What We're Reading, Vol. 26 – September 2020

Photo by Eliza Campbell, who has also launched her new bookstagram this month: elizacanread.

September, a darling month that most years serves as the exciting kickoff to The Attic on Eighth’s favorite season but that has, somehow, acted like a parenthesis in 2020 – rushing by and disappearing before we’ve barely been able to acknowledge it, let alone savor it with our usual enthusiasm. Usual autumn activities have been put on hold, as for many of us has been the return to academia and even, our book stacks.

Here, from this odd time is what we’re reading this September…

Amy Richardson

I have recently finished reading two very different books; Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Ownes and How to Argue with a Racist by Dr Adam Rutherford. While the former has been (as far as I’m concerned ridiculously) hyped within an inch of its life, the other came out shortly before lockdown and has proved to be a timely release. WTCS has some good points – the strong sense of location, beautiful descriptions of nature, and a cute and (mostly) kind boy – it really failed to do much for me and I found myself repulsed by parts of it. Not only was the ending awful, but the depictions of Jumpin’ and Mabel were lazy stereotypes if we’re being kind, racist if we’re not. And considering the stuff that came out about the author and her family, I’m leaning heavily towards the latter. How to Argue with a Racist is not an easy read, dense and science-y in places, but provides an interesting examination into the genetics behind racist claims – highly recommended. I’m now on something a bit lighter, A Masterly Murder by Susanna Gregory which is the sixth book in the Matthew Bartholomew series about a doctor working with a monk to solve crimes in medieval Cambridge during the years after the first outbreak of the Black Death. Next up are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte. I’m off on a short holiday to Whitby, so thought I’d take something suitably Yorkshire!

Eliza Campbell

I’ve had such a good reading month! Two books that stick out to me are Severance by Ling Ma and Educated by Tara Westover. I probably don’t need to tell you that Educated is a powerhouse of a memoir and that it gripped me from start to finish and still hasn’t let me go. It tells the story of how the author, Tara, grew up without a birth certificate or formal education in a Mormon family in rural Idaho and how she then made her way to academic success at Cambridge and Harvard. It’s powerful and sometimes difficult to read (or even listen to - I had the audiobook) but I can’t recommend it enough. Possibly the best memoir I’ve ever read. Severance is a very different book but one that had me reeling at almost every page. This is a work of speculative fiction about a woman working at a publishing job in New York City. As she goes about her daily life there come reports of a deadly virus in China that slowly makes its way across the world and into America. Public life shuts down, people rush to escape the city, and the world comes to a stand-still. Sound familiar? The book is more than that, tackling topics like immigration, family, isolation, and the end of human civilisation. However, it’s spookily familiar and I find it almost funny that I can now attest to whether the author was right or wrong in predicting how the modern world would respond to a global pandemic.

Olivia Gündüz-Willemin

What horrible month for reading this has been for me, consisting entirely of trying to finish Ali Smith’s Summer. I don’t know what it is with me but I tore through Autumn in one sitting when it came out all those years ago now, but with every follow-up of the seasons quartet, I’ve taken longer and longer to get through each one. I’m enjoying Summer, but I cannot for the life of me just sit down and finish reading it. My suspicion is that the second the calendar turned to September, my mind went into autumn mode and pouring my attention into something called Summer became an impossibility. As a result though, I’ve barely made my way into the stack I’d put aside for September: All Souls by Javier Marías, Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing, My Education by Susan Choi, or The Truants by Kate Weinberg. A pity with such an exciting list!

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