Shownotes Transcript
Incoming transmission. Hello, this is Matt and McKinley from History Dispatches. We are the father-son duo bringing you the weird, the wild, the wacky, and the craziest tales from across time. From the Ice Bowl to the Great Heathen Army and the head of Oliver Cromwell. The same head they kept on a pike for three years? Yep, all here on History Dispatches. New episodes every weekday. Find out more at HistoryDispatches.com or wherever you get your podcast app.
This is the Book Grab Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. And it's time once again for moms, dads, and grads recommendation request time. This is how it works. People have emailed in with their recommendations for their moms, dads, grads, and a lot of eyes in there, which is absolutely fine. Welcome even. In fact, maybe we prefer that, Rebecca. We love a person who's looking for a recommendation for themselves. Everybody deserves good book grabs. And
And we both have a couple ideas or sometimes if one of us are better than others or, you know, it's a Jeff joint or Rebecca joint, we'll take over from there but we're going to run through them. We'll do some today and then we'll mop up on Thursday the other thing that's happening Thursday is we're going to check in on Kevin the lumberjack Wilson's new book run for the hills in a mini book club there that comes out, I guess, next Monday on Monday.
The book comes out the 13th. So it'll be available right when the book comes out. So if you don't want to do spoilers, we'll be careful in that episode to talk about a review and impressions. And then maybe there are some more substantive discussions that people might want to miss. But anyway, that's coming soon. Let's see. Everything else is a little bit. Oh, on the Patreon. Coming tomorrow. The summer is here.
Summertime and the reading is good. A very strong lineup as it is generally for the summer in which Rebecca and I compete to win. And that's for Patreon members. There'll be a trailer so you can hear the setup of the show there, but go to Patreon to everything else that's going on there. And it is the time of year. If you are looking for a gift for mom, dad, or grad who is a reader or you'd like them to be a reader,
There's a lot going on there, but check out mytbr.co, our customized book reading service. And also for the old out there, Book Riot All Access. That's separate from Patreon, but this is from Book Riot Mothership.
You can level up your reading life, explore our full library of members-only content, must-reads, deep dives, reading challenge recommendations, and right now the first 50 new All Access annual members get a free copy of Automatic Noodle by Annalie. Now it's courtesy of Tor Publishing, so this is what's going on there. A crew of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen and decide to do what they know best, make incredible hand-pulled noodles for the humans of a post-war San Francisco.
A charming and thought-provoking story. You can get Automatic Noodle by Anna Lee Nowitz by signing up at bookride.com slash all access. Cozy Sci-Fi? Is that a thing? Sounds like it might be Cozy Sci-Fi. I think it is a thing. I believe some Cozy Sci-Fi gets brought up later in these recommendations. Yeah, that's a great point. They may want to check out Automatic Noodle. All right, with that, Rebecca, I guess I'll go and do the first read because you have the ones that I was thinking of. We can consider this a joint recommendation and maybe get both of these off the board because...
I think so. We may have a new entrant into the BR pod recommendation hall of fame coming up here. So this is from Laura. I'm turning 40 tomorrow. Congratulations. You've already 40 because this email came before today. I'm hoping to read a few books that help me give perspective on entering midlife in the year ahead. I've already read all fours. Sorry, Rebecca wink emoji. Glennis McNichol looks like a good direction, but I'm not sure how much will resonate since I have two little kids.
Is now the time for Women Were Birds, Gilead. Other ideas, please. I mean, I don't think you'd go wrong with When Women Were Birds or Gilead, but I think the two books for the job are the combo pack. And these books should just come shrink-wrapped together at this point. I like this idea. Of 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman and Life in Three Dimensions by Dr. Shigahiro Oishi. You've heard us talk about both of them, so I'll just do short answers.
pitches 4,000 weeks is about how you get 4,000 weeks on average in your go round on this planet.
Time is a non-renewable resource. And especially once we hit midlife, really thinking about are you spending your time in a way that is aligned with your values and what matters to you? It's time to it is time to do that. It's a good swift kick in the pants, I think. It's a philosophy of thinking about how you spend your time. This is not like checklists and steps you take. But I think it's a framework for that.
approaching how you think about how you want your time to go for the rest of your life and the reality that like sure you can spend another hour sending emails on a Wednesday afternoon but there will always be more emails the emails are bottomless the emails will never stop and so what happens if instead of sending more emails you went and walked your dog or hung out with your kids or cooked a great meal or whatever it is that gives your life meaning and joy
You want to take life in three dimensions? Because we do both love both of these. They do go together. They're not sort of lock and key in this regard because 4,000 weeks is, it's largely about not doing things that you mistake for being valuable when you actually kind of know they aren't or you don't want to be doing. Life in three dimensions is a little bit different in this regard, which is, okay,
How does one live the kind of life one wants to live? And historically, there's been two kind of paths, right? Happiness and meaning. This is just a third thing, which Oishi calls psychological richness, but we might call it living an interesting life, having diverse and interesting experiences. And that doesn't necessarily mean they're all comfortable. In fact, there's some argument to be made that
discomfort can lead to more memorable, more interesting and more richness. But I think taken together, they offer a way forward that answers this question is like, what do I want to do with what I've got left in the tank? And it is so easy for the first 10, 20, 30. I even think frankly, Laura into having two little kids is a really interesting moment because there is a, there is a path that's pretty well trod, even for those of us that want that thing.
that kind of start, the path kind of starts to wander off in multiple directions once you actually have the kids.
