ONYX STORM Rolls In, It's a Very Bookish Oscars, and Making Your Own Book Fair
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Next day.

This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. I'm Rebecca Shinsky. And today we're talking about the onyx storm. Storm? Crashing. Yeah, thundering, lightning, wrecking havoc, I guess. Meteorological analogy goes here. National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, Oscar nominees. Rebecca saw the Nickel Boys. We've got reading to do. We have a segment B.

That's going to be on the back half of the show. Rebecca, tell the people who you're going to be talking to. I'll be talking with Jamie Attenberg. Many of y'all know her as a novelist. She's written a few memoirs, but she also runs a, I guess, writing community project every summer now called A Thousand Words of Summer that started on Twitter several years ago and has grown into being a

based on Substack now with more than 40,000 participants. And for the last two years, Jamie has used the financial proceeds from the Thousand Words of Summer portion of her work to sponsor a book fair at a school in her town. She lives in New Orleans that makes it possible for every student to walk away from the book fair with books.

books. A really cool thing, I subscribed to her sub stack and I got to read the story about it this past November. And I thought, you know, like, especially in this moment where a lot of us are looking for ways to be more deeply connected to local community, grassroots effort, things that make direct impact on the kids in your neighborhood and

And you don't have to run for school board to do it. There are so many other ways to make an impact and support literacy efforts. So I just wanted to talk to Jamie. And, you know, when I invited her, she said, I'm not an expert. I just do this. And I was like, that's the point. The point is that you're not an expert. You don't have to be an expert or a professional to be able to put together something that will support literacy and education efforts in your local community and make a big difference in kids' lives. So I'll be talking with her about that in the second half of the show.

I think that's it. So it's going to be a little shorter on the first half of the show, but there's actually quite a bit of news. Before we do that, let's take our first sponsor break. Make your next move with American Express Business Platinum. You'll get five times membership rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked on amextravel.com. Plus, enjoy access to the American Express Global Lounge Collection. And with a welcome offer of 150,000 points, your business can soar to all new heights.

Terms apply. Learn more at AmericanExpress.com slash business dash platinum. Amex Business Platinum. Built for business by American Express. So the Onyx storm. Didn't go super well. I guess on the whole, I was at Powell's several times this week. I guess I just in and out. Because you're living right. Because I'm living right and always going in. I bought the new Hong Kong for book discussion that's going on Patreon. The 30th is when that goes up. I got to read that book this weekend. Luckily it's short. End of next week. Anyway.

So they have plenty of copies there as of Wednesday, the January 22nd of the deluxe limited edition. So a couple of things struck me. There was a bunch of them. They put them on a special cart. Pals almost never does this. They did it for Intermezzo. Like these are the kinds of things to do. Intermezzo, the one adult novel to generate midnight release parties in recent memory. Yeah. Yeah. So they had a bunch of them. There's a standard edition and a deluxe limited edition. They had them both.

The price delta was as much as I thought it was going to be. It's like $27, I think, for the standard and $32 for the deluxe. So it's only $5, which...

Okay. And five bucks means something to a lot of people, I guess. But I was like, if you're already going to buy a hardcover anyway. And a $32, like 600 page hardcover is kind of standard now for some of the big serious hardcovers. It's actually so low that I wonder if I misread that. My old, maybe it was $37.99. Maybe I'll do some Googling here in a minute and I'll correct this. But they had a bunch of them. So it sounds like the eye of the storm. No, the eye is where it's calm. Anyway, the storm wall was Target's.

The epicenter. Epicenter. They had their own different limited edition. Yes, they had an exclusive. So I learned on YouTube today. Oh, you were on YouTube? Not by choice. Yeah, right. The things we do for work. That it's an exclusive edition at Target, but it's not limited.

And what the YouTube kids at least have parsed that to mean is that while Target ran out of copies presently, they believe there will be more of them because it's an exclusive edition to Target where you can only get it at Target, but it's not necessarily limited to like the one run that they've already sold out of. I don't know.

If that is correct. But this is what multiple booktube, like angry booktube moments taught me this morning. Well, I think maybe the angry booktube thing is the story and forget about the specific details because you have a link here about not impress the fan art. This is the, this is the final boss of book level phenomenon. When it, when the exclusive art in the target only edition or whatever people are mad about, um,

This is the tulip craze stage of this. And that's not bad. It's great. I'm glad everyone is having a fun time. But the Target editions, which Target can go back to their...

factory in China and get 200,000 more of them selling for $500 on eBay today. It's bananas. That is not sustainable. That's like real peak whatever is going on with this kind of stuff. Yeah, that is really the point. And I've seen a lot of comparisons. I think maybe you even made the comparison between how this went for Onyx Storm at Target versus how the Taylor Swift rollout went. Yeah.

