Happy Tuesday everyone! It is the second day of the week already but I hope everyone is doing well and is safe. Tuesdays also mean one thing, a Top Ten Tuesday update! Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and is currently being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week’s given topic is Books On My Fall 2022 To-Read List

As I have mentioned in my previous bookish updates, the last four months of the year are dedicated primarily to books on my active reading challenges, most of which I have been sleeping on. My current read is Sarah Manguso’s debut novel Very Cold People. It is the sixth book on my 2022 Top 10 Books I Look Forward To list. It is also my 80th read for the year, quite a feat. Maybe reading 100 books this year for the first time ever is not that impossible at all. Anyway, here are ten books I am looking forward to this fall (although we don’t experience this season in the Philippines). Happy reading everyone!

Title: The Overstory
Author: Richard Power
Publisher: Norton
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 502

Synopsis: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Richard Powers’s twelfth novel is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of – and paean to – the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours – vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

Title: The Beautiful and Damned
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher: World Library Classics
Publishing Date: 2010
No. of Pages: 321

Synopsis: First published in 1922, The Beautiful and the Damned followed Fitzgerald’s impeccable debut, This Side of Paradise, thus securing his place in the tradition of great American novelists. Embellished with the author’s lyrical prose, here is the story of Harvard-educated, aspiring aesthete Anthony Patch and his beautiful wife, Gloria. As they await the inheritance of his grandfather’s fortune, their reckless marriage sways under the influence of alcohol and avarice. A devastating look at the nouveau riche, and the New York nightlife, as well as the ruinous effects of wild ambition, The Beautiful and the Damnedachieved stature as one of Fitzgerald’s most accomplished novels. Its distinction as a classic endures to this day. Pocket Book’s Enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhanced for the contemporary reader. Special features include critical perspectives, suggestions for further read, and a unique visual essay composed of period photographs that help bring every word to life. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The Last of the Mohicans
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
Publishing Date: 1993
No. of Pages: 423

Synopsis: “The chief extended his arm, and taking the other by the wrist, they once more exchanged friendly salutations. Then the Delaware invited his guest to enter his own lodge, and share his morning meal. The invitation was accepted, and the two warriors, attended by three or four of the old men, walked calmly away, leaving the rest of the tribe devoured by a desire to understand the reasons of so unusual a visit, and yet not betraying the least impatience, by sign or word.”

Title: Bridge of Sighs
Author: Richard Russo
Publisher: Vintage Contemporaries
Publishing Date: September 2008
No. of Pages: 642

Synopsis: “Louis Charles Lynch (also known as Lucy) is sixty years old and has lived in Thomaston, New York, his entire life. He and Sarah, his wife of forty years, are about to embark on a vacation to Italy. Lucy’s oldest friend, once a rival for his wife’s affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. Perhaps for this reason Lucy is writing the story of his town, his family and his own life that makes up this rich and mesmerizing novel, interspersed with that of the native son who left so long ago and has never looked back.”

Title: This Time Tomorrow
Author: Emma Straub
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 307

Synopsis: What if you could take a vacation to your past?

On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Alice’s life isn’t terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn’t exactly the one she expected. She’s happy with her apartment, her romantic status, and her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But something is missing. Her father, the single parent who raised her, is ailing and out of reach. How did they get here so fast? Did she take too much for granted along the way?

When Alice wakes up the next morning, she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her sixteenth birthday. But it isn’t just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush – it’s her dad, the vital, charming, forty-nine-year-old version of her father with which she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything she would change if she could?

With her celebrated humor insight, and heart, beloved New York Times bestselling author Emma Straub offers her own twist on traditional time-travel tropes and a different kind of love story – about the lifelong, reverberating relationship between a parent and child.

Title: Moon Palace
Author: Paul Auster
Publisher: Faber and Faber Limited
Publishing Date: 1989
No. of Pages: 307

Synopsis: ’It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened when I got there.’

So begins the mesmerizing narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg – orphan, child of the sixties, a quester by nature. Moon Palace is his story – a novel that spans three generations, from the early years of this century to the first lunar landings, and moves from the canyons of Manhattan to the cruelly beautiful landscape of the American west.

Title: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Author: Rachel Joyce
Publisher: Doubleday
Publishing Date: 2012
No. of Pages: 296

Synopsis: “When Harold Fry leaves home one morning to post a letter, with his wife hoovering upstairs, he has no idea that he is about to walk from one end of the country to the other.

He has no hiking boots or map, let alone a compass, waterproof or mobile phone.

All he knows is that he must keep walking.

To save someone else’s life.”

Title: Sea of Tranquility
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 255

Synopsis: Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite English society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal – an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for spare change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery Roberts, a hotel detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City, who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the time line of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

Title: Young Mungo
Author: Douglas Stuart
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 390

Synopsis: Douglas Stuart’s first novel, Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far. Published or forthcoming in forty territories, it has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel. Both a page-turner and literary tour de force, it is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men.

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars – Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic – and they should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when, several months later, Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murk pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

Title: People Person
Author: Candice Carty-Williams
Publisher: Trapeze
Publishing Date: April 28, 2022
No. of Pages: 343

Synopsis: IF YOU COULD CHOOSE YOUR FAMILY…

YOU WOULDN’T CHOOSE THE PENNINGTONS.

Dimple Pennington knew of her half siblings, but she didn’t really know them. Five people who don’t have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad’s gold jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues.

Dimple has bigger things to think about. She’s thirty, and her life isn’t really going anywhere. An aspiring lifestyle influencer with a terrible and wayward boyfriend, Dimple’s life has shrunk to the size of a phone screen. And despite a small but loyal following, she’s never felt more alone.

That is, until a catastrophic event brings her half siblings Nikisha, Danny, Lizzie and Prynce crashing back into her life. And when they’re all forced to reconnect with Cyril Pennington, the absent father they never really knew, things get even more complicated.

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