We asked some of our favorite local authors and booksellers what they’re reading this season. by Megan Seling Well, the weather outside is… wait. It’s too early for that. But shit is about to get gnarly. Seattle may have experienced a record-breaking streak of 80-degree days this summer, but now we’re entering the rainy season, the gray season, the time of year when the best thing to do is stay home and read. (And watch Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. But also read.) November is historically the wettest month of the year here, with more than six and a half inches of rain on average, and December has the fewest hours of sunshine for the year. To help you ease into hibernation, we asked some of our favorite local authors and booksellers what they’re reading this season, so your TBR list doesn’t shrivel away with the sun. Claire Dederer, author of 'Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.' “I’m in the middle of my traditional biennial reread of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. Alison Bechdel’s comic strip ran from 1983 to 2008 and is to my mind the great real-time chronicle of the end of the 20th century. Besides being hugely fun to read, it reminds me as a writer that I am living in a historical moment and it’s my job to bear witness/get this shit down on paper.” —Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma and finalist for the 2024 Washington State Book Award in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir Jake Uitti (top) and Eva Walker, authors of 'The Sound of Seattle: 101 Songs That Shaped a City.' Eva Walker: “Believe it or not, I’m reading Sex in the City! I absolutely love the show and have been getting more into writing, as I just wrote a book with my husband on music, but also trying to do more culture writing as well. This book is a style I like quite a bit.”  Jake Uitti: “The book I just finished was Green Bananas by Pat Rummerfeld. After a car accident left him paralyzed at 21, he eventually learned how to walk again, much to the surprise of doctors everywhere. He’s since run just about every kind of race and set speed records in race cars. His perseverance is astonishing and inspiring!” —Eva Walker and Jake Uitti, authors of The Sound of Seattle: 101 Songs That Shaped a City Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of 'Touching the Art.' “In Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere, Anastacia-Reneé fuses her skills as a poet, playwright, storyteller, conceptual artist, fugitive feminist, and queer world-builder to conjure the spaces between witness and want, overstimulation and incantation, craving and obliteration, sisterhood and fury. In this house of memory’s music, the windows blow open, the floorboards shake, and the roof flies up to the sky—making room for the rhythms of grief, rage, sorrow, sweetness, bodily inquiry, and revisitation.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art and finalist for the 2024 Washington State Book Award in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir Sokha Dahn, owner of Mam’s Books. “Landbridge by Y-Dang Troeung. Ever since I opened Mam’s Books, this book has been on my radar, since I’m Cambodian American. It’s a memoir by a Cambodian refugee who settles in Canada with her family. Her story of trauma and migration is all of our story, whether we choose to understand why or not. It’s also a powerful testament to a mother’s love for her young son and husband as she confronts a terminal disease.”  —Sokha Dahn, owner of Mam’s Books Geraldine DeRuiter, author of 'If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury.' “I just started Anna Marie Tendler’s Men Have Called Her Crazy, the artist’s memoir about her time in a psychiatric hospital and reflections upon her life experiences, both before and after. It’s a raw, painful, and at times almost perversely funny look at how misogyny shapes and harms us. It’s bluntly and beautifully written, but I’m taking it a little bit at a time because it hits me straight in the heart. “I just finished Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, a bizarre and eminently readable book about a new mother who gives up her career as an artist to stay at home and take care of her child, and who may or may not be slowly transforming into a dog every night. It’s a deeply frustrating and fascinating allegory for all the invisible labor women do, the impossible load put upon new mothers, the transformative nature of motherhood, and how maybe we all just need to go a little feral to regain ourselves.” —Geraldine DeRuiter, author of If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury Jane Wong, author of 'Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City.' “Another Word for Love, by Carvell Wallace. I’m in awe of this memoir, which feels transformative, ferocious, poetic, intimate, tender. I practically underlined everything in this book. From the beginning: ‘I try not to bother too much about figuring out which truth is the truest. A lot of things, I have learned, can be true at once. That is how I survived.’” —Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City and winner of the 2024 Washington State Book Award in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir