☀️ Sunday Sharies: October 2024

Some good fall reads, a crowd-pleasing soup recipe, & several movie recs!

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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Jenni: Begun at the end of September, Tom Lake by Ann Patchett was a lovely novel to be finishing as the leaves changed. Patchett’s writing is nostalgic and gorgeous, and this story about a family reliving their mother’s past as a Hollywood actress while stuck on their cherry orchard was just wonderful. (5/5 stars)

I have now also finished The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden, and thoroughly enjoyed it. If you’ve already forgotten my blurb from last month (understandable): this is a pastoral fairy tale set in a fantasy version of a medieval Russia facing the transition from paganism to Christianity. I loved the newness of this setting to me, as well as the lived-in quality of the story, due partially to what I assume are real Russian folktales woven in. Also? Good prose! (4/5 stars)

I also read The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo this month—another historical fantasy, this one adult, and set in 16th century Madrid during the time of the Inquisition. It’s a decent read for spooky season; it feels a bit gothic and dark in a fun way. (3.5/5 stars)

Jess: After unexpectedly enjoying Rachel Gillig’s One Dark Window, I was looking forward to the sequel, Two Twisted Crowns. Per the Goodreads reviews (and those of my book club peers) I’m in the tiny minority, but I found this nearly impossible to get through. Slow, meandering passages filled with aimless journeying is punctuated by long, frustrating asides devoted to the insta-love between two characters who were hardly developed in the first novel. I wanted a continuation of what I found interesting, but most of that is relegated to quickly resolved footnotes. (1.5/5 stars)

I’d seen a lot of hype upon the release of The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, so I was excited to crack that open on my 12 hour direct flight from NYC to Honolulu. As an avid thriller reader, it was refreshing to read one that focused on character depth as much as an intricate mystery, and Moore paints a vivid portrait of a lush upstate setting with morally questionable inhabitants. At over 500 pages, though, it felt overstuffed with too many shifting POVs and loose ends that were brought up just to be tidily tied up in the last 50 pages. I’d recommend it, but not with as much enthusiasm as I’d hoped. (3.5/5 stars)

Only knowing Paul Tremblay tangentially via the Shyamalan adaptation of his novel The Cabin at the End of the World, I thought his newest genre offering, Horror Movie, could be a good spooky season read. It’s not for everyone — it uses an experimental structure, with scenes from a screenplay interwoven with a non-linear narrative — but I loved the ambiguity, eeriness, and commentary of modern “elevated” horror. (4/5 stars)

Jess: Normally, I try to watch as many horror and Halloween-themed movies as I can during the month of October, but this year, the time was filled more with wedding prep than with seasonally appropriate activities. I wasn’t able to make it to the theater even once, but I was able to catch a few direct-to-streaming movies.