Barnabas Owl Presents: The October "To Be Read" Pile

Greeting. This is Barnabas Owl waiting for me to make my way to the kitchen to brew some Lady Grey Tea and get down to the business of picking out some spooktacular reads for October. After much hooting and wing flapping (on his part) and assembling piles of books and thumbing through many pages (on my part) we have reached a decision.

I've already started on my first choice for the month; I'm about 100 pages through M.R. James' Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. Thus far I'm pinning M.R. James' as a cross between H.P. Lovecraft and Henry James. M.R. James lacks the florid over the top descriptions of Lovecraft, but the creatures of the night in this collection are pretty gnarly. This James' isn't nearly as wordy or heavy as Henry James, but has that same sense of intellectual depth and usually contains a fairly objective or distanced narrator.

In edition to this collection I have:

• The Dracula Dossier by James Reese
• Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum
• Death at the Priory: Love, Sex, and Murder in Victorian England by James Ruddick
• The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
• The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill
  

I'm really pumped about October reading. I'm on "vacation" next week and between the freetime and the new glasses I'm ready to read. Now if I can just convince Barnabas that candlelight isn't really the best way for me to read and preserve my eyes.