What I Read October 2026

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OH, HERE WE GO. SHE’S DIFFICULT.

Graphic with a smoky black background and red-orange lettering reading “What I Read October 2026” and “Oh, Here We Go. She’s Difficult.” Below are the covers of four books by Hannah Arendt, Rebecca Solnit, Jacqueline Harpman, and Karen Karbo.

There are many ways to be a difficult woman. You can be too loud, too quiet, too emotional, too detached, too interested in the proceedings, or insufficiently grateful to have been invited to the proceedings in the first place. You can talk too much (bad), or too little, (suspicious). You can ask a question (too much!). You can ask a FOLLOW-UP question (an act of war). You can point out that the question itself is idiotic, (have your affairs in order before attempting this one).

And then it’s all OH, HERE WE GO. SHE’S DIFFICULT. LET’S GET RID OF THIS BROAD.

Getting rid of difficult women is a time-honored tradition of our species. We’ve tried drowning, burning, confinement, bogs, marriage, hysteria diagnoses, and ostracism. These days we also have text groups and PTAs, all of which save considerably on firewood.

We call her shrill. We call her angry. We call her difficult. A remarkably versatile little word, “difficult.” You don’t even have to specify what the woman has done. Everyone will automatically nod and scoot their chairs a little further away out of a vague sense of discomfort.

We could actually use more difficult people. Put them on every committee, board, corporate retreat, strategic planning session, HOA, task force, listening session, leadership summit, or anything that begins with an unironic icebreaker. Give her a Difficult Person Slide Whistle™ and the authority to blow it whenever somebody says something stupid. No appeals process.

I’ve got thoughts, clearly. Let me tell you, this was a heck of a month to go on a dangerous women reading kick.

These were, without question, the most Octobery reads I’ve had in a while. Spooky, yet not a zombie in the bunch, although plenty of ideas that should have died centuries ago keep digging themselves out of the ground. You can put away the plastic skeletons, eat the discount candy, and take down the fake cobwebs, but the oppression, lies, institutional rot, hatred, and hierarchies? Still here, asking if the cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving is homemade or from a can.

A cheery little assortment of books! Just the thing to curl up with while civilization does whatever it is doing to increase my ice cream consumption and under-blanket marathon sessions.

I waffled over my favorite this month. The Mother of All Questions or I Who Have Never Known Men? One is non-fiction, one is fiction, both are excellent, and I’m not industrious enough to write two full reviews. Read either or both books with my blessing.

Anyway, this month’s victims of my enthusiasm is…

The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s The Mother of All Questions tackles feminism, violence, silence, masculinity, and other sundry boxes into which we insist on stuffing women. It opens with Solnit recalling a lecture about Virginia Woolf during which audience members wanted to know whether Woolf had children (and whether she should have.) Here’s a woman with a formidable intellectual reputation whose writing changed the world, and somebody in this lecture thought, “You know what we haven’t covered in this academic discussion of Virginia Woolf? HER UTERUS.”

Solnit waxes brilliant on silencing, which doesn’t always involve telling someone to shut up. We’ve figured out how to make speaking so unpleasant that eventually a woman decides it’s not worth the trouble, and we say that it was her choice to stop. Punish women for speaking and then blame them for their silence. Brilliant and monstrous.

I loved this funny, rigorous book. Solnit has a gift for exposing the rot behind things we regard as perfectly normal.

Read this if you want analysis of oppressive systems that silence a lot of us and yet you want hope that we can unmake what we have made.

Honorable Mentions:

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Forty women locked in an underground bunker, watched, regulated, and denied everything that might make life worth living, including physical affection and any explanation of why they’re there. Thirty-nine remember a life before imprisonment. The fortieth, our narrator and the youngest in the group, remembers nothing. She has no idea what she’s missing, which is both a terrible thing and in a few horrific instances, a survival advantage.

Eventually the women escape, but outside the bunker the world is bleak and also without explanation, basic amenities, or hope. If Plato’s prisoners leave their cave and discover a larger reality, Harpman’s women leave theirs and discover that the larger reality is more of the same.

The narrator has never known men. She has never known most of the things by which we understand ourselves. We learn throughout the book what makes her human.