And I wonder if it's because they kind of did things in the opposite direction, that Taylor Swift's was exclusively in-store first. Right.

Like you had to walk your meat suit into a Target on the day after Thanksgiving to get the Taylor Swift book if you wanted any shot at a copy. And then it was like, if there are extras, they will be made available online the day after. And Onyx Storm went the other direction. It was, I think, available on the Target website and people were logging on at 2 a.m. and there was so much demand.

it crashed the target website. So a lot of folks who were doing, this was, this was basically what happened to ticket master with Taylor Swift. Too many people wanted in at the same time and the website couldn't handle it. And a lot of folks were really upset that they did not get their exclusive target edition because targets technology is

couldn't handle the capacity. Plus, there are folks who are not impressed with what the exclusive art turns out to be. And I think this is the double edge of the sword that you build so much hype for something that

that people start to have really high expectations of it. And there is a point where, like, what a publisher can reasonably produce inside, you know, publishing budgets and then reasonably sell for, what, $32 or $35 in hardcover and make the margins that they need to make. Like, it can only get so fancy. I'm a little surprised. I mean...

The point about how they did the Taylor Swift launch in that book compared to this is interesting because it suggests to me a couple possibilities from Target's point of view. One is that they really didn't know what kind of demand this kind of thing was going to have.

Kind of like the Powell's used book event where there's a mile long people. Like we thought there'd be some people, but wow. And it sort of overwhelmed the system because I think you're right. Getting your human body to a store is a winnowing process, right? And I don't remember hearing a bunch of stories about huge, super long lines outside of targets and other things or things being out of stock. So I'm going to assume that it went fairly well, but

So Target can do it. That they didn't handle it well for this is either...

I'm going to put incompetence out the road because they did. They can't do it, Rebecca. They just did it with the Taylor Swift book is they didn't understand what they were getting themselves into. Yes. Yeah. And maybe the fact that Taylor Swift went smoothly, even though that was in store first, you know, maybe they thought they had their bases covered. Like, well, if we can handle Taylor Swift demand, surely we can handle this. And there are so many competing versions of,

of Onyx Storm, the Target one isn't the only special edition, as you were saying, that I can imagine that does make it pretty difficult to get a sense of what your demand is going to be. Plus, there were like a million pre-orders for some other edition of it. So if you're Target... You would think you would have smoothed out demand to some degree. Yeah, if you're Target, you're just kind of sitting on your hands. Like, we don't know what demand is going to be. We're just going to see how many people log on at 2 a.m. and go for it. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I wonder if they had to do over, they would run back the Swift playbook. I'd love to know what their print run for that thing is. There's so much I'm interested to see. Also, I saw some stories, I don't have a link here, about people who had access to the book early in the form of retailers, really, because millions of units are floating around to be on the show floor at 9 a.m. on the 21st. People were reading it in social media about it.

that's what's going to happen yeah it probably bookstores probably received it on monday sunday or monday i would guess right if not sooner and it's been sitting in their stock rooms with big tape on those boxes that say it's embargoed but it's just tape friend yeah and the and the soc so incentivizes someone to break like in the old days like if you had a spoiler like

Hey, you could make money off it. Now, if you have a TikTok following or whatever, you can make money and cloud and get a bunch of followers. If you're one of the people, oh my God, about the end of whatever book or this or that, like the incentives are so much higher to, um,

Kind of like people breaking iPhone 17 rumors because the stakes are so high. You're incentivized to get into and take a look at what the camera bump is going to look like this fall because case manufacturers are interested in move stock markets, frankly, to have that kind of information. Really, really interesting thing. Well, for those of you who are super pumped, I hope you had a good time. I don't know.

i don't even know where i would go as a civilian now that i'm not stalking the soc to see if people like the book or not but if you're if you're a fourth wing fan and you want to let us know what the vibe is out there about onyx store podcast at bookriot.com be super interested to know it was kind of a award bonanza day when i was writing today in books they were the national book critics circle awards and then

The Oscars, which included seven of the ten Best Picture nominees, were for adaptations. And, of course, the Best Adapted Screenplay category we're interested in by itself. You want to start with the NBCC or you want to do Oscars first? Rebecca, where do you want to go? Let's do NBCC first. Yeah. So the National Book Critics Circle Award, they did their long list in the fall, earlier in the winter. Yeah, a couple months ago. Late 2024. Yeah.

which now feels about 10 years ago. And this is, we're winnowing down to the shortlist. I said winnow, now I've said it three times in this pod. It's unusual. And well, I have just realized that I put the 2024 nominees in our show notes. Oh, okay. Yeah. Updating that. I think I know them now, but...

