The Biggest Book Club Books Coming Out This Fall

I led a book discussion on Coates’ Between the World and Me for a library I worked at in the DC Metropolitan area a few years ago, and remember being surprised by how dense it felt to read. The language was beautiful, and I found myself relieved with how well Coates explained aspects of the Black experience, but damn if it wasn’t depressing. That’s the thing though—discussing the reality of Blackness in America can be depressing, but Coates does it so well. At the risk of sounding clichéd, his latest is so timely. It’s a collection of essays that explores how the stories we construct distort reality. He travels to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine, contending with myth and reality in each place.

A new Murakami is always going to make waves, and this is his first in six years. Fans of the author will find the Town here familiar. It’s where a Dream Reader reviews dreams and where shadows go on their own way. There’s love, noir, pop culture, jazz, libraries, and the intriguing otherworldliness that we’ve come to expect from Murakami.

Rooney’s eye for interpersonal relationships is turned to two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, who aren’t very much alike. Peter fits every bit of the confident and successful attorney stereotype there is—until his father dies, and he starts self-medicating to get to sleep. And, now his relationships with two different women—one his age and one in college—are starting to falter, too. Then there’s his younger brother, Ivan, who is a competitive chess player, and who has never been all that social. Since their father died, his life has changed, too, and he finds himself becoming more and more involved with an older woman.

After reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Tokarczuk’s books and I go together real bad. Here, she’s set her glittering and thrilling prose to a sanitarium in 1913 Poland. Mieczysław is a young man suffering from tuberculosis who arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, where he will gather every day with other residents to discuss class, war, and the inherent value of women. But strange things are happening while Guesthousers do all this pontificating—something is watching them. And as Mieczysław investigates what’s going on, he realizes it may be too late. I am so ready for the humor, folklore, and horror this promises.

I haven’t come across anyone who’s read Braiding Sweetgrass by Kimmerer who doesn’t recommend it emphatically. Here, the Indigenous scientist considers the gift economy and how we can better position ourselves when it comes to reciprocity and community, based on lessons from nature. Which is, of course, in direct contrast to the capitalist-driven culture of scarcity we currently live in.