The Astrology Book Club: What to Read This Month, Based on Your Sign

With all the good books that come out each month, it can be hard to decide what to read (or, if you’re anything like the people erstwhile of the Literary Hub office, now of our homes and Slack, what to read first). There are lots of good reasons to pick one book over another, but one we’ve never really explored before here at Lit Hub is . . . astrology. Hence, this “book club,” which is actually just a a literary horoscope guaranteed to come true: a good book to read, based (sort of) on your zodiac sign. Here’s what you should be reading this month.

AQUARIUS

Rachel Carson, The Sea Trilogy
Library of America, December 21

For the sign most at ease with big-picture thinking—and most in-tune with Saving the World—a beautiful volume that collects three of Rachel Carson’s classics of nature writing, all focused on that most mysterious and precarious of the planet’s resources: the sea.

PISCES

Tom Bissell, Creative Types: And Other Stories 
Pantheon, December 14

For the sign most likely to think of themselves as a “creative type,” Tom Bissell’s funny, precise collection of short fiction.

ARIES

Francesco Pacifico, tr. Elizabeth Harris, The Women I Love
FSG, December 7

For the sign who can’t help but believe that the world revolves around them, at least a little bit, a novel that satirizes that very impulse—especially when it comes to the way that men historically write about (and think about) women.

TAURUS

Shea Ernshaw, A History of Wild Places
Atria, December 7

For the lover of fairy tales who most wants, this holiday season, to be pinned to their chair by a great novel, a hypnotic thriller concerning a PI with special talents, a missing writer of dark books for children, a commune that everyone thought was only a legend, and a young man who finds out.

GEMINI

Siri Hustvedt, Mothers, Fathers and Others: Essays
Simon & Schuster, December 7

For busy-but-curious Geminis, a book of essays that connects the personal to the philosophical, from one of our most interesting writers.

CANCER

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, Silence and Silences
FSG, December 7

For the sign most likely to understand the deep emotional power of emptiness (also, the deep emotional power of pretty much anything), this fascinating meditation on silence both literal and cosmic.

LEO

Robert Gottlieb, Garbo
FSG, December 7

For the sign most likely to (still) want to grow up to be a movie star, a big, comprehensive biography of one of the best, written by a literary world legend.

VIRGO

Nadifa Mohamed, The Fortune Men 
Knopf, December 14

For the sign that always wants to get to the heart of a true story—even if it’s through fiction—this novel reconstructs the life and legend of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor unjustly accused of murder in Cardiff in 1952, whose tale is all too familiar, even now.

LIBRA

Aysegül Savas, White on White
Riverhead, December 7

For the most aesthetic sign, who knows the value of white on white (and will, besides that, definitely love a novel about art, connection, and madness).

SCORPIO

Peter Stamm, tr. Michael Hofmann, It’s Getting Dark
Other Press, December 14

For the sign whose favorite color is black.

SAGITTARIUS

Juhea Kim, Beasts of a Little Land
Ecco, December 7

For the sign of the seeker—of knowledge, of freedom—a debut novel about two young people swept up in the epic revolutionary struggle for Korean independence.

CAPRICORN

Joe Moshenska, Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton
Basic Books, December 7

For the sign that’s always studying the great and the brilliant—for tips, of course, but also just because they like to know more than other people—a new biography of an old intellectual, that seeks, among other things, to de-mustify his image.