The Most Recommendable Books of the Century (So Far)
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The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, and a pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Card may be used everywhere MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply. Hey everybody, Jeff here. As an enticement for you to consider joining us at Powell's on July 9th, where Rebecca and I and Vanessa Diaz and Keith Mossman from Powell's will be doing the best books of the year so far. 7pm, tickets are $10, link in the show notes, bookrag.com slash listen.

We are bringing in front of the paywall, in front of the Patreon paywall, the event we did earlier this year, the most recommendable books of the century so far, so you can hear what it's going to feel like to be in that room. Hope you'll join us. All right. Without further ado, here's the show. I guess we're going to do this now. All right. This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. I'm Rebecca Shinsky. And we're coming to you from Powell's in Portland, Oregon. Hey!

You know that AI-generated applause sounds so real. It's really good stuff at this point. So for those of you listening at home, we are live at Powell's. We have so many friendly faces and people who are so warmly invited us today. Here's how the night is going to work. We are going to try to remember that we are podcasting for thousands of people and not the folks here. I'm so focused on you guys that I forget that...

Podcast is theater of the mind, and we need to talk about what we're actually doing. So I just explained to the crowd here how this is going to work. These are the 20 most recommendable books of the century so far. We stole this from the New York Times, sort of. Kind of. And we each submitted our list of 10 to our co-worker, and she saw if there was any overlap, and we had to switch it out. We do not know what each other picked, so that's part of the fun here. We're going to go turn by turn. We have our two-minute timer for

For those of you listening at home, I have asked the people, boy, show of hands is really going to work on a podcast, isn't it? Oh, yeah, this is a really good plan. Yeah, we'll have to give a sort of qualitative description of the hand showing of that. And then we're going to go through, and then we might do a little Q&A at the end that can be related to what we picked or whatever. So if you've got one in the chamber for us, we can move and do a little Phil Donahue mic. That's how old I am, sorry. That's really like carbon dating myself to make a reference like that. All right, with that, Rebecca, we're going to talk about

what recommendable means to us and how we kind of went about this. So you said we kind of stole this from the New York Times, and I think kind of is the right adjective there, because they did the best books of the century so far. Of course, we did our own versions, and we talked about it on the show.

But if we think best is not necessarily the same as recommendable and your favorites aren't necessarily the same as recommendable, I see a lot of nodding heads. So I think everybody here is thinking of a book you love that you're like, how the hell would I tell someone else that they need to read this? So those are the ones we're not talking about. That's the whole...

There's a whole section of our favorites that we're not going to talk about. Recommendables, it's good and you can recommend it to a lot of people. I think that means maybe it's fun to read. It's probably pretty quick. It's engaging and interesting. It doesn't have to be easy, but it probably has to have

very little to no, like really difficult subject matter or something that would be painful for people to read or traumatic for them to read. So we're staying in a zone of like, what's not necessarily safe, but what do we think is widely appealing so that maybe you haven't read some of these, but also people who are in this room are pretty likely to be the ones that like at the holidays, your friends are like, what book should I read for this person? What book should I read? And we want to help you guys stock up on your selections. And we're not looking for

Everyone loves a beach read. No beach read slander coming out of this mouth, at least into a public microphone. So we want a little more meat on the bone. At least I did. I should speak for myself here. I want you to do a four-quadrant kind of thing where it's interesting, you get through the pages, and it kind of means something, and maybe it does something a little bit different. So it's not going to be just that you can inhale. That's a different kind of recommendability. There was a debate in my house about whether the Da Vinci Code should be on this list. Oh.

And you lost that argument to Bob? Is that what happened? Well, I'm not revealing, but it's not on my list. Did he make a pitch for Master and Commander? No, he didn't. He did not. Bob did not make a pitch for Master and Commander. I think he knows. That's a niche interest. Yeah. And did some of yours, do you have like, I've got a couple that's like for, it might be recommended for this kind of person or this kind of reader. So they're not all for everyone all the time. Okay. With all that, would you like to stand up and Vanna White it a little bit over there and see how we can pull one away? All right.

They're not in any particular order, so we're just going to... No longer they are. Oh my God, we're starting. Was this the one? No, but we're starting with Gilead.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I can't believe that's what... To the timer. Okay, sorry. Okay, so this is in the category of books that Jeff and I call Old Men Waiting to Die. And it's maybe our mutual favorite book ever. We might get through this two minutes without either of us crying. I cried beforehand. I took care of that.

It's set in a small town in Iowa. It's about a pastor of a small church who's later in life, he's in his 60s or 70s. He's fallen in love, kind of by surprise, with a younger woman. They have a small child. And he is realizing, kind of

sitting with the reality that he's not going to live for most of this child's life and that his young son is going to know a lot of life in the world without him. And it's written as letters to his young son about his life, about what he has seen in this small town, what it means to be a person who lives in the world. I'm like getting goosebumps thinking about this book. I can't look at you. I know, I'm sorry. We're getting, it's good. We're just like ripping the bandaid off. We're getting this one done first. And I think this book just like really

sits in everything I want from Recommendable because it sounds like like Old Man Waiting to Die should be a tough hang and this is not a tough hang at all a book written as a bunch of letters can be challenging to get into but it's super engaging you sink right into it a book about a religious person might not be that inviting to everybody but here he's you really just have to believe that like something in life is sacred or special in some way to tap into it

man, it's just lovely and beautiful and so readable and will give you or anybody that you recommend it to a lot of opportunity to reflect on your own life. Like what, what do I want to be able to put in the story of my life at the end? What do you hope your legacy will be? Um, for Jeff, it's also in the fathers and sons, man, Rebecca, I swear to God, I'm so sorry. I really did not know this was going to be the first one. So that's Gilead by Marilyn Monroe.

Won the Pulitzer in 2008. And it's going to be a movie directed by Martin Scorsese. Yeah, Scorsese is doing the whole series. It's the first in a quadrilogy. And Martin Scorsese is directing. Shoehorning the shootouts in is going to be an interesting screenwriting problem for that particular book. You didn't do any of the bits. How many people have read this? Has anyone converted? We have 19 more of these. Are we out of time? Yeah, okay, good. I don't have to say anything about that and get choked up and embarrass myself. All right, here we go. I don't know what this is going to be. Okay.

Alright, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Timer's on. Anybody read? Who's read this? Wow, look at all those hands! Okay, we're done. Good job, everybody. So, The Night Circus came out in... I had all my dates right. It came out in a year. It came out in, I think, 2011. It is a fantasy romance, which listeners know is my favorite genre.

but there's a couple things to recommend it. A, the writing is gorgeous. The setup is this. There are these wizards, magicians, I guess. Is that right? People have read their more magicians. They're magicians. Oh, thank you for chiming in on it. Um,

And they have been having this centuries-long duel to decide who's the best magician, because this is what dudes do, apparently. Unfortunately. It's a bond measuring contest. Yeah, it really is. And as part of their bet, they decide who can pick an orphan, basically, at random, train them up, and who will then beat the other one. They fight to the death over time. It's a long-term wager. It's not clear what the stakes are. It's a sort of honor, right? Yeah, it's glory. They're kind of bored.

And I don't want to spoil it, but I'm going to, that the two prodigies figure out what's going on and they fall in love. And then they have to deal with what's going on with that. I'm not going to spoil what actually happens.

But the world that it's in, the night circus is this traveling circus that only appears at night, and it's magic, but the people that visit don't really know it. Maybe this could actually be practical effects, but it's actually magic. And the writing and world building is just out of this world. I'm going to apologize to pals for one minute and say it is the single best audio book I've ever listened to.

narrated by the magisterial Jim Dale. Michelle, my partner, will turn it on just to listen to in the middle and let it wash over her and sort of wash the cares of the world away. How am I doing on time? You're almost out. Yeah, and it's just really, really enchanting. So if you're not into...

