I have started to do some regular posts in order to 1) beef up the posts on The Starving Artist and 2) be more clear about what The Starving Artist is. One of these regular posts is “The Artist Recommends,” which will be posted before seasons, holidays, sometimes months or new years… Just to give you some ideas to keep your own TBR (to-be-read) going and growing.

I’m not only going to tell you what I think you should be reading this month because I recommend it, but also what I am especially looking forward to reading at this moment in time. And yes, there are plenty of options. And they’re not all Halloween-related.

Image from Project Gutenberg.

I just read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stephenson, and I was pleasantly surprised by this 50-page, basically short story which was somehow a breath of fresh air from the 1800s. I’ll be reviewing it later this week, but if you want a short, Halloween-y read and enjoy classics, then pick this up. (I read from the Stephen King-forwarded Signet Classics collection of Dracula, Frankenstein, and this story.) I chose this moment to read it in preparation of an ARC read, which I’ll talk about in a sec.

Every October, I pre-order my copy of either Minalima’s or Jim Kay’s illustrated (and pop-up, in the former’s case) edition of the next, retrespective Harry Potter book in the series. This year it is Minalima’s turn, so in anticipation of book three’s publication on October 3, why not revisit the first two books in the series, the Minalima editions of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J. K. Rowling. I enjoy these fanciful, pop-up versions.

Last month, I read Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. I have had a roller-coaster experience reading his stuff (probably because each work can be so different from his other work), but I really enjoyed The Graveyard Book, which would suit a wide range of readers and is especially appropriate for Halloween-month reading. (If you are the type, you could begin by reading Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which it is based off.)

Strangely, I have heard the name of the following book a few times in the past year. It is strange because I have gone a lifetime reading everything of L. M. Montgomery’s that I could find (over and over), but everyone around me seemed content to read just Anne of Green Gables or maybe Emily of New Moon. I decided last year to re-read her collection of short stories, Among the Shadows, for Halloween, since they are her spooky stories. Now, it seems that I am not the only one. Much more innocent for being written by Montogomery, these will not keep you up late at night, but will give you a crinkly feeling up your spine while also transporting you back to the simpler, more agrarian life of Montgomery’s Prince Edward Island, Canada, in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I have also been surprised by the supposed die-back around the most excellent book by George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo. It’s probably just that there are so many books published all the time, now, but this book still sits at the top of my all-time faves list. And since it’s an unconventional ghost story taking place in a graveyard where Abraham Lincoln is mourning the loss of his beloved son, it definitely deserves being recalled at Halloween-time.

Image from Amazon.com

I started reading Dracula by Bram Stoker, last October. I… well, I got bored. Unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Jane Austen and much of the Brontes’ writing, I was distracted by the Victorian writing style and the very slow turning of the wheels therein. At any rate, I will finish someday, and in the meantime plenty more people will enjoy reading the classic, written—obviously—before the vampire waters were stirred up with so much tradition. I believe I shall try to finish reading it this year as an audiobook. I am a captive audience while driving in the car.

Image from Amazon.com

I will also be reading—one hundred per cent for sure—Sherlock Holmes & Mr. Hyde by Christian Klaver. It is the second book in the Classified Dossier series of Holmes mashups with classic monster stories. (The first book was a mashup with Dracula, titled Sherlock Holmes & Count Dracula.) The reason I am sure to read this is that I have been sent an ARC and have promised to review. This book caught my eye because I am a Sherlock Holmes fan, it is nigh on Halloween, and Klaver has some pretty good ratings elsewhere. It should be a fun time, anyhow.

Image from Barnes & Noble

As I mentioned above, Minalima will release its most recent addition to the Harry Potter series—an illustrated, pop-up Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J. K. Rowling)—on October 3. I will, no doubt, be procuring my copy ASAP, or at the very least, making someone gift it to me for Christmas. It is a collector’s edition kind of thing, but Minalima’s books are so much fun… artistic, whimsical, beautiful, and special, a toy for grown-ups or a great way to read the books with a child (though I would not recommend a child read all the way through the series while still a child, but that’s a different blog).

I have read some Edgar Allan Poe, to be sure, but that reading has been random and spread out throughout my life. (Most recently, we read “The Masque of the Red Death” in the homeschool co-op class I taught a couple years back.) One of these years I will get around to reading a collected works of Poe during the Halloween season, and the title I have on my TBR for that is Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

Image from Amazon

I have also not read (at least not in a long time) “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving. You may or may not know that this is a short story, not a novel. If it isn’t already somewhere on your bookshelf (in some anthology or other), then perhaps the best place to read it would be the original compilation which contained it, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, which also goes by the title The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories and is credited as the start of the American gothic story. The short story can be purchased as a stand-alone volume, as well, just—as always with classics—buyer beware of cheap, poorly-done versions in the market (due to it being in the public domain).

I am busy, lately, revising the first book of a YA fantasy trilogy, and in that book another book has a prominent cameo. That book is the graphic novel The Sandman, volume 1, Preludes & Nocturnes, by Neil Gaiman (and Sam Keith). Published in 1993, the series would grow to 10 volumes, but I am just going to start with reading the first one. It’s research. And it just so happens to be frequently ranked as one of the best graphic novels of all time. (Technically, The Sandman was a comic book series that ran from 1989-1996 and went to 75 issues, then was re-packaged as graphic novels.)

