Talking Audiobooks with Spotify & FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi
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Welcome to Those Who Can't Teach Anymore, a narrative podcast series that explores why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. This season, we're getting a look at the year and the life of teachers from across the country through their audio journals. I am Darcy Oftermiller. This is Megan Overgoth. This is Sophie V. This is Charlie Blackwood. This is Taylor Barrett. This is Iva Moss Redmond. This is David Whisker. This is Dan Morris. This is Amanda Smith. Look for Those Who Can't Teach Anymore, Season 2, A Different Kind of the Same Thing. ♪

Welcome to the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. We have two segments today. Up first, Rebecca and I talk to Katie Del Rosario, who is the Associate Director of

of audiobook editorial for Spotify, which means she works on the audiobooks that are presented, curated, listed, recommended, listened to on the Spotify platform for their listeners. Really interesting conversation. There, also, in the second half of the show, Sharifa is back. She joins me to talk about one of the marquee releases of June, the summer of the year, really,

Flashlight by Susan Choi. Susan Choi, who of course won the National Book Award for Trust Exercise. And this is a really anticipated book. We talk about our reading experience with that book, who we think was going to like it, and get into it a little bit. There's some pre-spoiler discussion for those of you who don't want that, and then some spoiler discussion where we talk about what happens in the book. They're also available now, and there'll be a link in the show notes, bookright.com slash listen.com.

Our next event at Powell's, Rebecca's coming back out July 9th. We're going to be talking about the best books of the year so far over there. We have some people from Powell's join us as well. You're going to hear more about that. Link in the show notes. Tickets are available. Had a good time. Hope you can come out. If you made it last time, come again. If you couldn't make it last time, come out. That's July 9th. We'll talk more about that, of course. And without further ado, let's get into the show.

All right, Rebecca, who do we have today? We're joined by Katie Del Rosario. She is the Associate Director of Audiobooks Editorial at Spotify. Katie, thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I've heard the title twice now, Rebecca, and I still can't remember what it is. But Katie, what is your title again? And what the hell do you do at Spotify? Yeah, I'm the Associate Director of Audiobooks Editorial at Spotify. I'm a

And really, you know, I lead a team of amazing editors who spend their day curating playlists. We craft thematic collections, work really closely with book publishers, and ultimately spend a lot of time reading and listening to hundreds of books a year in order to bring the best possible recommendations to Spotify's listeners and fans. So we've been covering Spotify's audiobook forays really since the very beginning where there was...

Listen to 15 hours as part of your premium subscription. And we've had people talk to us, civilians in our lives are like, I can do this now. What should I listen to? And I'll be honest with you, Katie, that's kind of the extent of my knowledge of the Spotify audiobook experience. And listen, I know I'm an unusual listener because I kind of know what I'm looking for. So I go to Spotify. I got some other places I go.

What else is there? What have been the post-launch things that are exciting and interesting that have gotten some traction or that you guys find really interesting for people to know about?

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think I'll start with just some high level stats, if that's okay. Yes, we love stats. You can start there, continue there and end there. That's fine with us. Awesome. So, I mean, I think first and foremost, our catalog is huge. We have more than 400,000 audiobooks available, which is a mind boggling number in our catalog. And that's particularly for English language markets. So that's US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.

And then last fall, we expanded to France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. And then just this spring to Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. So we're live in a lot of territories, which is super exciting. And every time we launch a new territory, our editorial team grows, which is thrilling for me.

In our English language territories, listeners can enjoy 15 hours of audiobook listening with premium every month. And in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland, they can enjoy 12 hours every month, which is great. I'm sure there's an interesting reason for that that we can't get into, but that's fascinating.

Correct. You know, and then I think, you know, your question of what has been most interesting and surprising about making audiobooks part of premium, I think there's a couple things like, one, I will say, you know, our goal is really to introduce audiobook listening to a super casual audience, right? Customers who people who aren't necessarily deep in the books world already are deep into the format already. And

And the goal overall is to, you know, increase listening overall. And, you know, what we're showing is we're kind of we're starting to do that, which is really exciting. So, you know, a we've seen really strong signals that our audio books offering is a value add that our premium listeners want and care about. And in English language markets, we've seen over 35 percent growth in listening hours year over year, which is super exciting.

And then I think, you know, from a content perspective, I think one of the things that's most exciting to me is just how successful backlist listening has been. You know, I think as somebody who, I mean, I've been in the industry since 2004, so 21 years now, I think it's really rare that you have an opportunity to, you know, everyone's interested in new releases. That's what's trending on TikTok. It's, you know, very timely. But

But we've been able to, you know, because of our discovery driven model, we've really been able to breathe new life into backlist and niche titles. There are so many gems in the backlist catalog. And we look at Wrapped last year, for example, seven of our top 10 audio books were backlist, which is really exciting. And only two of them were by Sarah J. Maas. Exactly. And five of them are over five years old. So we're really able to, you know, find new audiences for these titles and create new revenue streams for publishers and authors. Yeah.