Having a feeling, it's not for you. So that's really the only demerit against it because you have to have feelings to enjoy it. Let's check our conversion rates now. Anyone interested in that that didn't read it before? Yeah, there we go. Ryan, you've got to read this. Have you ever read this? Oh, come on. If you're doing Romantasy now and you have not read The Night Circus, you definitely have to go back. All right, you're up next. Okay. This one is The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. Who's read it?

Nice! So Ross Gay is a poet and one year on his birthday he decided to write a short essay every day about something that delighted him. And this is a collection not of all of them but of, I don't know, the ones he liked the most or that he thought hung together as a collection most effectively. Some of them are exactly what the title makes it sound like, you know, like

the glories of your neighborhood garden, the fun of a pickup game of basketball. Ross Gay is a black man and so one of the essays is about like the nod between black men who pass each other on the sidewalk and what that means. And so he gets out of the things that are surface level, like obviously fun, delightful, beautiful, and into deeper issues that he faces in his life.

Because they're only a couple of pages long you get to drop into that and then step out and process but that I think really real willingness to go into To share that he sat down every day for a whole year and reflected on something that he saw or experienced is such an invitation to do it yourself and to let the definition of delight be broad and expansive and something beyond like

Hey, guess what? I saw a dog today. Which is wonderful. But he lets it be such a much bigger, beautiful thing. And if you like this one, there is the Book of More Delights as well. Really struggled with the titles for this one. Yeah. He's continued this practice. I've heard him on podcasts talk about people tell him that they developed a delight practice because of it. So just really wonderful. This is like an all-timer for holiday gifting. It's a very good recommendation. It's a great book.

If you like to do a few minutes of reading during the day, you can pick up and read one and it's just a couple of minutes. And if there are macro conditions that maybe you could use a few minutes of centering yourself every day, this might be a good selection. Good one. Can we convert anybody? Who's going to pick that one up? Any ideas? Oh, you moved a lot there. Wow, that's right. Yeah, he's terrific. I love that for him. Oh, good. Yay.

This one, I'm mad you got it. This is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. I think actually, did you have this on your list? Yeah, this is one I have. This is a mutual favorite. So, oh, this is a hard one to synopsize. It's an epic family saga. Yeah, so an epic family saga starting in about 1930 in Korea all the way up into their late 80s in New York City following multiple generations of one family as they try to live their lives under world historical circumstances. Intergenerational conflict

there's a lot of politics stuff i didn't know about koreans getting moved out of korea coming to japan being a subject cast in that situation but you're really here for the spirit and will of these people um you know you're gonna cry over a bowl of white rice in one scene in this particular book because you're gonna care so much strong so many strong people doing so much to just to eke out a bare existence and the the world building is terrific

The sentences are terrific, and the characters are indelible, memorable, and you really want things to go well for them. They don't always. She is not afraid, the author, to put your heart through the ringer without being melodramatic, which can be quite difficult to do. And it really is an education challenge.

of a sensibility and a worldview that, you know, fiction is as good as this is anything. Of like dropping you into a world and saying, this is what it was like and what these people are like this. And you don't need Wikipedia to pick up all the history. No. She does a really lovely job of helping us understand where these characters are and what's happening in a moment of history that most of us in the U.S. are not educated about. Yeah, and the central conflict really, the main character, she, her mother has a boarding house and they don't have much and things go badly and she falls in love with, not fall, that's not right, but,

Thinks she's going to fall in love with, has an affair with. We get impregnated by sort of an up-and-coming mobster. And that's complicated, apparently. And it doesn't go well. Mobster got some eyebrows up. Yeah, he really does. Also a wonderful adaptation on Apple. It looks like they spent all the money to get everything looking right. So I can really remark on that, too. I realize I forgot to ask anyone who read that, so we're going to ignore the second part. I'm out of time, too. You're up next. Pachinko, Minjin Lee.

Alright. That one I was mad that you got, but also I'm glad I didn't have to try to explain. Yeah, thanks so much for that. This is Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby. Who's read this one?

Okay. Only a couple of people. Only a few. We get to convert some people. There's a high ceiling on my conversion attempts here. This is like an edge-of-your-seat thriller. This is the first of his novels. It's about Bug, who is a man who's like the best getaway driver on the East Coast. He has come out of prison. He's been out for a little while. And so he's like resolved that he's going to stay clean. He's going to be out of the game. And then his former buddies in crime call him back for one last job.

And they're gonna do a heist on a jewelry store. They need him because he's the best there is. And he's torn, like I'm a family man now.

I don't want to do this, but also things like times have been tough and it's tempting. And he knows that he can probably pull this off and that nobody else can pull it off. This sits in our shared favorite category of getting the gang back together, getting the gang back together. Really? It's really fun. It is edge of your seat, like heart in your throat. Are they going to get away with it? What's going to happen? Uh, one of those where people are doing bad things and you're rooting for them to get away with the bad things because the author is just so good at

writing it. I saw this described as like a combination of Ocean's Eleven and Drive and I think that's right for the movie

Are you sure that's not gone in 60 seconds? That's not what you described right there? Well, anyway. Yeah. It's really, really great. His next two novels are also terrific. A thriller writer who's on the come up. Yeah. Yeah. His new book is coming out later this spring, King of Ashes, and the Obamas are adapting that for their production company. So he's doing really well. But this is one of my favorites of the last several years. Like, sat down on a Saturday morning, could not stop turning the pages. Yeah.

That's it. That's Blacktop Wasteland. It's a really good recommendation for people in your life who are gifting, who like mysteries and thrillers, and maybe they're getting into sort of a James Patterson kind of a rut. You know what I'm talking about here. Sean Cosby is a fresh voice and really exciting and telling different kinds of stories. It reads like a... You can tear through them. Oh, yeah. They're super fast. Plain reading, too. So how'd I do? Conversions? All right. Oops.

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Today's episode is brought to you by Bloomsbury Publishing, publishers of House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Moss. Bryce never expected to see a world other than Midgard, but now that she has, all she wants is to get back. Everything she loves is there. Her family, her friends, her mate.

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Today's episode is brought to you by Sony Pictures Classics presenting Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. Now from the title, you can tell that yes, it is about Jane Austen or I should say a Jane Austen lover, but it's also like grown. It's a romantic comedy. It's like the perfect little rom-com that is bookish when you want to watch a movie when it's rainy. You know what I mean? All right, follow me.

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It looks fun. I'm going to go see it. I don't know about you. I think you should. I think you should. Again, check out janeaustinwreckedmylife.com. And thanks again to Sony Pictures Classics for sponsoring this episode. Great. Okay. Anybody? Beautyland?

