the 1990s, between a 13-year-old genius named Thomasina and a cadre of modern academics trying (and failing) to make sense of her brilliance.

The precise “gardens” of Enlightenment-style thought give way—in the play and in the outside world of the play—to romantic wilderness. In both timelines, the characters are giddy with questions, love, and ruin. 

The brilliance of Arcadia lies in its marriage of head and heart. It makes fractals romantic and carnal love scientific. It is the ideal spring read because it is both fecund and formal—its dialogue clipped and exquisite, yet drenched with emotional urgency. Like May, it is a hinge: a time when intellect and instinct flirt outrageously, each stealing the other’s lines.

Read Arcadia aloud I say! Do all the voices! Don’t skip the stage directions! Revel fully in Stoppard’s wit, or better yet, see it performed live.



4. Weather by Jenny Offill

Early summer often brings a hum of low-key anxiety about the future (think graduation, life changes,
existential dread). This fragmented, witty novel captures May’s atmosphere beautifully—the month when the world is either blooming, buzzing, or quietly breaking into a sweat.

Reading Weather in May is like sipping lemonade while doomscrolling—it hits both your sweet spot and your spleen. Offill’s prose, famously fragmentary, lands like poetic pollen: light, airborne, and likely to spark a reaction. It mirrors the May mood—attention fractured by birdsong, barbecues, and the gnawing sense that climate change might just cancel June.

Weather is the literary version of overhearing a whip-smart stranger muttering to herself in a community garden. It’s a domestic novel, sure, but with apocalyptic garnish. Our narrator, Lizzie, is a librarian who collects anxious questions like others collect wine:

“What if we all become bugs?”

“Is it OK to eat meat if the cow wanted to die?”

And yes, Librarian Lizzie will help you renew your books while the world teeters on collapse.

May is also the month when we remember we’re animals—squinting at the sun, dreaming of reinvention. Offill gets this. Her characters are always evolving, molting old selves. Weather doesn't hand you answers; it hands you a dandelion puff of paradox and invites you to blow.

 

So if you’re standing at the intersection of “should I plant tomatoes?” and “is civilization crumbling?”, Weather is your match. It’s short enough to finish on a breezy Sunday and dense enough to haunt you until the solstice. 

 

 

5. The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

 
Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem is a groundbreaking science fiction novel that blends Chinese history, political intrigue, and astrophysics in an utterly unique way. Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, the novel explores the consequences of first contact with an alien civilization. 

The story revolves around a physicist named Ye Wenjie, who, after a series of traumatic events, sends a signal to the stars—a signal that is eventually answered by an alien race on the brink of extinction.
Liu’s writing is at once intellectually stimulating and emotionally compelling, exploring themes of scientific progress, humanity’s place in the universe, and the unanticipated consequences of our actions.
This first book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy will take you on a mind-bending journey through space and time.

Books-by-the-Month: April

April books: the books you read with a window cracked open, letting in the smell of new grass. The kind you flip through lazily on a park bench, feeling virtuous for finally sitting outside. In April the days stretch, juuuust a little longer, and the first true rains of the season drum against the windows—not the relentless, chaotic, personality-disordered downpours of March, but the gentler, softer showers that turn the world green overnight.There’s something about this month—half spring, half something else—that calls for stories with a little moodiness. 

- A big ol’ novel that shifts between sunlight and shadow.
- A collection of poems that brims with the promise of newness; read in snippets, between peeks at the tulips.
- A story that is best read with the window cracked open, so the smell of rain and freshly turned soil can mingle with the scent of well-worn pages.
- A classic you’ve been meaning to get to, because April always feels like a fresh start (until you realize it’s just March with better PR).

And thus, it deserves books we reach for when the sky darkens at two in the afternoon, and you think, Well, if April is going to be like this, I might as well… READ.

So, in honor of the month of new beginnings, sudden downpours, and the eternal debate of jacket vs. no jacket, here are the best books to read in April—stories that bloom, that rain, that whisper of change.

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1. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

      I know  I know  I know—I have listed this novella in my “Spring Reads” collection, but how can I neglect re-mentioning it? A novel about escaping from one April to another—specifically, to an Italian villa bursting with wisteria from the gloomy rain of "between the wars" London. 

A story of blossoms forming where one was certain of a branch’s death. 

A story of second chances. 

A perfect, dreamy read for when you’re longing for warmth but still stuck in sweater weather.