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That's been one of the most interesting things to me as a Spotify user for all of my things is pulling up my Spotify app and getting the audiobook recommendations and seeing like, either Spotify really, really knows me, which I think Spotify really does. Or they're making some targeted efforts to highlight certain titles. Are you all

finding backlist titles that you're pulling forward? Or is that more of a passive users are going towards some of those you got the bump from ACOTAR being big everywhere. So it was big on your bestseller list. Like, how's that working in terms of curation? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a little bit of both, to be honest, you know, I mean, I think when when we think about

algorithm, we think, you know, we really have a great blend of kind of human efforts and algorithmic efforts, right? I mean, obviously, we do leverage the power of algorithms to personalize recommendations based on your listening history and preferences. But it's so important for Spotify to have the human touch of editors. And you see that across all content types, music, podcasts, and audiobooks. And we, you know, our expert editors are constantly curating playlists, crafting those collections and finding hidden gems. And I mean,

All of us, many, I would say most of us come from the industry. And so we're really keen to share the books that we love and that we think our customers are going to love. So we're constantly, you know, digging through our whole catalog and trying to make it shine. Do you hear from list? Like, so you see all the data on the back end, who's listening to what, you know, what's trending, listen through rates, all that kind of stuff.

Do you have other avenues for listeners to give you feedback for Spotify audiobooks? Like, how do you know what you should be working on next? Or how do you know what is awesome or maybe what could be some tweaks in terms of the listener experience?

I mean, I think for us, it's that magic combination of like paying attention to industry trends and publishers and the data, right? I mean, it's really, I, you know, we call ourselves editors, but my team, we often think of ourselves as booksellers, right? And so I think it's that we bring kind of that same magic that I think great booksellers have into the equation, right? And we're really, you know, what's trending on TikTok? What are our publishers talking about? What are they excited about? Everyone's, you know, reading books.

And listening to kind of industry news and trends and bringing those together in a great way to kind of figure out where we should pay attention. I think, too, another thing that's interesting is

that Spotify has some of its own original audio books and original sort of things that go on. How do you navigate that? Do you see that those perform? I mean, you know, use qualitative rather than quantitative. Rebecca and I will stay quantitative, but we also understand that can be dicey. But talk about how, I don't know if your team chooses and how you source those, but that whole process of becoming a de facto audio publisher as well for some time. It's fascinating.

Yeah, I mean, you know, that work does fit on a different team. Spotify Audiobooks is kind of its own embedded kind of little mini publishing company within our broader audiobooks team. We're really excited about that content. I think it, you know, it gives us a lot of chances to take a chance on something editorially, right? In a really exciting way. I think one of the great examples recently, just last week,

That in-house audiobook imprint released 51 titles from Bloomsbury's iconic 33 and a Third series. It's a collection of short books about legendary albums. Which is awesome. It's an awesome series. Can you say what that is? Because it's really good for this kind of listener that listens to podcasts, frankly. Yeah, it's this amazing series of books that really take a deep dive, not so much on the artist, but on a particular artist.

album. You know, so for example, you might really deep dive for a couple hours into Jagged Little Pill. And so it's just a really great way to bridge that gap between music listening and audiobook listening. And this series is so cool. First of all, the beautifully designed covers is just released last week, you can find it on our on our audiobook storefront. I think that's really cool is that we've kind of infused it with some new product experiences that we're trying out. So in this case, these to some select titles from that series include a feature called

called Follow Along. It's this immersive experience that we've been testing that now connects audiobook narration to the music itself. So if listeners are listening, that track or album actually appears in the Now Play window. It's sort of magic. So listeners can easily save it. That's wonderful. It's very cool. We were just on the show we recorded yesterday talking about some new book. Oh, I think it was talking about Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, which has a ton of music built into it. And like, I wish that I could listen to this on audio and get snippets of the book. Yeah.

or snippets of those songs that the characters are talking about pulled in. That's so exciting. And I'll just plug for listeners, if you are not familiar with the 33 and a third series, you might have seen them like in little spinners at your independent bookstore, but they are so much fun. And Jeff, they do have one about Garth Brooks in the life of Chris Gaines. How many do you have? Do you buy them just to keep them around the house? Or what do you do? I'm probably responsible for most of the sales of

Also sidebar within the sidebar, awesome Father's Day gifts. If you have a music lover, dad, uncle sort of situation, you can go pick out something that fits there. That's so cool. Katie, you were talking about finding some of the hidden gems that especially in Backlist, like we all have seen that Romanticies recent Backlist has really popped. What are some of the other hidden gems that you've seen, you know, be discovered by listeners or that you all have found and put in front of your listeners lately? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest story for us right now is spicy romance. You may have seen we ran a beautiful spicy audiobook campaign back in February. That was the third most popular genre across Spotify audiobooks last year. And I think the, you know, the thing that's really fascinating about the performance of spicy books to me is

is that while women may be 80% of that listenership, the spicier it gets, kind of male listenership grows. What we're seeing is men make up about 9% of regular Roman listenership, but kind of when it gets spicy, it's closer to 15%, which has been really interesting and a really fun opportunity to think about merchandising. And a sociology thesis that someone should write. I know.

Can I throw a hypothesis at you two and see what you think about that? Just a quick one. I haven't thought about this but for 10 seconds. I wonder because if fourth wing and the moss counts...