Another shared favorite author, Marie Helene Bertino. I embarrass myself terribly, and I'm not gonna say how, except that I am, with Rebecca because I was like, I was comparing her sales to a different author, and we looked at the Goodreads rankings, and I was like, do I know anything about anything? - We were texting and I was like, I don't think-- - She was very kind to me and be like, you might be wrong about that, which is I can't believe you thought that was anywhere close. She is a one of one

it's hard to really describe the kind of writing she does because they vary so much from book to book. This particular book came out last year and it was with Martyr and James, like our three favorite kind of books of the year. The main character, Adina, she's coming of age in the 1970s and the conceit of this book is also hard to explain. Well, it's easy to explain but you don't sound like you know what's going on in the world if you say it, but at some point she realizes that she is a

reporter for an alien civilization. Yes. And she is there to tell aliens what it's like to be a human and how things are going and who Carl Sagan is and why you eat popcorn in movie theaters even though it's the loudest possible choice for

for something to eat when everyone's supposed to be quiet. Couldn't have been caramels. She files her report by fax machine. Yeah, she gets missives by fax machine back and forth. And it's an avenue, I think, to do what a lot of coming-of-age novels are trying to do is capture the banal strangeness of just being a person

And we all kind of have similar experiences, and it all feels weird to us all the time. And isn't this weird? And this is happening. And shouldn't I tell someone about it? And aliens would think this was weird if they got dropped onto Earth. Why do we do it this way? Why do we do it this way? And the answer is, we don't really know. And so as she comes of age, she writes a book about this, and it becomes a sensation, and that has its own kind of...

ramification. And then the ending, I really didn't know what the ending was going to do. That's one thing I would wonder, like, is this real? Is this a hallucination? Is she going to get beamed up Scotty to be part of the whatever? Or is she going to be one of those people that's like, yeah, I got probed by aliens in the 70s. And I was like, yeah, whatever. Adina, that's cool. But a really cool read. And I'd recommend 2AM at the Cat's Pajamas, another book that she's written. She has a new book coming out, one of our favorites. I wish everyone...

- New Bertino. - Yes, I do too. - So go buy Bertino if you have credits to spare. So go use that. - There's your timer. - All right, did I convert anybody on Beautyland? That's a hard one. Oh, I guess. Don't be shy. I put 'em way up there where I can see them. - Okay, so I'll reveal my one that there was one copy of and it's her other book. This is maybe the book that on our annual holiday rec shows we've done the most over the years. Like it just comes up forever. So it is 2:00 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas. - That's really funny. - Right? - Is it in print? It must not be if they've only got one.

It's in print and it's in people's back. Because that's a used copy. Yeah. Okay. Sorry, I interrupted you.

We had some last minute negotiations about it. So you can fight over the last one. Or I'm sure the folks at Powell's would be happy to order you a copy if you want one. So it's set in Philadelphia on Christmas Eve. It's about a nine-year-old girl whose mother has died recently and she's grieving that. Her father is not taking it very well. And her whole dream in life is to sing on stage at the city's beloved jazz club, The Cat's Pajamas. So she's going to spend... The whole book takes place on Christmas Eve. She spends that evening...

as a nine-year-old girl trying to sneak into a jazz club and get on stage. It's amazing. The story intersects with one of the teachers from her school who's dealing with some stuff, also the owner of the club who finds out that night that maybe they're gonna have to close, and what can he do to try to keep the club open. It is charming as all get out. It's so sweet and so funny. You will read it so quickly. No aliens either. No aliens.

It's just kind of perfect. It's a pretty perfect reading experience. It's like reading Stars Hollow for the Gilmore Girls folks. Oh, that works. I'm going to use that one. If that's the vibe, this close-knit community, but everybody's kind of a big character, and they're gathering around this little girl who wants to do this big, beautiful thing.

which is kind of preposterous but she doesn't know that it's a ridiculous thing for a nine year old girl to do this is just like the most natural thing in the world for her it's wonderful and now you can all fight over it how many of you are going to try to read it yeah yeah okay oh there you why do you have that you you're gonna pick it oh my god

I feel uncomfortably seen. It's your pick. Yeah, it's like people know what I'm saying. Yeah, they listen to it. And for a long time, and we stopped, well, we still recommend it, but there's no read-alike for it. People are like, I'd like a book like To Him at the Cat's Pajamas, and my response is, so would I. Yeah. It's impossible. I think that's the only repeat. Um...

Speaking of a one-of-one, this is "The House on the Cerulean Sea" by T.J. Kuhn. Who has read this particular-- Oh! Lots of hands! Well, you know then. I think technically maybe there's some librarians or other-- it's technically middle grade or young adult, do we know? It doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter. We have a head-shaking note. Yeah, head-shaking note. Not middle grade, but it's for all ages. My family listened to it on audio, which is terrific. It's one of our favorite books for this reason.

It's as warm and affirming as any book you're ever going to read without being syrup, you know, that you're going to get sort of emotional diabetes from as you're reading it. The conceit here is that magic beings exist in the world, but they are downtrodden, looked down upon. Other words for treated shittily.

You did it. Yeah, that was it. Yeah, there it is. And there are these homes and places where they can go if they do not have a family or they've been outcast or ostracized or other ways discarded.

And there's a person there who becomes the master of the house who takes them in and puts them under his literal and figurative wings, not to spoil anything, and protects them. And there's some of the characters, right, are these kids who are kids. They're special. They're trying things. They protect each other. They want the world to be better for them and for everybody else.

If you've got family time in your life when you will listen to something, if you're looking for something you can deal with, you know, a fantasy conceit that is quite warm. There's not much action. There's like one scene where maybe something could happen. It's not about like they're going to use their powers and nuke all the bad people. That's not what's going to happen here. What is going to happen is we're going to form a found family that you yourself would die for.

Let's see here.

Ah, yes. Got The Martian by Andy Weir. Hands. Fist pumping. Who's read this? This might be the one that most people have read, don't you think? But I also think a lot more people have seen the movie than have read the book, so we gotta... I did it. Okay, timer is on, great. This one's from 2014, I believe. It's about an astronaut who's on a mission to Mars and a dust storm happens and the crew evacuates, but he doesn't make it onto the escape pod, whatever that thing is called, and

It's the ship. I'm sure Ames is like, how dare you not to look at this? The Mav. The Mav. Thank you, Ames. He thinks the crew probably died on the way back to Earth. The crew thinks that he is probably dead and he's on Mars for God knows how long. The first sentence of the book, which I did get permission to say in public as well, I'm fucked.

So you get the hard science of this guy trying to figure out how he's going to survive on Mars for much longer than he's supposed to be there with many fewer supplies than he's supposed to have. But it's also really, really funny. It's like man versus nature and also man versus himself at the same time. And the way that it's written will just keep you turning the pages. This may be the last book I stayed up all night to finish. And it went through wildfires. It did. It really did. It did.

It's also truly four-quadrant. I learned in the car on the way here that all four members of Jeff's household have read this independently of Jeff.

That's right. It's the only book we've all read on our own. So it's interesting. Yeah. So that's The Martian. And sneakily a comedy. It's actually a comedy as much as anything to do. Also good on audio. Sorry, pals. Very good on audio. All right. Anyone left that's going to try that? Also a good recommendation for the sort of science, tech, engineering people in your life if you're looking to give a book that way. What have I chosen? Oh, right. Okay. Okay.

Oh, I should have known. Jeff Book Time. Bill Bryson, nonfiction writer. People know Bill Bryson or Short History of Nearly Everything. This book is the oldest on my list, 2009. No, no, 2003. I'm sorry. So this is really, it's nonfiction. It is a chronicle told in a droll, humorous, amused style of...

what we now call the Age of Discovery, though I think we know a little bit more that that's not what we should call this, but of the 19th century where we were putting together

the great scientific disciplines, geology, anthropology, biology, zoology, where you could have a small piece of land in England that could support you, and you'd sort of get on a ship and go somewhere and discover like 50 species. Like, "Look at all these things I found!" Right? Or write about for English people, maybe, rather than discover.

Or you can be like, hey, look at those rocks. I wonder how they got there and be the most famous geologist of all time because we were just sort of coming out of these religious modes of understanding the world. Like what if this was put together in a different way completely? And the stories and this spirit of adventure. And for those of us who like, and Rebecca, I know you like this too, to just read about what makes the world interesting. Imagine if you just like walked out your door and you could found entire new fields of scientific inquiry.

