Why brave the perils of the outdoors (and of new, over-hyped titles) when you can burrow in the classics all autumn long? In the spirit of Joshua Glenn, Mark Kingwell and Seth’s new The Idler’s Glossary (which gets a TINARS launch Oct. 8), we present our own Idler’s Guide to Fall Reading: a prescriptive literary calendar for those with all the time in the world, and whose aim it is to feel the season exquisitely, intensely and utterly vicariously — without, as it were, setting foot on a single leaf.

Sep 25: Fall primer, a.k.a. beautiful seasonal clichés: “To Autumn,” John Keats; “To Autumn,” William Blake; “12: The morns are meeker than they were,” Emily Dickinson; Paracelsus and “The Last Walk in Autumn,” Robert Browning; “Autumn Day,” Rainer Maria Rilke; “Autumn Song,” Paul Verlaine

Sep 26 and 27: Back-to-school week begins. Start in horror over literal lost youth: Bunny Lake Is Missing, Evelyn Piper

Sep 28: Back-to-school week, continued: Autumnal Shakespeare! Sonnets 73, 97, 104; As You Like It

Sep 29: Back-to-school week meets Rosh Hashanah: Goodbye Columbus, Philip Roth

Sep 30: Back-to-school week gets juicy: The Rules of Attraction, Bret Easton Ellis

Oct 1 and 2: Back-to-school week gets Gallic-melancholic: Lost Illusions, Honoré de  Balzac; Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier

Oct 3: Back-to-school week ends. To the faculty! The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee

Oct 4 and 5: Harvest weekend: Cane, Jean Toomer; Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy; Open House, Theodore Roethke

Oct 6 and 7: Personal, moral harvest: Persuasion, Jane Austen

Oct 8 and 9: Personal, moral, political, aesthetic harvest: The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Oct 10-12: Canadiana week begins. Feelin’-feral weekend: Bear, Marian Engel; Wild Geese, Martha Ostenso; “Making It,” Margaret Gibson

Oct 13: Canadian Thanksgiving, bloody-poultry theme: A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews; “The Turkey Season,” Alice Munro

Oct 14: Federal election: Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King (NDP candidate, Guelph)

Oct 15: A different kind of conservative Stephen: Social Criticism: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and Other Essays by Stephen Leacock

Oct 16 and 17: Canadiana week ends: Deep Hollow Creek, Sheila Watson

Oct 18 and 19: And now for something completely different… Happy birthday, Lee Harvey Oswald! Libra, Don DeLillo. And for an extra-autumnal flourish: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot

Oct 20-23: October Revolution! Samizdat lit: Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak; Heart of a Dog, Mikhail Bulgakov; We, Yevgeny Zamyatin; Animal Farm, George Orwell

Oct 24-25: Goth week begins. Campy-creepy: The Monk, Matthew Gregory Lewis

Oct 26-27: Goth week, continued. Real-creepy: Diane Arbus: a biography, Patricia Bosworth

Oct 28: Goth week, continued. Sex-creepy: The End of Alice, A.M. Homes; Crash, J.G. Ballard

Oct 29 and 30: Goth week, continued. Financial-creepy (marking the anniversary of Black Tuesday): The Great Crash: 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith

Oct 31: Goth week ends. Classic-creepy: “The Black Cat” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe; “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Washington Irving; and as much of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as you can imbibe

Nov 1 and 2: Day of the Dead: Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

Nov 3: Related: “Clay,” James Joyce

Nov 4: Prepping for the US election: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

Nov 5 and 6: Coping with the US election: Capable of Honor and Preserve and Protect, Allen Drury (fast readers may go on to one of the two sequels following the latter title, which allow them to choose which presidential nominee gets assassinated)

Nov 7 and 8: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers (the best passages, those about “the two mutes,” take place in November)

Nov 9 to 13: War, naturally: The Wars, Timothy Findley (Nov 9); The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, Wilfred Owen (Nov 10); Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Siegfried Sassoon (Nov 11); Generals Die in Bed, Charles Yale Harrison (Nov 12); Dispatches, Michael Herr (Nov 13)

Nov 14 and 15: Anniversary of the Clutter family murders: In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

Nov 16: Football weekend: Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger

Nov 17 and 18: November sublime: Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

Nov 19: Another cold, rainy heath: King Lear, William Shakespeare

Nov 20 and 21: Rain turns to snow: “The First Snowfall,” Guy de Maupassant; “Emergency,” Denis Johnson; “Miranda Over the Valley,” Andre Dubus Senior

Nov 22: Mental-instability week begins: Running With Scissors, Augusten Burroughs

Nov 23 and 24: Mental-instability week, continued: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

Nov 25: Mental-instability week, continued (with some much-needed California escapism): Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion 

Nov 26: Mental-instability week, continued: The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Nov 27 and 28: Mental-instability continued, US Thanksgiving special: Diary of a Mad Housewife, Sue Kaufman; The Ice Storm, Rick Moody

Nov 29: Mental-instability week concludes, glamorously: Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nov 30: Glamour dissipates. Autumn as cosmetic metaphor: “In the Autumn of the Year,” Joyce Carol Oates; Quartet in Autumn, Barbara Pym

Dec 1 and 2: More snow: Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

Dec 3 and 4: Feelin’-fat-and-lazy week begins (on the week’s midsection): Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov

Dec 5: Feelin’-fat-and-lazy week, continued: “Brobdignag” from Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

Dec 6 and 7: Feelin’-fat-and-lazy week, continued. Big Weekend: Gargantua, Francois Rabelais

Dec 8: Feelin’-fat-and-lazy week, continued. Exercise? Nah: “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” Alan Sillitoe

Dec 9: Feelin’-fat-and-lazy week, continued. Persecution complex: A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

Dec 10 and 11: Feelin’-fat-and-lazy week, continued. Persecution complex: Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

Dec 12: Feelin’-fat-and-lazy week concludes. Enough already! Blubber, Judy Blume; “Fat,” Raymond Carver

Dec 13 and 14: Seasonal anomie, about a week before Christmas: Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

Dec 15: Bundle up! “The Overcoat,” Nikolai Gogol; “Beg, Sl, Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep,” Amy Hempel

Dec 16-19: Seasonal dysfunction: “The Winter Father,” Andre Dubus Senior; The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

Dec 20: Gift-giving and more seasonal dysfunction: A Doll House, Henrik Ibsen

Dec 21: FIRST DAY OF WINTER: Glimmers of hope on the darkest day: “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story,” Paul Auster; “Where I’m Calling From,” Raymond Carver; “Crèche,” Richard Ford; “The Loudest Voice,” Grace Paley; Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis

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