And they're grown up a little bit and they're starting to have lives of their own I'm feeling this very much now with a 14 and 12 year old, which is their directionality isn't really it's that arrow of direction is not inward towards the family as much as it used to be. And you can kind of feel the weather vane like in Mary Poppins twirling around right like some days it's really back towards us. And some days it's totally friends in the future and what they're working on on themselves.
And that is a time when then that whole narrative for you, and I'll throw myself in with you, Laura, if you don't mind, is an inflection point. And maybe you have some experience, autonomy, and life lessons, even if they're negative ones, that you can use towards say, okay, here's how with some kind of intention, I want to take a crack at whatever pinatas the next years hold. So those are 4,000 Weeks of Life in Three Dimensions.
All right, I guess you're the next read then. All right. Yeah, next one is more Jeff Kor. This is from Nikki, whose husband has recently started reading and his absolute favorite so far has been Project Hail Mary. So she's looking for something similar to give him. So we need to have a quick meta conversation about Project Hail Mary.
Because I put it's an impossible comp, which I mean is. I agree. It is singularly pleasurable and has a really high Q rating amongst the people that are I read it, you read it, my son, like everyone I know. It shows up later in this document, I think multiple times right Rebecca I can't remember right now. Andy Weir shows up. Andy Weir shows up and I think in Project Hail Mary.
look the martian is the martian but project tail marries him doing some other things that like really builds on the martian the setup is very similar and the character could be in fact if he wanted to it could have made it the same character and would have been kind of funny there's some things that you would get if you read that makes that cool um but there's just not a lot out there the voice the hard science the humanity all those things together make this a really impossible comp because it's not cozy sci-fi because there are real stakes and things can go wrong um but it's also not
I don't know, grimdark or just space stuff. So it's really hard to do. In fact, I think I may have a, may do something with this idea of this, this is a new impossible comp. So I'm going to pick a couple of threads is what I did here. Do you like this space voice entertaining kind of having a good time looseness to the narrative quality? Then Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers is a long rating series called The Wayfarers.
There's a group of, I'm now doing this from memory, so this is probably 70% right, this synopsis here. But they're on their way somewhere and something happens and they all wake up in the middle of their hyperbaric whatever. And it's sort of a found family, we're going to tumble through space in a celestial romp. So if you like that piece, if you like the plotty hard sci-fi piece, Dark Matter by Blake Crouch is about...
Is it multiple reality got made into a TV show that her wasn't very great, even though they're making season two, whatever. I don't care. I don't know anything about this. Like a string theory, metaverse kind of situation. Basically the main characters has an opportunity to go through multiple doors that go through multiple kinds of existences. He has to navigate himself, but Crouch does as well. He can to make it grounded in some kind of science with rules. So like, it's not Bill and Ted's where like you just go into the phone booth and there's the circle. Okay. Like there's reasons for things just to navigate and figure it out.
So if you like this sort of hard sci-fi puzzle box, not puzzle box, but puzzle mystery quality that a main character is navigating, figuring out. But I do not have one, Rebecca, that is a comp for comp Andy Weir puzzle.
Right now. He's one of one and long may he reign as the king of weirdom. In that pantheon with like the night circus of books that we just don't have good comps for. We don't. And it's going to get worse when this awesome movie comes out that apparently the footage is really good starting up Ryan Gosling in the fall or I think maybe it's spring of 2026. It's going to get worse before it gets better for us here. I might have to bring myself to Portland for an afternoon at the movies for that day. Yeah. I mean, there's, well, anyway, we can talk about that later.
later. All right. My read. Let's do a quick sponsor break here while we're at it. Today's episode is brought to you by Eighth Note Press, publishers of the Taking of Persephone series by Ambrosia R. Harris.
If you are into a lushly written fantasy, if you like Greek mythology, if you like grumpy sunshine pairings, stay tuned. I got you. Before the goddess of the underworld, before the dread queen, there was Kori. Now, Kori is caught between two worlds. On the one hand, her mother schools her in duty and hiding her powers from the other gods, but Kori secretly finds freedom and visits from the feared king of the dead.
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Make sure to check out the Taking of Persephone series by Ambrosia R. Harris. And thanks again to Eighth Note Press for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Eighth Note Press, publishers of the Chicago Heartbreaker series by Allie Wiegand. The first book in the series, aptly titled First Base, follows photographer Maggie, whose last love ended in tragedy. So she's content to focus on her job, snapping shots of Chicago's MLB team instead of her love life.
But Maggie's throwing a curveball when the team signs Tommy, a tattooed hotshot whose talent for making plays is matched by a Playboy reputation. Okay.
When an out of context photo of the two of them goes viral, the PR team devises a plan. Fake a public established romance until the fuss dies down. But as their fake romance plays out in the spotlight, real feelings arise. Thing is, Maggie's already loved and lost and Tommy's never learned to commit, so can they make it past first base?
First base is followed up by the book going for two where a physical therapist and a star quarterback must overcome their difference and growing attraction to prepare the quarterback for his Super Bowl run. Make sure to check out the series. And thanks again to eighth note press for sponsoring this episode.
Today's episode is brought to you by Grove Atlantic, publishers of Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata. Set in an alternate version of Japan, sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.
As a girl, Amine realizes with horror that her parents "copulated" to have her. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage, Amine and her husband Saku decide to go live in a mysterious new town called Paradise Eden, where all children are raised communally and men get pregnant using artificial wombs. Is this strange new world one where Amine will finally fit in?
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Do you have any recommendations for sci-fi fantasy books with a funny, sarcastic narrator? I've already read Gideon the Ninth by Tasman Muir and Murderbot by Martha Wells and love them. I would love something else in this vein. I also wasn't a big fan of Hitchhiker's Guide. Sorry. You don't have to apologize. There's a lot of parenthetical apologies. Keep those to thyself. We don't need this. You're allowed to not like things? Yeah, that's just data. That's not a judgment. That's just data.