And Bryson himself is interested and also irreverent about this, like the silliness of wearing like a three-piece suit on a boat in the Amazon, right? And sort of going through those things or, you know, trying to figure out what dinosaur bones are and just sort of wildly speculating without really any reason for believing they are what they are. Really wonderful on audio. And I think for me that the...

of a kind of entertaining nonfiction that a lot of us don't discover until later in life because they don't teach this kind of stuff in school, right? These books that are informative and fun, but they're not going to show up on like an AP test or help you study for, I don't know. It doesn't feel like homework. It doesn't feel like homework. So this is a core text to my reading life, and so I needed a reason to talk about it. So that's a short...

What's the title again? A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I'm getting flustered. Are we selling any copies? Yeah, anybody going to check that out? Yeah, I wondered. Okay. Thank you for humoring me. I appreciate it. Yeah. Let's see what's next. All right. Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel.

It's maybe the one I'm like, who's read it? Read it. All right. Good job, book people. This one is from 2014. Popped again during the pandemic, partially because it was a pandemic and partially because there was a really excellent HBO adaptation, but we can't look at each other while I talk about it or we will definitely both start crying. So it's

mostly set 20 years after a really terrible flu has wiped out like almost everyone on earth. And we see that happen in the early pages of the book. It starts in Chicago, but when it picks up 20 years later, the main character, Kirsten, has joined a group of traveling performers. They call themselves the Traveling Symphony, and they roam from town to town along like the Lakes District of the Midwest performing Shakespeare.

Because you need more than survival to get through life. You need art and connection and beauty and joy, and that's what they're trying to make with each other. But it also has the elements of post-apocalyptic dystopia kinds of things. It's really hard to get by. Not everybody is a good person. There are bandits that come for them. You've been living with the same 15 people for the last 20 years, and sometimes you just want to kill each other. And sometimes do. Right. Right.

And there are surprising reunions and connections that happen between the characters. But I cannot bring myself to reread this one. We've been talking about it and can't quite get ourselves in the mental space to do it again. If you read the book and you haven't watched the HBO series, it's just beautiful. They've changed some things from the book, but it's one of the cases where I think the adaptation really adds to the story. It's more of a transformation story.

If you haven't read it, I just really can't recommend this enough. It's a good shot in the arm for like, yeah, art, we need it. And I don't know, maybe in this cultural moment, that's a thing that's helpful for you again. I would read some version of that book for the rest of my life. That's the kind of book I kind of always want to be reading to some degree. Oh!

Okay. Excellent. Strong choice here. Some of us read things to try to make ourselves a little bit better. Has anyone read The Checklist Manifesto by Toga One Day? Oh, right. Look at the real heads out there. I'd love to be back.

Yeah. All right. That's our co-worker. That's our co-worker, Vivek. Atul Gawande is a surgeon turned writer. What do we need to get? It's him and Siddhartha Mukherjee. Yeah, yeah. We need to call. But a surgeon who happens to be a beautiful writer, a smart person. It's not fair. And have his pants all the way on. We kind of hate him, I think. Maybe the most interesting man in the world. He's one of the people out there.

but this is a productivity book when we were first starting book riot and i was coming out of grad school i didn't know how anything worked um or how to put my life together in a way that could be sustainable and help run a company and i was looking for things just to get me through the day and the checklist list manifesto is slight because it's not about a very you know involved topic but it's about

using checklists and that sounds boring and it is except but it's not a history but it's not a history of pencils would read did you did I did I did read it it's too um

how much our brains aren't meant for remembering. They're made for thinking, being creative, making connection, analyzing. And this is sort of a stand-in for a category of books. I could have talked about Getting Things Done by David Allen, Building a Second Brain by Diego Forte.

but of really coming to terms with we have all this technology and we don't even need technology, pen and paper will work. You make a checklist for the things, especially things you do all the time because the people who make mistakes are kind of not beginners and they're actually not the experts. They're what most of us are in the messy middle where we think we know enough to remember to put the butter and the cookies rolling, right?

and not, you know, check off the damn thing as you do it. And it talks about nurses and surgeons and pilots and engineers of all kinds that use checklists to make fewer mistakes, but then to free themselves, because they know they're going to get that right because they check it off, to make more interesting connections. So we spend less time just sort of spitting out these routines that we do

And we can really spend the time that humans are good at, and even the best LLMs are, of sort of being beautiful, unique, weird creatures that can make stuff that no one else can. So this is an important book. I mean, weirdly an important book to me. Yeah, it's kind of a canonical shared text. It's one of the things we recommend to coworkers often because it does, like...

It lets you offload the thinking about process to a checklist, and you can use your brain for the stuff you want to use your brain for. Yeah, recommend it to your coworkers. You know, buy it for an office. You don't get it for yourself, but this is one that really, we're helping people today. We're helping people. It's one of those things that, like, when things repeatedly go wrong at work, we're like, is there a checklist for this? Is there a checklist for that? Yeah, and half the time, there's not. And then when you make one, it gets better. It gets better. And we're like, wow, look at that. Isn't that cool? All right, you're up. Okay, let's see. Just to be clear.

butter somebody else we're correcting the record rowan did not forget the butter i can't get with anything on my own podcast people

All right, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain. Yeah, this one like sneaks under the wire. It came out in 2000. I think it's the oldest book we're going to talk about today. We have all of the food writing that we have today and all of the wonderful travel and food content on TV that we have today because Anthony Bourdain wrote a New Yorker article in 1999 that became this book in 2000.

it's like swashbuckling and swaggery. And he talks about the kitchen as a pirate ship. And if you've ever liked Anthony Bourdain on TV, or if you still miss him, like I do, and you haven't read this, you really need to give yourself the gift of seeing how fully formed that voice was well before any of us were watching him on the travel channel. But also what a marker of a time in restaurant culture and food culture, like kitchen culture. I see your brother is nodding because he has experience.

with this where Bourdain is kind of like, this is the way it's always been and the kitchen is at a terrible place and if you can survive it, you're a pirate. And he didn't know it at the time but he was starting a conversation that moved us into maybe that's not how it should work.

Maybe you should be able to be a person who loves food and works in kitchens and enjoys restaurant culture and also, I don't know, not get smacked at work every day. But the way that it's written is not endorsing it. It's not really celebratory of it. It's just like, drop into this world and come on this wild ride with me. His voice is so fun and really infused

with like noir writing. He loved noir and crime fiction. You can feel that in here, but I've read this like several times. There's a great 20th anniversary edition of it from a few years back that's annotated with some of his notes. You can order that special edition as well. So that's Kitchen Confidential with Anthony Bourdain. Any takers? Probably the only book we're going to talk about that's like there's a before Kitchen Confidential and after. That's really a marker.

Oh, yeah. Anybody read A Gentleman in Moscow? All right. Amor Towles. Amor Towles. Toll. Toll. Every time. The genesis of this one is pretty interesting. He, the author, was working in the world of private equity and jetting around the world. And he was at some high-end hotel in Dubai. He's like, I saw those people here last time.

And then he came back and he said, "I saw those people here again." And finally worked up the nerve to ask the concierge, like, "What is the deal?" He's like, "Oh, they live in this hotel."

