Ellis Avery's novel The Last Nude is a fictionalized account of an affair between a 30-year-old DeLempicka and her teenage model Rafaela Fano. I am a sucker for fictitious biographies about artists. They are a guilty pleasure I don't feel very guilty about.

For October, I am sharing one the creepiest books I've ever read. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, is a complicated and fascinating novel that took ten years to write. It has a story within a story narrative, analyzing a documentary about a house where doors appear where they should not, leading to dark hallways that sometimes go nowhere and other times open to an infinite maze of corridors with an unknown destructive force inside.

The People of Paper struck all the right cords. It is filled with loneliness, longing, mediations on the magic of paper, beautiful graphic design with unconventional typography. After immersing in the metafiction of this novel, I had trouble going back to more conventional reads.

I savored this book like a cup of perfectly brewed tea - it was just the right temperature and flavor. The prose is delicate, quietly impactful. There are 18 stories within, all dealing with love in some manner -  the love between romantic couples, but also love of children or parents lost, of life's ephemeral beautiful moments.

I am loving the resurgence of classic books with modern illustrations! I was at Barnes & Noble last weekend, and saw this edition of Pride and Prejudice, illustrated by Alice Pattullo, an artist and printmaker based in East London.