🎃 Sunday Sharies: October 2023

a can't-miss pumpkin bread recipe, a new horror-comedy flick, and 7 thriller novels to read

It’s the last Sunday of the month, and you know what that means. There’s a lot of stuff we’d like to share that won’t fit in our usual Thursday TV newsletter. Some of that stuff is here. Read on for a special monthly peek into what your trusty Double Take duo has been watching, reading, listening to, and more.

— Jess Spoll and Jenni Cullen

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Jess: My book club met in-person for the first time this month! We’ve been meeting monthly for over a year exclusively on Google Meet, and it was a nice (and loud) change of pace to have the discussion off the screen and in the same room. This month we were reading All the Dangerous Things by Stacy Willingham, a thriller about a woman whose toddler is kidnapped from her home while she’s asleep. I’m tired of the unreliable narrator / women-can-be-bad-too tropes, so this one was a bit of a bummer for me, extra so because I really liked her previous novel, A Flicker in the Dark. (2.5/5).

To celebrate spooky season, I also read Rachel Harrison’s Such Sharp Teeth. It was a coincidence that I was also watching the second season of Wolf Like Me at the same time, and I was struck by how similar the stories were. Maybe werewolves are to 2023 what vampires were to 2008? The book ended up being more romance than horror, to my chagrin, but it was an easy read. (3/5).

As I mentioned last month, I finished re-reading Ninth House so that I could read its sequel, Hell Bent, this month. I’d been waiting since 2020 to get the follow-up and, unfortunately, it was a letdown. Hell Bent had none of the dark academia vibes of the first, and the plot was over-stuffed and all over the place. (2.5/5).

Jenni: It’s been a slower month for me book-wise. I was lucky enough to read the first five chapters of a friend’s new fantasy novel in early October, which I’m super excited about. I’ll be sure to write a less cryptic recommendation once it’s actually available for public viewing.

The only other book I had time for was One for My Enemy by Olivie Blake, which…I sort of wish I hadn’t made time for. I don’t remember who gave me the original recommendation — many apologies if you’re reading this right now — but based on what it was compared to, I thought it was going to be a fun, semi-spooky witchy story, and instead it was a melodramatic, poorly-paced romance (1/5 stars).

Jess: More long training runs means more time to listen to audiobooks; this month I finished Things We Do in the Dark by Jennifer Hillier, None of This is True by Lisa Jewell, and Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison. The first was predictable but entertaining (4/5), the second underwhelming but a well-produced audiobook (3/5), and the last was unique and perfectly macabre for Halloween-time (4/5).