New books to read this fall

Did you know there’s a very specific reason we have a fall book season?

It’s not the only reason, but it’s the reason that set this cultural cycle in motion. Long story short: As New York and Philadelphia became hubs for publishing in the United States, there was a need to sell more books to a burgeoning Midwest — Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland. The problem was the Susquehanna River and Erie Canal, the industry’s primary shipping routes. They were frozen roughly from Christmas to Easter. So starting in the mid-19th century or so, publishers would wait until the big thaw, particularly autumn, to release their big titles, ensuring new department stores like Chicago’s Marshall Fields and Detroit’s Hudson’s had plenty of books for holiday gifts.

“Geography is destiny,” Napoleon supposedly once said.

If the new fall book season looks overwhelming — Al Pacino’s memoirs, and a new Haruki Murakami epic? — if you’re about to triple your To-Be-Read pile, I guess blame the Erie Canal. Also blame a great time for biographies. An explosion of diverse voices. A horror renaissance. And no shortage of legendary authors waiting to break the ice.

Bio-picks

Before he died last year, Bill Zehme, Chicago-based celebrity whisperer, was deep into a definitive biography of Johnny Carson, who gave Zehme his first interview after retiring from “The Tonight Show.” What Zehme finished (with Chicago Sun-Times writer Mike Thomas) makes up the core of “Carson the Magnificent” (Nov. 5), a lively account heavy on the talk-show legend’s rise to fame. Did you know Congressman John Lewis once went to New York Comic Con dressed/cosplaying in the outfit he wore to the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma? That and more paint the definitive, admiring images of “John Lewis: A Life” (Oct. 8), David Greenberg’s thorough portrait of the Civil Rights icon (who did interviews with Greenberg before his 2020 death).“Lovely One,” the new memoir by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, shares some of the formality of that Lewis book — it gets personal, but not that personal. You don’t get much insight into the Supreme Court, but you do get a tender, old-fashioned stoicism from the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.

Short, not shallow

The problem with fall is you’re ready to learn but the abundance of the season leaves little time for deep dives. Might I suggest the new Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose “Between the World and Me” was a generation-defining study of race? His latest,“The Message” (Oct. 1), just as slender and poignant, is centered on travel narratives (Palestine, South Carolina, Senegal) about the legacy of myth, censorship and country. “Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class,” by Sarah Smarsh (2019 winner of the Tribune’s Heartland Prize), is a long-promised journalism collection about Americans just getting by that avoids straw men and glibness, with thoughts on dentistry, working at Hooters and arguing with Trump voters. “The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies” (Oct. 1), by ultra-prolific Deborah Levy, plays like a lunch with an especially sharp, scattered pal, with brief (often one or two pages total) thoughts on celebrity death, Collette, female friendships, lemons.

The stuff of the Midwest

“The Registry of Forgotten Objects: Stories,” by Chicago’s Miles Harvey, chair of the English department at DePaul University, has an addicting theme: A debut collection in which characters are about to disappear but the tactile things of their lives — Eudora Welty books, old buoys, strange tunnels — go on. If you’ve ever felt sort of haunted by something you own, you’ll relate. “A Reason to See You Again” (Sept. 24) by Buffalo Grove native (and #1000WordsofSummer project founder) Jami Attenberg, is not about objects, but by leanly tracing the collapse of a Midwest family from 1971 to 2007 (in a third of the pages of a Jonathan Franzen), she can’t help but linger lovingly over artifacts — like ashtrays, indoor malls, magazines.

The New Masters

Booker Prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst (“The Line of Beauty”) returns to the territory once owned by Martin Amis with “Our Evenings” (Oct. 8), another devastating study of privilege, tracing the fortunes of a half-Burmese man from his scholarship days at a boarding school to his soaring future — setting off the reactionary spite of Brexit. Speaking of award-winners: Always-ambitious Evanston native Richard Powers returns to the environment for “Playground” (Sept. 24), another sprawling science epic that draws in entire worlds. Whereas “The Overstory” was set among trees, this is in the ocean, to tell the story of a set of people (including two Chicago students) on an atoll where floating cities are being tested. If Powers has remade the way novelists use the environment, Rumaan Alam revived the gilded moral parable. “Entitlement” (Sept. 17), like Alam’s bestselling “Leave the World Behind,” both cringes at crass unexamined wealth and longs for an easy frictionless life, telling the tale of a modest woman tasked with giving away a billionaire’s fortune. (“This was an illness,” she thinks late in the book, seeing new rooms only for how their size compares to smaller rooms.) For something less intense (but just as accomplished): “Death at the Sign of the Rook” is Kate Atkinson’s return to her Jackson Brodie mysteries, a very Agatha Christie-inspired tribute to big British mansions, lots of guests and one murder.

The best writer you’re not reading (yet)

Katherine Rundell is due, but it’s understandable why the name is not familiar. She wrote a devilishly fun biography of poet John Donne (“Super-Infinite”) but is best known (in England) for children’s books. This season, she delivers a bit of everything: “Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures” (Nov. 12) is composed of nearly two dozen hilarious strange, totally true essays about the natural world that summon real wonder. (“Hey,” I yelled to my wife while reading, “hermit crabs probably ate Amelia Earhart!”) The breakthrough, however, looks like “Impossible Creatures,” already a smash in Europe, a YA epic with the wisdom of Tolkien and the accessibility of Rowling. It’s set inside an island chain, hidden from mankind, where every mythological monster lives.

Streets of dreams

“In this real world, you and I live not so far from each other,” writes Haruki Murakami in his first novel in six years,“The City and Its Uncertain Walls” (Nov. 19). That’s not a bad way of describing his latest (or any of his novels). It tells the story of libraries and Dream Readers who review our dreams — and if that sounds vague, you’ve never read this eventual Nobel Prize winner. Comparably, “The Great When” (Oct. 1) — about a parallel London that must never be revealed — is straightforward, yet as effectively moody as you might expect from author Alan Moore, best known for his benchmark comics “Watchmen” and “V For Vendetta.”