So I prefer something scary or dark over silly. Thank you for reading. Love the show. That's Amanda. So the darker... Oh, you go first because that's the hard part. Well, yeah, I'm just going to connect us up to the previous question. I think this is Andy Weir. If you have somehow made it to the Murderbot Gideon the Night part of your reading life and you're not already familiar with The Martian or Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir's voice is a great place to go.
there um now we're outside of my realm of reading but the internet says if you like Andy Weir you might like John Scalzi you might also like The Lies of Locke Lamore which on this round through Google was pitched to me as Ocean's Eleven but medieval and speculative and I would have read that book like 15 years ago if someone had pitched it to me that way so that's what I've got
I went way back into my bag from 2012. We were just doing BR and this got passed around amongst us. It's a movie that I never saw too. It's called John Dies at the End. And it is humorous. So these two guys, I think they are in college or dropped out of college. They have to save the world from supernatural invasions. And it does the thing where it's really funny, but also pretty scary. Yeah.
I'm a coward, so you may not feel the Scoville score of scares like I do because my palate for horror is pretty sensitive. But this is the one that came to mind for me of being funny, having a good narrative voice. And then you can do the thing if you like it of checking out the movie and saying it sucks or it's great or sort of doing the thing but that's John Dies at the End by David Wong is my pick there.
Good one. Okay. I will read this next one from Elizabeth, who is a first time mom with a four month old at home. Congratulations. And lots of middle of the night feeding time with the Kindle. And that's all the information we have. And I was like, I don't know what to do for this person. It's too much. So I went to blank check recommendation and I had exclamation points and question marks.
And this is a time to steal from my previous work that hasn't been in the main feed, which was what we did for the most recommendable books of the century so far. I was like, I'm just going to pick my number one pick. And my number one pick there was The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, which is a little bit of everything. It's a bit of a family drama. It's a bit of a mystery. It's a bit of a historical novel. It's about a pair of sisters in Louisiana who are light skinned.
And that affords them choices about whether or not to pass. And one of them makes one decision, one doesn't. And they go through the world and they separate and come back together and satisfying in an interesting ways that I don't want to spoil too much here. But without knowing much about anyone, except that they listen to the Book Riot podcast, I think that's as good of a straight up. I think there's going to be some part of this that's going to connect with most readers. That's as close as I can because a guarantee is what I say there.
I respect your courage here. I'm going to piggyback on your move and just pull from my bag of most recommendable and say Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain. It's 25 years old this year. And I don't know how old you are, Elizabeth, but there's, I think, a good chance you have not read this. Mm-hmm.
This swaggering, fun voice of a young Anthony Bourdain who stumbles into working in kitchens and finds them to be like pirate ships and just cannot resist it. And we have all the food writing and really like the culture of food TV today that we have because Bourdain wrote this book and made the world of food interesting and exciting and accessible for people who haven't worked before.
in kitchens i mean if you have ever enjoyed like one hour of anthony bourdain on tv you need to go read kitchen confidential like the voice is all there all of the things that we came to love about him over time are there and you know it's 25 years old as well so some of the perspectives
He endorses in this book. He was not endorsing by the time his career was over and by the time like Me Too had hit and the restaurant culture had changed. But it's a it's an incredible read. It's super fun. He would keep you good company in the middle of the night. And we're going to get a Bourdain biopic in the next year or two that I think is largely grounded in the stories in Kitchen Confidence.
So you can prep for that as well. For the other stuff that he did, I like it all, but he never quite hit the heights of kitchen confidential again because it was revelatory. And it holds up. Like we read a couple of years ago, as Rebecca said, there are some parts of it that I don't know
land quite the same way today, but the underlying Bourdain-ness is pure, uncut, unfiltered. It is the real McCoy, his sense of adventure, play, bodiedness, respect, subversiveness. His literate and literary swagger is on full display, sort of right out the gate, which is sort of unbelievable and hard to imagine.
It just kind of grabs you by the throat. Yeah, it really does. And on the sentence level too, I think is underrated. It's fun to read on a sentence level. It's a good book. Which you can't say about all food writing. No, you can't say it about most food writing. No, you can't say it about most food. I didn't want to say it. I teed you up to be the jerk. The mean one. Jeff O'Neill, not the worst.
All right. All right. This next one is Jeff Corr also, so I'll read it. This is from Allie. They are looking for a book for their mom who loved House on the Cerulean Sea, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, and Under the Whispering Door. Looking for any good books with a similar vibe and preferably a killer audiobook reader. I don't have a lot of experience with this, which is cozy fantasy. We're talking with Automatic Noodle Cozy Sci-Fi, though Automatic Noodle might be interesting. If you have an audiobook...
preview selection in whatever your audiobook of choice is, I would try that one too. You could also, and I didn't do this because I would just be doing the Googling for you, like cozy fantasy is a established genre now and I'm sure we have some stuff on Book Riot or you can find some other stuff. But the one that I have read, and I have read Under the Cerulean Sea and somewhere beyond, I'm screwing these up, I've read The Clunes.
And the one that's really close to me, and if it's just me, if I'm perfectly honest, I think my family preferred the Clune, but I like Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldry a little bit better. It is found family with a speculative hook. Here it's like a D&D-ish world, right? There's knights and magic and, you know, everything. But the main character is an orc who's just coming off a big quest and
And she wants to retire. And what she wants to do, she discovered this gnomish invention called coffee. And so what she wants to do is go to this little fantasy medieval town and open a coffee shop and get away from the slings and arrows of the questing life.
and meets with remnants of her past and new friends and challenges, opens her heart and doors and wallet and mind to a cozier existence. There's like one or two little action scenes. They're bigger, but most of it is how does one set up a coffee shop in a medieval fantasy village?
