November 2026
Welcome to The Book List!
What a month of reading, you guys. And at the end WE'RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT EMMA M. LION.
But first, because delayed gratification strengthens character, I want to answer a question that came in last month.
“How do you decide what to purchase (be it digital or physical) vs get from the library? I was actually a little surprised when you mentioned being on the library waitlist, because you’ve talked often about buying physical or kindle books. So what’s that decision making process look like? Any decide-onces?”
Such a good question, and I didn't even realize I had a specific approach.
My book purchases always happen in one of five ways:
I have memberships to Book of the Month, Aardvark, and Audible and get books every month from the first two. (Audible credits often build up until there's something I really want.)
I occasionally look at Kindle or Chirp sales and get books on my TBR that are cheap.
I visit a used bookstore about once a year (ours moved almost an hour away, and it's devastating), and I go to a local book sale that happens 2-3 times a year.
I always get at least two books when I visit an indie bookstore while traveling for work or visiting somewhere new.
I preorder books from authors I absolutely love. (The next one is Mrs. Christie and the Mystery in the Mews by Amanda Chapman coming December 8!)
I can't remember the last time I just went to a bookstore to buy a book. I have so many at home that it almost feels ridiculous to just buy one willy-nilly.
But how do I decide what to buy and what to put on hold at the library?
I put things on hold for one of three reasons:
I'm not convinced I'll like it, so a hold is noncommittal.
It's in the cultural zeitgeist, and I'm curious but not desperate.
I get notified of a new release and get on the hold list immediately. (You will not see me move faster than when Libby tells me a book on my "notify me" list is added to the library. The heartbreak when my hold spot is #2, but I also respect whoever beat me. Good game to you, ma'am.)
Currently, I'm on the wait list for Whistle by Lincoln Barclay. That falls into category 1. It's a thriller/horror about a mom and son who move to a small town, and the boy finds a train locked in a shed that I guess holds some kind of evil? I don't know. It could be dumb. It could be awesome. Let's put it on hold and find out.
Yesteryear is the perfect example for number two. Initially, I had no interest in reading it, but after a few weeks of polarizing reviews, I put my name on the hold list. I had to wait like 32 weeks or something crazy and was curious but not desperate. Then I started listening to it on Spotify since Book Twin Katie recommended the audiobook, and I got sucked all the way in, eventually buying the audiobook on Audible when my Spotify hours ran out.
Another library hold I had until recently was Revenge Plot by Stephanie Wrobel. I read about it on Publishers Weekly, I think? It's a new release that sounded awesome, so I put it on my "notify me" list months ago, got on the hold list as quickly as I could (which was like spot six), but then it was an option for Book of the Month last month! So I just got it with my monthly credit.
If I wasn't such a mood reader, I'd read from the library so much more. It wouldn't bother me to be at the whim of my hold list, and I'd just read whatever was available. Alas, that approach makes me want to cry. I have cravings for certain kinds of books and really love getting to walk to my shelf to pick that book at the right time. To each their own.
Hope that answers the question!
This Month’s Books
Book Reviews
The Names by Florence Knapp
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Content warnings: domestic abuse, death of a family member
Casting: none
Book words: emotionally immersive, super interesting, cinematic, found family
This. Book.
It is not my typical fare. No circuses. No magic. No enemies to lovers. It was [gulp] literary. And I loved it with my whole heart. Thank you to my friend, Kaitlin, who said, "I know this isn't your usual vibe, but I think you'd like it."
The book opens with a mother walking with her young daughter and newborn son to the county deeds office to register the name of the baby. And the book diverges three ways based on what she names him.
It's just masterful. Moving. Well-drawn characters. An interesting premise that stuck the landing. I just loved it and will think about it for a long time. I think it's my favorite book of the year so far.
The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Content warnings: brutal violence, a school shooting, miscarriage, rape, death
Casting: I imagined Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy since they're starring in the Peacock series based on the book, and they were good, especially Meghann.
Book words: gritty thriller, family drama, crime drama
This is not for the faint of heart, but I was captivated by this story. Samantha and Charlotte (Sam and Charlie) are sisters who are used to fear. Their father, Rusty, is an infamous criminal defense lawyer in their town, and a lot of people do not like Rusty. When a former client comes to the house to threaten him, they enact violence on the two young sisters and their mother instead. It's devastating in unimaginable ways.
The story alternates between the sisters being children and now adults, dealing with the aftermath of their trauma. When Charlie, a lawyer herself, stumbles into the center of a fatal school shooting that impacts the entire town, family secrets and dysfunction begin to surface.
This is part family drama and part crime drama, as this fractured family tries to bring justice to this new horror as well as to the one they've suffered with their entire lives. It's a tough read in places and could be criticized as gratuitous, but overall, I found it compelling, thoughtful, and quite the page-turner.