As Spicy Romance and Katie, you can tell me if it does. Men are picking that up because it's just trending. Like my brother picked up fourth wing because everyone's talking about it. Now, was it because it's spicier or spicier sort of has broken through to a more general audience, which was going to pick up a few more dudes? That's my theory. Katie, what do you think about that?

I think it's that, but I also think there's that through line with fantasy, right? I mean, at the end of the day, it's spicy, but it's also some just great fantasy writing and world building. And I think that gets people excited to kind of bring together those two facets into one great series. And I mean...

Sarah, that ACOTAR is just incredibly bingeable, which I think helps too. Yeah, you've got 5,000 hours of audio ahead of you if you get cracking on one of those. Rebecca, we were talking... Oh, go ahead. I had another question. So you said spicy romance was the third most popular category. I'm wondering about the first couple. Oh, that's exactly where we're going to go.

You know, I don't have that answer in front of me, but I can share a couple other areas that are really popping. One, of course, is music memoirs, which I think is, you know, with everything we've been talking about with Home Run, Fastball. And our music kind of listenership, that's no surprise. You know, when we look at like

like we're promoting like Bono's Surrender or the autobiography of Gucci Mane. If we can kind of link that to people who are listening to that artist's music, we can see upwards of like 400% plus average consumption. And we've seen music memoirs like Mark Hoppus' Fahrenheit 182, which just came out. It really resonates with younger audiences, which is really nice, and male audiences, right? Like that listenership on that title, something like 89% millennial and predominantly male audiences.

And then, of course, book to screen. Any kind of book to screen adaptation. Is that right? Is that still working? I've wondered about that recently because in the print sales, I don't see it pop as often, but sometimes it's a different ISBN. It's a little hard to see, but you're seeing it on your side. Yeah. I mean, again, going back to Wrapped last year, I think 66% of our top 100 audiobooks, just in the U.S.,

either have been greenlit or already adapted for TV or movie. And then recently, you know, when the new trailer for The Summer I Turned Pretty just dropped, which we're super excited about that final season, we saw a 386% uptick in listenership for that book that week, which is amazing. Fascinating.

That's super interesting. That's much higher than I would have expected. That's really great to hear. Yeah, we don't see those, Rebecca, because A, we don't have a Sarkana. We should talk to our management about that. We're not plugged into the matrix. Yeah, but also since they're not front list, back list, that doesn't show up on a lot of the bestselling charts because it's ineligible. So that can be difficult to see on that side too. You know, it kind of takes me to one of the questions.

that I had. I was at the Publishers Weekly book show last spring when there was a rep from Spotify who gave a really interesting presentation about what was going on with audiobooks. The premium offering was still relatively new, and so it was really fun to get stats about how that was looking at the early parts. But he was talking about the crossover recommendation potential and being able to look at music and podcasts and then recommend audiobooks into listeners for those kinds of things.

I imagine editorial is doing some of that as well. Do you have particular music to book recs that y'all are thinking about or podcast to book recommendations that you're making?

Yeah, I would say it's something that's constantly on our mind. And every feature that we're creating, we're thinking about making those connections. I think obviously, as we mentioned, 33 and a third has been the big recent example of that. The thing that I thought was so cool is that we actually engaged with Spotify's music editorial team to introduce videos of those experts talking about the significance of the album featured in a

particular book. So it was really fun to engage with that team really closely to kind of draw in those connections between music and audiobooks. But again, recently, we were just just last week celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Pride and Prejudice film, we put together a beautiful collection that featured the film soundtrack and the book, and some podcast opportunities. So you know, if we work really closely together, we have a

bi-weekly, I think, leadership meeting with all of the leads, editors from each of the teams. So I think all of us are really keen to work together and draw those parallels for our listeners, because we know kind of it's all about, you know, if we can draw those connections between disparate pieces of content, I think it's something really special that Spotify is able to do.

Fun fact, that audio, that album, the 2005 Pride and Prejudice soundtrack is my number one wrapped from last year because we put it on all the time when we're working and listening and reading. And it's our kind of our stimulating but ignorable, no shade soundtrack that we put on. My daughter listens to it. We put it on all the time. So that's an interesting one there. I'm super interested in also, you know, like you're talking about music memoirs being successful, but I wonder about like

Do you have specific, like people who really like this popular podcast, we've given them this book recommendation. Are you, are you doing matchmaking like that?

Typically, we're not being that granular. We're kind of trying to find the wider trends and trying to kind of provide those topical paths, so to speak, for if people are interested in this kind of bucket of information, how to kind of navigate them deeper into the catalog. I think especially because our customer base is so casual and we're still relatively new and finding those new listeners, often it's

you know, we're trying to go for that broad awareness as much as possible. I guess I have a related question, which is in terms of, I don't, I'm sure you have your internal KPIs and that's, that's for you guys, but like in terms of what you're trying to do, is it to get people who aren't listening to audio books to listen to it at all? Is it to try to get people who are listening to some to listen to more? Is it all of that? Because I'd imagine those are sort of different tactics and strategies you'd employ. How, how does that mix work out in terms of converting a,

music only or podcast only listener to audiobooks versus getting an audiobooks person to continue or buy more or do something else on the platform? Yeah, I mean, I would say our absolute primary goal is to introduce audiobook listening to a new audience. So zero to one, just to get someone to try. Zero to one. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But I mean, of course, we want people to all, you know, it's healthiest if those customers come back, right? And continue to listen to audiobooks with us. So I think, you know, that's something that we're

thinking about a lot is what is that right balance? Especially when you think about you kind of running a digital storefront, right? Where you are merchandising to that wide group of listeners. You wanna make sure that you're going after that broad awareness content enough that you're drawing in those first time customers, making sure that they're regularly seeing those touch point books they're hearing about on TikTok, on social media or in the news.