Where do you get the espresso machine? How do you explain coffee to people who don't know it? They call it bean water for a while, which is funny, but it's also a really good audio. And then there's a sequel called Bookshops and Bone Dust, which is a prequel about that same character kind of getting the idea for running a small shop when she helps out in a medieval D&D bookshop at the same time. So that's a pretty checker on a checker, I think a lot of people would agree. Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldry.
- This reminds me, my mom drinks her coffee so watered down with cream that my dad calls it scared water. - Scared water, yeah. Milky bean water is what the latte is before they name it. I'm not even sure they say the word latte in the course of the book. Okay. - That's funny.
The mom in question is me I'm in a reading slump. Nothing I've read recently has made me want to shout from the rooftops. I read mostly classics literary fiction and short stories I love risky experiments that work so well they blow my mind. Think complex structure, blending fact and fiction, unusual narrative voices, etc.
I enjoy magical realism, especially Salman Rushdie, Helen Oyeyemi, Janet Winterson, Jeanette Winterson, and Richard Powers. The last few books that hit every mark for me were The Old Drift by Nam Wali Serpell, and When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labateau. That book was awesome. Recently excited about but didn't quite love Yes, No by Esther Yee, which is a very strange book. The Girl I Am Was and There Will Be by Shannon Gibney.
My love of experiments applies to classics, too, if you want to go there. Gertrude Stein and Lose Me, but favorites are Air One by Samuel Butler, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and The Pillow Book by Sey Shunagon. All right, Rebecca, what do you have?
I'm going with a couple of our recent reads that we enjoyed here. We Do Not Part by Han Kang opens with a woman getting a call from a longtime friend who is in the hospital and needs her to come immediately and then kind of sets her off on this quest to go to the woman's house and maybe take care of her pets. But it quickly enters a sort of dreamlike state where we're not totally sure what's actually happening to the narrator.
Hong Kong does not want you to be totally sure what's happening to the narrator, but it's beautifully written. And even when you are suspended in that place of not knowing what's happening in the story, you know that you're in really good hands with the writer. And that's the feeling you're supposed to be having. It's just really pleasurable and masterfully done. Like, oh, there's a reason she has a Nobel Prize.
And all things Katie Kitamura. You could start with her debut if you wanted, go to A Separation. Intimacies is the second novel. And then, of course, we both just read Audition. All of them play with structure, with voice, with perspective, with what characters understand about themselves and what we do or don't understand about them. And what's real or not. Audition more than any of them.
than either of the previous two, but they are both, all three of them are really wonderful and they are tight. Since you like short stories, like these are books that are under 200 pages and she accomplishes a whole lot. They don't read like a short story, but her story,
just like economy of language feels like a short story vibe to me, that there's not a word out of place. All of the sentences serve important purposes. It's enjoyable to read on that level as well. Like you can just enjoy what Kitamura does with language, but the impact of the language and what it feels like to read her, I think is the kind of feeling you're going for here. Look, there's one answer here for me. And I think, Kara, you invited it, so I'm doing it.
Go for it. This is what you wrote us. And this is true. And you have not read 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. This is your K2 to climb. This is the book I would recommend. I have Cane by Gene Toomer, which is a short novel experimental of the Harlem Renaissance. Really cool short with poetry and passages that link together in a really interesting way. Ted Chiang short stories I could recommend. But all of that is me being a coward.
And not just saying, to get thee to the 1100-page behemoth Goliath magnum opus, mind-bending, frustrating, beautiful work of not mystery, not thriller, but all genres wrapped up into one that was published the year after Bolaño died. The capstone work to a monumental career and sits comfortably aside, I think, for
The Ulysses of the world, the Moby Dicks of the world, and all the pleasures and frustrations that are attended upon those books will be found in 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. So there it is. Go forth and conquer. Good luck to you.
It's a big one. Okay, here we go. Oh, look at this. Praise for me. For me. I know. Let me read the praise for you. Just sit over there and bask in it. From Alana, who will be buying their dad Jeff's favorite phosphorus book, which is a real book. So Jeff, take credit for at least one sale. It's going to register in the Amazon rankings, this conversation right here. White Light is what it's called.
Also, thanks in general for all we do for Championing Books and providing a temporary distraction from the world. We are happy to be here for you. Not the only ones being distracted when we do these. Right.
We are looking for further ideas for Dad, who has enjoyed some of our front-list foyer picks in the past. Got him Foundryside, Infinity Gate, and All Systems Red, the Murderbot Diaries. A lot of action for Murderbot in these recommendations. And as I should mention that the Apple TV adaptation drops next week. I read the first one a long time ago and remember really liking it, but I don't do long-running series. I've got things to try.
I'm going to read the first one this weekend and then we're going to like, I am compelled by Alexander Skarsgård. Beloved by the BR rank and file contributor core, I would say. Yeah. So dad loved all of those recs and now Ilana's at a loss as to what else he might like. We're also looking for stepmom who is 80 and has read extensively her whole life, all the classics and a lot of current releases too. Is there anything I can get that's under the radar enough that she won't have come across it already? Yeah.
Well, here again, we find ourselves, we use the one bullet Project Hail Mary for dad.
This is the easiest one and we're going to have today. There's no question there. In terms of underrated things, this is where I get a chance to talk about The Orchard by one Adele Crockett Robertson here for Stepmom because it's under known. There's no way she knows this book. You have gotten so much unexpectedly wonderful mileage out of The Orchard. You know what? Oh, you should be so proud of me. I picked up a book I didn't understand and I'm like, this seems wrong, but I'm going to continue through and here we go. Life is hard.