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Content warnings: weird sex stuff
Casting: Elle Fanning was such a perfect Linda for me.
Book words: weird, heartfelt, sharp, found family
When I was in Minneapolis for work, I went to Comma, a bookshop, to buy as many books as my suitcase could hold. Supporting indies is one of my favorite things on the planet.
I chatted with the owner and told her I like "weird little books," and she immediately went looking for this one.
"So the best way to describe this is that it's about a woman who's sexually attracted to airplanes and believes that the way she will consummate a relationship with one is to board it and then die in a crash."
Um, SIGN ME UP. You don't get much weirder than that.
Y'all, if you're turned off by weird sex stuff (which is wildly understandable), skip it. While the sex stuff isn't super graphic or persistent, it's occasionally there and very weird. HOWEVER, this book was so freaking good. It's less about Linda's sexual obsession and more about how she's trying to figure out who she is. The friendships are fascinating, her take on the world is compelling, and the ending was NUTS. I also read this start to finish while either hearing planes fly over my Minneapolis Airbnb or on an actual airplane flying home. A wild experience.
This surprised me in every way, and I loved it. Also, this is why you should shop at indies. And why you should listen to Knox and Jamie on The Popcast. Jamie greenlit this last year, and I should have listened to her then.
The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Content warnings: tepid mentions of partner abuse, a weird family but not an obviously abusive one
Casting: none
Book words: family drama, character-driven, a little slow
I love Kevin Wilson, but I didn't really care for this one. I mean, it was good. But I think because I had high expectations, it disappointed me. Then when I told Book Twin Katie I didn't love it, she said it was her least favorite Kevin Wilson, too. I think he was finding his feet and his voice, and it just felt a little lacking.
The Fang family is weird. The mom and dad are artists who make art by doing increasingly awkward social experiments, often using their kids. The kids don't have much of a choice, but when they become adults, they do and bounce.
Now the brother is a struggling novelist, the sister is a struggling actress, and they find out that the parents they are mostly estranged from might be dead. But is this another stunt? Leave it to their parents to stage their own death to get the kids back into the center of their art.
The premise is solid, and the storytelling is decent. It was just too... sad. Kevin Wilson is the king of writing poignant things with humor, and there was very little humor, which made the family dysfunction just kind of a bummer.
The Apparent Trap by Ali Rosen
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Content warnings: I thought this was closed door, and then one scene was like ALL THE WAY OPEN. Took me by tremendous surprise. But other than the sleeping bag shenanigans, it was rather mild, at least from what I can remember.
Casting: Shailene Woodley as Ezzie, Jamie Dornan as Lee, Simon Baker as Ezzie's dad, and a blurry pretty person as the daughter whose name I can't remember
Book words: fake dating trope, exploration of grief, fun and sizzly
Super wild premise. A morning show television producer randomly introduces her widowed dad to the show's new (very) young anchor, and sparks surprisingly fly. Not only is Ezzie worried that her dad is being dumb by dating this woman decades his junior, this woman is the secret daughter of another morning show host, Lee Morgan, a guy Ezzie had her own chemistry with weeks earlier but who's ghosted her since.
When Lee and Ezzie team up to break up their respective daughter and dad, they decide that fake dating each other is the way to do it. Of course.
You know how it ends, but also you kind of don't? I really enjoyed it.
The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jimenez
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Content warnings: death of a spouse, 2.5/5 spice level
Casting: This is way too weird, you guys, but I'm going to come clean. Annie and I have been really into The Voice, and I could not get both Riley Green and contestant Lillie Kolich out of my head for these two characters. I didn't want it to be that way and tried to find other options, but no matter what I did, those two faces would not leave my brain. Makes watching The Voice a little weird now.
Book words: sweet romance, includes a dog, exploration of grief
Abby is my favorite romance writer in the world, and this one from her earlier writings was quite good.
I remember reading the first book in this series, The Friend Zone, where Florence Pugh has a custom dog product business and falls in love with Andrew Garfield, a firefighter who is the best man to her maid of honor? Or something. Details are fuzzy, but it was cute.
In that story, we sort of met Sloan Monroe, Florence Pugh's best friend, and her new husband, but at the end of that story, her husband dies in a motorcycle crash. Now book two is all about Sloan. She's grieving, making art that looks nothing like she made when she was happy, and is just living the grayscale version of her life. Then when a stray dog quite literally jumps in her car, things start to change.
The dog gets Sloan out of the house and starts making her life a little better, but since the owner doesn't return any of Sloan's texts, she starts thinking of the dog as hers. Eventually, the owner, a super famous musician who's been writing songs off the grid for several weeks, gets in touch with her, and he and Sloan start texting.