Harpman refuses to explain much, which is frustrating, and yet somehow that frustration is part of what makes the book extraordinary. It’s spare, unsettling, occasionally horrifying, and profoundly sad. This one will haunt me for a long time.

Read it if you’re interested in existential literature but don’t want to spend the weekend curled up with Kierkegaard.

In Praise of Difficult Women by Karen Karbo

I like to think I’m a difficult woman, although I also know there’s a fine line between challenging the status quo and being a general pain in the ass. (But if you set your mind to it, you can do both!) Karbo gives us twenty-nine women who were uninterested in making themselves more palatable and who had the audacity to act on their opinions, ambitions, and appetites. She writes that “sometimes the cost of being fully human is upsetting people.” AMEN. I skipped the Rowling chapter and considered DNFing because the profiles felt a little glossy, but I was stuck in a car for three hours with nothing else to read. So onward! The women were fascinating. I wanted more of their contradictions and insubordination. I wanted more excavation, less of an introduction to being difficult. Still, better than three hours of scrolling my phone.

Read if you want a solid introduction to some fantastically difficult women. Feel free to skip the Rowling chapter. Better yet, share this book with a young person who could use a launchpad for being difficult.

On Lying and Politics by Hannah Arendt

A slim volume of two essays about political deception, organized lying, and the crises they create. Arendt uses the word “defactualization” to describe what happens when facts lose their authority and those in power exploit the resulting confusion. What an excellent word! What a perfectly awful thing to need an excellent word for! Although Arendt wrote these essays more than fifty years ago, I kept wanting to check the publication date. Surely someone had slipped a few pages in the last year or so?. Despite what you may have heard, Arendt isn’t impossible to read, but she is impossible to skim. That’s a good thing. Slow down and attend. (Bonus points to David Bromwich and his introduction which bridges the decades, though, again, that distance is shorter than you might wish)

Read if you’d like to understand how we got here, although you may not particularly enjoy recognizing the scenery.

And there be the October books. Read anything good lately?

OH, HERE WE GO. SHE’S DIFFICULT.

Graphic with a smoky black background and red-orange lettering reading “What I Read October 2026” and “Oh, Here We Go. She’s Difficult.” Below are the covers of four books by Hannah Arendt, Rebecca Solnit, Jacqueline Harpman, and Karen Karbo.

There are many ways to be a difficult woman. You can be too loud, too quiet, too emotional, too detached, too interested in the proceedings, or insufficiently grateful to have been invited to the proceedings in the first place. You can talk too much (bad), or too little, (suspicious). You can ask a question (too much!). You can ask a FOLLOW-UP question (an act of war). You can point out that the question itself is idiotic, (have your affairs in order before attempting this one).

And then it’s all OH, HERE WE GO. SHE’S DIFFICULT. LET’S GET RID OF THIS BROAD.

Getting rid of difficult women is a time-honored tradition of our species. We’ve tried drowning, burning, confinement, bogs, marriage, hysteria diagnoses, and ostracism. These days we also have text groups and PTAs, all of which save considerably on firewood.

We call her shrill. We call her angry. We call her difficult. A remarkably versatile little word, “difficult.” You don’t even have to specify what the woman has done. Everyone will automatically nod and scoot their chairs a little further away out of a vague sense of discomfort.

We could actually use more difficult people. Put them on every committee, board, corporate retreat, strategic planning session, HOA, task force, listening session, leadership summit, or anything that begins with an unironic icebreaker. Give her a Difficult Person Slide Whistle™ and the authority to blow it whenever somebody says something stupid. No appeals process.

I’ve got thoughts, clearly. Let me tell you, this was a heck of a month to go on a dangerous women reading kick.

These were, without question, the most Octobery reads I’ve had in a while. Spooky, yet not a zombie in the bunch, although plenty of ideas that should have died centuries ago keep digging themselves out of the ground. You can put away the plastic skeletons, eat the discount candy, and take down the fake cobwebs, but the oppression, lies, institutional rot, hatred, and hierarchies? Still here, asking if the cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving is homemade or from a can.

A cheery little assortment of books! Just the thing to curl up with while civilization does whatever it is doing to increase my ice cream consumption and under-blanket marathon sessions.

