Autumn TBR

The wordsmith finds great joy in identifying the precisely correct word for a particular situation. What to do when that precisely correct word cannot be located? Create a new word, obviously. My wordsmithing lacks a certain panache, such that lackluster could reasonably describe it. Created words don’t always work as well as I would like, which I guess is just part and parcel of wordsmithery, but I try. My newest one is legetemporum. In other words, I read seasonally.

Summer has just come to an end, although where I live, the weather is still warm enough that one could imagine. Nonetheless, autumn is technically here and the concomitant weather is hovering just around the corner. It is time to shift to autumn reading style.

My summer reading tends towards the frivolous. Books I would never even look at in the dark days of winter find their way into my beach bag. This past summer, I read things like The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides and The Institute by Stephen King, along with a pile of Golden Age detective fiction. I don’t know why, but I just don’t want to read serious books with my toes in the sand.  

But once autumn rolls around again, my reading tastes shift, back to what I consider more thoughtful books. Into the future TBR pile go the murder mysteries and pop fiction, and into my current TBR pile (I have a lot of book piles) go literary fiction, art history, essay collections, science, poetry, and the like.

I don’t have an explanation for this shift, other than to say that my current read, Studies in Iconology by Erwin Panofsky, works with a sweater and a cup of coffee, but not a beach chair and sunblock. Am I alone in this? I don’t know. I do know that my pile for this week includes Gothic horror (it is almost October, so…), art history, literary fiction, English history, and an accidental used bookstore find which turned out to be an early 20^th century walk through New York City in the form of a novel about an aspiring opera singer, a jaded music critic, and a wannabe intellectual, aka the perfect autumn read.