Book notes
These are notes, not reviews. The distinction matters. A review tells you whether to read something. A note records what happened when I did.
I don’t rate books here. No stars, no scores, no verdict at the end. What I’m after is closer to what you write in the margins: the observation that doesn’t fit a summary, the thing the book did that surprised you, the sentence you had to read twice. Some of these notes are about Gothic fiction. Some are about food science, early radio history, or cookbooks that turned out to be something else entirely. The range is the point.
Gothic and supernatural fiction
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
A maternity home in 1970 Florida, young women with no good options, and something that might be witchcraft, or might be what happens when people with nothing left find each other.
The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell
Published in 1962, nine years before The Exorcist. The possession novel William Peter Blatty read before he wrote his own.
Slewfoot by Brom
Horror and beauty in Puritan New England, where the devil is less interested in damnation than in what the Puritans were doing to each other.
The Accidental Exorcist by Joshua Graham
A horror novel that earns its tension through belief rather than spectacle — what happens when a skeptic can’t dismiss what’s in front of him.
Folklore and the uncanny
Interlands by Vincent H. O’Neil
A slow-building unsettlement rooted in place and folklore — the kind of story that doesn’t startle you but leaves something behind.
Crime and moral reckoning
The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens
A mystery that’s less interested in the crime than in what justice actually looks like when the legal system gets it wrong.
History, science, and the unexpected
Wireless by Sungook Hong
I picked this up expecting a history of early radio. It turned out to be a book about how scientific credit gets assigned — and how often the story we tell afterward doesn’t match what actually happened.
Food writing
The Passionate Olive by Carol Firenze
101 uses for olive oil, organized by someone who clearly thinks it’s the answer to most problems. She’s not wrong.
Lobsters Scream When You Boil Them by Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough
Kitchen folklore examined: what we repeat, what we inherited, and how much of what we think we know about food we never actually tested.
More book notes are added as reading continues. Browse the full archive at shereadseverything.com/blog.