James survives into the shortlist. We're going to talk about fiction. We can look at some of those. James and Beautyland are the two that I think we're most interested. Danny Sena's Color Television did not make it into the final five. So that hand-holding run to the top of that is over. Us Fools. Joseph O'Neill's Godwin, which had some late-breaking buzz among the critical circle at the end of last year, is there. I read his Nether...

land a million years ago when I was in grad school and just reading book blogs for the first time. I think it might have been the first book I read because I read a book blogger write about it. Mark Starvis wrote about it. I was just going to say, this sounds like an elegant variation. It very much was. I really liked the book. It was about cricket, which I, you know, it's not something I know about, but I can get there. So that was really cool to see. And

I think the story is James still. I think so too. Yeah. It's going to be the story. The last of the five nominees is My Friends by Hisham Mattar, which was also on the National Book Award list this year. Yeah. I put on our blue sky for the podcast that we were delighted to see Beautyland get recognized, but I look forward to celebrating James's continuing sweep. The story is going to be James. And let's see. Challenger, you're Adam Higginbotham. Yeah.

That is, I think, my leading pick among the nonfiction. Well, that's history. And then don't they have like criticism too? Because Adurakeba is under criticism for There's Always This Year, which is a little strange. I guess it's, is it? I don't know. That's essays. There's nowhere to put essays. They don't have just an essays category. I mean, his Little Devil in America was much closer to criticism than There's Always This Year is. I think I would have put There's Always This Year in autobiography, memoir category.

It's very personal. And I don't know any of the other four finalists in the criticism category. So I'm just going to keep rooting for Hanif Abdurraqib in all things. And as I said, the NBCC can be a little more idiosyncratic than the other major awards. And I do consider it one of the major awards. This isn't the chalkiest of all possible, but this is as chalky as I think the NBCC gets. And it has.

That's one of my favorite categories, which is the prize for first book. I love that too. Yeah, it's genre agnostic. So By the Fire We Carry by Rebecca Nagel, which is nonfiction. Feeding Ghosts, a graphic memoir by Tessa Hull. Great Expectations, a novel by Vincent Cunningham. Miss May Does Not Exist, The Life and Work of Elaine May. That's a biography. I want to read that. Is she a film editor? I really want to read that book.

Bored Toward by Cindy Ju-Yong Oak, which I'm not familiar with that one. And When the Clock Broke by John Gans, which got a lot of buzz last year. But I love this of like, let's talk about debuts and that they throw all the debuts from all the different categories together. But celebrating remarkable debuts, I think is a wonderful thing to do. It's one of my favorite things in books. Yeah, because Penn has a first novel and the Center for Fiction has a first novel that

But I think this is the only just first book and let's throw them all into the jambalaya and see. That's not a bad reading list. If you just want to read five books and you're looking for like that first book, you get a little bit of everything. It's a cool award. I think Endowed by John Leonard. It's always called the John Leonard Award. I don't know who John Leonard was, but good job with that. Yeah, good job, John Leonard. Good use of it. Oscar nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best

I don't know what this... I mean, so you saw Nickel Boys. What do you want to lead with that? Yeah. Well, let's just run through the list of best adapted screenplay. A Complete Unknown, screenplay by James Mangold based on what's it called? Dylan Goes Electric is the book.

Conclave, the screenplay is by Peter Straughn, based on the novel by Robert Harris. Amelia Perez, screenplay by Jacques Odiard. It's based on a libretto, also written by Jacques Odiard. Nickel Boys, screenplay by Rommel Ross and Jocelyn Barnes, based on the book by Colson Whitehead. And Sing Sing, the screenplay is by Clint Bentley and Greg Quaidar. And it is based on a long New Yorker piece called The Sing Sing Follies that you can now find anywhere.

in paperback book form, but originally a long New Yorker piece. So interesting. And I think this is the first year in a couple of years where most of them have been book adaptations. Like last year, we had Barbie as an adaptation. We've got stuff based on musicals. There was a chance Wicked was going to be in this category. There was a moment where I thought maybe The Wild Robot was

might be in this category. So I've seen all of these except A Complete Unknown currently. I've seen Conclave, Amelia Perez, Nickelodeon, Sing Sing. We're going to do an episode all about adapted screenplay right before this.

the Oscars, but Nickel Boys is phenomenal. Is it? I'm so excited. I still can't get a show time here. It's so... It is wonderful. It is shot in, like, I think the film version of second person, basically. Like, you see through... Or Bob said, yeah, that sounds like first-person shooter games. Like, you see through the two main characters' eyes, and you bounce back and forth between their two perspectives, which...

