BookLovers: 5 more new fall releases to read
We’re in the thick of Fall Book Release season, my friends, and the hits are dropping like leaves. I’ve raked up a few for you today. Let’s jump in.
1. “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life,” by Margaret Sullivan.
If you know a journalist, you know that Hollywood’s version of a pressroom is often just that — Hollywood’s version. Real ink-stained journalists — whether they’re editors, copy editors, foreign correspondents, or (ahem) freelance arts writers — do what they do for the pure love of the game. There is usually no money, and little glory involved. Almost no one will understand the care and work that goes into it. (And I can’t think of another job where if you make a small mistake, you get hate mail from strangers.)
Just after my 20th birthday, I started as an intern at the Brockton Enterprise, wrote a story about a school parade, and was hooked. This all goes to say, that on a personal level, I loved Sullivan’s book.
Forty years ago, Sullivan began as an intern at the Buffalo News and eventually became the small paper’s editor-in-chief. Here, she chronicles her years in the trenches battling sexism and throwing elbows in a highly competitive newsroom,” as the publisher’s synopsis tells us. She’s also witnessed a sea change in the industry.
In 2012, Sullivan became the first woman appointed public editor of The New York Times. In 2016, Sullivan left for the Washington Post. Here, Sullivan takes readers “behind the scenes of the nation's most influential news outlets to explore how Americans lost trust in the news and what it will take to regain it.” #MustRead. I’d also recommend the media critic’s 2020 release: “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.”
2. If you’ve looked at New York Times or USA Today fiction bestseller lists lately, you’ve seen Colleen Hoover all over ‘em. “Verity” and “It Ends with Us,” specifically, have dominated, thanks to #BookTok readers falling in love with her page-turners. Hoover is back with “It Starts with Us,” (out Oct. 18) the prequel to “It Ends with Us.” See what all the hype is about.
3. One of the greatest writers of our time, Ian McEwan should be studied in classrooms. No one writes quite like him, from underrated gems like “On Chesil Beach” to bonafide hits like “Atonement.” (If you’ve never read “Enduring Love,” that is a ride.) SouthCoast book clubs, take note: His latest, “Lessons,” is a bestselling epic with a lot to unpack. According to the synopsis:
Young Roland Baines’s life changed at boarding school; his childhood piano teacher’s sexual manipulations left lasting scars. He remembers this as we meet him in the mid-1980s. His wife has just vanished, leaving him alone with their son. As radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that look deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life. We’re left with questions that make for long book club discussions: Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without causing damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?
4. “Our Missing Hearts,” Celeste Ng. The author of “Little Fires Everywhere” is back with another page-turning family drama, set in an eerie dystopia, a la “The Handmaid’s Tale” -- again, SouthCoast book clubs, this is a perfect discussion book. According to the synopsis:
Bird Gardner, 12, lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father. Bird knows not to ask too many questions — for a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” after years of economic instability and violence. To restore prosperity, authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese-American poet.
Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is drawn into a quest to find her…. Timely and chilling. I can see this as a Hulu series.
5. “Demon Copperhead,” by Barbara Kingsolver.
Attention Kingsolver fans: The wait is almost over. Her next novel hits shelves on Oct. 18 and it’s pure Kingsolver. The title evokes Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield,” and that's not accidental: Here, “The Poisonwood Bible” author transposes the Victorian epic to contemporary Appalachia. As the synopsis tells us, it’s “the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival…he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.” A modern Dickensian bildungsroman.
Until next week, SouthCoast: Keep on readin’ on.
Lauren Daley is a book columnist and freelance writer. Contact her at ldaley33@gmail.com. She tweets @laurendaley1. Read more at https://www.facebook.com/daley.writer
This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: BookLovers: Check out these 5 new books this fall