He's like, huh, that's weird. I bet I could write a book about that. Why don't we set it in pre-revolutionary Russia? Why not? Yeah. So the main character here is a gentle person of the Russian aristocracy, which was great in 1911, starting to suck real bad around 1916. And he had been a frequenter of this hotel in Moscow. And rather than go to the guillotine, he worked some kind of a deal. And actually, the details of how he worked this magic escape me,

Oh, they escaped you too good. I'm glad to hear it. It just washed over you. But he makes a deal. He's like, I'll just stay in this hotel. You don't have to execute me or send me to Siberia. I'll just live in this hotel. And they're like, cool. Let's do that. And it's the chronicle of the next few decades of his life as he lives in this hotel and then lives through by proxy or by hotel suite and room service how to live a life in a hotel but also seeing the world change around him. And he strikes up

I just invented a word. Yeah, you did. Can we use that? Is that a thing? We're doing family ships with these people that he encounters, particularly a young girl and then some other people too. And they come in and they come out of his life and sometimes things go well and badly and

But it's a master class in voice. It is. Right? Not a whole lot happens, but you feel like you're in this hotel and you feel like you understand this world. And I think it's sort of what every Wes Anderson movie wants to be. Oh, I think that's fair. Yeah. And I held out on this forever. Yes, you did. Like, you've been recommending it for so long. And when the show came out last year, I was like, fine, I'm going to read it. And I remember texting Jeff like 30 pages in and being like, okay, I get it. Yeah. The best text you can ever get from someone you work with is, you're right.

You're right. It just doesn't happen that often. Let's see here.

Oh, yeah, we're cooking. Yeah, we're going. This is Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. Anybody? Anybody? Yeah. Great. This is her debut novel, 2017, I think. It's set in the late 1970s in a planned upper middle class suburban community in Ohio about a Chinese American family. Their favorite daughter has turned up dead. Her body is found in a local lake.

And it's partially mystery of what happened to this girl that led to her death. It's the parents' process of discovering that the story they had about this daughter, that she was popular and happy and was enjoying her life, is really not at all the reality of the life that she was experiencing and how they find that out and what

they do with that information is really the heart of it. So you get the procedural elements, but it has all of this additional substance that deals with family and secrets, identity, the immigrant experience, and also who done it, how done it, why.

it's really great on several levels. One of the best debuts, I think, of the last 15 or 20 years. All of a sudden, she came out and now she's a brand, right? Yeah, right. She comes out, I think this was one of the big book clubs, Hick Dick, there will be

It's a really good book club pick if you're in a book club and you want something that's got a little more edge to it. A mother-in-law or someone who likes to read the big book club books, this is a cut above generally what gets picked by the Jennas and the Reeses of the world. There have been several more. Little Fires Everywhere is wonderful. There's a great adaptation of that. And Our Missing Hearts is her most recent one. But if you maybe caught on to Little Fires Everywhere and you never went back to Everything I Never Told You, it's a really strong debut. You guys hear us on some of the shows be like, it's a debut novel. It has some

If you told us it wasn't, if you had told us it was her third book, we would have totally believed you. Totally, yeah. It's very self-assured, confident. She knows exactly what she's doing and where she's taking you. And I'm like very terrible at guessing what's going to happen in a mystery anyway, but I remember being so surprised about how this one went. Are we getting down to it? Yeah, a couple more.

Oh, I'm surprised by this one. Good. Well, tell me why. Let's flip it up. We're almost done. Why are you so surprised? Tell me why we have not. We haven't talked about this as much when we have been really doing recommendations for listeners. So Romana Lam's 2020 novel about a family on vacation on Long Island in New York.

and they're renting an Airbnb, beautiful Airbnb, and then something is happening out in the world. And they don't know what. Their cell service goes out and the family, whose Airbnb it is, comes in from the city, it's like, "We need someplace to be." So they're sort of forced to be in the same spot. They don't know each other, they're suspicious of each other,

And the thing that freaks me out about this is I feel like this is what most of us would experience some huge, horrible thing happening. We'd be together kind of far away from it in a weird place and have absolutely no idea what to do.

And we just have to sit tight and wonder and wait and hope like the next mushroom cloud or locust zombie swarm or whatever's happening doesn't come for us or someone who knows what the hell to do says go in your basement or get out of your like what should my relationship my basement be right now in this particular moment. That's where we need to go.

And the other thing too, so it's an apocalyptic novel, right? So it has that inherent tension of like, oh my God, this is crazy. It's like sinister. But the thing that makes it different is his identification of the dynamics between these people. Like the opening 20 pages of just their family getting ready for vacation is

those of us with families who have done a weekend in an Airbnb and like we're so excited and then like you're getting raised like I'd rather die than finish this exercise right like let's go to the coast or like let's maybe not because we're fighting and how much stuff and you want to be on your phone and you don't and like you go right from something that feels so real visceral and relatable to the unthinkable and that whiplash it creates a kind of existential vertigo that's

pleasant in a kind of weird ass way, I guess. It also reads like a house on fire. And this one, I should say, this one and Gentleman in Moscow, we say when there's good adaptations. Notice when I don't mention the adaptation. Oh, I'm sorry. Leave the World Behind, thank you, Michelle, by Ruman Alam, because there are people listening on the internet to this. Thank you. Did we move any units of Leave the World Behind? Any takers? There should be more hands up for that. There you go.

This episode is sponsored by With a Vengeance by Riley Sager. Stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition provided by our sponsors at Penguin Random House Audio. In Riley Sager's chilling new thriller With a Vengeance, a story of justice, revenge, and what happens when the hunted becomes the hunter, Anna Matheson lures her enemies onto a luxury train to make them pay for what they did to her family. But when one of them turns up dead, justice turns into survival.

The clock is ticking. The bodies are piling up. Can Anna catch the killer before the train reaches Chicago? Riley Sager is back with a vengeance. This is one train, no stops, a deadly game of survival and revenge. Riley Sager, of course, is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, most recently Middle of the Night, The Only One Left, and The House Across the Lake.

With a Vengeance is narrated by Aaron Bennett and is available now wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Listen now before time runs out. Again, stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition of With a Vengeance by Riley Sager.

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The Vitals app tracks key overnight metrics so you can spot changes in your health before you feel them. The Vitals app on Apple Watch. iPhone XS are later required. The Vitals app is for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. All right. This is my entry in the dad book canon. I'm sorry. I knew this was on both sides.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee sits in the club with Atul Gawande of people who are just way more talented than anyone has ever existed. It's really sick. It really makes me sick to think about it. I don't like it. He's an oncologist. He's a biologist. He writes incredible books. This is the first one. It won the Pulitzer in 2005. It's a biography of cancer.

If you are sitting here going, "Yeah, lady, I don't want to read a 500-page book about cancer," I promise you, you really do. Is it the best title of all time? It might be. It might be the best title for subject of all time. Yes. It's unbelievable. It's a great title.

And he goes into the history of cancer. How did humans discover this? How did we originally understand it? How has our understanding of cancer evolved? And how has our treatment of cancer evolved? Who are the people that made these discoveries? And also because he is a physician and he sees all of that science's impact on humans every day, it's really empathetic and warm and considers the human elements. A lot of times you pick up a 500-page book about cancer and it's just science.

How many have you, you've done a lot of these, right? 500 page books about cancer? I've tried a few. Okay, yeah. This is the only one I've finished. This is your number one pick for big books about cancer? Yeah, but you know, you pick up a big science-y book and it's just science. And what makes this one so special is that it's really, really human. And grounded and funny. The writing is really lovely. It's not too heady, but you will feel like a genius when you finish it. Yeah, you will.

His other books, Song of the Cell, I mean, that's a Whitman reference in the title. And he makes these delighted Shakespeare puns in the text. There's probably that stuff in here, too, but we weren't doing book podcasts when this came out, so I don't remember it through that lens. But you will learn so much. Your dad will love this book. As you know, on the Book Riot podcast, anyone of any gender can see dad. Dad is a spirit.

habit. I think this and Bill Bryson are like the ultimate of the dad book category. You know that line as good as it gets when Jack Nicholson says like, it makes me feel good about me that I get how special you are. When I'm reading this, I feel better about myself because I'm like, oh, I get that this is awesome. Yeah. And that makes me feel better about me. And it's so awesome. And I think he really might be the most interesting man in the world.

world. Yeah, and writes his sentences as fine as a flower. It's sickening how good that book is. It really makes me mad. It's just unfair, but I'm really glad that books this good exist. This is why we do this. Who's buying this one? No pressure after that bit.