But then also making sure that it feels like a bookish space, right? That's run by people who understand the industry and know what's hot and know what everyone's talking about. So it definitely is a constant balance, particularly for a team of heavy readers. I bet. Yeah, that was going to be my question is if you've seen particular titles or particular genres that have been better for converting folks from that zero to one place. Yeah.

I don't know if I have that information right in front of me. I may, again, tap in Caitlin. I don't know if she has that. I think, you know, when it comes to

I think it's the same trends that we've been talking about. That's a lot of what we've seen, right? I mean, media, those media tie-ins, those are popping because they are of interest to that broad audience. It's something that is great for a first-time listener, particularly if there's a celebrity narrator involved, right? I mean, that's a question we get asked a lot. If I've never listened to an audiobook, where's a great place to start? And often I will suggest, you know, a celebrity narrator is often a great

I don't know, Caitlin, if you have... I've said for a long time that a memoir narrated by the writer is like the canonical experience of that. I think that it's hard too because Rebecca and I have talked about this in the past that the sort of general nonfiction...

category is not something you read in school, right? You don't get, we used to use Born a Crime by Trevor Noah as the prime example. Like that's a kind of a book a lot of people would like. And fantastic on audio. And what's the main thing? It's unbelievable on audio, free rec for all of you out there, but you have to sort of discover that on your own later, right? It's not on a syllabus. You don't, what is this? What am I supposed to do with this? And if you have an audio example like that, you're going to find more. Like

Memoirs by comedians is one of my favorite genres and I only do an audio because that's the best way to do it. But I think that's part of the conversion process as well. Not just the audio book exists that like there's a special magic to some kinds of audio books, right? They have their own pleasures. And I'd imagine you're trying to think not just is this a genre or a trending thing, but is this a good audio experience? Like how much are you distinguishing between a trend versus like, actually this, this audio book itself is awesome.

That's such a good question and a really great point. And I think it's absolutely at the heart of what my team is doing. Because like I said, we are paying attention to the wider industry. We're talking to our publishing partners. Obviously, we want to make sure that if a customer comes to the store looking for a book club pick or something, for example, that everyone's talking about that they find that

But what is really exciting to us are those really, really special moments, right? Is there music? Are there sound effects? What is it about this audio experience that really, really makes it sing? The one that I think about, the book that I think about a lot is The Water Dancer, narrated by Joe Morton. And, you know, that was an Oprah's Book Club pick. Yeah, the Coates. For people listening, that's Donny Ossey Coates' book.

Exactly. And Joe Martin sings during that book. And nobody really talked about it, even though it was a book club pick. But that, you know, everyone was talking about the story, rightfully so. It's an amazing story.

But Joe Morton's performance is just so beautiful. And it was such this unexpected gem. And I look for moments like that a lot. What is it that really makes the audiobook in particular shine and be a really special product? So are publishers feeding those tips to you? Because I'm going to use one example here. I was interviewing Amal Al-Motar about her new book, The River Has Roots.

And she and her sister sing in it because it's about sisters who sing. And I wouldn't have known that unless I was just freaking talking to like, that's kind of a hard moment of discovery, Katie. Like, how do you find out about that stuff?

I will say, I mean, our publishing reps are great. I mean, and I, most of them, I've worked with for years. Yes. I mean, our sales reps, you know, particularly in the audio book space, they're so passionate about what they do. Right. And having worked with them for a while now, when, when audio books were still kind of like up and coming, right. And they were the underdogs a little bit, they're so passionate about the format. And,

And they want the format to be special and to shine. But a lot of it is just deep listening, to be honest. I mean, my team, we block out hours of our week for dedicated listening time, right? And it's something that we're encouraged to do. It's something that, you know, you can actually dig up

similar articles with interviews from the music team where they block out time to listen to music tracks as well. So we do something very similar on our side. Fridays are really blocked out for listening. And our team is, I mean, deep in the weeds, listening to hundreds of hundreds of hours of audio books every month. Rebecca, I have 10 questions about that. But before you do that, what else did you have in the chamber?

Well, I was just going to ask about other, you know, big recommendations, personal favorites of yours, like in that space where the audio book is a really special experience, like one that Jeff and I share is Heartbreak by Florence Williams. Right. Where folks, if you haven't heard us talk about this before, she's like coming out of a surprise divorce from a long marriage and trying to process like the science of heartbreak.

but also incorporates her own audio journals and like puts her phone on the table and records conversations with friends at dinner or like conversations with her therapist or talking to herself as she's kayaking through the Grand Canyon. And you get to hear all of that in the audio book in a way that is a totally singular and different experience from what reading it in print would be like. And that's just one of our signal examples. Yeah.

