I was sitting in the waiting room of a medical office recently, and I noticed something I haven’t seen in maybe fifteen years: The waiting room was nearly full, but none of us was looking at a phone. Four of us were reading paper books (I was reading Transforming Climate Anxiety by Leslie Davenport, but the others’ books were angled so I couldn’t read the titles, unfortunately), two people were chatting with each other, and one person was reading an actual, physical newspaper. It wasn’t remotely a representative sample of the local population, but it really left me feeling more hopeful about the future than I sometimes am.
September has been a solid reading month in general. I focused on reading the Booker Prize Longlist, which was overall a great plan as there are some wonderful books on the list. The book I was reading in the waiting room was an ARC I got through LibraryThing, and I didn’t quite finish it before October began so it will be on next month’s Bookends post. And I listened to the new audiobook of a Goosebumps book because a colleague I’ve been in workshops with was one of the narrators (and she did a fabulous job!).
A side note on my rating system because everyone does them differently:
- DNF: Didn’t finish it, but not necessarily because I didn’t like it.
- 1 star: I finished it out of spite because I disliked it so much.
- 2 stars: I finished it because I thought it would improve, but I probably should have DNFed it.
- 3 stars: I liked it okay, but I probably will forget I read it.
- 4 stars: I really liked it, but there were a couple of things that didn’t quite work for me. I would recommend it to others.
- 5 stars: Phenomenal. It changed my life and/or how I view the world in an immediate way. If you’ve talked to me since I finished it, I’ve already recommended it to you. My benchmark for 5 stars is To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s not necessarily my favorite book, but it’s phenomenal and I can easily conjure how I felt the last time I finished it.
I also use half stars and occasionally quarter stars when a book is between whole stars in my scale. I rarely re-read, but when I do, I have no qualms about updating the rating based on the most recent read.
And now that you know my rating scale, here’s the full list of what I read in September:
September Completed Books:
The graphics are a little different this month because The StoryGraph’s new Kobo sync feature erroneously double-counted a couple of titles and when I went to re-generate the graphics after I removed the duplicates, it wouldn’t update the images unless I changed the format. So, this month we have squares for the summary and the addition of the ratings on the cover collage.
My favorites from September:
- The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (narrated by Robert Petkoff)
- Switzy by Emma Cline (narrated by Robert Petkoff…it’s not until this very moment that I realized that two books on the longlist were narrated by Robert Petkoff. He must have distinguished well between the narration for the two books for me not to notice. Or maybe I would have noticed had I listened to them back-to-back)
- The Disappearers by Marlon James (narrated by Brandon Miles, Michael Sean Harris, Solomon Peck, Andrew Clarke, Karl O’Brian Williams, and Ano Okera)
Currently Reading:
- May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (narrated by Sarah Barron and Ian Dunnett, Jr.)
- John Quincy Adams: A Life by Harlow Giles Unger
- The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams
- The Notebook by Roland Allen
- Transforming Climate Anxiety by Leslie Davenport
- Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (yes, still)
- And I need to read Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Camille de Peretti before book club next week. I feel a bit in over my head, book-wise, right now. I just want to set everything else aside and read my October spookies!
In addition to my StoryGraph, you can see my Litsy profile for status updates throughout the month or check out my Blog Instagram or Narrator Instagram for book-adjacent posts.
Featured Photo: Suburban September sunset, 2026.