This right here. If I had to pick one for all of us, like I said, okay, we're all going to be stuck in this room and you have to read this. And which book will get me killed the least often? It's The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. This book came out last summer. My recency bias is showing. It's still hardcover. I know, right. Set in 1975 and after at a summer cap in the Adirondacks.

some content warnings about kids getting killed, which is my least favorite thing. Like maybe the most obvious thing anyone has ever said, but I really don't like to read about it. I don't like them when they're used as, you know, narrative devices and so on and so forth. And this is a thriller and it's kind of hard to articulate why it's a cut above. And I'm going to take a shot at it and you tell me how right I am. Okay.

The sense of place is really strong. And she is so good at locating you. Sometimes it's hard to know where you are in one of these books. Like, where's the relationship of the cabin to the cafeteria? And what's the thing up there? For some reason, this one, I really knew where I was. And as my family will attest, my spatial reasoning is a zero. Oh, yeah, mine too. Yeah. And we could sort of follow that. So the sense of place was really enveloping.

The Adirondacks are not unlike our beloved Pacific Northwest. So if you're here and you can kind of imagine yourself amongst trees, their trees are kind of all the same. You know what you get with the trees, I've once said. Trees are not all the same. How dare you? Yeah, we're going to go outside. I'm going to point at six trees. If you could name two of them, I'll concede. And so there's a murder and there's multiple murders that may or may not be connected.

And the other thing she's good at is she knows all the mysteries and murders that you've read. So she knows what you think maybe would happen. And then she knows that you know that she knows what you think is going to happen. And so suddenly, like, you're in this place of kind of feeling like you're jumping up on the trampoline of knowing what's going on. And then I was still surprised at the end. It's very satisfying in an unexpected way.

I think I have given this book to people in the audience here, so there's no better recommendation for that. But this is my Swiss Army pick of the night. I could recommend this to almost anybody. That's a really good pick. All right, are you down to two? This is my last one. This is the rare book about books that I love. The Story Life of A.J. Fickery by Gabrielle Zevin. Who's read this one?

Oh, good, like maybe a third, a quarter of folks. So this is set on a fictional island in Massachusetts, kind of a Cape Cod vibe. It's about A.J. Fickery, who I believe is about to turn 40, and he is cantankerous and sad.

He lost his wife and his unborn child. Life is understandably bitter and hard for him, but he has really taken it to the extreme. And then one day a two-year-old is abandoned at his bookstore.

and changes his life. In all the ways that you imagine that having a kid just show up and insist on being part of your life might change it. Especially if you're like a crusty middle-aged guy who was pretty committed to being a cranky middle-aged guy.

that was how he was going to spend the rest of his days just being kind of grumpy. Love comes into his life. Like this is kind of the bookseller whose heart grew three sizes is maybe a way to think about it. And of course it's set in and around a bookstore. All of the chapters are, the chapter headings are named after literary works. So for me this works because like it's set in our

She actually hates this kind of book. Whether it's a bookstore, it's about a library. I mean, the pandery stuff, she really doesn't like. So she's recommending this as a big deal. Yeah, this is a big deal. If it's like the Book Lovers Book Club on Book Island, I'm like, what are we doing? We could get a $100,000 advance for that. Don't give that out for free. Those books fill me with a, like, come on, book lovers deserve better. And I remember reading this and being like, this is it. This is the book all those books are aspiring to be. Yes, yeah, this is the one.

the one this is the platonic ideal of a book about books that is not just hey you love books and let's talk about how that enriches our lives but the story between the characters is really warm and very charming this is I think maybe the most recommendable of mine you can give it to just about anybody like

I could give this to my mother-in-law for Christmas and not be worried that anything was going to offend her sensibilities. But you can give it to somebody that you think of as a more serious reader, and they'll find enough substance and stuff to hang on to to find it interesting. I've got one more pick. Good job, Rebecca! Thank you!

I'm giving my kids one book of heads up. We picked some family wrecks that I might run through at the end. If they would like to come up and speak to the microphone, they are encouraged and welcome. Rowan's face suggests that that is not going to happen. Ames might. You want to come up here in just a minute? Two minutes to think about it. You want to hold the timer? You want to come hold the timer? All right. My last one. Anybody read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett? I was really mad when I had to. This was on yours, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So this came out in 2020. It's her sophomore novel after The Mothers. The two main characters are twin light-skinned black women who are born in a fictional town, I believe, Mallard, Louisiana. And it's the story of their lives.

They have a hard time. Things don't go great. And it leads one of them to make the decision, because she is so light-skinned, to pass as a white person and lead life as a white person. Her sister has a relationship with a darker-skinned man, has a kid, and so that's really not available to her if she wants to stay with her family. And so their paths...

and things happen, and then they sort of start coming back towards each other. The other thing that they encounter a lot of other characters who are also negotiating their own identities, trying to figure out

Do I have to live as this thing the world says I am? What if I don't? What are the ramifications of that don't? Because it does not come without a cost to any character who makes a decision either to stay who you are or to decide to be someone else. I mean, I do not have this experience, but I think most of us do. We know that either decision is a trade-off of some kind.

And they make a different one. The cast of characters is fascinating. She's a wonderful writer. Never really read anything like this before. Because there's a mystery element to it as well. Yeah, there is a little, like, how is this going to turn out? How is this going to happen? Is everyone going to be okay? But a combination of page-turnery, book club, character-driven, but also...

a heart and a head at work. - It rings a lot of bells. - And it rings a lot of bells because that's what we try to do, we ring bells here. So there's a mind, thank you so much for listening to my picks. - Good job, Jeff. - If you're gonna come, come now. So we're doing family picks. If you wanna come up, come up. All right, Ames, you wanna talk about yours? You wanna say it or you want me to talk about it? - I'll do it. - You'll do it, okay. You gotta talk into the mic, kiddo. - Should I just like stand right here? - Hold the mic. - My first time doing this. - Welcome, Ames!

I did not expect that much applause. So I picked just a book. I do not know what date this was written. I picked this up three or four years ago at a small bookstore in Bend, a hyperbole and a half. Anyone ready? Yeah, lots of hands. I just saw this in the bookstore, and I looked at the cover and said, yes, please. And it definitely delivered. So what it is, it's about the author, Ali Brosh, who is...

just in my opinion an amazing illustrator. So it's it's as close to a stand-up comedy skit as you are going to get from a book. That's a great way to put it. It is a bunch of collected stories, some when she's a kid, some when she's adult. They range from the God of Cake to Dinosaur the Goose Story. She

She's incredibly funny. But the thing I think is so recommendable about it is there are a couple chapters like, okay, you have time to cry now. Because she just goes through these incredible life moments and she writes about them really well. And I think the thing I'm most proud of is she's super authentic. If you went through this, yeah, I could see being that.

So yeah, that's just, I like it a lot. So yeah. - Great job Ames. - I'm sure there's copies. I didn't give the staff heads up we'd be doing this, but I bet we could find you a copy. And what's the second one? Solutions and other problems is the second one? She lives in Bend, I believe. - Oh, Bend. - All right kid, what do you got? - Front Desk by Kelly Yang. - Here, I'll hold it up for you.

This book is about a 10-year-old girl who her parents work at a motel and she manages the front desk. And it's about her and her family who her parents are both immigrants supporting all the immigrants that come to this motel and just figure it out. Figure it out, yeah. Great job. Yeah. Why do you like it? Can you say why you like it? Thanks, Rowan.