I waffled over my favorite this month. The Mother of All Questions or I Who Have Never Known Men? One is non-fiction, one is fiction, both are excellent, and I’m not industrious enough to write two full reviews. Read either or both books with my blessing.

Anyway, this month’s victims of my enthusiasm is…

The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s The Mother of All Questions tackles feminism, violence, silence, masculinity, and other sundry boxes into which we insist on stuffing women. It opens with Solnit recalling a lecture about Virginia Woolf during which audience members wanted to know whether Woolf had children (and whether she should have.) Here’s a woman with a formidable intellectual reputation whose writing changed the world, and somebody in this lecture thought, “You know what we haven’t covered in this academic discussion of Virginia Woolf? HER UTERUS.”

Solnit waxes brilliant on silencing, which doesn’t always involve telling someone to shut up. We’ve figured out how to make speaking so unpleasant that eventually a woman decides it’s not worth the trouble, and we say that it was her choice to stop. Punish women for speaking and then blame them for their silence. Brilliant and monstrous.

I loved this funny, rigorous book. Solnit has a gift for exposing the rot behind things we regard as perfectly normal.

Read this if you want analysis of oppressive systems that silence a lot of us and yet you want hope that we can unmake what we have made.

Honorable Mentions:

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Forty women locked in an underground bunker, watched, regulated, and denied everything that might make life worth living, including physical affection and any explanation of why they’re there. Thirty-nine remember a life before imprisonment. The fortieth, our narrator and the youngest in the group, remembers nothing. She has no idea what she’s missing, which is both a terrible thing and in a few horrific instances, a survival advantage.

Eventually the women escape, but outside the bunker the world is bleak and also without explanation, basic amenities, or hope. If Plato’s prisoners leave their cave and discover a larger reality, Harpman’s women leave theirs and discover that the larger reality is more of the same.

The narrator has never known men. She has never known most of the things by which we understand ourselves. We learn throughout the book what makes her human.

Harpman refuses to explain much, which is frustrating, and yet somehow that frustration is part of what makes the book extraordinary. It’s spare, unsettling, occasionally horrifying, and profoundly sad. This one will haunt me for a long time.

Read it if you’re interested in existential literature but don’t want to spend the weekend curled up with Kierkegaard.

In Praise of Difficult Women by Karen Karbo

I like to think I’m a difficult woman, although I also know there’s a fine line between challenging the status quo and being a general pain in the ass. (But if you set your mind to it, you can do both!) Karbo gives us twenty-nine women who were uninterested in making themselves more palatable and who had the audacity to act on their opinions, ambitions, and appetites. She writes that “sometimes the cost of being fully human is upsetting people.” AMEN. I skipped the Rowling chapter and considered DNFing because the profiles felt a little glossy, but I was stuck in a car for three hours with nothing else to read. So onward! The women were fascinating. I wanted more of their contradictions and insubordination. I wanted more excavation, less of an introduction to being difficult. Still, better than three hours of scrolling my phone.

Read if you want a solid introduction to some fantastically difficult women. Feel free to skip the Rowling chapter. Better yet, share this book with a young person who could use a launchpad for being difficult.

On Lying and Politics by Hannah Arendt

A slim volume of two essays about political deception, organized lying, and the crises they create. Arendt uses the word “defactualization” to describe what happens when facts lose their authority and those in power exploit the resulting confusion. What an excellent word! What a perfectly awful thing to need an excellent word for! Although Arendt wrote these essays more than fifty years ago, I kept wanting to check the publication date. Surely someone had slipped a few pages in the last year or so?. Despite what you may have heard, Arendt isn’t impossible to read, but she is impossible to skim. That’s a good thing. Slow down and attend. (Bonus points to David Bromwich and his introduction which bridges the decades, though, again, that distance is shorter than you might wish)

Read if you’d like to understand how we got here, although you may not particularly enjoy recognizing the scenery.

And there be the October books. Read anything good lately?

A Bestiary of Modern Horseshit

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Aged parchment background with ornate, dark red lettering reading "A Bestiary of Modern Horseshit," with "Jackie Pick" in smaller text beneath.

