October 26, 2026

TPOC and 3 Ghostly Reads

Thanks to everybody who helped me almost double my goal for the Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon. Yesterday, I buckled down and read for eight street hours in memory of my friend Melanie, and of TPOC founder Samantha, both of whom lived so hard under the shadow of metastatic breast cancer, and dreamed of a world where other women with MBC could live longer lives with better outcomes.

I make fun of the fact that this is an awfully self-indulgent kind of marathon—an entire day spent horizontal with a book in my hand is pretty much my dream scenario. But in our age of distraction, it actually is a feat of endurance to spend eight hours with books, and I’m proud that I have the capacity (and then some!). Intensive reading is also a deep and meaningful experience, an escape from the noise of the world, and the opportunity to not only focus on the books themselves, but also on the way they’re in conversation with each other.

With Halloween on the immediate horizon, I decided to finally pick up Marcus Kliewer’s haunted house horror novel, WE USED TO LIVE HERE, about a couple whose cozy world is disturbed when a family shows up who used to live in the house, and just wanted to have a look around. If you’re going for intensive reading, you can’t do much better than a book that’s as hard to put down as this one—it was gripping, devastating, and terrifying—and I loved it. Next up was another haunted house book, but this time in the romance genre—I HAUNT IT THAT WAY, by Isabelle Popp is about a woman who works as an assistant for a woman who writes bonkbusters and receives a life-changing inheritance when her boss dies. She uses that money to buy her once-rich family’s old camp in the Adirondacks, but that purchase comes with her ex-husband’s handyman bestie, in addition to some kind of supernatural presence that doesn’t seem to want them there. I’d never read a haunted romance before, but this one delighted me to no end. And then finally, I read GLYPH, by Ali Smith, which is a more literary kind of ghost story, but also in conversation with the others (and with Smith’s previous novel GLIFF, which I also loved, and which characters in this latest book have also read).

Three very different books about ghosts and haunting, each of them absolutely excellent. I had a very good day.