The Crying Book by Heather Christle. I picked this slim book because it is stylistically interesting: like one long fragmented essay, drawing together research and memoir and some rather poetic ideas about tears. I found it difficult to put down, not least because there are no natural stopping points such as chapters. I also found myself crying a lot during the days that I read it–not necessarily while reading, and not because the book is sad. There are sad moments, of course, but the book itself is more reflective and lyrical. Yet the intense focus on how it feels to cry made me more likely to break into tears, which I sort of enjoyed.
Women by Chloe Caldwell. A short, sexy novel that captures the heady, bruising rush of falling into impossible love–or obsession, if you prefer to think of it that way. I sat down to read a few pages one evening and ended up devouring the whole book. It’s a fragmented novel, which suits the subject matter; impossible to explain what makes any two people fall in love, let alone embark on a volatile and moody affair where one partner is cheating and the other only just realizing her sexuality. It’s painful to read, but also deliciously messy and relatable.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn. I was blown away by The Employees, which is as unsettling and otherworldly as you could wish sci fi to be within the lyrical, formalistically interesting trappings of a fragmented novel. The Wax Child does something similar, but in a very different context: set during witch trials in seventeenth century Denmark, these fragments are all narrated by a wax doll created by one of the witches. Inhabited by some otherworldly being, the doll sees much more than what is before its eyes–which is fortunate, since it spends part of the story buried in the ground–and gazes yearningly on the lives of the women who find fellowship and power amongst one another. I was reminded at points of Quest for a Maid, although that beloved childhood book bears very little in common with this one except in its knack for capturing the sensory detail of premodern life, from knuckle-crunching work to herbal remedies to the unsettling sense that a magic-rich medieval era is both long past and just within reach.
I’m glad that when my library holds came in at long last, they included these rather short but absorbing books. Reading new-to-me books is one of my principal pleasures–and it soothes my pride to keep my annual book count relatively high–but until the end of this month, I’ve been pretty slow to pick up new-to-me books since the summer. There are so many possible reasons why! Some personal, some ::gestures at world:: situational. Last month I struggled to read at all. But this month at least I got back in the habit of holding a book by rereading some old favorites.
Picking up on last month‘s passion for Jane Austen screen adaptations, I re-read Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. The latter put me in the mood for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which may seem like a very tangential connection, but the latter book takes place in roughly the same time period as Austen’s stories, when rich people were constantly engaging homes in London while complaining about the noise and crush of the city, not to mention the proximity to disreputable and/or lower class people, and there was a general flush of patriotic British feeling amid the Napoleonic wars. To my surprise, I don’t actually own a copy of this book. So instead I reread an already-owned ebook of Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, which was great fun and still full of surprises even though I felt I had just revisited it. (I last reread it in September 2023, it seems.) Then I was able to borrow a friend’s copy of Jonathan Strange, squeezed into 1,006 pages of tiny print in a mass market paperback, but I drank it down in a week and loved revisiting those old familiar scenes of rainy, wintry magic. In a sense, they are all comfort reads: wonder, horror, and imperfect people trying to make things right–plus a pleasurable attention to the physical world, the rituals and clothes and sensations that accompany a life. (Weird to say this about Gideon, but I stand by it.)
Rereading is a pleasure, too–and a luxury that I don’t often make time for. I wish I did!
Elsewhere
Having read and enjoyed H is for Hawk last month, I was really interested in this Orion article that puts it in conversation with several other “animal memoirs.”
I love a good heist story, so when thieves managed to spirit away crown jewels from the Louvre, I took to my group chats to hold forth on why it is better to grab precious stones than, say, rare books or easily identifiable goods that aren’t made of inherently valuable materials. This Conversation article breaks down the challenges that await the successful heist: You’ve just stolen a priceless artifact – what happens next?
Of course, you could always keep the priceless treasures. Back when I was still reviewing books, I read one about an art thief in France who stole for the pleasure of stealing beautiful and historic things…. things which got burned or thrown into a river when authorities were closing in on his arrest. The book was mid but the story is amazing. Here’s a review that gets into a little bit.
AI in the news:
AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring (Bloomberg, September 29, 2025)
How Local Librarians Keep AI Slop Off the Shelves (Governing, October 3, 2025)
Advocates raise alarm over Pfas pollution from datacenters amid AI boom (Guardian, October 4, 2025)
AI Data Centers Are an Even Bigger Disaster Than Previously Thought (Futurism, October 10, 2025)
An Open Letter to Perplexity AI (Rhetorica, October 17, 2025)
The AI Industry Is Traumatizing Desperate Contractors in the Developing World for Pennies (Futurism, October 21, 2025)
Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory (BBC, October 22, 2025)
People Who Say They’re Experiencing AI Psychosis Beg the FTC for Help (Wired, October 22, 2025)
Higher Ed’s Rush To Adopt AI Is About So Much More Than AI (Defector, October 23, 2025)
How NDAs keep AI data center details hidden from Americans (NBS News, October 28, 2025)
On October 27, Wired released a special issue about AI: AI of a Thousand Faces. Wired has been a fairly reliable source of skeptical or at least neutral AI coverage. At the same time, they have a large stable of staff writers and freelancers, so one can expect some viewpoint diversity; who can forget that, just earlier this year, they published and then retracted an insufficiently fact-checked AI-written article from a freelancer? With those caveats, here are some of the articles I found relevant to my interests:
AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All by Brian Merchant
Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI by Tommy Craggs
The Worst Thing About AI Is That People Can’t Shut Up About It by Katie Drummond
Minutiae
October brought storms and stiff winds, and my house got chilly. My little orange foster cat became more interested in draping himself on my lap than chasing his favorite toys, and we spent many evenings in that pose while I read. Halfway through the month, I officially adopted him. For a long time, I was not ready for a permanent companion; then, suddenly, I was. I’m delighted that I get to share a life with this affectionate, mischevous little sprite. He makes me laugh every day.
This month I marched with 15,000 other Philadelphians to remind ourselves and others that most people do not want an authoritarian government. I spent a morning working in my favorite park, and then took some water samples for a region-wide snapshot. I went to some panels for Climate Week and found them disappointingly corporate and empty. I led an hour-long workshop about writing and water.
I didn’t do anything special for Halloween, but I did enjoy some seasonally spooky entertainments throughout the month. One weekend I went to see a spooky ballet featuring the legend of Lizzie Borden and also a rather Caligari-esque expressionist thing with fascinating choreo, then an Interview with a Vampire-themed burlesque show that brought the house down when a dancer performed as Anne Rice forbidding people from writing fan fiction about her copyrighted works. The following weekend, I saw a stage adaptation of Dracula that took many explicable departures from the original, but played up the campy and sexy elements and coalesced into a pretty hilarious story in its own right.
I watched The Lost Daughter, an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel I haven’t read, but the movie has many of the tones and types that I recognize from the Neapolitan series, and it is chock full of English-speaking stars. It is both sexy and unsettling in a visceral way. I also watched All of You, yet another movie about technology that determines who your soul mate is (like Timer, which I liked a lot, and Fingermails, which I liked okay), and while I enjoyed All of You enough to finish it, I kept thinking this was written by a man. The Lost Daughter made a meaningful counterpoint to that.
Sara Davis 