Welcome back, Fall! This is a fantastic time of year for readers: the cooler days encourage many of us to cozy up to a good book and thus many publishers time their releases to come out now. This year provides an even greater selection, since many anticipated books from the Spring were held up due to COVID. This is especially good news for fans of contemporary authors, who may have new titles available over the next few months.

But what can you do if you have exhausted all the works of your go-to authors or need to discover new ones to satisfy your yearnings while you wait? What if your preferred writers have passed on or are no longer producing new output for the foreseeable future? Such websites as GoodReads and NoveList Plus can be great resources, as well as genre or author-specific pages. Fantastic Fiction is another good site, providing guidance in an easily searchable format. There is also a huge number of new authors waiting to be discovered this season if you are willing to take a chance (See below for a review of one that I was delighted to stumble upon).

For this month’s blog, I put together a short list of some “Read-Alikes” for adult fiction that I compiled based on data our consortium collects about circulation trends seen over the past few years. My list is broken down by genre, names some popular authors from that group and then offers some suggestions of specific books you might enjoy if these writers have appealed to you in the past.

September's Featured Reviews

As usual, I also want to link to my reviews of a couple books that I enjoyed recently that you may want to try:

	White Ivy by Susie Yang. It is a well-written, interesting debut that is both a taut thriller and an intriguing twist on an immigration tale. I found it to be truly unique and a really absorbing study in character.
	A non-fiction collection of deeply personal, heart-rending stories: Craigslist Confessional: A Collection of Secrets from Anonymous Strangers by Helena Dea Bala. 40 short “conversations” that the author captured for an inspired personal project. Sending out a call for anyone who wanted to candidly share their memories, Dea Bala transcribes the tales without censorship while protecting their originators from potential recrimination.

Recent Readings

Right now, I am currently listening to a self-help book, Atomic Habits by James Clear and reading The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry (for our own GPL Mystery Book Club!). I also just started Little Eyes, a novel translated from Spanish by Samanta Schweblin. All three have been pretty good reads, thus far.

I hope that you find these entries helpful and interesting, and I want to encourage you to drop me a line (jnmegan@gpl.org) with any suggestions you might have or feedback on what you would like to see in upcoming blogs. Do you have any authors in mind that I should add to my evolving “Read-Alikes” list? I am hoping to keep this thing growing, and your input would really help me-and our fellow readers-out!

Until next time: Be well and be well-read!

Joelle

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So, who am I, anyway? I am a resident of West Groton, with a husband, 4 teen aged children and a Samoyed puppy—all of whom are systematically destroying our house during the COVID crisis. I am currently working part time at the Groton Public Library and in a former life I was employed as a Director or PR/Marketing at a high-tech consulting firm. My BA is in Psychology, but most of my time was spent in college earning a Concentration on the Novel. That is all to say that I make no claims at being an expert of any kind and my thoughts, opinions and mistakes are solely my own. I am just a person whose passion for books has continued to grow from the moment I was first able to grip and gnaw on them, and I have been devouring them ever since.