There is nothing better during the fall season - as temperatures begin to drop and the leaves change - than to grab a great book, along with a blanket, and enjoy a cozy morning, afternoon or evening of reading on the couch. Let's be honest with ourselves, the household chores can wait to read a couple more pages... or chapters.
If you need some suggestions, don't forget to check out the following picks from our staff, which were also featured in the September/October edition of Columbia Living Magazine:
Marlee thought she’d tackled the man of her dreams, only to call a penalty on his illegal holding on the sidelines. She declared a time out on dating athletes, but now the handsome new quarterback is making a forward pass. Will they go all the way this year? Between Wives and Girlfriends drama, Marlee’s ex, and the perils of dating a player in a football down, it will take a Hail Mary for this relationship to survive to see the playoffs! This romance by a first-time author and wife of a former NFL player is a funny, sexy insider’s look into the high stakes world of elite athletes.
In an isolated region of Russia, two little girls go missing by the ocean on the Kamchatka peninsula. What follows is the region's response to their disappearance in an expertly woven series of snippets of life from the villagers, each chapter a month of time that girls are missing. There were so many sentences where I stopped and reread them, often times out loud because they were so beautifully crafted and carefully pieced together that they seemed to make Julia Phillips less an author and more an artist. The stories were loosely strung together, with characters barely overlapping between chapters, which made for a mysterious puzzle I was trying to put together until the very last page.
There is no better time to go hiking than in the fall. Get inspired to get out into nature this season with the inspiring classic travel book, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. Bryson brings you close to majestical forests and peaceful lakes with a humor and an understanding of the healing effects of nature. This book will make you want to get outside!
Stephen Chbosky, author of the cult classic The Perks of Being a Wallflower, returns to the writing world with a masterful and cinematic story that is nearly impossible to put down. When Kate Reese and her seven-year-old son Christopher move to tiny Mill Grove, Pennsylvania to get fresh start, it quickly becomes apparent that something sinister is at work in the town. When Christopher goes missing for six days in the Mission Street Woods, he returns with mysterious new abilities and a compulsion to carry out a task with dire stakes for the “nice man.” Fans of Stranger Things will fall in love with Imaginary Friend.
What makes life worth living? The first book in Norwegian writer Knausgaard’s seasonal quartet consists of letters and mini essays to his unborn daughter that seek to answer this question. It reads like a self-described personal encyclopedia. The essays inspire us to lose everything we know and assume about the world, and experience it anew. Everyday objects such as toothbrushes, telephones and buttons, as well as creatures from the natural world, are charged with meaning if we take the time to stop and notice. There are lovely paintings included in the book that were not prompted by the essays themselves, but by the season that inspired the collection.
Winter 1917. While World War I rages on the Continent, arms manufacturer Lord Highmount hosts a spiritualist gathering at his home on an island in the Irish Sea, presumably to contact his dead sons, both killed in the war. However, there is much more than a séance on the agenda, and the English intelligence services have sent Kate Cartwright, a code breaker and Highmount family friend with supernatural gifts of her own, along with Captain Donovan, a soldier, spy, and assassin, to ferret out the guests’ secret agendas. This is the perfect fall read – a former abbey haunted by its ghostly inhabitants, a raging winter storm cutting the island’s guests off from help on the mainland, an intruder and murderer making his way through the house’s warren of secret passages, and spies trying to determine who has leaked secret weapons plans to the Germans. A novel that keeps the suspense on a steady boil to the very end – a nice blend of cozy mystery, historical spy thriller, and gothic horror, with just a smidge of romance that leaves the reader hopeful of a sequel.