Books I read in October 2026

My favourite reads in October were a couple of early Nobel Prize winners, but I also read some Roman poetry, anthropology, and economics.

The Outcast by Selma Lagerlof

For some reason I was browsing a list of Nobel laureates and saw that Selma Lagerlof was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. I knew nothing about her and had read none of her work, so I decided to rectify that. I’m glad I did: The Outcast was an enjoyable tale featuring a good man who becomes an outcast in his rural Swedish community, a woman trying to escape from a controlling husband, a religious mystic, and more fascinating characters.

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun

While I was catching up with early Scandinavian Nobel Prize winners, I thought why not try this classic by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. Again, I’m happy I did. Growth of the Soil starts as a “man against nature” tale of a solitary settler, picking a spot in the wilderness and scratching a living from the soil. Then, as the book develops, it shows Isak’s traditional lifestyle coming up against modernity.

Metamorphoses by Ovid

Ovid’s Metamorphoses take us through the major characters and stories of classical mythology, from the creation of the world through a dizzying array of jealous, lustful, cruel and occasionally wise gods and heroes. It’s one of those books that I’d wanted to read for years (decades?), and I’m happy I finally got around to it.

The Little Book of Anthropology by Rasha Barrage

I can’t remember where this book came from, but it was on my Kindle, so I read it. It was a quick, easy read, but I didn’t get much from it. It was such a “little book” that there wasn’t much depth on any topic—just a page or two on each idea, with the kind of basic summary you could get from Wikipedia, and then the book moved on to the next thing. Maybe it’s OK as an introduction if you know literally nothing about anthropology, but I don’t know much about it, and it felt too simplistic for me.

The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi

Although it was written in 1944 and deals largely with the 19th century, The Great Transformation is quite relevant to today’s world. Polanyi’s basic thesis is that the 19th-century belief in “the alleged self-healing virtues of unconscious growth” laid the groundwork for the fascism that tore Europe apart in the early 20th century. Unfettered free-market capitalism creates such misery and social disintegration that governments regulate it to save people from destitution, and in doing so they slow economic growth, creating an impasse. Fascism offers to restore growth and vigour, but at the expense of democracy itself. It’s actually a more complex argument that needs more space than I’ve given it in this brief summary, so maybe I’ll write a full post on it.

What did you read this month?

Let me know how your reading month was. Which was your favourite book, and which were you disappointed by? Let me know in the comments.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.