Life in four dimensions. That's what's happening right now. Going one above. This is nonfiction. The setup here, if you haven't heard me rave and rant about this book before, is that Adele Crockett-Robbins' daughter, Betsy, I believe her name is, was going through her mom's house after her mom had passed and found this manuscript under her bed. Her mom had been a journalist and a newspaper writer for a long time, so writing wasn't unexpected.
But this memoir of her time as a younger woman trying to keep the family apple orchard alive during the Depression was in it. And it's beautiful and moving. And it has sort of a Steinbeckian quality to the writing that Adele Crockett Roberts herself does. It's not dissimilar of time, of course. It is the 30s. But people and the land and trying to make it work against all odds.
It's beautiful and wonderful and I think, especially an older person might have some appreciation for the layers of this memoir and the daughter finding it and this mother daughter sort of relationship that is between and around the pages as well. Um,
And then one that I often mention for under known classics is Oreo by Fran Ross. It was rereleased by, I'm looking it up right now, the publisher, I should have done this before. I think it was Gray Wolf a few years ago. It came out of, yeah, 2015. Wow, that's amazing. But Fran Ross is multiracial. And this is a satire about being a biracial black girl from Philadelphia who
who goes to look for her Jewish father in New York City. And it has a New York sort of mid-century feel of it. Like you could imagine like
This standing alongside, maybe above, some Philip Roth kinds of works, right? Because it has ultimate, it's different kinds of dimensions, a different personality, different perspective. Not above, but I think it sits right outside those things. So if Philip Roth is now classics, right? We're now looking at 50 years since the height of his powers in the 70s. I think this came out in 1974 or 1975. It got great reviews when it came out.
feels ahead of its time. Again, it's been 10 years since I've read this, but I feel like if this came out today, it would be like picked for book clubs and like it would be talked about. Like it's a terrific book. So that's Oreo by Fran Ross and funny, I should say at the same time.
I have nothing for dad here because Project Hail Mary is the perfect recommendation. Number one with a bullet. For your stepmom, Stoner by John Williams. Under-celebrated kind of classic from New York Review of Books. Yes.
When I was early blogging, Stoner seems to have a renaissance like every 10 years. And it had one in my early blogging days. I had never heard of it, but it's set in Columbia, Missouri at the University of Missouri about a literature professor who has worked there his entire life. And it's just a
It's kind of in the old men waiting to die genre, just this quiet novel about an older person who's had an academic life and it's just lovely. But you don't encounter it on a lot of like big lists of classics. And so if your step-mom has been reading her way through the kinds of things that are on, you know, like a college syllabus, she just might not have come across it. I also think passing by Nella Larson might be a good under the radar pick, um,
here are just a really phenomenal novel. If your stepmom has read Brit Bennett's like talking about the vanishing half, that kind of story has its roots in what Larson does in passing. It's set out, I think the 1920s in Harlem, the two main characters are light-skinned black women
One of them is married, has kids, living in Harlem as a black woman, and she reconnects with this old friend and discovers that her old friend has been passing as a white woman. And each woman admires and is scared of something in the other woman's experience. They're very curious. Like the woman who is living as a black woman is intrigued by what it might be like to be able to walk through the world and have the privilege and experience of being perceived as white. And the woman who's passing is
wonders what it would have been like if she had accepted her racial identity and had that connection to the Black community that she sees in her friend. It is as complicated and difficult and beautiful and challenging and just layered and complex as it sounds like it would be. And I think most of us come across this later in our reading lives. Like, I did not encounter this on a list of classics or syllabi.
in school. So it's more under the radar than it should be, certainly. So I'll just take any opportunity to recommend it. I'll throw a hat on the hat here and you can kind of see what we're doing, right? Is like these writers from an earlier time that maybe didn't get the due that they could have. I'll put one more. The Living is Easy by Dorothy West came out in 1948. She was the youngest really of the Harlem generation, Harlem Renaissance generation. This book, the main character whose name, excuse me, I'm sorry, is
David Carrico: Was a sharecropper and then ingratiate yourself into the elite of Boston society and black Boston society is specifically David Carrico: And then get her sisters to come along and her kids, but maybe not their sisters husbands and sort of like trying to the living as easy as an ironical tire like trying to find a way to an easier quote unquote life.
But then the costs of that. So it's a bit of, you know, I think a comp might be like Edith Wharton of Black Boston in the 40s is not the worst way to describe it there. So it's going to feel like a classic because it's almost 100 years and is of a time and a place but still reads quite well. I think it's been, it's been some time.
Okay, I'll do the next read. I've graduated into my middle age, pickleball playing, early bird dining, watching birds out my kitchen window, drinking coffee in a bathroom at sunrise air. I love it. My most recent favorite books are Sunrise on the Reaping, All the Colors of the Dark, and the new John Boyne Element series, Fire Was Dark. Help me buy myself a graduation into the later's 40 present. Rebecca, what did you
I love everything about this question. Did I write this? It's your name, but I could have written this. Yeah, pave the way for me into the later 40s from here in my early 40s. I'll start with Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, which came out earlier this year, set in Australia about a woman who is at this same time of life. And all we understand is that she has left
a successful career and a marriage and moved into basically a convent, a monastery of sorts. She is not religious. When we first meet her, she has gone on a retreat there. And then the book comes back several years later and she has moved there. She has not taken vows, but she has become a part of this community. And it's a lot of her sitting around thinking about her life and observing the people around her. Not a lot of like
Big philosophical questions written directly onto the page. But as she observes the women around her and observes herself in those, in the interactions and the situations she has and drops little reflections about the life she had before. I think it just has a midlife flavor to it. I really loved it. It's just a great quiet novel. This is the place where I have to ring the bell and recommend When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams. This is it.