I agree. That audiobook is incredible. Yeah. And I that's one that I personally do recommend a lot. You know, some of a couple of my favorites. One is actually Stephen King's Pet Sematary, which is read by Michael C. Hall. Obviously, like, Michael C. Hall, what a great voice.

But right. So if you enjoy Dexter, I think like this is a great way in for either a casual listener, if you've never listened to audiobooks, because if you like Dexter, I mean, it's classic Stephen King and his performances is masterful. It's such a joy. And then on the nonfiction side, I would say Clanlands, which is written and read by Sam Hugin and Graham McTavish of Outlander fame, among many other things.

And it's just this travel account of them bashing around Scotland. Their banter between the two of them is amazing. And it's just a lot of fun. It's relatively short listen and just a great, a great joy. We'll get you out in this direction, Katie. What are, if you could make anything, if you could do anything, if you could tell people anything, like what's next? What are your hopes and dreams for the audiobook space, whether or not it's sort of Spotify centric or not?

Oh, that's such a good question. I mean, first and foremost, I want the audiobook industry to continue to grow and thrive. I think we're in such a special time for audiobooks right now. I love that, you know, it's, I don't, I'm hesitant to call it a moment because it feels more than a moment. It's been a decade. I mean, it's really been a decade. iPhone plus Audible. I mean, sorry for a competitor, but they got the train going.

And personally, I've spent my career focused on books for reluctant readers. And so I really naturally see audiobooks as a progressive through line for that work. And it's something that I'm really excited about. For our team, you know, we're really focused in this next year about building out our editorial brand.

We want to be more visible kind of within the books industry and just within the wider kind of cultural conversation. We are getting ready to launch our new Editor's Picks program, which I couldn't be more excited about. That's coming in July. It's really just kind of a program meant to

you know, to look at the collective passion and knowledge of our team, we're going to select the handful, you know, 10 to 15 titles a month that we just think are going to be really relevant and interesting to our readers. So I'm really excited about that. And we're looking for, you know, what other programs can we continue to kind of look at and expand upon to really drive awareness of our team and the work that we're doing here at Spotify.

Thanks, Katie. That's a pretty great spot. And thank you for joining us. And maybe we'll have to get you back on sometime to give us some recs, because now I'm going to go check out this Outlander thing. This is my disease. Now I have to go listen to that. Thank you so much, Katie. Thanks, Katie. Thank you so much for having me. This was great. It's so nice to meet you. All right. Sharifa Williams is here with me to discuss Flashlight by Susan Choi, one of the most anticipated books of June, for sure, of the summer, and really the year, I think, coming off Trust Exercise and the National Book Award win. And she's going to be talking about

Sharifa, I know you were looking forward to Flashlight. What was your previous Susan Choi reading experience? This was my first Susan Choi reading experience. Yeah, I had heard a lot about Trust Exercise and it was one of those books that was forever on my list of

TBR, but I never got around to it. So I was really excited to find out what she was all about. Yeah. I read Trust Exercise after it won the National Book Award. And I think I've said on the show, it wasn't for me. I didn't particularly care for it. There were some dynamics at it, but there was also something about the writing. I don't even know style, but writing decisions. And I think this is actually, I play a little bit in Flashlight.

I'll speak for myself and you can chime in here. The first third of the book I found kind of hard to get through, to be perfectly honest. A combination of factors and tell me if, you know, which of any of these resonated with you. One is it moves around quite a bit.

And there are no chapter heading signposts about what character is speaking, where you are in space and time. And there's a lot of moving back and forth across time and location. So it's disorienting. And Choi has a penchant for really long paragraphs, really long, dense paragraphs. And I think it's the combination of those two things

that frankly made it a little hard to get through. How was your... I know you had a harder time. I know you had a hard time too, so I'm stacking the deck a little bit. Yeah, yeah. I did have some difficulty, and it was some of the denseness. I love the internal lives of characters, but I think that it was a touch more than I needed here, and some of that dense feeling of...

The book, the writing was about that internal world monologuing description. I love the writing style, I will say. I think that Choi writes a beautiful sentence, but I agree the blocks and blocks of paragraphs perhaps made it feel like I was getting through a lot more of the book than I actually was. Yeah.

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Maybe we should back up for a second and see what the book's actually about. So it starts out, the titular flashlight, there is a... And I talked to Susan Choi on first edition, and I think that will be coming out right around the same time this comes out, because this is June 3rd. And so if you're going to see there, the sort of beginning vignette did start out as a short story of this young girl and her father walking on the coast, and he disappears on the coast of Japan in the late 70s. They are...

visiting from back from the US so it's a cross-generational immigration story of Japan Korea and the US and we move back and forth in time we're not going to get to all the many layers of it but this is the opening sequence and this young one this girl really I think she's 10 or something at a time Louisa is not our point of view careful character but she is the the hub of the wheel and their spokes kind of shooting out here a father being a main one

And then this opening sequence is actually, I thought, pretty great, where it's this character who has had this traumatic experience. She's overseas and then back home in the U.S., and she's not having a good time. And she's talking to this court-appointed or school board-appointed counselor about her acting out. And we get Choi doing something which is very difficult to do, which is to write an interesting, complicated, and accurate child's POV. And I think she does a pretty good job of that in the beginning.