Once upon a time, a woman went online shopping for the end of the world.

Perhaps she should have scrolled for armor, or a sword hammered from the bones of a dead god, or a palette of freeze-dried beef stroganoff.

She shopped for pants. Velour pants with a 28” inseam because she was willing to confront the forces of darkness but not with muddy cuffs. Maybe a matching sweatshirt. A complete velour tracksuit.

She sat in a parking lot, awaiting the return of her child from one of the many activities required of modern children. The woman was exhausted. She was weepy, but not beautifully so. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s So Far played.

She’d been scrolling. The scrolling disgorged the usual monsters as well as new species. Brotherhoods, Two-headed Chieftain Beasties, Keepers of Things, Couriers, and Tribunals, all bowing to His Most Blameless Majesty, while casting truth into the moat. Pactum Virorum.

(There were lesser demons, of course, that wouldn’t devour the kingdom but merely infest every corner of it. For example, those who insist on calling sandwiches “handhelds.”)

The woman had slain none of these monsters, though not for lack of trying.

She had, however, become extremely tired of them, so she looked at velour tracksuits. Then her algorithm offered up fleece capes. Fleece capes possess neither the grandeur of a cloak nor the practical advantages of withstanding a direct assault by a collapsing institution, but she could be a little comfortable. And yet, and yet, comfort is not consolation, and neither one is repair.

The woman considered this and considered her life and her algorithm. She glanced up, trying to catch a glimpse of her child at practice or rehearsal or a meet or a match or in conversation. Safe, for now. She considered this as well.

Perhaps the woman could become a witch, she thought. Not one of the beautiful witches, with their flowing black hair and rings of moonstone. A different sort. A Richard Simmons witch, if you will, but one who had all but abandoned the cardio.

She would stand before the monsters and say their true names. LIAR. COWARD. FRAUD. SANDWICH.

The woman sat in her car, waiting for her daughter, listening to music and welling up (again! still!) from loving a world determined to destroy its own better qualities. Although she was not languishing, she was tired of the monsters devouring everything and everyone, then demanding gratitude for doing so.

And so the Velour Tracksuit Witch of the Fleece Cape, wearing neither cape nor velour tracksuit, considered the many ways the kingdom described its troubles in elaborate think-pieces bewailing the decline of civility (and by all means, please ignore the dragon in the mead hall). Elegant chronicles all.

The woman had lately become inclined toward a less elegant description. Everything Is Horseshit.

Yet the Witch Woman Who Was Not a Witch, sitting in a parking lot, listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, waiting for her daughter, contemplating a fleece cape, conceded that every proper account of monsters must also acknowledge the possibility of something good surviving.

She made a comprehensive list That Which is Not Horseshit:

  1. Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins

What I Read September 2026

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Says Who?! (Dork Alert)

Graphic for “What I Read September 2026: Says Who?! (Dork Alert),” featuring the covers of five books reviewed this month on a bright pink background

Who defined what a novel is? Who decided which women were monsters and why? Who takes “I’m fine” at face value? Who gets corrected and by whom? And if somebody manufactures an image of a thing and shows it to enough people, at what point does the image eat the thing?

Humans LOVE categories. We make a category, invent some rules for it, forget we invented the rules, and then act like the category and the rules came from on high. And then, because we can’t leave anything along, we peel off the little labels we’ve stuck on everything to see what’s underneath.

Don’t get me wrong, labels are useful. “Please hand me the spoon,” saves considerable time over pointing at the drawer and shouting, “Gimme the small metal thing! No, the other one! No, the other other one.” But trouble begins when we name something and decide we have thus explained it. This month I read five books about that trouble.

Even though most of them were decidedly not postmodern, they organized into some sort of postmodern union behind my back. Did I sit around this month muttering about Derrida and the instability of meaning? NOT ANY MORE THAN USUAL. I sat around muttering about skepticism, mixed forms and genres, metafiction, unreliable narration, and self-reference. Bricolage, even! What a mutter!

All five books looked at the labels we’ve stuck on things and bellowed a mighty “SAYS WHO?”

I love a good SAYS WHO.