I am a bit of a lightweight when it comes to spooky reading, but two creepy books have caught my attention for years: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier. While Dorian Gray is gothic horror, Rebecca is gothic romance, but I imagine both of them might give me the willies. They both call to me as October reads.

I’ve been seeing a strange trend on the book tables in bookstores, lately, and that is an interest in C. S. Lewis and/or his contemporaries (which include J. R. R. Tolkien). Now, I have an enduring interest in C. S. Lewis, but I have rarely seen this play out in the conventional bookstore (except for perhaps when the Narnia movies were released or when a random bookseller understood that Till We Have Faces is a must-read). I now have three books that fit this trend, two of them recommended recently by bookstores: The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski (2016), Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Calahan (2020), and A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Van Auken (about Lewis sort of obliquely, 1977). In the spirit of good trends, this would make an interesting trilogy to read interspersed with Lewis’s (and others’) work (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, The Lord of the Rings, Out of the Silent Planet…), perhaps watching Shadowlands (1985) and Tolkien (2019).

Another two books that have been calling to me from the bookshelves are A Winter’s Promise, the first book of the Mirror Visitor Quartet by Christelle Dabos (2018) and The Priory of the Orange Tree, the first book of the still-growing Roots of Chaos series (which also has a #0 prequel) by Samantha Shannon (2019). I guess I have a thing for big (or, in the second case, giant) fantasy books with sleek, new covers, hanging out on shelf-ends and book tables. Well-rated, I am hoping to be as blown away as I was by Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, last year.  

Image from Amazon

A super-new book that I am looking forward to with anticipatory glee is Zadie Smith’s The Fraud. As is much of the book world. It dropped in September, and though anything Smith writes gets a lot of attention, I am especially excited for her amazing writing abilities to take us in a slightly new direction with a historical crime novel. The 1990s and the Victorians are hot right now, and I am totally on board for all of it.

Image from Amazon.com

How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South by Esau McCaulley is another book that came out in September, and another title I heard chatted up (with interview) on one of my favorite podcasts. I was sold by the enthusiasm of the interviewer and also by what McCaulley had to say for the book.

Image from Amazon.com

Lastly, for no particular reason, I have my eye on I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai. It caught my eye on a list of most anticipated books of 2023 because I subscribe to Makkai’s newsletter after a writing friend strongly recommended it. Then the description hooked me good: it’s a “literary mystery,” and I am always way excited about books that blend genre-writing with amazing language (like, hopefully, The Fraud, see above). It is, I sincerely hope, what will be said about my work.

The best books that I read in September are The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Click on the links for those reviews, but these two very different books both surprised me out of almost nowhere, though both of them are titles I “should” have gotten around to earlier. As always.

And just for kicks, there are a few Halloween-y movies that I have yet to watch but would like to, and those are Ed Wood (1994), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Sweeny Todd (2007), Little Shop of Horrors (1986, at least since I was like a teenager), and The Dark Tower (2017). (Note: there will not be new installments of Wednesday or Stranger Things, due to the WGA and SAG strikes. Next year in October?… Or 2026 for Stranger Things.)

As for my usual Halloween recommendations, I am always game for a re-read of the Harry Potter series, especially in the fall. You could take it one further and read an illustrated edition (up until their current availability), like Jim Kay’s (currently at book five with Bloomsbury looking for a new illustrator for the last two) or Minalima (currently at book three). It’s not too late to get on the couple-year-old bandwagon and high you a copy of Thea James’ Cooking for Wizards, Warriors, and Dragons. Then there’s always The Witches (Roald Dahl), The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), the Twilight saga (Stephenie Meyer, which I often recommend despite it’s less-than-literary writing style), Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs), Tuck Everlasting (Natalie Babbitt), Grimm’s Fairy Tales (the Brothers Grimm), A Snicker of Magic (Natalie Lloyd), and these kids books: The Ghost Eye Tree (Bill Martin Jr.), Sideways Stories from Wayside School (Louis Sachar), The Stranger and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (Chris Van Allsberg), A Series of Unfortunate Events series (Lemony Snickett), My Teacher Is an Alien (Bruce Coville) The Monster at the End of This Book (Sesame Street and Jon Stone), and The Berenstein Bears: Trick or Treat (Stan and Jan Berenstein). As for movies, I love re-watching seasonally-appropriate movies, and my usual recommendation for October are  Frankenweenie (2012), Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Alice in Wonderland (2010), The Cloverfield Paradox (2018), 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), Lost (series, 2004-2010), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Coraline (2009), The Corpse Bride (2005), Cloverfield (2008), It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown (1966), Donnie Darko (2001), the Harry Potter movies (2001-2010), Rear Window (1954), Super 8 (2011), Signs (2002), The Sixth Sense (1999), Hotel Transylvania (2012), The X-Files (series and movies, 1993-2018), The Dark Crystal (1982), Warm Bodies (2013), Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Knives Out (2019), Glass Onion (2022), Ghostbusters (1989 and 2016), The Quiet Place (2018),Scooby Doo (Scooby-Doo Where Are You! 1969-1976 and Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated 2010-2013), Goosebumps (2015), Book of Life (2014), Coco (2017), Save Yourselves! (2020), Nope (2022), and the new Haunted Mansion (2023). And even without new installments, Stranger Things (series, 2016–) and Wednesday (2022–). As for brand-new stuff, A Haunting in Venice looks kind of amazing, but I think too scary for me, and my son is f-reaking out about the upcoming Five Nights at Freddy’s.