Yeah, I agree. I really loved the way Luisa in particular was depicted in childhood. And this whole scene with the therapist was just so cringe. Like you feel for the therapist who has this really precocious, intelligent child. And he's trying his best, right? I kind of admired his efforts, right? Like he was trying the tricks and he knows what, there's a bit of a, I know that you know that I know that you know that this is sort of a dumb show, but I also have to do the thing, you know?

Exactly. And then there's this like, you know, of course, Louise has been through this terrible traumatic experience. So you also feel for her because you're like, why would she want to talk to this person? Like, what is she going to get out of this? She's already been through so much. She's been moved from this place. She was just starting to learn to call home. And it's just like such a great like that was one of.

I think that was a standout scene in the book for me. Yeah. And, you know, and she's dealing with this horrible loss and there's nothing to do really for her but therapy. But you also know in those moments that like, this isn't going to help. Like it doesn't seem like there's any possibility of this helping and

And I guess I'm not... I thought we might just follow Louisa through her life. I'm trying to remember what I was feeling at this moment. We're going to follow her, grow up, we're going to stick there because it is marketed as a literary mystery. Choice says it's a literary mystery, but it's a literary mystery, not a mystery that happens to be literary. And that meaning it doesn't have the...

And Rebecca and I talked about this, I think on the It Books episode where I said, it doesn't have the promise necessarily that you're going to figure out what happened to this guy, her dad. That is a central, it is a mystery in the book and it, we're going to do a little spoiler talk in a minute, so I don't want to give anything away. But it does promise more of the mystery elements being central than some other kind of literary books where something happens you never know or you're like, you and I are reading this book and having read a lot of literary novels before and

We are not expecting necessarily to get an answer of what happened to her dad. Maybe we will, maybe we won't, but we're not expecting that. And then from there, I think the thing that's a little disorienting, and I got my feet under me about halfway through, to be honest with you, is we follow the characters. We follow how we know where Louisa came from. We know her dad came from. We know where her mom came from. There is a secret half-brother situation going. I mean, I don't want to get too much into the plot details, but part of it is

I think the central part is, is Choi following these characters through their lives. And some of it is in the backlash or the after effects of this disappearance. But a lot of it actually isn't about that, Sharif. And I think that's one of the other things I was having a hard time figuring out. I was like, is this about this guy's disappearance or isn't it? And I think the answer is kind of yes to both. It's like it is and it isn't about that, which is interesting, but maybe a little more difficult to parse than I was expecting. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting, the piece about this being marketed as a mystery really stood out for me because I think what I expected, and

And this is not the fault of the book, but I was anticipating more of the mystery element interspersed in the book. But when it started to feel more like a character study or character studies of sorts, like I think my expectations were a little bit confounded and I found myself like uncertain of what I was doing.

reading and moving toward. And between that and the pacing being a little bit slower than I expected, I think that's where I sort of had some tension with my reading experience. That's a euphemism for just tough sledding for a little while. I think that's true. And I said to Rebecca, and I'll say it here again, I think there's a version of this book that I myself find considerably more

entertaining, compelling page turnery if it's 90 pages shorter. It's a big book. It's 464 pages. It's clocking at 350, and maybe some of these chapters are a little bit shorter. Maybe some of the... And again, I don't want to be anyone's editor, but from a reading experience, it doesn't read like a God of the Woods or a Rebecca McKay or something like that. It's a little more on rails. Again, those are more...

Mysteries with a literary quality, this is the other way around. And Choi says that the mystery itself came a little bit later because she was interested in writing about this time. She herself as a young person spent a couple years outside of the country. And I'm not going to spoil kind of who is where, but this was an interesting experience for her. And then coming back,

And the other thing that affects the book and it becomes a part of the book is how isolated these characters are from each other. Like the central family system here is estranged even before the dad disappears. And he and Anne, I believe, is Louisa's mom. And Louisa, well, she's 10. So like 10-year-olds, you can't... They're 10. There's not much to expect them. But as she and her mom grow up and go through their lives, they've...

grow apart in a way that's pretty toxic is overused. I don't think it's that, but it's not not that. And a lot of the book is about that. And so the combination of it moving around a lot and these characters being isolated emotionally and physically and temporally from different sections, it felt kind of like a lonely ass book, I'll say, for a lot of it. And it being long, I found myself feeling that. And I'm not sure that wasn't intended, frankly, but it was definitely one of my experiences. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we're not getting into spoilers, but there's one character, Tobias, who is kind of was the only sort of relief from a lot of miserable characters. Like they were the situation between, I mean, as a mom myself, like the situation between Louisa and Anne was so hard.

So hard. Like reading about that relationship and feeling like there's no end to the sort of animosity they have toward each other. First Louisa, and then Anne sort of develops this over time. But then there's Tobias, who's almost like the extreme other side of it, where he's almost like, I don't want to say gormless, but a little bit like...