I think Ramel Ross did this really beautifully in scenes where they're talking to each other. And it's not necessarily like every time one of them speaks, you bounce back and forth, but you're with a character and then you're with an, you get to see them see each other and we get to see them through each other's eyes. I'm curious how your vertigo is going to do. Oh no!

There are a couple moments where like somebody's... Yeah, where like a character is running and it's pretty jostly. It's not a whole lot. It took me a little while to sink into that...

way that it was shot. But once I was in it, it was so absorbing. He was really faithful to the story. And I always have to remind myself that best adapted screenplay is about how good is the screen? What's the best screenplay that happens to be adapted from something? It's not how good of an adaptation is it from the source material. But since we are concerned with how good of an adaptation is it, I can say I thought it was really spectacular and quite

an achievement. There's a version of a movie like that that does that. Here's a really terrible thing that happened in history and let's all feel good about ourselves for going to see a movie about it. And Rommel Ross doesn't fall into any of that. It's really wonderful.

Yeah, I guess on the adapted screenplay side, there's, you know, the long, all worthy nominees. I wondered about Wicked. My kids and I were doing this in the car when we came back from seeing Wicked. It's like, it's a movie that's based on a musical, that's based on a book, that's based on really, it's really based on the movie itself.

Yeah. Based on the book. It's confusing. Frank L. Baum's original is basically a reconfigured Alice in Wonderland, but in Kansas. So it's like that is really a rushing nesting doll all the way down. It's pretty wild. I can't think of anything else like that. I guess it was like Kiss Me Kate or something like that. You have adaptations all the way down. But Wicked is his.

Yeah, you keep spinning. You just keep spinning. Yeah, and you know, I've got my own opinions here. I think Amelia Perez is kind of a mess, but it also... 13 nominations? Did you see that? Yeah, it is the most nominated film this year. Something is happening for it in the Academy, so I don't know. But we should decide if we're going to read one of these together. Which would be the likeliest Larry here? Conclave? I think Conclave has some juice.

I have not seen A Complete Unknown yet, but the buzz I'm picking up around that is like, Chalamet's performance is really great. He's maybe going to win, probably going to win Best Actor, but I don't know that the film itself is actually excellent. I mean...

I think it'll be a good time to watch it, but in terms of adaptation, like, okay, yes, it is technically based on the book, but it's based on the book of life. It's based on Bob Dylan's life. So I'm sure the book is, I've heard wonderful things about the book actually, and maybe it gives shape and contour or whatever, but I'd love to see nickel boys take it, but I don't know. Sing, sing. I may have a shot that maybe they all have a shot here. We're kind of stepping on our next show about this, but I think conclave would be a fun one to read. That's, I mean, a pulpy. Yeah. Well,

Well, it's a super wide open year at the top of the ticket all the way down. Maybe some of the acting categories, there's some people circling, but like, I don't think I'm not getting the sense that Amelia Perez is super widely seen or widely beloved. I don't know why it has 13 nominations. I was very surprised to see it. That puts it like Lord of the Rings territory. Yeah, it's...

you know, the international voters, there's more international voters in the Academy now, and there's been quite a campaign around Amelia Perez. I do think it falls prey to many of the things, the kinds of things that Rommel Ross really avoids with Nickel Boys, but the Amelia Perez, if you're not familiar, is a

about Zoe Saldana plays a lawyer in Mexico City who gets hired by like the head of a cartel, a really bad dude who tells her that he is actually a woman. He identifies as a woman and he wants to transition and he wants her to facilitate this process for him. Like, where is he going to go? How are they going to keep it secret? How is he going to restart his life afterwards? And it's a weird, messy musical like

all around this. And I think maybe there are folks who are like less familiar with trans issues and seeing a, seeing this kind of representation of trans life is something that they're like, that's great. Right. Most of the trans critics have said not so much. So we'll, we'll see. I think it might go that direction where people feel good about themselves for having liked that movie. I just remember two Wizard of Oz fact toys I meant to tell you. Tell me. Because I, I,

When I was in L.A. visiting my brother over break with my family, went to the Academy Museum, which you haven't been to, right? Have you ever been? I have not, no. You would dig it. It's pretty cool. It's not like huge Smithsonian level, but it's pretty cool to see. But they have the original ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz movie.

