Books With Autumn Vibes

Today's Top 5 Wednesday topic is books that give Autumn Vibes. I went through hundreds of books on my Goodreads shelf of read books, and wrote down some titles. Then I picked from that list.

To me, Autumnal books have a certain feeling or tone. They might have funny parts, but overall the book's tone is subdued. I'm not explaining it very well. Let's see if my list sheds any light on the topic. They are listed in no particular order.

Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramago - I truly just noticed the skull on the cover of this book. I legitimately thought it was just black with a moth. Wow. This is a fantastic book, as you would expect from Saramago. In this book, each country has it's on death. He or she is a "person" (or maybe a ghost) who's job it is to cull people smoothly. Well, in this particular country, death falls in love and begins to ignore her duties. People stop dying. The hospitals are overrun, the funeral business is going under, and people are suffering needlessly to the point that people are sneaking their dying loved ones across the border where they can die and be out of their misery. Definitely Autumn vibes here, what with all the suffering and death.

The Road by Carmac McCarthy - This is a post-apocalyptic survival novel about a father and son traveling through a future America trying to get to the ocean. They have to hide from marauding looters who would take anything they had. They are wandering through a landscape filled with "snow" which is really fallout from a nuclear event. They scavenge for food wherever they can find it. The boy's mom died early because she didn't want to live in this terrible place. See? Very autumnal. Kind of depressing. I've read it three times.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini - Everyone is enraptured by The Kite Runner, but I like this one better. It's about two women in Afghanistan who are married to a brutal, disgusting man. It's about their relationship to each other and how they deal with their husband. This book made me so hungry with all the discussion about food.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - A young woman roams around Europe looking for her father who disappeared while researching Dracula. It's very slow moving and creepy. The ending fell a little flat, but overall it was captivating.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco - A young English monk goes to an Italian Abbey where monks are mysteriously dying. Using the detective tools of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Francis Bacon, he digs into the mystery.

There you go. Five books with Autumn vibes. I think maybe the vibe is from the slow, methodical pace of the books. Aha! Maybe that's the key! All of these books move at a leisurely pace (except near the climax of the story, of course). These are not fast-paced, keep you on the edge of your seat, kind of books.

What do you think makes a book have an Autumnal feel?