Couple of other quick ones. My family did the whole series of the Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yon Glazer, who was a book writer contributor and still comes, I think, from time to time. It's about a family, a mixed-race family that lives in Harlem and the misadventures of the children who...

really should just tell their parents what's going on but then we don't have a book you know that's the way these things go if you talk to each other we don't have stories it turns out um but it's endearing the whole series uh the i cried the hardest reading a particular character's death that i did i wasn't ready we're all sitting on the couch sobbing looking at each other like i guess this is great right i don't know uh the cared feeding of a pet black hole this to me on the drive by michelle cuevas this

It's a young girl, right? Finds a small black hole wandering the streets. Yeah, her dad works at like NASA or something and escapes from the Large Hadron Collider thing, whatever's going on. But it's kind of like a dog-like creature that has a personality and all it wants to be is hugged, but you can't hug a black hole because you get sucked into the InvenHorizon and turned into spaghetti, which is a tough beat.

And it's really funny and absurd and charming. There's a little bit of hitchhikers, but for six-year-olds going on with this book, it's pretty great. And then lastly, this is Michelle and I, Rebecca, other people that we know. We've moved more units of this, I think, as a business book. Radical Candor by Kim Scott. And I guess it's kind of coming out of the talk to people. More people talking about more things more of the time. More of the time. Yeah.

I mean, is it fair to say it changed our lives and businesses? 100%. Yeah, it's a very simple idea, which is you're honest with people, good and bad. You don't wuss out and not tell people when they've done something poorly. And you also don't shy away from saying...

Great job. And you're not a jerk to say you weren't doing that particularly well. There's structures for it. We use it almost every day at work. It's meant a lot to us personally. It's meant a lot to Michelle and people she's worked with. And I know we've moved a lot of these. So again, it's not going to be like, oh my God, I just enjoy reading this. But in terms of a book to change your life, Rebecca writes a newsletter called Better Living Through Books. And this is in the Parthenon. I should just write about it every month.

Write about it every month. And those are the picks. We seeded some idea. This is the end of our formal programming tonight. We're going to do a little Q&A because I know we have some BRPod listeners that may have something they want to ask. If there are no questions, I'm not going to force you to do anything. As always, you have the coupon. Please shop, pals. Go buy some books. I think we're available for personal recs if you've got an idea if we're sitting up here. Yes, and you can, of course, shop.

Shop the carts there. Does anyone have a question for either of us about the books or the pod or anything else we do? This is your chance. Yeah, we're going to run. I'm going to come to you.

It's a good thing that the one with the long legs got the mic without the cords tonight. Is this the first time you've done a live podcast recording? Oh, great question. So in 2015 and 2016, Book Riot hosted a couple weekend-long events called Book Riot Live, and we did live versions of the regular news show at those. So it's been 10 years, and this is the first time we've done this show in a bookstore setting. So I'm going to say mostly yes.

Mostly yes. Anybody else want to ask a question? I'm coming right up to gut. Oh, books set in Portland. We need help. I don't know. This might be, we need to crowd source this. I don't have one that comes to mind. Jeremy? Jeremy, you have one? Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zahn. That's a good one. Patrick DeWitt. Patrick DeWitt is the librarian that's set here. The librarian is set here. Okay, green hat. I'm sorry.

Glaciers? Yeah, Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith. It's called The Tin House. I'm guessing it's about a forest? No. It's a hundred or so pages. It's about works. I think I actually asked how. Oh, wow. She also really likes to do T-shirts. Like One Day. Oh, I love a One Day. Glaciers. I haven't heard of it. It's a new one to me, too. Anybody else want to ask something while we're here? Is this Wild by Cheryl Strait, Kelsey? Oh, Wild by Cheryl Strait. I'll allow it. That's Oregon adjacent. Anybody else? Yeah, take them off.

Favorite but least recommendable book? Oh, I think this is the Toni Morrison conversation, maybe? Like, Beloved is one of the best things I've ever read, and also I don't know how you ask someone else to have that experience. But you'll be glad you did. It's just not something that you can wrap up and put under the tree or in a stocking or give someone for Hanukkah and be like, you're welcome.

Yeah, I've thought about this a lot. I mean, most of the books that I like, I think there's something to recommend it. I think the hardest category to recommend, if I cheat, which I'll allow to myself, is a book that's about something no one has any reason to care about. So I've been talking about this book called Engrained by Callum Robinson. He's a Scottish woodworker, and this is about him and his...

family and small business pivoting from making bespoke high-end wooden installations to making tables and that is a hard pitch that i just gave you to be like oh my god but it's like not just about that but it's not about that but like it is also totally about that um

But I don't understand how he writes these sentences because I don't know if he has any form. That's how you recommend it. It's the sentences. It's a business book. It's a love story. It's a craft book. Mm-hmm.

And I still wouldn't be like, please go read this. I just, I don't know who I give this to. You'd have to be, unless I like found. I mean, I bought it after you talked about it. Yeah, but you're a soft touch. It's true. It's fair. That's fair. Any other questions we're going to get? Oh, Jennifer. Oh, a recommendation. Okay, yeah. Oh, it's hard. Yeah, let's do recommendations. Does anyone, anything someone should have been on here? Yeah, what did you think we should have listed tonight? I don't know.

I don't know if this should be on there, I was kind of thinking Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Taylor Jenkins reads debut novels. I was wondering where those were. That's a good sign. Zero Stars Do Not Recommend. And every time I give the pitch for that book, people are like, I'm going to read it. And then I made my book club read it and everyone loved it. Yeah, tell us. Oh, man. So I think on page one, The Sun Explodes.

So you're on, I think it's a Bahaman or Caribbean island. You've got your main character, who was a TAG student, but he's kind of underperformed as an adult. He's got an amazing girlfriend named Mira, who's a nurse. She's wonderful. And he's a couple...

Bud Lights Inn and looking out and the sun explodes. And then everything kind of goes crazy and there's this resort and the resort is kind of this microcosm of everything because you've got the A building where all the rich people are and Liliana, Bich Bod by Liliana, she's like a

MLM person so she kind of takes charge of everything and you've got the B building where the normal people are and then you've got the C building where you've got like your New Jersey deli owners and those are the people you want on your side when the shit gets real and everything happens murder mayhem

It's just really, how do you know all of them? It's called like Zero Stars to Recommend. Zero Stars to Not Recommend. It's a debut novel by MJ Wasmer. It's got a really, really cute cover. It's a relatively recent. Cool. I actually was talking about it at a publishing event and the person across from me, it's a source book, so I'm like, oh my god, that's our title. And I'm like, okay, you guys should be like pitching this a whole bunch more. They should advertise with a book-related publishing company. If only. It's the kind of book

you finish and you feel good. Oh, that's the best. Even though the sun has exploded. Yeah. That's the beginning. That's a good thing. Other questions or recommendations for the room? That's a tough one to follow.

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Oh, Jeremy, over here.

My question, and I'll give my really quick answer, is what is a book that's being published this year that you're looking forward to reading? And my answer is kind of an absurd one like yours, which is, I pre-ordered it, which is called When the Moon Meets Your Eye, and it was on a college newsletter.

What a great title. And it's the moon literally turns to cheese and over night. Yeah, and it's like what are the implications for the world? And it says that it's like

says what's going on for like politicians or stand-up comedians or religious people or billionaires and it's like how do all these people like come to terms with what's happening from like their own different like vantage points of like these different parts of society. That was a really long answer but what are you looking forward to? That's a weird thing? Is that what the answer was? Or just in general what's going on? What is it? Was it supposed to be a weird thing? Oh no, just whatever. What's coming up?

