September already?!? Yikes! Well, my August TBR was somewhat of a bust (more on that in a future Best Reads post). I bailed on one book, skipped out on my book club read because I don't really need to read it until *this* month, and avoided a book altogether (Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead just felt too heavy to bear in the moment). Despite those hiccups, so far I'm still enjoying the process of planning a TBR, so I'm going to keep doing it.

This month will involve reading some books I ordered from Bookshop.org last month, along with the aforementioned book club read that I initially thought I would read last month. It's that time of year when the temps start to drop and I feel more inspired than ever to cozy up with a good book, so I hope to get through eight books this time around. Here are my plans...

The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door ―crushing the cockroach ―and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature…

I've been wanting to read Lispector ever since I read The Houseguest: And Other Stories by Amparo Davila, a book I fell deeply in love with. As I did a search for similar writers. Lispector's name popped up again and again. I'm looking forward to jumping into her work for the first time with this novel.

Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse―by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals―propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.

This book was shortlisted for the Man Booker, and the premise caught my interest. I've read reviews that say it's quite brutal and unrelenting. We'll see if it would've been better for me to save this for October. LOL!

Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories - Venita Blackburn
Black Jesus and Other Superheroes chronicles ordinary people achieving vivid extrasensory perception while under extreme pain. The stories tumble into a universe of the jaded and the hopeful, in which men and women burdened with unwieldy and undesirable superhuman abilities are nonetheless resilient in subtle and startling ways.

I have to admit, I don't know much about this one. It popped up on a list somewhere (and even that detail I can't remember) and I was so intrigued by the title that I just decided to take a chance. I'm crossing my fingers for a wonderful surprise!

M Archive: After the End of the World - Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive-the second book in a planned experimental triptych-is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story "Evidence," M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human.

This will probably be my densest text. The premise really intrigued me and I've heard only good things about it!

The Beauty - Aliya Whiteley
Somewhere away from the cities and towns, in the Valley of the Rocks, a society of men and boys gather around the fire each night to listen to their history recounted by Nate, the storyteller. Requested most often by the group is the tale of the death of all women.

They are the last generation.

One evening, Nate brings back new secrets from the woods; peculiar mushrooms are growing from the ground where the women’s bodies lie buried. These are the first signs of a strange and insidious presence unlike anything ever known before…

If you've been following my blog for awhile, this book probably looks familiar! It was one of my favorite reads in 2019, and it was my proposal for our next book club read. Despite the fact that I've already read it, I'm looking forward to reading it again, and having the opportunity to discuss it with others as I consider it one of the strangest things I've ever read!

Sisters - Daisy Johnson
Born just ten months apart, July and September are thick as thieves, never needing anyone but each other. Now, following a case of school bullying, the teens have moved away with their single mother to a long-abandoned family home near the shore. In their new, isolated life, July finds that the deep bond she has always shared with September is shifting in ways she cannot entirely understand. A creeping sense of dread and unease descends inside the house. Meanwhile, outside, the sisters push boundaries of behavior—until a series of shocking encounters tests the limits of their shared experience, and forces shocking revelations about the girls’ past and future.

I'll be doing this one on audiobook. It was a bit of an impulse buy using a credit I had on Libro.fm. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to listen to this month, but I knew I didn't want anything terribly long. And I have to say - THAT COVER! It's amazing, and really drew me in. I'm not familiar with Johnson's work, but the description of this novel and the cover were enough to convince me to try it out.

And as always, I make room for two reads that are unplanned. Typically I have *some* idea of what they'll be, but this month I have absolutely no clue. We'll see where my heart sends me!

And that's my September! What will you read this month? Read anything last month that you found riveting and would recommend? Let me know!