Embrace uncertainty with our November book pick

Happy Halloween, book clubbers,   I hope you got to see our live event with Silvia Moreno-Garcia on Thursday. She's the kind of person who goes really into the weeds on the stuff she's interested in, which is the ideal Vox interview spirit, so we got to go very nitty-gritty on both the gothic novel and mushrooms. We'll have a recording of that interview up soon with a transcript of the highlights for you if you weren't able to make it.   In the meantime, let's turn our attention to the extremely nervewracking month of November. COMING UP IN NOVEMBER   This November, the Vox Book Club is reading Susan Choi's Trust Exercise! It's the kind of book I like to read when I have no choice but to live in a state of uncertainty for quite a while: a destabilizing book that creates its own kind of uncertainty in you, and then uses that as a way to play.    Trust Exercise won the National Book Award in 2019, and it was one of my favorite books of that year. It starts off as a love story between two kids at a high-achieving performing arts high school. Then it spins off from there with a vicious act two twist that I won't spoil for you, because the moment you realize exactly what you're reading is such a kick that I wouldn't dare do anything to jeopardize it.   What ensues after that is an extended meditation on trust: the trust between lovers, between student and teacher, between actor and director. But Trust Exercise also covers the trust that is implicit and unspoken in novels themselves, that lies between the author who writes the novel, the characters who enact the novel, and the readers who read the novel. It's the perfect book to read as we try to make our way through this period of deep and profound uncertainty. And I have confidence that together, if we all try hard enough, we'll be able to figure out what the hell is happening at the end.   Here's our schedule for the month:   Friday, November 20: Discussion post on Trust Exercise   Monday, November 30: Virtual live event with author Susan Choi. We'll send you an RSVP link as soon as it's available. THE WEEK IN BOOKS ON VOX   To celebrate Halloween, Vox Culture declared a Witch Week and wrote a series of recommendations on witchy pop culture. Two of our recommendations are for witch books, including one literally titled Witch Week (it's a middle-grade fantasy by Diana Wynne Jones and it's perfect, please do read it), and another called Witches of America (a nonfiction portrait of witchcraft that Alissa Wilkinson highly recommends).   Meanwhile, Bryce Covert has a long reported piece on what indie bookstores are doing to weather the pandemic, and Sean Illing talks with the author of The Simulation Hypothesis about whether or not we're living in a computer simulation (he says we probably are).    Happy reading!   —Constance

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