2. Spring by Ali Smith
Smith’s novel is like April itself—unexpected, shifting, unruly, full of thaw and tension. A meditation on art, politics, and the changing seasons, it’s part of her Seasonal Quartet but stands beautifully on its own. Ali Smith’s novel is both fiercely political and deeply lyrical, weaving together fractured narratives of disconnection and rebirth. Like the month of April itself, Spring resists simplicity. It is not just a celebration of renewal; it is an interrogation of it.

Smith’s writing pulses with the restless energy of the season. She juxtaposes stark realities—immigration detention centers, Brexit-era disillusionment—with moments of sudden, almost mythic beauty. A lost filmmaker, a cynical older man, and a mysterious girl moving through the world like a force of nature—all collide in a story that feels as unpredictable as April’s shifting weather. Smith writes in a way that mimics spring’s own rhythms: fragmented yet whole, sharp yet tender, unafraid of moments of stillness before sudden, torrential movement. To read Spring in April is to be reminded that the season’s promise is not gentle; it is urgent.

But what makes Spring the perfect April novel is its insistence on possibility. Smith, like the season itself, is relentless in her belief that change is coming—even if it arrives in fits and starts, even if it is difficult, even if it asks us to reckon with the past before moving forward. April is a threshold, a moment when we must decide whether to step through or turn back. Spring is a book that urges us to step through. It does not offer easy answers, but it offers something better: the certainty that something new is always just about to begin.


3. "As One Listens to Rain by Octavio Paz
A single, stunning poem that captures the feeling of April rain—not just falling, but soaking into memory and thought. A reminder that poetry belongs to spring as much as birdsong does.

Spring has always been the season of poets—and Octavio Paz, with his relentless curiosity and lyric precision, is a perfect guide for this awakening. "As One Listens to Rain" one of his lesser-known but deeply evocative works, reads like a meditation on transience, a book where each page shimmers with April’s dual nature: beauty and uncertainty, light and shadow. The title alone suggests something more than mere precipitation—it suggests an atmosphere, a presence, a self dissolving and reforming in the rain. His language does not settle; it moves, like water, through history, myth, and personal reflection. 

In "As One Listens to Rain," he writes of love as something fluid, time as something porous, identity as something always in motion. This is poetry for the in-between spaces. Paz was a poet obsessed with thresholds, with the liminal, with the moment just before something becomes something else. And what is April if not a threshold?

4. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
This one is a heavy hitter—if you’re looking for an emotionally intense reading experience, A Little Life is a stunning and, at times, painful masterpiece. Following four college friends as they navigate their adult lives in New York City, the story zeroes in on Jude, whose traumatic past emerges slowly, layer by devastating layer. 

Yanagihara’s writing is visceral, unflinching in its depiction of suffering and survival, and yet there’s a strange beauty in her exploration of friendship, loyalty, and the human need for connection. It’s a novel that stays with you long after you've finished it, one that might make you rethink what love and friendship mean. Perfect for a long, reflective read.

5. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

No one Pays Attention like Annie Dillard. April is a month of noticing, and no book teaches the art of attention better than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning meditation on nature is, at its heart, a book about seeing—about standing still long enough for the world to reveal itself in all its teeming, chaotic, exquisite detail. And what is spring if not the perfect time to learn to see again?

Dillard’s writing crackles— she does not merely observe the natural world; she interrogates it, turns it over in her hands, studies it with the curiosity of a scientist and the wonder of a mystic. She watches frogs being swallowed alive by giant water bugs, muses on the violent abundance of a newly hatched praying mantis nest, and kneels in reverence before a floodplain crawling with new life. Her prose— almost incantatory—mirrors April itself, a season of bursting and breaking, of terrible beauty and raw becoming. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’s world is churning, restless, alive in ways both thrilling and unsettling.

But perhaps what makes this book most suited to this time of year is its deep, abiding sense of wonder. Dillard does not shy away from the brutal mechanics of nature, but she never loses her awe. She reminds us that the world is strange, that it is extravagant, that it is—despite all its cruelties—staggeringly beautiful.

Books by-the-month: March

As March arrives, bringing with it the promise of early spring, Women's History Month, and the festive revelry of St. Patrick’s Day. The literary world offers us tales of renewal, strength, and history. This month, we celebrate not only the invigorating green of the season but also the empowering stories of women throughout history. 

 

Daylight is adding up, about three minutes more each day as March progresses, give or take. Spring hasn’t arrived yet, but the plane is circling the tarmac. Welcome back, light! This time of year is The Great Unclenching, for when the light returns, something unclenches in us all. 

 

March offers the perfect opportunity to dive into novels that inspire and enrich. Here’s a carefully curated list of books that will fill your days with literary joy, perfect for curling up with during those first glimpses of warmth.