Fun fact, and this is maybe a wicked spoiler, but not really. It's just in the original book, the slippers are silver. Oh. Like just silver. But because one of the big deals about the Wizard of Oz movies is going to be Technicolor, like they wanted the color to pop. So the production designer just decided to make them red because it looked good on camera. Legendary. Isn't that amazing? What a legendary choice. And then that sent me down the Wizard of Oz rabbit hole on my phone that night, as you might imagine this happens to me sometimes. Yeah.

But the thing that stuck to me most is that Frank L. Baum, L. Frank Baum? Frank L. Baum. No, it's L. Frank. L. Frank. I can never keep that right. L. Ron Hubbard? Yeah, it's confusing. Good Lord. He named it Oz because he was sitting around and he looked at his file cabinet and it was like O to Z was his second file cabinet. So he just called it Oz.

So random. And you don't ever think a random choice that you make like that is going to last for more than a century. It just becomes iconic. It's like Roger Sterling says in Mad Men, it's like 99 cents. Someone had to think of that. Someone thought of that and it caught on. I can't get enough of that stuff. Anyway, anything else with Oscar nominees you want to do? Yeah, no, just to mention the Best Picture nominees that are based on books, A Complete Unknown is there, Conclave, Dune Part 2.

Emilia Perez, Nickel Boys, and Wicked. Dune Part, having not seen anything really, it will be hard to beat Dune Part 2 in my mind as adapted screenplay. What they did with that is amazing. Well, it's not nominated for adapted screenplay. I know. Did I say it's what it's going to win? I said should win.

Yeah, there seems to be something going on for like no one's going to give Denis Villeneuve his roses for the Dune series until the third until O'Neill's razor has been met. I'm sorry to tell people the next Dune storylines is bananas. It's going to be. I don't I don't know what they're going to do. I've heard it gets real weird there. Oh, I could I could say things that you would think we need to take you to the doctor and take your blood pressure because you're having some sort of neurological event.

All right. Well, good luck to all nominated and we'll figure out what we're going to read and watch together. Yeah. Should we do Frontless Foyer here in a minute? Yeah. Let's do it. Sponsored by Thrift Books. Thrift Books, did you know 19 million titles to browse? New and used books, DVDs, Blu-ray, everything else. I was actually, my daughter and I were scoping around last night. She spent some time in New York and took some pictures of books she wanted to buy. They didn't have the space in their bag. Smart girl.

And so like, okay, I bet we can find some of these on thrift books. We did. She put them in there. What's cool about thrift books too is like on some sites that have new and used, it can be a little bit hard to navigate the used pieces. I'm not talking about any site in specific except for the one that you're all thinking of.

But what's cool about the landing page for a book on Thrift Books is they have all of the editions right there and easy to see what the price is right there. So you can kind of toggle between them and see. One thing I appreciate there, free shipping on book orders of $15 or more in the U.S., delivered right to your door, news and use, plus DVD and Blu-ray. You know, there's a bit more of a crowd out there that doesn't want to stream.

They'd rather own the physical media because stuff goes away. You don't have to pay for it for a million years. I have an Apple movie library of purchased movies that I'm concerned about into the future because I spent some money on those and

And Blu-rays and DVDs aren't really, I'm not like, you know, the performance king when it comes to resolution and everything else like that. But that I have it would be nice. But there's, if you're out there with Blu-rays and DVDs and music too a little bit. And there's a Thrift Books Reading Awards program. I cashed a free book in last night to get something. Yeah, you did. Almost embarrassed to talk about. It's the history of the alphabet. There you go.

That's the one that you're embarrassed to talk about? Did we finally hit the limit? Look, everyone knows that it's kind of like the lie you tell to keep from telling the other truth. Mm-hmm.

The ones I'm embarrassed about, that's the front. That covers. What I just told you is air cover for the real embarrassing stuff. For the really embarrassing stuff. Okay, well. I hope you enjoy your history. There's that. Frontless Foyer. Rebecca, you're up first. Well, I listened to I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sant. And how right was I? Man, you were so right.

I downloaded it while we were talking. I found it on Spotify during last week's podcast recording. It was like, you're just selling the hell out of this. I'm going to listen to it. And then I had some baking to do the next day. So Lucy Sant and I spent like four hours in my kitchen. And then I just ran errands so I could drive around and finish. It is so...