Yeah. If you have not heard me talk about this before, Terry Tempest Williams' mother died at the age of 54 and left behind her lifetime's collection of journals. They come from the Mormon tradition where this is a thing that one does is women collect journals about their lives and then they pass them down to their daughters. The year that she is 54, Terry Tempest Williams goes finally to read her mother's journals and discovers that they're all blank.
True story. One of the more indelible images of our sort of reading career so far, like a memorable hook and scene, really epitomic in its way. It is. And that's the pitch is inherits her mother's journals and finds out that this lifetime collection of journals is blank, which begs the question, why keep a bunch of journals if you're never going to write in them?
And so the book is 54 variations on voice. It's 54 little vignettes. It's a slight book where Williams is wondering, like, why, what is my mother saying to me by choosing not to say anything? Is this about what she kept for herself? What does it mean to have a voice and to choose not to use it in this particular way? What are the duties of having a voice? How might, how might I use my voice? Yeah.
I mean, this was one like this book did me in when I read it. I read it like four times in a row. I think about it constantly still. It's been about a decade. I just can't recommend it enough. And then since you did talk about, you know, some more genre tinted things here, I thought I would toss in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro about kids who are growing up at a boarding school in Britain.
And they and we understand that something is strange about their lives. Something sinister is maybe going on. I'm not going to spoil what that thing is. But it's about connection and empathy and the value of human life and the relationships that we have with each other. And it's just the kinds of questions that we're asking in midlife. I think Ishiguro really lingers on those and manages to tell a really compelling story while he's doing it.
Yeah, very good picks. So I can't believe that Annie Dillard was only like 35 when she wrote The Pilgrimate Tinker. It's incredible. Because A, it feels like the kind of book and thing you do when you're older, which is that she goes and lives on a creek and writes about what happens there. And that sounds boring. It is not. It is not.
It's like the Mary Oliver of prose is not the worst way to describe what Annie Dillard is doing of like looking at nature but also connecting it to life, the universe and everything and doing it in scintillating, accessible, spare and exciting sentence level and micro revelations and moments.
It's really terrific stuff. And then from there, you could go pick up some of the other books if you like it. But I think The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for me, I'm not sure is it's her best selling book. This is the kind of thing you could go look at Goodreads, I guess, and see which has the most shelvings even for a book like this. Do you think this is a TikTok sensation waiting to happen? The work of Annie Dillard, Rebecca?
I wish I thought this was a TikTok sensation. I would have a little more faith in what social media is doing to us if we could make Annie Dillard go viral. It's a good Patreon episode. TikTok sensations that would surprise and delight us the most. Annie Dillard would really be up there. I cannot besmirch anyone's hobby.
Both, it's not my nature, nor do I have any grounds to do so because I will read about even the hobbies I would find the most mind-numbingly boring, and I would include birdwatching in. Not for me. I'm glad everyone's having a good time. But what I will do is read a book about birdwatching and be delighted by Amy Tan's The Backyard Bird Chronicles, which is about her...
let's say ramping up of her hobby and life pursuit of watching and cultivating a birdwatching environment in her backyard. If one can be extra about birdwatching, Amy Tan is. What a great word. And it's delightful and satisfying. And she applies her considerable observational and literary skill to what seemed to me a, just a bunch of,
air trash in your backyard eating seeds, but I will read it. Shots fired. The birds are taking strays. Air trash? They just, to me, it's just a group of birds. My joke when we lived in New York and Aims wouldn't know what birds was, like, there's two kinds of birds. There's the greater brown bird and the lesser brown bird. And they fell into two categories. Oh,
man you're gonna get some emails that's fine i'm so happy for you and this is my mea culpa is i love this book and i think you will too rebecca because you already like doing boring shit which is watching birds out your window but this is fun this is a fun book it sold quite well from what i've been told it did it sold quite well it's the the physical version has some nice illustrations i think amy tan's own drawings are in it and but i did an audio uh
which was also delightful. So the Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan is my, there's no backhanded compliment. That's a forehand. The two double forehand, like a high 10 for the Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan. All right. This next one is from Lindsay looking for books for herself so she can tell her partner what to buy her for Mother's Day.
recommendations for highly literary speculative fiction the kind where i feel like i need a dictionary on hand but there is also a strong plot and imaginative elements a la cloud atlas the luminaries hyperion the seven moons of mali almeda cloud cuckoo land and playground give me a puzzle box of a book it can be a doorstopper as long as it's really well written i love ted chang and nana kwame ajay brinja but i'm not looking for short story collections so i first my first um
thought was Cloud Atlas, but then I realized I thought that Cloud Cuckoo Land was the only cloud-based literary experimental doorstopper that you got. So I say get thee to Salman Rushdie.
This also, for whoever I recommended Bolaño to above, if you have not encountered Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, of course, a satanic versus. I like Midnight's Children a little bit better myself. I think that's maybe a majority opinion amongst the minority of us that have an opinion about which of those two books might be preferable. But Salman Rushdie's Victory City, which came out a couple years ago,
that I talked about on the show a couple times is quite accessible if you haven't done Salman Rushdie before. This is a really good entry point. It was... he did not promote the novel because he had been attacked as as chronicled in Knife, so I'm not sure it got the push that it could have.
But it does all these kinds of things that Rushdie does. It has a supernatural element. It's about East and West. It's about the power of language and story to literally have magic be brought into the world. I'm not going to read the synopsis because that's beside the point. You should do so.