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March Theme: Women’s History Month

Women are amazing. Good Gd how we hate them. Let's uplift them instead.

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott 

Little Women remains one of the most beloved and enduring classics of all time. The story follows the March sisters—Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy—through the trials and triumphs of their adolescence and early adulthood during the Civil War. 

 

There is a certain magic in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women that no film adaptation—no matter how lovingly crafted—can fully capture. The silver screen has given us many beautiful versions, from the golden glow of the 1933 and 1949 classics to the heart-wrenching performances of the 1994 and 2019 renditions, but nothing compares to the original novel, with its gorgeous prose, recognizable characters, effortless warmth, wisdom, and its deeply personal intimacy. 

 

Alcott doesn’t just tell the story of the March sisters—she invites us into their magical attic, lets us sit by the fire as Jo scribbles away long in to the night, as Meg dreams of simple, beautiful things, as Amy yearns for greatness, and as Beth’s quiet kindness radiates through the pages. The novel pulses with life, with all the small joys and sorrows that make up a girlhood, and it is this depth—this richness is what truly makes Little Women not just a beloved book, but one of the great literary classics in the canon.

 

For at its heart, Little Women is about the messy, bittersweet journey of growing up—about the triumphs and disappointments, the laughter and heartbreak that shape us into who we become. Who hasn’t felt Jo’s frustration as she cries, “I’m angry nearly every day of my life!”? Who hasn’t longed to leave their mark on the world, or wrestled with duty and desire when torn between home and ambition? 

 

The beauty of Alcott’s novel is that it allows space for all these contradictions, for the quiet, everyday struggles of being human, and it does so with prose that glows like candlelight—soft, illuminating, and endlessly comforting. So yes, watch the films (come on: the 1994 was so crucial to my teenage sexual awakening it is hard to express just HOW important 1994 Christian Bale was so almost every one of my teenage romantic choices for better and for worse), fall in love with the March sisters all over again—but to truly know them, to hear their thoughts and feel their dreams, there is no substitute for the novel itself.

2. "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s masterpiece novella is a fever dream wrapped in the suffocating folds of Victorian domesticity. The protagonist, suffering from what is diagnosed as a “nervous condition,” is confined to a room in her home by her husband, where she becomes obsessed with the room's yellow wallpaper.

 

Written in 1892, the story explores the mental and physical confinement of women in the 19th century, it is a tale that simultaneously drones with claustrophobia and crackles with the desperation of a woman unraveling beneath the weight of total oppression.

From the very first lines, we are drawn into a world where the walls themselves seem to whisper, where the sickly yellow of the wallpaper morphs into a living, breathing tormentor. This is not just a tale of one woman’s descent into madness—it is a searing indictment of a society that silences and stifles, that mistakes a mind in turmoil for mere female "hysteria." Every creeping tendril of the wallpaper, every shadow shifting in the dim light, becomes a manifestation of our narrator’s struggle; her rebellion simmering beneath layers of repression until it spills over in a dizzying, mesmerizing climax.

 

What makes The Yellow Wallpaper so hauntingly unforgettable is its intimacy—the way Gilman locks us inside the narrator’s fractured psyche, forcing us to see the world as she does, to feel her isolation as palpably as the stale air of her sickroom. The language is hypnotic, looping and circling like the patterns on the cursed wallpaper itself, mirroring the slow dissolution of self that takes place within those four walls. 

 

And when, at last, the narrator succumbs to the madness that has been tightening its grip around her soul, we are left breathless, horrified, yet strangely exhilarated. Gilman doesn’t just tell a story; she drags us into the heart of a nightmare that feels all too real: a cautionary tale that still resonates fiercely today.

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March Theme: St. Patrick’s Day

There are too many exquisite Irish novels, plays and collections of poetry to even begin to narrow them down. From classics such as Dubliners, Star of the Sea and The Country Girls, to contemporary classics like Angela’s Ashes, there is nothing quite like an Irish writer talking about LIFE. 

 

3. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, what better choice than Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes, a heartbreaking yet darkly humorous look at the author’s impoverished childhood in 20th-century Ireland. But Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes is not just a memoir—it’s a symphony of sorrow and resilience that transforms even the bleakest of childhoods into something fiercely beautiful. With prose that sings like an Irish ballad—both mournful and full of unexpected humor—McCourt paints a portrait of Limerick that is as rain-soaked and poverty-stricken as it is brimming with life.