He's like shockingly well-adjusted considering his situation. I mean, on the whole, you keep expecting to be a creep and he's not. Yeah. Yeah. He is. It was so funny because I did expect something to be revealed. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

But he is just this character who's, you know, living his life the way he chooses to, even though it is completely unconventional, perhaps not healthy, but also like trying to toe this line between being a foreigner in a different country and not like overstepping. He's a really interesting character, but he was kind of my only respite from these characters who seemed rude.

really unhappy with their lives. And that was also really... It was heavy. It was heavy in the heart. It's a heavy book. I mean, we haven't talked about it, but it is a heavy book. There's no doubt about it. I did find myself, when we got a Dubai section, feeling some relief. I think you put it well there. And I wonder...

in different choices that could be made about this particular story. Is there a version of the story where he's the POV character that has some of the weight and complication and pain, but told through sort of, because he's an outsider. I mean, again, we're four minutes away from getting to a more spoiler-filled discussion about

but he comes to it with a different sensibility. He doesn't have all the, as my parents used to say, old pizza, like this old pizza in these people's relationships, like it's in the fridge. It's no good anymore, but you can't throw it out, right? That old pizza. And so he can come with a refreshing sort of dynamic that I think both Louisa and her mom appreciate in their own ways, and they come to think of him

quite well. Just in qualitative evaluations, by the end, I quite liked the book. I'd say I liked the book pretty well. I find it a little bit difficult to recommend just knowing that I found the first 120 pages to be difficult to get through. It's not difficult in terms of understanding, but

I, you know, it's a thing. I always say there's two kinds of reading experience. One's where you think about turning the pages and one where you don't. And the ones where you don't think about turning the pages, you're just going through. And this one I had to think about, oh, how many pages did I read? Like you said, like, boy, I thought I made it through that. But the back half I found fairly interesting and it comes together pretty quickly at

at the end. And I found that pretty cool. Do you want to say anything before we spoiler about the totality of your reading experience? Yeah. I actually pointedly noted, there was a specific moment in the book where I was like, okay, this is picking up on me. Okay. We'll get to that in spoilers. But okay. So there was a moment. Interesting. I wonder what that was. Yeah. And it was like 76% of the way through. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's about right. I feel the same way. Kind of the last third to a quarter. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

And it's one of those experiences where I'm like, well, normally I probably would have DNF'd this book. And now I'm like, oh my goodness, what other books did I miss out on? Because you're on the hook to talk about it with me for 25 minutes, like all the hours that you are on the hook for. Yeah. So there's our review. I'd say mixed to positive from both of us or with a caveat, maybe positive with the caveat of that first section. Okay. If you don't want to know what happens at the end,

of Flashlight by Susan Choi. Thank you so much for listening. You can find all the show notes in the place you're used to. All right, here we go. So we do find out what happened to Louise's father. And it's part of this actual historical event, a series of abductions by North Korea of

who they thought were South Koreans, I'd say off the coast or in the water in boats in the late 70s. And these people got captured and were held hostage and served as translators and sort of intelligence assets, just sort of regular ass people, which is wild. And, and

Tobias, I think another reason we find some more warmness towards Tobias is he sort of gets shit together. Like he starts connecting some dots. He hears some stories about other people that have disappeared. Tobias is Louise's half brother. And they find out that Tobias was born before Louisa was born and Louise's parents were together. So not related, but

to the person who disappeared, but he's interested. And he sort of has a empathy for them. And he's also looking for something to care about himself. And then he starts a mini investigation. It turns out that Louisa's father is still alive, has been... We end the book where Louisa's in her 40s, so 35 plushious years in North Korea, and then spent some time in South Korea and kind of knocking around, not knowing how to get out or where to find anybody. And it culminates in a pretty moving...

And also terribly sad reunification between Louisa and her father on her deathbed in which she gets, I don't know, is it a few weeks to visit him before he... Yeah, it's a very short time. I think it was like a couple of weeks. Yeah. And that's how it ends up. So we find out what happens though. I'm not sure it's more... It's not happy, I wouldn't say. Is it better than not knowing what happens? Maybe. But a real...

I don't know, a real bittersweet, bittersweet doesn't capture it, but I'm struggling for a better word to how this book ends up. Yeah, it is a very, it's moving and it's also one of those, those, I would say, I guess, bittersweet moments where so much of the closure you would hope

Would be found in a reunion of this sort just never happens. That felt real. Like this, this sort of reunion, it didn't have like a whole lot of,

saccharine sweetness, which I did not expect after reading the fullness of this book. But, you know, it didn't have that, but it was just this moment of, well, one thread has been, you know, closed or whatnot. It's, we have discovered what's happened. Louisa has been reunited and never gets to have that reunion. Who knows if she would have wanted it? Probably not. Probably not. And yeah, it's,

That ending really got me in the feels. Oh, yeah. It's a gut punch, too, because he recognizes her, but sort of just barely. He has been under duress for a long time and I think suffering some kind of dementia. Just what happens to you after 35 years of constant stress and worry and trauma that's a little...