So compelling, both just how deeply she articulates the experience of transitioning, period, but also transitioning so late in life and coming to understand herself, having other people come to understand her in a new way. A really just a really powerful story. And her voice is so just like mesmerizing. As soon as she started speaking, I was like, oh, here we go. Yes.

I'm just, I'm in. So that was a great recommendation from you. One of the many benefits of front-list foyer is getting to crib each other's reading perks, reading picks. And then I read Blob, A Love Story by Maggie Sue, which is maybe my most random reading pick in quite a while. I stumbled on it in a catalog while I was prepping for the draft for the season. I paused on it because it had a Kevin Wilson blurb. And the pitch is...

The main character Vi is in her early 20s. She dropped out of college a couple of months ago. Things were not going well for her and her boyfriend broke up with her and she's just a mess. She works at like a sad business traveler hotel. Life is not great. She's drinking too much. It's not a good scene.

goes one night to a club to meet a co-worker who's invited her out and she's waiting outside like for some reason standing by the dumpster and she sees this blob on the ground pokes at it and because we're in sci-fi land she like determines that this is not goo and it's not something that's spilled this blob is a creature it is sentient and

Later that night when she's drunk, she packs it up, takes it home and she starts talking. She names him Bob. So that's been really entertaining around my house. And so she's got Bob the blob. She starts talking to him.

And she's just, you know, like, this is what I've got to do today, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, you could at least give me a hand, you know, just sort of casually joking around with her now pet blob. And then a hand grows out of the blob. What? Yeah. What is happening here? So she sees what else she could get the blob, Bob, to grow. And eventually Bob grows into a man or something like a man.

And he's hot and he's quiet and he likes her and he lives in her house and she's in favor of all of these things. But Bob watches a lot of TV and starts to understand that there is a world outside of Vi's apartment and maybe he wants to experience it. And this is where the story turns into kind of horror.

of what's going to happen to Bob the Blob, what happens to Vi. It is cuckoo banana pants. Like it's a really wild premise. There are some debut novel problems here. I had a really good time though being like, okay, I kind of see where this is going, but how is she going to do it? And just the novelty of I can grow this blob into a human man and what might that lead to? What?

was like great imagination on Maggie Sue. I'll sign up for whatever she writes next. That is, that's like we call, like we call wild. It is wild. Yeah. I was describing it to Bob, my Bob, not Bob the blob.

And like she she shows that she shows the blob pictures of movie stars and understands that he will form whatever he has seen. So he's got like movie star abs and a face that's like a conglomeration of Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling and George Clooney and sparkling white teeth. And he's just, you know, a total smoke show.

And the rest of it is completely bonkers. Sounds a little... It's got like weird science vibes from the 80s. Yeah, yeah. That's a good comp. That's interesting. Yeah, it read super fast. I was just like, well, who knows what this is going to be, but let's get in there. Let's see. What are we talking about on my side? Those are the two you have. Those are my two, yeah. Last night I finished The Language of Mathematics by Raul Rojas. Oh, how's... So what is... It's...

Man, I'm also confessing to this one. I loved it. It's got way more math in it than I understand, so my eyes kind of blurred over some of the harder stuff. But it basically is a bunch of mini histories about the symbols in math. Oh. Which was...

Why? It's really wild. So I'll just give you one. Please. And I'll try to keep it to three. So some guy named John Wallace, who apparently is a very famous mathematician. I'm sorry for all you math nerds out there. They're like, what? That's like saying Michael Jordan was some basketball player. Some guy. I get it. Yeah. In 1655 was trying to figure out how to write a formula for the surface area of a cone. Okay. A conical shape. I think I'm getting this right. Okay.

And he's like, did this thought, well, if you think of it as a stack of coins, because it's hard, because it's smooth, right? So it's hard to do. Well, if you have a stack of coins, you could get the side of the coin because it's flat. And then, well, the problem is then there's a disjunction because that stair step. But what about the space between the stairs? You're not getting it. It's like, well, what have you thought about a stack of infinitesimally small, an infinite stack of coins? Right. Because then there would be no gap because they're so small.

I was like, okay, I guess I'm here. I don't really follow how... My brain hurts. My brain hurts, but you kind of get the idea. But he needed a symbol for this thing. Like one of these was what? One of these infinitesimally small triangles. How am I going to... Or it's a coin. I'm going to record it. So he made up the infinity sign. Oh. He's like, I'm just going to use this sign. This will just be it. That's just it. One divided by that sideways eight was his unit for that infinitesimally small coin. And then some people...