Every page pulses with the raw, unfiltered voice of a boy who endures hunger, loss, and shame, yet somehow never loses his wide-eyed wonder at the world. “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all,” he begins, and from that moment, we are swept into a story whose power lies in its stark refusal to submit to self pity or to sentimentality; in its ability to find poetry in the gutters and grace in the struggle. It is not just a memoir—it is a testament to survival, to storytelling, and to the indomitable spirit of those who dare to dream beyond their circumstances.

 

 

4. Ulysses by James Joyce

Ulysses was first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920. It has been called one of the most important works of Modernist literature. No other book captures the soul of Dublin with such ferocity and tenderness, stitching together the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June 1904, with a depth and complexity that transforms the ordinary into the epic. To read Ulysses is to walk the streets of Dublin in 1904, to feel the rain on your face, to hear the chatter of pub-goers and the distant tolling of church bells, to live inside the thoughts of characters.

 

James Joyce’s Ulysses is not just the crown jewel of Irish literature—it is its beating heart, its wildest dream, its most defiant and dazzling creation.  Joyce hammered a job on the novel so complete that he became a category unto himself. This is a novel that dares to contain multitudes—history and myth, comedy and heartbreak, the sacred and the profane—all flowing together in an intoxicating stream of consciousness that changed literature forever.

Every literary style was mist to his grill, as he might have said, and his plotting, if such it can be called - two men who take all day to meet each other - paved the way for, among others, Samuel Beckett. 

Above all he taught every writer the importance of naturalistic dialogue; with his fine tenor voice Joyce knew better than most that we read not with the eye but with the ear.

And yet, Ulysses is more than just an ode to Dublin—it is the very soul of Irish literary ambition; the book that shattered conventions and redefined what a novel could be. Joyce takes the English language, that instrument of colonial rule, and bends it to his will, infusing it with the rhythms of Irish speech, the poetry of everyday thought, the sheer audacity of a mind unchained. It is a book that demands everything from its reader, but in return, it gives back a universe— in which a single day can contain all of human existence. 

 

“Yes I said yes I will Yes,” Molly Bloom declares in the novel’s final, breathtaking lines, and in that moment, Joyce doesn’t just conclude a masterpiece—he affirms life itself, in all its messiness, all its beauty, all its infinite possibility. 

 

If one book must stand as the pinnacle of the Irish literary canon, let it be Ulysses.

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March Theme: The Ides of March

With this addition, Julius Caesar rounds out the list perfectly, infusing the month of March with both the classic weight of Shakespearean tragedy and a timely nod to the historical moment that defines it.

5.  Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

March is synonymous with the ominous "Ides of March," and what better way to dive into the drama of fate, ambition, and betrayal than with William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar—the mighty general and leader of Rome—is on the verge of absolute power, but a group of conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius believes his rule will bring tyranny. While this ticking-time-bomb of a play is set in the heart of ancient Rome, it reads (and plays!) like "DC Noir" made popular on television in the 21st Century. It explores the tension between personal loyalty and political duty through the all-too-human lenses of loyalists and conspirators.

 

William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is so much more than "just "a history play—it is a timeless political thriller; a study of power, ambition, and the chaos that ensues when the line between patriotism and personal ambition blurs. And in 2025, as the world grapples with populist movements, political conspiracies, misinformation, high emotions and a desperate common man, the ever-present question of who truly wields power reveals that this classic feels more relevant than ever. 

 

The fickleness of the Roman crowd, swayed so easily from love to uncontrollable rage, mirrors the way modern public opinion shifts with a single headline or viral video. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings,” Cassius warns, and his words ring truer than ever in an era where leaders rise and fall within 24-hour news cycles at the whims of public perception. The senators, believing they act in Rome’s best interest, justify their actions with noble rhetoric, yet their violence only breeds more instability—a cautionary tale for any modern political upheaval.

 

Even more striking is the play’s exploration of the power of speech, leveraged emotions, and misinformation, something that resonates in an age dominated by social media and manipulated narratives. Mark Antony’s funeral oration is a masterclass in persuasion, as he subtly turns the crowd against the conspirators without ever directly condemning them: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” What follows is a perfect example of how a skilled orator can bend public sentiment to his will, a lesson we see played out daily in modern media and politics. Observe Damien Lewis deliver Marc Anthony's eulogy-as-political-excoriation, here:

 

 

 

The chaos that erupts in the wake of Caesar’s death, where reason is drowned out by outrage, echoes our contemporary political divisions as they spiral into violence, dis and misinformation, and violent power struggles. Shakespeare’s Rome is not so different from our world in 2025—ambition, manipulation, and the ever-looming question of who truly holds power remain as urgent and dangerous as ever.