Autumn Reading List With Tanya Burr

I always find myself wanting to read slightly more atmospheric books as autumn arrives. There’s something about darker evenings that makes me want to disappear into a really immersive world. I just love reading at this time of year, preferably under a blanket on the sofa with an autumnal candle lit.

Anything that I can get lost in, whether that’s a beautifully written family story, something slightly mysterious or a novel with a strong sense of place.

I have a new release I’m excited to read, John of John by Douglas Stuart. My current read is The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, which is our Chapter Book of the Month. I also have a couple of classics, as I find them particularly cosy at this time of year: Middlemarch, which I’ve never read and have decided I must, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I think is going to be Chapter’s October book, as I always choose something slightly gothic for the month of October.

Definitely our living room. We have floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in there, so it feels sort of like a library, as well as a very comfortable sofa and an open log fire. It makes for the perfect reading place.

A combination of all three, although instinct is probably the strongest. I’m constantly hearing about books through friends, booksellers, publishers, podcasts and other readers, and then I’ll usually go away and read a little more about them.

I’d always loved sharing books, but I wanted a deeper sense of literary community. There are so many recommendations coming at us from every direction that I found myself craving something slower and more considered, where we could spend real time with one book rather than immediately moving on to the next. That became Chapter. What started with a monthly recommendation has grown into a much wider literary community, with conversations, events, author talks and Reading Rooms. I love that a book can begin as a very private experience and then become a reason to connect with other people.

A lot of research. I’m constantly reading reviews, looking at publishers’ lists, listening to literary podcasts and paying attention to recommendations from booksellers, writers and people whose taste I trust. I’m looking for books that feel worth spending a month with. Beautiful writing is important to me, but so are interesting characters, emotional depth and ideas that give you something to talk about. I also love introducing people to books they might not otherwise have found. And I mostly choose a book I haven’t read myself, which I think is quite exciting. There’s something lovely about discovering a story alongside a whole group of people.

There’s an intimacy to being in a room with people who have all just spent weeks reading the same book. You can feel the conversation changing as people respond to one another, and often the most interesting thoughts are the ones that happen spontaneously. There’s also the social side. People arrive not necessarily knowing one another and can end up talking for hours. Online conversation can be wonderful, but being physically together gives literature a different kind of energy. It becomes a shared experience rather than simply a discussion.

Definitely. I’m much more conscious of what a book might open up in conversation now. I find myself noticing the details that other people might have strong feelings about, or questions that I know could lead somewhere interesting. But perhaps the biggest change is that I’ve become more comfortable with not having a definitive interpretation. Listening to other readers has made me realise how differently we can experience exactly the same story. One of my favourite things about Chapter is watching one book become many different books depending on who is reading it.

I’ll often make little notes as I’m reading, particularly if a sentence or an idea really catches me, but I prefer to write the proper reflection once I’ve finished, even better if it’s a few weeks later. I think you need a little distance from a book to understand what it actually did to you. Sometimes I finish something and immediately think I know exactly how I feel about it, and then, often a few weeks later, I realise it’s had more or less of an effect on me than I first realised.

Books have been so important to me, and such a big part of my life since the age of about six. I’ve always shared what I read with my audience online, but I found that every time I did, I had so many people sending me messages with their thoughts. I realised I had a big audience of readers. I think I also realised that this audience of readers was craving connection with other readers, and I thought I could facilitate that.

Oh, so many. I always look back at the first books I read that felt like proper stories rather than picture books, and I started reading these quite young, at about six or seven. Books like Pretty Polly by Dick King-Smith and the Josie Smith Series made me fall in love with reading. Then there were the classics I read as a young teenager, like Anne of Green Gables and Pride and Prejudice. I think it was more a person than a book that shaped me as a reader, though. As soon as I was old enough, or possibly just before, my mum introduced me to the literary greats like Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker and Angela Carter. I think reading those authors quite early on shaped my taste as a reader, and I have my mum to thank for that.

I think whatever a person enjoys reading personally is “cool”! If you’re reading something you genuinely enjoy, that authenticity is what makes it cool.

Tayari Jones is someone I’ve been thinking about a lot since reading Kin and having the privilege of interviewing her at Hay Festival. She writes about relationships with such compassion and emotional intelligence. Her characters are never simply good or bad, and I think that ability to hold contradiction is one of the things great literature does best.

It gives me access to other people’s inner lives. You can spend a few hundred pages seeing the world through someone else’s consciousness, and I think that is an extraordinary thing. It’s both an escape and a return. You can disappear completely into another world, but somehow come back understanding yourself a little better too.