I think this is a good place to start. If you're like, you know what, I want a Rushdie on my belt and you're going to do one, I would think I would make it Midnight's Children, but I can recommend this a little more full-throatedly because it's been, you know, less than two decades since I read it, which is a very careful thing I want to do here. But Rushdie writ large, Victory City in specific, and Midnight's Children sort of always for Rushdie there. That's my choice.
Right. The phrase highly literary speculative fiction puts me immediately on Ishiguro. It's like saying the Candyman three times. It's just like Ishiguro is here with us now. Also, there's a reason that he has a Nobo. I would go to Clara and the Sun, which is set in a near future where people have robots that companion robots, basically. And Clara is a companion artificial intelligence. We experience the whole story of the book through Clara's eyes.
And it, I mean, it's just really something. I remember reading it together and book clubbing it for the show or maybe for the Patreon and both just being like, well, you know, on the first page that you're all the way in here, um,
It's incredibly human and empathetic. Ishiguro is just magisterial and putting us into the feelings and perspective and also the distance that an AI being in this story has to observe humans and humanity and wonder about what it is that we're doing and what we're trying to do. Just really incredible. The Fraud by Zadie Smith. I didn't thought of that for this, but that's a nice pick. Thank you.
And I feel like I just have to mea culpa forever because I thought I was going to be out on the fraud by Zadie Smith. You were prejudging this like a boss. It was really something to behold. I mean, I still think the slug line on it is bad. That it's about a literary dispute and a fraudulent story. Like a public fraud in a politician situation and then a bunch of Victorian novelists. What Zadie Smith does with that makes it...
It's incredible. It's just incredible. And the synopsis almost made me not read it, but I know better than to question the queen now. You see the Z, you buy the book. That's what you've learned. Right. We'll never, we'll never question Sadie again. And I think Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake might be a place to go here. Not as much plot, not quite speculative, but it feels that way because she is...
kind of a spy, kind of an operative that gets hired by these like kind of shady big corporate people that she doesn't even totally know who they are. And in this book, she is infiltrating a group of environmental activists that are trying to block the
some big thing, this project that's happening that would damage the environment, but that would further business interests for people. And she has feelings about her being a spy. She has feelings about the people that she interacts with. It's just kind of unsettling the whole time. The writing is phenomenal. There you go. A couple more for today. Yeah. Should we take another break? Yeah, let's do one more break and then we'll do a couple more. We'll catch the rest of the next episode.
Today's episode is brought to you by The Floating World by Axio. Sun Ho lives in the underworld, a land of perpetual darkness. An ex-soldier, he can remember little of his life from before two years ago when he woke up alone with only his name and his sword.
Rin, on the other hand, is a cheerful and spirited acrobat traveling with her adoptive family. But when their village is attacked by a horrific human-like demon, Rin releases a blast of silver light, a power she has kept hidden since childhood, and she kills the monster. Rin sets off over the mountains and her path sets her on a collision course with Sun Ho, where their destinies are far more entwined than either of them could have imagined.
So this is Axio's Max YA Fantasy following the New York Times bestseller, The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea. It's perfect for fans of Stephanie Garber, Elizabeth Lim, Studio Ghibli, the Final Fantasy video games, and Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse. It's on my TBR. I'm looking forward to it. Make sure to check it out. And thanks again to The Floating World by Axio for sponsoring this episode.
Today's episode is brought to you by Eighth Note Press, publishers of the Critters and Criminals series by Tara Lush. Even in the quirky town of Wahoo, Florida, Maggie is an anomaly, a petite but determined gator trapper who isn't afraid to get dirty.
but to fulfill her father's dying wish maggie came home to run the family business and reunite with her twin sister vera enter jack a criminology professor from miami who was renting a room from the twins jack's good with maggie's kitten and hot as hell but while maggie's debating whether she has time for a fling a body turns up in the swamp full of bullets from vera's stolen gun
To prove her sister's innocence, Maggie must recruit the professor and take up crime solving. So the first book is Gator Queen, and it's immediately followed up by Swamp Princess, naturally, where a gator trapper, Maggie, and criminology professor Jack team up again to solve the murder of a cryptozoology influencer at a Bigfoot convention. You heard right. Make sure to check out the Critters and Criminals series by Tara Lush, and thanks again to 8th Note Press for sponsoring this episode. Okay.
Please tell me a book that will teach me how to help save my local public library. It was my childhood library and I love it so much. I'm a nurse, so I've already found my vocation and dream job and I have no plans to consider running for public office. I also have some, well, I'll keep it here and say there's some things that make a poor candidate. So it's not a run for something situation. Melissa knew what we were going to say first, didn't she? Melissa listens to the show.
So I think we're both on the same tip here, which is there's not a book here to read. I did find one that is a path to the thing that you're saying, which is go be an activist in some regards. Here's what I think. The book is called The Proactivist by Dan Chiarello. You can find it in Amazon or thrift books or wherever. It doesn't look like it's in print necessarily right now. But that is just an arrow pointing towards...
Get involved and stay involved in money is a super way to good that for someone who doesn't want to be in front of a mic. I also would go talk to the head of your library system, ask them what would help them the most. It might be. Maybe you could form a political action committee. There's, there could be a friends of the library group already that's involved and you could start there. A lot of those are non political in terms of.
Yeah, they're more about helping the library raise money for its current operations and less about the meta protection of the library. But it is going to come down to, fortunately and unfortunately, who gets to say what the library can and can't do in your locality and then support someone who's going to support what you want that person to say. Right?