It's frankly beyond the scope of representation at all, let alone in 100 pages. The other thing that's strange about the reading series is we don't know that he's alive for a long-ass time, right? It's not that we know and are waiting for someone to find him. We get through... Was that the 76th point where you figure out he's alive? Was that what you were talking about? Yeah. We're like, oh. Yeah. Because we switched to his point of view. The Tobias chapter. And then we do a flashback to...

his initial abduction. And then we follow him for the next, I don't know, 50 or 70 pages where we get him up to the current day for all practical purpose. And that part's on rails because you're like, okay, what is the information gap closure going to look like? Is he going to die in prison no one ever knows? Is he going to escape and have a tearful reunion in multiple decades as grandpa or whatever? Or some other thing? And we got this, some other thing. But yeah, once we got to that, and I don't know, I think to...

I'd be curious to know if one of the tensions of the book is as soon as you know he is alive, any chapter that's not about him seems like filler until you get to another chapter of figuring out what his story is going to be. So I can kind of understand why it came later. Because if we found it out in like the 28% mark, we're both reading digital copies, I think, Sierra, so we're using those marks. Then a lot of the family dynamic stuff is,

We might be kind of, let's get moving. Let's keep moving. No, I'm serious. Like we told this escape narrative. I don't know. That's funny because I was feeling like I would have enjoyed more of the Cirque backstory, what was going on with him interspersed throughout the book to kind of break it up and

And because we were getting it so late, there was a part of me that was ready to be upset that he was just going to sort of die. And I was like, why? Because it's just like they're never going to find out what happened to him. But once I got to the ending, I was like, you know, I think I could have done with more of that stuff in the earlier chapters, even like maybe later.

a little bit before the midway point. I don't know when the exact right time for it would have been, but in my mind, it would have been earlier. And then I would have felt like there was more propulsiveness. There was something that was making me really want to move ahead in the story to see how all of these

these different storylines were coming together in a way. Yeah, because Louisa lies to him about his wife having passed away because she realizes that he's not going to make it and why. It would have offered different dramatic tension if we knew he was alive and sort of slowly making his way out of the worst places and she dies not ever knowing, right? Yeah. That those kinds of dramatic tensions would have been...

I'm sure Susan Choi and her editors considered all these things. So I should have... We were trying to have a conversation that was spoiler free with her. So it was really difficult to... Oh boy, I don't know how you do that. Yeah, we ended up talking about some of the other sort of bigger picture things, but sort of sliding those tiles around would have had different ramification is pretty interesting too. So I'm not sure anything else to say, characters or moments, or I think that pretty much covers it there. It's funny.

We watched and my family and I watched Andor season two, and then I had to watch Rogue One because I needed to see them get the plans. And then I had to fast forward the end of A New Hope to see the Death Star get blown up because that's what they did. And there's a moment in Rogue One where it's a similar dynamic insofar as

A young girl lost her father when she was young, Gin Eriso and Galen Eriso. And they're reunited for like 90 seconds, like two decades after they've been separated. It's a very... Again, the circumstances are different, but the dynamic is the same of like, you get one moment after these years of not knowing what happened. And I guess it's better, but it's almost... It brings its own pain and complication. And that part was...

Pretty fast. I don't think there was a version of this story in which he sort of walks into the room one day and picks up the kids from fourth grade and it's like, boy, that was tough, wasn't it, Dad? Like, yeah, sure was, Louisa. That would have been a very different reading experience, a very different book. No, I think that...

I mean, one of the most interesting things about this, I didn't know a lot about the history of these abductions, to be honest. And so reading about them was both harrowing and enlightening. And the whole...

the exploration of Cirque's identity in general was one of the most fascinating pieces of the story for me as somebody who is Korean, but sees himself from a Japanese perspective and what that does and how it has an impact on not just him, but his whole family and the way he navigates the world, even in the U S like, I thought that that was really, um,

excellently explored and the complications and the nuances of that. That was one of the, the elements of the character study and the deep internal world stuff that I really did enjoy. His early days in the U S in which he's building a career and building a family was pretty compelling as this, like as the, as this moment. And, you know, I've, I know a little bit more than I used to about this sort of Japan U S and

Korea triangulation because of pachinko because of Hong Kong so I know a little bit more about those dynamics I did but it is a it is a thorny mess and you know his eventual position it's similar with with characters in those other books as well as there You're an exile, but you also don't have a home to go It's like you're exiled from a place you've never been to or your mom and those multiple layers of leavings and exile and homecomings and decantment

make for pretty shaky, characters can feel pretty shaky about who they are and where they should be and what they want to do. And you get that throughout as well. In terms of the rest of the year, again, I think if our reading experience is indicative, and I think it might be, I don't think it's going to have the kind of the same pickup that say trust exercise does. I think it's just going to be a tougher experience

There's going to be more people that fall off earlier in this book than you need for it to be that kind of a hit. Maybe the critics will like it. I don't know. Maybe they'll find the difficulty and complication as we did towards the end to be worth the hang in some of those moments. But...

I'm not sure. I'm very curious to see how it goes. I think that people who are more inclined to read Big Doorstoppers will be into it. But I do think that it has a higher level of entry for most readers, perhaps even people who read Trust Exercise. We'll see. Yeah.

I mean, it was still very anticipated by a lot of people. For Susan Choi fans whose first book was Trust Exercise, getting through this, at least the first quarter, will be a trust exercise. Like, I trust that this is going to be worth it. Sharifa, thanks so much for reading along and talking with me for a few minutes. Appreciate it. Sure thing.