I checked my list if you need a minute to vamp. Yeah, do yours. So I'm really excited about Harriet Tubman live in concert by Bob the Drag Queen. Which, what did you say? From the Traders? Yes. Um,

And the pitch is that it's an alternate present, maybe alternate future when great figures from the past, including Harriet Tubman, come back to tell us we're doing it wrong and get us back on track for how we should be doing it. And Harriet Tubman does it by going on a live rock tour.

And this is all I know about it, and that was all I need to know about this book. And my other one in the Shinsky wheelhouse zone is a book called Change of Habit about a woman who gives up her life with her partner and family and becomes a nun. And I just tell me everything. Yeah, the one that... I mean, I've already read it, so the one that I really like that's coming out, it kind of goes into the hard book to recommend. It's called White Lips.

And it's about phosphorus. I don't know if you're joking or not. I'm deadly fucking serious. And you'll be too once I tell you about it. It is why phosphorus is important. Phosphorus, I didn't know. I wish we'd end the show. Is that it? I'm serious. So like, this is the kind of thing. This is real. Thank you.

This is real. She lives with this all the time, every day. So it's about phosphorus and why it's so important. Did you know the world we're living in isn't the world built by phosphorus? I did. Did you know that the most rare mineral in your body right now and yours too is phosphorus? It's the limiting agent of life. It's the thing that determines how much biomass is in the world at any given moment.

And in 1864, some English dudes, they're probably in Bill Bryson's book, are like, hey, what's that big white pile of shit over there? And it's literally a big white pile of shit because it's calcified phosphorus. And like, you know what? If we put this on our corn, we can make more of it. And we avoided famines and built the world we live in. And you enjoy food, don't you? I do. You have phosphorus to thank for. There's something beautiful when a person is just 100 million percent himself in a moment. Yeah.

We're going to run out of phosphorus before the sun explodes. So anytime you're like, we've got until 3600, 1000 years, give or take 100 years. This is the most Jeff O'Neill you have ever been. I'm leaning back. I'm comfortable now. It's great. What a gift. You saw it here, folks. You can say you were here when it happened. Phosphorus is going to keep you up at night.

I think this one has a Powell's connection. Alison Bechdel is going to be here. Tell me the date. And I just finished The Secret to Superhuman Strength for the second time. She is about 60, and for every decade of her life, she was into some other thing.

fitness thing. Oh fun. And the drawings are just hysterical. She obviously went to Iyengar yoga. Okay. There's straps and blocks and men in shorts. That's a whole vibe. It's just hysterical. Men in shorts is another thing. And I've read her other books too. Thank you so much.

These are graphic novels and the new one is about how, so she wrote Fun Home which became a musical and made her wealthier and more famous and this book Spent is about the aftermath of being famous and wealthy and a lesbian graphic novelist and like all the things that come along with being uncomfortable in your own skin. Anybody else want to shout something out? May 29th. May 29th she's going to be here? Yeah. She's terrific. That's fantastic.

So I'm curious to both of you as readers, how much do you look for and at what times do you look for fiction and non-fiction that leans into who you already are and how much you lean into people who are unlike who you are? That's a great question. Windows and mirrors question. Yeah, I really like the way that you phrased that. I don't know that I'm consciously thinking about...

I'm in the mood for something that's reflective versus in the mood for something that's a lens on something else. But those are both really important elements of my reading diet and Jeff's as well. It's more when the right book crosses your threshold, you're like, oh, I want to read that. And sometimes it feels like it's going to really resonate.

More often, to me, it will be like, I don't know what this book is going to be. So usually if a book reflects something back to me, it's by surprise. I feel like I seek that out less, but I'm seeking out something that will be different or new or surprising or that I want to learn something else. I think we both lean

in that direction. Yeah, I think we've described it as like we're kind of explorers when it comes to reading. Like, we'll give anything a fair whack on the whole. I don't really do a lot of comfort reading. I wouldn't put it that way. But, you know, we've talked about this book, Life in Three Dimensions, and it really unlocks something for us how to understand what we're getting through books, which is

trying to explore the full richness of what makes the world the world and I live in smallish life and that's only a very very small bit of it and I know what that life is like so I'm trying to read about really interesting exciting things like boss. Anybody else before we get out of here? Oh Jill! This is so exciting, Jill.

Hi Jill, hi Billy. What a trip to have our friends be in the room for this. Hi, a shout out to Short Stories. Oh yes. Yeah, my nomination is At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kish Johnson from 2012. And it's just magical and surreal and strange and kind of unearthly and beautiful. And the last story takes place in Lawrence, Kansas. Oh, excellent. Thank you, Jill. Lawrence, Kansas.

Thank you all so much for coming. Come say hi if you want. Go shop the store if you want. Buy lots of books. Buy some books. Thanks to pals. Good evening. Good night. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you'll enjoy this excerpt from the audiobook edition of With a Vengeance by Riley Sager, read by Erin Bennett. Available now wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Anna Matheson clears her throat, straightens her spine, and steadies her trembling hands. She pictures herself as a statue.

rigid and impenetrable, anything to make her look like she's not afraid, when in truth, she's been scared for so long that fear has seeped into her marrow. Still, when she begins to speak, her voice is firm and clear. You know who I am, just as you know why I've gathered you here. If you haven't figured it out yet, you will very soon.

Anna pauses, just as she'd rehearsed. The length timed to the millisecond to allow any unlikely stragglers to catch up. By now you've recognized each other. Maybe you've even had a chance to chat a bit. Likely long enough to suspect that you've been brought here under false pretenses. That suspicion is correct. The reason for this journey is simple. I'm here to- Just then, the train lurches, sending Anna off balance.

In the tiny bathroom of her room, she watches her reflection sway in the equally tiny mirror. The first time she'd been on the Philadelphia Phoenix, everything had felt enormous. Not just the room, but the train itself. Every car seemed endless, as if walking the entire length of the train constituted a journey of miles. Then again, Anna had been 11 at the time, and trains loomed large in her life, especially ones run by the Union Atlantic Railroad.

Unlike most rail lines of the day, Union Atlantic had been privately owned. Her father had inherited the family business when her grandfather passed away. In another bit of unconventionality, it hadn't relied on an outside company like Pullman to build its cars and locomotives. Union Atlantic designed and manufactured its own in-house at a facility in Philadelphia, including the Phoenix.

Anna's mother had even designed the interiors, filling them with her favorite fabrics and colors. Velvet drapes, chenille upholstery, damask walls, all in shades of peacock blue, emerald green, and rich ivory, surrounded by walnut and gold leaf and bronze. After her mother, her brother, and Anna herself, the Philadelphia Phoenix had been her father's pride and joy.

Debuting in 1937, it wasn't the first streamliner train, nor was it the fastest or the most famous. But those superlatives didn't matter. The Phoenix was still a gleaming marvel that offered both jaw-dropping speed and unparalleled luxury. Plus, her father loved it, which is the main reason Anna chose it for the night's journey. It serves as a reminder to the others of all that had been taken from her.

The train lurches again, this time with purpose. A moment later, someone raps four times on the door. Seamus, here to tell her what she already knows. The train is in motion. There's no turning back now. Anna hurries to the door, feeling the train picking up speed beneath her bare feet. A strange sensation that, for a second, wreaks havoc on her balance and makes her reach for the wall to steady herself. No matter how many times she travels by train,

It always takes Anna a moment to navigate that unwieldy combination of standing on solid ground while also being in motion. Train legs, her father had called them, removing her hand from the wall. She stands in the middle of the room, waiting for her legs to learn how to absorb the gentle rocking of the train. Once they do, she's able to reach for the door, unlock it, and pull it open.

As expected, Seamus is on the other side, filling the narrow corridor that runs the length of the car. The windows behind him show nothing but blackness. They are now in the tunnel on their way out of the city.