Right, Rebecca? I mean, that's kind of the game. Yeah, that's basically where I was going to. I don't think there is a great book here, but there's a lot of space between there's nothing to do and I don't want to run for something. Or just read a book and I don't want to run for something. Because all the people who do run for stuff and get elected into these offices, or even who get elected to like your local library board, which you might look and see who's on your library board and do they need volunteers for things, like
all of these political groups function on volunteer energy and none of them ever have enough of it. Like there is just never enough volunteer resource. And
my experience, at least I volunteer with my local county Democrats, is that you can really get in where you fit in. Like, do you have two weekends a month where you can spend a Saturday morning doing something? Do you want to knock on doors for people? Are you a good fundraiser? Do you just want to write a big check? Can you make phone calls, but you don't want to knock on doors? Like,
Are you really connected to business leaders in your community and they might be willing to come out in support of something or sponsor an event or maybe you plan an event? Local chapter of the ACLU was an interesting idea. Yeah. There really and truly is some way to get involved. And I know folks have all kinds of feelings about different political parties, but the apparatus to do this in most places is likely to be your local Democratic Party. That's a really good point.
And so if you're thinking in terms of being practical here, I would start there. How can you get plugged in to volunteer? And I guarantee you, if you type in your county and Democrats, you will find a website that has get involved and that someone will email you back very quickly about how you might be able to be connected. So I would look at that and at your local library board as well and just see they likely already have opportunities where you can just be of support and
in some way, but this is a boots on the ground situation. Yeah. There's some place for you in the streets or spreadsheets in this whole thing to
Okay, your read, I think. Last one. This is from Rachel. Looking for a compelling and well-narrated audiobook for a new dad who needs the distraction while rocking the baby to sleep. He loved Challenger, thanks to Jeff, good job, Kitchen Confidential, and the go-to contemporary biographies of the big tech giants. Do we have any recommendations for books in the culinary tech or compelling history space? In other words, not the standard World War II stuff.
and ones that we enjoyed the narrator of. Thanks so much. Yeah, Mukherjee. Yes. Emperor of All Maladies, tech, the best written popular science book of all time. It's not close. I don't think it's particularly close. Email me, podcast at bookride.com. If you've got a contender, I can say is inferior to your email face. So that's an easy one.
You know, I've seen a lot of Challenger love recently. And the easiest thing then is go look at Midnight in Chernobyl by one Adam Higginbotham, which I think is a superior. But it's because I knew less about it. It is about the meltdown of Reactor 5 in Chernobyl and got turned into an unbelievably harrowing, nerdy series on Apple TV. Is that Chernobyl? I think so. Anyway. Anyway.
So that's two. The last one to me is along the Challenger vein, One Giant Leap by Charles Fishman, which is about NASA up until the moon landing, which I think there is not as many comprehensive stories of NASA that aren't
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe or a memoir. I'm sure there's been others, but this one leapt out to me one day when it was new and I listened to it all and it's quite long and well narrated, which in my memory of rocking a baby to sleep with my AirPods in is exactly what I'm looking for. So those Empire of All Maladies, Midnight in Chernobyl, and then One Giant Leap by Charles Fishman. As you were talking, I wonder, is this the place where we drop the works of Patrick Radden Keefe?
Like, this feels like he might be in the zone to do some say nothing. Yeah, I mean, if he's ready to make the switch, you know, fatherhood changes a man, and he might be ready to go New Yorker writer book. And I think the Kitchen Conventional Books Challenger, if you kind of hold them next to each other, books by New Yorker writers sort of appear like as an emergent property of those two poles.
If you cross-pollinate, yeah, that's what you get. I think that's right. So for the food writing tip, I'll go on Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, one of the sort of early aughts
Classic food memoirs. Really love her. Eat a Peach by David Chang more recently. And this book came out after the reckoning with kitchen culture had really taken hold. And Chang was part of that, but also reckoning with his own behavior in a lot of ways. Eat a Peach and Contradictional together are quite a...
bookend of food writing. Yeah, and Bourdain was a good friend and mentor to David Chang, so those do really go together if your partner here has not read Eat a Peach. And then one that probably just hasn't made its way to him is Black, White, and the Gray by Mashima Bailey and John Omorosano. Mashima Bailey is the chef behind the restaurant The Gray in Savannah, which is a
wonderful Michelin starred restaurant. She is a rare black chef in the U S who has that kind of a claim. And John O'Morrisano is her business partner. He's a like media and tech money guy. And the book is their dual memoir about starting this business, celebrating the restaurant together. And a really, as the subtitle of it gets to an unexpected friendship, like these are kind of an odd couple that you would not expect to,
You might expect them to work together and do okay, but the way that their relationship unfolds is really cool and fun to hear. And The Grey is an amazing restaurant experience. So I have to toss that one out. All right. So end of part one. You can email us podcast at bookriot.com. Check out the Patreon because shortly, today, tomorrow, the summer draft will be there and ready for you to watch.
Cast your votes on if you are on a Patreon member. Thanks to our Patreon members who get to support us and let us do weird stuff. Like rate the short stories of Marie Helene Bertino by how Marie Helene Bertino are there. And that was a ton of fun. It was such a good time. I got to see it in the wild. There's a literary arts, which is a literary organization in Portland has a new storefront and bookstore, which I finally made it to on Sunday. And right up front, we're auditioning Exit Zero. And I'm like, my people are here.
They're just like, Jack. There was something else there. Oh, they had Life in Three Dimensions out. And I was like, this is a very well curated bookstore, which is kind of a self compliment. But what else are you going to do in that kind of a situation? You know, it feels good to be seen. That's right. All right, Rebecca, we'll talk to you later. Thanks, Jeff.