Of course they like each other and sparks fly and all the things. But how they navigate this relationship that involves her tremendous grief and his increasing fame is super interesting. It's definitely dramatic in places (melodramatic more like), but sometimes stories are. I thought it was handled well, and I was even teary at the end. Super sweet.
Life's Too Short by Abby Jimenez
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Content warnings: typical Abby, slightly open door but usually mid-level spice
Casting: Jamie Dornan as Adrian (leave me alone, he's good in everything) and Jennifer Lawrence as Vanessa, mostly because Adrian described her as "looking a little like Jennifer Lawrence."
Book words: typical romance words
This is the third book in the "trilogy." You don't have to read them in order, but you know. At the end of Playlist, Sloan goes on a date with Andrew Garfield's cousin, a hot lawyer named Adrian. This book is about Adrian.
He's a successful lawyer with some family struggles and a girlfriend who might be married. One night, a baby is crying incessantly in the apartment down the hall, and when he goes to ask his neighbor to "turn the baby down," which is hilarious in every way, he meets Vanessa, a travel YouTuber, a high-energy, lust-for-life woman who lives like every day is her last because it might be. Several of her family members have died from a rare genetic disorder, and she's pretty sure the same thing is going to happen to her.
The two strike up a friendship while taking care of the baby, who belongs to her drug-addicted sister, and his aging Chihuahua foster dog. He's a helper, she's a dreamer, and their chemistry while they navigate his job and her family dysfunction (her dad is a hoarder on top of the sister who's addicted to drugs) is compelling.
The reason this is four stars and not 4.5 is because of how dramatically (and dumbly) they navigate the central conflict in the final third of the book. I was like, "Dude, you guys. Just get it together." That level of insanity normally happens in rom-coms but not always in Abby's books. It just lost me a little bit. Plus, four stars for a rom-com is a solid rating no matter what.
Abby Offsides by Anna McCallie
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Content warnings: 3.5/5 spice level
Casting: none really
Book words: friends-to-lovers, new start romance
Listen. I was so into this thing. Great writing. Fun characters. I loved it. At first.
Abby gets cheated on, so she moves to the UK and gets a job as the social media manager for a football club. She becomes friends with Lachlan Ramsey, an older player who's come back to add some life into a struggling team. Their banter is adorable, and I really like both of them. Plus, I love sports, and soccer is a big part of the story.
Then it turns out he's married. It's not a healthy marriage, and his wife, who apparently only wants the spotlight of being a famous soccer wife, is still in Spain, where he previously played. Somehow, Abby WHO WAS CHEATED ON thinks it's okay to toe the line with this married soccer player, convincing herself their chemistry is just harmless. I realized about halfway through that I wouldn't be happy with this, no matter the ending. I'm not unreasonable when it comes to relationships and how people don't always stay together, but it felt... wrong. I mean, it was. Some of it definitely was. But the emotional affair was wrapped up in a therapy-laden bow at the end that somehow made it all okay. But for me it didn't.
I wish the trope was different in the same setting with the same writer, and I would've been in heaven. Alas, I'm never a fan of an emotional affair with a married guy that somehow lands on its feet.
Black Bag by Luke Kennard 🎧
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Narrated by the author
Content warnings: deeply, deeply weird, sometimes sexually
Casting: none. Truly, the main character is always wearing a black bag.
Book words: art house literary, weird for weird's sake
In the same way that Sky Daddy was a weird sex book about a woman attracted to planes, but way more than that, Black Bag was about a struggling actor who agrees to be in a black bag for a professor's social experiment that turns into a weird sex thing that becomes more prevalent in the story as it went on. I skimmed the last quarter because it was just too dang weird.
I listened to this, and the narration was actually excellent. First-person narration and such a wild concept. But then some female professor enters the story in the first third, gets obsessed with Black Bag, and too much of the story became about his reactions to her weird sexual attraction to him... but only when he is in the black bag.
This was done well for what it eventually became, but it became something it didn't start out as, and it bummed me out. If we had stayed with just the social experiment of Black Bag, I would've loved it. But when you sully it with kinks (you do you, but I don't want to read about them... unless they're airplanes, I guess), I'm out.
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Vols. 2-8 by Beth Brower 🎧
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Narrated by Genevieve Gaunt
The hype is real. Yes, the first book is a little slow, but once it gets going, it's an utter delight. I listened to books two through eight all in the month of October and could not get enough.
Also yes, you should listen to them. The narration is sublime.
The ninth book comes out in February, and I will use an Audible credit on it immediately.
If you're unfamiliar, this is an Austen-esque story about Emma M. Lion, a feisty, independent woman in Victorian England who is trying to make her own way after her modest fortune was wiled away by a fashion-obsessed cousin. Told in first-person diary entries, you follow the life of this delightful woman and all the characters of St. Crispian's, the unusual village to which she belongs.