Anyway, this month’s victim of my enthusiasm is…

This is Not A Novel by David Markson

A novel has characters, plot, and narrative. It has description and meaning and metaphor and all the other things that appeared on laminated posters in my seventh-grade English classroom, right? David Markson says no. In another book he asks, “What is a novel in any case?” This Is Not a Novel seems determined to find out by getting rid of nearly all the things it is supposed to contain.

David Markson brings us a box of bones. Some are famous bones. Joyce bones. Byron bones. Beethoven bones. Some belonged to people who hated each other, slept with each other, misquoted each other, reviewed each other badly, died absurdly, died horribly, or simply died, because everyone in This Is Not a Novel is eventually going to do that. Also rattling around in the box: illnesses, insults, mistranslations, literary gossip, historical lint, quotations, coincidences, and Writer.

Writer, who is writing this book, would like us to understand that there is no character here. Writer would also like a book that is “nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.” None of the standard equipment..

DORK ALERT: It activated the part of my brain that once studied literary theory, so everybody gets to suffer now. (Still preferable to activating the part of my brain that remembers old commercial jingles.) This is Not a Novel gives Reader fragments until Reader fills them in and makes a book. There is a lot of theory about gaps in texts and Reader’s role in making meaning, and This Is Not a Novel is one enormous gap with famous dead people scattered throughout.

At first: fact, fact, insult, death, Writer, fact, death. Then, Reader’s brain starts laying track ahead of the train. Recurrences become motifs. Trivia acquires emotional weight. Writer, who is definitely not a character, looks suspiciously character-shaped.

Markson keeps handing us bones. He insists there is nothing to assemble while we are very obviously assembling this book. kneads that “between” with gusto. He removes the machinery of the novel and leaves us assembling it ourselves. We keep building the very thing he says isn’t there. By the end, even the ending reaches backward and rearranges what came before it.

Maybe it’s not a novel. Fine. But by the end I had experienced character, motif, development, rhythm, consciousness, and something I might even refer to as emotional movement.

This is a playful book. It’s funny and gossipy and strange. It has rhythm. It loses the rhythm. It finds another. I wanted, sometimes, to hear it read aloud, or set to music. Performed as poetry, performed as humor.

It soothed and unsettled me. I loved it.

Honorable Mentions:

Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild and Untamed by Margaret Atwood et al

Do you know what humanity has NEVER had enough of? WORDS FOR WOMEN WHO ARE furious, wild, and/or who refuse. (How even dare they?!) I’m sure you can think of half a dozen off the top of your head, because we’ve got an entire historical thesaurus. Of course, at no point did anyone spitting these words at an “unacceptable” woman think, “Hey, maybe she has a point.” That’s the playground for Furies, an anthology that hands those labels to women writers and says: Please return to sender! Have fun! The strongest pieces share sense that we are still explaining something that should have been settled THREE CENTURIES AGO. (Mostly our humanity, but there you go. Is that a spoiler?).

Read it if you like your female rage peppered with linguistic reclamation.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I came to this one after hearing over and over that it was funny until it broke your heart. It did break my heart. I did not find it funny. Eleanor is strange, but at some point, laughing at her felt cruel. This is a trauma story about what happens after a child survives to adulthood and then is expected to just know how to function normally. It was a hard read for me.

Read it if you can handle a survival-by-kindness story.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Lambert family has several problems, mostly each other. Franzen details their lives and their spectacular professional and personal disasters. Now matriarch Enid just wants everyone home for Christmas. The Corrections is enormous. The family is big, the ideas are big, the sentences are big, and it’s 500-plus pages. I didn’t LOVE LOVE LOVE it but I’d willingly surrendered to all of it again.

The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin (50th Anniversary Edition)

Reality is complicated and often ugly. Fortunately, humans invented the pseudo-event, an event created largely so it can be reported. (Think press conferences, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, staged commemoration, or a planned televised presidential debates.) The fallout is that reality itself is now sometimes indistinguishable from pseudo-events. Some of The Image has aged poorly, but an unnerving amount of it feels like Boorstin somehow got hold of the internet decades early.

Read it if you like the feeling of finding the smartest professor on campus, settling into a seat, and realizing about ten minutes in that you’d happily stay after class.

And there be the September books. Read anything good lately?