Recent Reading and Some Media Diet Updates [Teaser]
05:40 Share

You're listening to a teaser for Book Riot Podcast premium content. If you want to hear the rest, join us at patreon.com slash bookriotpodcast. For just $10 a month, get access to our full library of premium content. In addition to receiving early ad-free access to the regular episodes you hear in the show. Here we go.

All right. We're about to enter on into a series of weeks in which we're not going to be doing regular pods. And we haven't really done a front list for you in a while because we have some other stuff going on. So we're going to check in with recent reading. Also, you know, recent cultural stuff because I saw Mission Impossible. I went to Pandor. I saw Fountain of Youth on Apple TV. So we haven't checked in a while. So we're just going to do what we've been watching and reading and, you know, give our heat checks to this kind of stuff.

Yeah, I'm excited to like check in on what we've been reading because it has already, as you were saying, been a couple of weeks since we had a front list foyer. And then like I'm about to be out for two weeks. And then I think we have like four overlapping days before you go away. It's going to be podcasting just like marathons. Yeah. And this is just also code for like things are going to be really unhinged in July when we are reunited. Because that's what happens. Yeah.

I was looking at a recent reading stuff and let's start here because I don't remember what you ultimately thought of it, but you did eventually read Tilt by Emma Petit, I believe.

Did you not? I did. Yes. I don't think we ever talked about it. I did. I really liked it. You liked it. I don't think we did either. We texted about it maybe. I really liked it. It weirded me out reading the name of the taco place in your neighborhood. Yes, right. And so it had to be extra freaky for you, like having mental imagery of all of those locations that she's writing about. I thought it was great. I read it in one sitting, like a full, just sat down on a Saturday. I feel like you had prepared me well for the fact that that's what I was going to want to do.

I haven't seen it. I don't know that it's doing particularly well. I know they had hopes for it and I know pals was trying to get behind it here. Um, and there's been people and Patreon listeners and pod listeners that said they read it and really liked it. I haven't really seen a bunch of negative. I mean, just really didn't look, this is what books are. There's a lot of good books. Sometimes they don't hit just because I read this one early and liked it did not have it mean it was gonna have any better shot than anything else of, of doing anything. But, um,

Kind of seems like a long time ago. It does feel like a long time ago that we were talking about it. Yeah, Powell's is continuing to do some. They did like an emergency preparedness day thing around it and the whole thing. Interesting. I mean, smart for Portland. Yeah. Okay, so I wanted to make sure I asked about that. I'll be thinking about it next time I go to IKEA. What else do you want to name check?

You know, I read The Dry Season by Melissa Phoebus. Vanessa and I talked about it a little bit a couple of weeks ago, but I definitely want to name check that because it had been one of my most anticipated for the season. I picked it up like several weeks in advance of its publication date.

For folks who haven't heard the description, I mean, first of all, she's an incredible memoirist and essay writer. But this is the memoir of she has come out of a very abusive relationship that was the subject of her previous memoir, Abandon Me.

And she like it's not immediately after that, but she gets out of the abusive relationship and has a string of relationships, flirtations, dalliances, like whatever you want to call them, and realizes that maybe she relies on sex, relationships, romance in a way that.

isn't serving her as well as it could or maybe she needs to like press the reset button so she decides to be celibate for three months it extends into a six-month project and during that time because she's also sober she brings in some tools from her sobriety practice where she undertakes an inventory of all of the romantic relationships in her life working backwards so

and is looking for patterns and looking for like, what did I get out of this? What didn't work? What are the things I repeated over and over? And at the same time, she's doing a lot of reading about women who were celibate for various reasons throughout history. Most of them were mystics and nuns. So she spends a good portion of time, like she has all this new free time because she's not flirting with people. She's not taking people home. Yeah.

She's not dating. Didn't really think about the hours that opened up for you. Yeah. And I think she hadn't either, but she's thinking about like, oh, one of the ways that we have all of this incredible writing from women in, especially like medieval times is that those were the only women who were really free to do creative thinking like that because they weren't subject to marriages. And that really at certain points in time, the only ways that a woman could be free was writing.

really the only real way was to be a nun. Shut it down. Right. Marry God. And then you don't have to deal with a man.

You can explore your own mystical leanings or creative insights and maybe have relationships with other women in those places. And just kind of for me, that was the perfect mix of stuff like just a memoir of celibacy could be interesting, but that Phoebus is always working on several levels. And so that she's like, let me consider why other people do this. Let me take an inventory of all my relationships.

what was I getting out of it? She's just like so, so honest in a way about things that like, I would need a couple glasses of wine to be that honest with my very best friend. I can barely listen to you talk about it. Thanks so much for listening. Join us at patreon.com slash bookriotpodcast to hear the rest of this episode and get access to our full back catalog of premium content. That's patreon.com slash bookriotpodcast.