For some reason, October was the quickest month of this year for me. It flew by without me even realizing it. I hope you all had an interesting reading month, a great Halloween evening, and of course many opportunities to watch horror movies and read some scary books.

I feel like I did a lot of reading this month, and even started two new books, but in the end, I only managed to finish two works. That’s okay. Right now, I’m in the middle of many books and on the brink of finishing a few, so November’s newsletter will be filled with more literary and philosophical works.

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Read in October

October Country by Ray Bradbury 5/5

A collection of short stories with an autumnal theme. This is the first short story collection in which I liked all of the stories; they were just that good! My favorites were; The Next in Line, The Emissary, Touched with Fire, and The Scythe. However, all of the stories had something special. I have said this often but Bradbury’s writing style is beautiful and poetic. These stories were a good fit for the Fall season because they contained many descriptions of changes in weather and nature, which are so characteristic of autumn, and because of their dark plot twists of course.

Bradbury always puts a deeper meaning into his stories. They are not all scary but they are all dark and they deal mostly with the human condition; how people react or interact with each other. This collection also had many stories with some form of body horror; mummies, skeletons, or characters with anatomical problems or special characteristics. I liked this aspect too.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James 4/5

Henry James (1843-1916) is seen as one of the greatest American modernist story writers and a prolific one as well (he wrote more than one hundred works including novels, short stories, plays, and essays). The Turn of the Screw is an experimental psychological novella and a ghost story in one. James experimented with longer and more complex sentences in this story, making every sentence almost a story of its own. I had to reread multiple paragraphs throughout this novella and found myself often confused after reading a page and not understanding anything, making it a must to return and read it more carefully. I would compare the experience of reading The Turn of the Screw to reading some works of Edgar Allan Poe. For example, The Fall of the House of Usher can feel cryptic too. And just as with Poe’s work, it is worth your time!

The plot follows a group of people telling ghost stories to each other. One person intrigues everyone by claiming to know a terribly scary ghost story; one that a former governess told him through a letter. It is scary because it is supposed to be true. So we leave our first-introduced main character and dive into his story. James uses here a meta story-telling technique: a story within a story.

The woman in question gets an offer to work for a man who has two children in need of a governess. The children are his nephew and niece, they just lost their parents, and he is responsible for their lives. They live in a big mansion in the countryside with some servants. The man will provide good payment but has one critical condition for the employee; she must never contact him no matter what. She finds this strange but eventually decides to accept the offer.

When she arrives there, she is pleasantly surprised by the homely mansion, the friendly servants, and the angelic children. In the beginning, the children, Flora and Miles, take up all of her time and she is very content educating and talking to them. Until she starts seeing people that are not there and she thinks that the children are aware of this. Her relationship with them begins to change. Especially the behavior of Miles is very concerning to her.

‘’The change was actually like the spring of a beast.’’

But how can she protect the children from these horrible ghosts when they choose to work together with them? And are the ghosts even real or just in her head? You would have to read her letter carefully to find out.

Currently Reading

Right now I’m in the middle of too many books (16 to be precise) and it’s chaos. I don’t think that I can solve this problem entirely in November, however, I should be able to finish at least four works which I have been reading now for a while.

The first is a poetry anthology called A Poem for Every Autumn Day, containing poems with an autumnal theme, as the title suggests, for every day and night of the Fall season. The poems are collected by Allie Esiri and foreseen of a short introduction. November is of course the last month of Autumn, so the anthology is almost done.

Then the second book is a long sci-fi novel (around 1300 pages) that I have been reading for almost three months now; 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. It’s actually a trilogy and right now I’m in the middle of the last book.

The third book is a read-along (Jared Henderson’s book club) of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I hoped to finish this book in October, but I’m a couple of pages behind. Woolf’s writing style consists of complex long sentences and is called a strain of thought style. This novel in particular has no chapters or other forms of breaks in the text. You feel like you cannot stop reading and everything flies by at a quick pace, however, the difficult sentences and the various subtitle switches of perspective make you tired and unable to finish the book fast.

And then the fourth book which I’m definitely going to finish in November is the newest short story collection by Stephen King; You Like It Darker. So far, I have been loving the stories in here and the book reads easily.

Currently, I’m working on the fourth chapter of my philosophy thesis, which focuses on health data ownership and exploitation. I’m reading multiple articles on these subjects, but I also had to start two new books. One is a work of Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which explores morality and serves as a foundation for his other works on morality. Central ideas of Kant such as the universal moral principle and not using people as means are discussed in the Groundwork. I’m reading the Oxford World Classics edition and this edition provides an excellent introduction to the text.

The second book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Many people would not recognize the name of Henrietta Lacks, however, most of our scientific and especially medical inventions and studies are based on her cells; the HeLa cell line. Rebecca Skloot, a science journalist, does an excellent job at writing a biography of such an important woman who did not receive the deserved recognition for a very long time. More importantly, her cells were acquired and researched without her consent, and even without her knowledge of it.

At first glance, my reading style seems a bit chaotic, but I do have a system. The books that I discuss in this newsletter are my focus reading books. These I read almost daily or at least weekly. Then I have my background books. These are books that I have started reading but at some moment they are pushed back to the background by others. I read them at least every month, but I finish them over a longer period of time. Usually, this includes various works of non-fiction, philosophical or scientific, and novels in a foreign language that I use for learning a language. So far, this way of reading has been beneficial but I should try to minimize the current reading list to no more than 5 or 6 books.

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