And Brunelli, who are other famous math physician, Brunelli's principle, I think is about airflow. They like, that's really useful to have a sign for infinity. Cause I guess before that we were just saying infinity all the time, like animals, but

So that's another one. That goes in the Sterling Awards. Some guy thought, someone had to think of that. We should have a symbol for this. We should have a symbol for this. So there you go. A bunch of stuff like that. Really good. That's fun. Like a whole book of hey, did you knows? Yeah. And, you know, Isaac Newton used a parentheses instead of a decimal point. Like the decimal point was independently written.

by a 12th century Islamic scholar, but because of what we did to the Islamic scholars in the 12th century, kind of got lost and had to be subsequently reinvented. And if you look at Isaac Newton's notations, like for pi, it's not 3.14, it's three left-hand parentheses, 141319. Anyway, I thought it was cool. I'm sure there's like me and a bunch of math nerds, but I thought it was cool.

Did we already talk about Life in Three Dimensions on the show? No. Did we do this on the show or do it outside the show? That's been outside the show. I haven't had a chance to talk about it. I was hoping to talk about it. I just interviewed Shigeo Oishi, who's the professor and researcher who wrote Life in Three Dimensions. It's going to be on first edition in two weeks, so watch out for that. Life in Three Dimensions, his research in the book is about psychological richness, basically adding a third dimension to what one might consider as an element of a good life. So...

Not surprisingly, even if you don't know anything about it, it makes sense to think, are you happy? Do you read a happy life? Do you live a meaningful life? Okay, you could be happy and not do anything that means anything, sit around and, you know, you're a WALL-E character at some point, perfectly happy, but it doesn't mean anything. And what his work presupposes, and I don't know if it presupposes, but it formulates this idea that there's this third dimension, and he calls it psychological richness.

I should have asked him and I didn't. Why not just calling it an interesting life? Because I think it's probably as useful as like, what about leaving an interesting life? How does that go into something that could be considered the good life? And what are the effects of it? There's some studies about it. What kind of experiences do people have that leads to it?

I thought it was awesome. I immediately recommended it to you. We're probably going to do a pop-up book club about it that it could just be us talking about it. I thought it was really cool. It's been a while since I've read one of these. Pop psychology. It's meant for a mass audience. There's studies in it, but it's totally approachable. I thought it provocative, and I kind of felt seen by it in some ways. I even said to Professor Oishi, I was like, you know,

Even if I see a movie that's bad, I'm not angry that I wasted my time. Like, yeah, I like an interesting mess. And he's like nodding his head vigorously. It sounds like you're this kind of person. But we also talk about how books can and also the limits of it, like some kinds of books and experience of reading or art or movies are maybe more likely to engender moments of psychological curiosity or lead to psychologically rich lives. So I really recommend that. I thought it was really good on audio. And then you'll have a first edition version.

episode for that. I also listened to Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez, which is coming out from Crown in a couple of months. It's his second memoir and essays. The first one was, I think, a soft skull or $2 radio thing a few years ago. This is coming out from Crown. It's kind of weird. I was interested in it on audio and I was walking in my neighborhood and I swear to God, there was a review copy just in the middle of the sidewalk about two blocks from my house for Alligator Tears. It's very weird.

So I don't know who around me is also in the book game. It's out of your bag. And it's now mine. And I was like, I took that as a sign to move it up my list. I'm glad I did. It's a story of a young queer Latinx kid growing up in the 90s. The first his first book was called High Risk Homosexual. And it's treads. It's a similar format. And I think there's some similar topics there.

One thing I was a little confused by is some of the big events in his life in Alligator Tears, which is the most recent one. I was like, I didn't really spend a lot of time on that. And I'm assuming now it got covered in the first book. So I'm not really sure. But it was really good, especially good on audio. Like I said, memoir by a literary writer, audio is the only way to go for me.

Now I have this galley, though, that the universe or someone put on the sidewalk. Brought it into your consciousness for your own psychological richness. Yeah, I have pre-ordered my copy of Life in Three Dimensions, and I look for it. I love it when science validates my beliefs about life. And as soon as you started texting me about it, I was like, oh, yeah, sign me up. Yeah. I guess as a way of preview of things to come, we're about to record an episode of Writers to Watch. Yes.

And Edgar Gomez will be on my list. All right. Yeah, that's one to watch for me. Check out Thrift Books. Stick around for Jamie. If you want to hit the Patreon, what did we just put up? Hot list check-in. We did a hot list check-in.

