What We’re Reading This Autumn. Five Longer Evenings
Autumn hands the evenings back to us. The light goes early, the lamp comes on, and the attention that summer scatters begins to gather again. This is the season for the book that asks something of you, the kind you read slowly because it rewards being read slowly.
So we asked five members of SWS what is on their table this season. What came back is less a list than a portrait: five minds, five reasons, five books chosen by women you would want to sit beside. Every one of them asks something of the reader. That is rather the point.
Our Share of Night — Mariana Enriquez
A father and son travel through an Argentina haunted by dictatorship and by something far older and hungrier. Enriquez writes horror that reads like literature, vast and immersive and impossible to put down. Save it for the night you have nowhere to be.
End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World — Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Klein and Taylor name a new strain of politics: the far-right factions who have stopped trying to save the world and started preparing to outlive it. It is a book to read with a clear head and a pencil. The kind of argument that sharpens your own.
The Hare with Amber Eyes — Edmund de Waal
A collection of tiny Japanese carvings passes through five generations of a European family, and de Waal follows them across war, exile, and fortunes lost. A memoir told through objects, patient and luminous. The quietest book here, and perhaps the one that stays longest.
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves — Sophie Gilbert
Gilbert looks back at three decades of pop culture and asks how a generation of women were taught to turn on themselves. It reframes the music you loved and the magazines you read, and it is quietly furious about both. You will not listen to the same songs the same way.
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage — Belle Burden
It begins with a message from a stranger: your husband is involved with my wife. From there Burden traces a marriage coming apart in real time, unflinching and strangely graceful. You will finish it faster than you meant to, and then want to talk to someone about it.
Five women, five books that ask to be met rather than merely finished. What we choose to read when the evenings lengthen is its own quiet self-portrait.