And there was, I think I like this. I think this format's going to stick. It only takes me 18 months to get stuff right, generally speaking. I like this format. I mean, for as long as we've tinkered with some other things, I think 18 months is pretty good. Minimum viable podcast. Isn't that what MVP stands for? Absolutely. All right. You're going to hear a little ad or something or a break, and then you'll hear Rebecca and Jamie. So stick around for that. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, y'all.

All right, listeners, as promised, I'm here with author Jamie Attenberg, who, as I told you at the top of the show, runs a really fantastic... Jamie, how do you think about Thousand Words? Community writing project? It is a group writing accountability project. Okay. And would you just tell our folks how it got started? When did it start? And I know it's grown to what, like 40,000 people now? Yeah.

I think so. I think it'll be probably about 50,000 people participating this year. I mean, it's hard to know how many people actually do it, but I think it's great. Sometimes people are doing it and don't even know what it is. And I just see a little hashtag, a thousand words of summer out there on the internet. It started eight years ago and it was just, I just decided to write a thousand words a day with a friend here in New Orleans who is a teacher and

And she had summers off as teachers do. So that's why we decided to do it for a two week block then. And I tweeted about it because I'm a pretty online person. And then all these other people said, oh, I want to write a thousand words a day too for two weeks. And so I set up a little mailing list and I decided to send little reminders out to everybody who was signed up. And then

And then I asked some of my writer friends to also write little motivational notes. And it was very organic. And the first year, I think we had 2000 people that signed up for it. And then the next year was five, the next year was 10. And so every year just keeps growing. And now it's a book that's just out now in paperback as well. So that has a collection of all these great letters from over the course of the last seven years and some great

Words from me as well about creativity and productivity. Yeah, we'll put a link to the book in the show notes and also to your sub stack craft talk, where you're writing about the craft of writing and other folks show up and guest and that's the place that thousand words flows through now, correct? The sub stack?

Yes, that's right. It starts, it's the first two weeks of June. Cool. So folks have some time to prepare. If you're like thinking about a writing project, you can get yourself geared up to do your thousand words a day in that, that two weeks in June. That's awesome. So I remember I've followed you online for a while. I have, you know, read your work.

And I saw last year, I guess in 2023, like, oh, Jamie did a book fair at a local school. And I didn't realize at first that it was connected to Thousand Words. But would you just talk about that whole process? What inspired the book fair project? How did you get going on it?

So one of the, one of my favorite things about a thousand words of summer is that it's also a fundraiser. So every year people, you know, tip it, you know, tip a little bit, subscribe, you know, subscribe to the newsletter and we take all the money and we, each person, author who contributes a letter, I donate to a charity they've chosen. And then I have

extra leftover. And I'm always trying to find something in New Orleans where I live that I can help younger people here if I can. So we've sponsored different writing schools for kids, things like that. But I kind of wanted a bang for the buck thing. And

And I actually read this article on Romper by a woman named Megan Angelo that was all about their scholastic book fair that she had arranged for in her school. And it was a really lovely piece. And I was like, maybe that's the way to do it. So the original inspiration actually came from that piece. Okay.

Which I had, I'm like, when you asked me to do this, I was like, wait, I need to sort of, you know, take my steps back here a little bit. And that was actually what it was. And I thought, oh, that looks like something that's worth exploring. So I reached out to somebody at Scholastic and said, how do I do this? And they are able to kind of figure out what schools have Scholastic, have had Scholastic book fairs in the past. They're able to access which schools have a need for,

for it and they will also contact

somebody at the school for you. So I think, I think a lot of people who are doing this probably are already familiar with a school. It sounds like this, you know, the woman who wrote this article knew, knew of the school. But for me, as someone who doesn't have children, I was like, I don't even know where to start. So Scholastic was really helpful in that way of helping me figure out a great school. That's so wonderful. I had wondered, like, is this just the school in her neighborhood? Or how did you get connected to them? So that was a Scholastic joint. Yeah.

It was a scholastic. And then also, I knew a school librarian as well. Her name was Maureen Iverson, and she used to work in a bookstore in

in New Orleans, which no longer exists. But many years ago, I met her there. And so I'd see her out in the world at readings and things like that. And so I was familiar with her too. And so we were able to have some conversations as well. So it was really about contacting Scholastic, and who also were able to tell me how much is it going to cost? How much do I need to put it, you know, a raise for this to be effective, they can give you those actual numbers, because there's a per book price. Is that a ballpark sharing here?

Well, this year we did $10,000. I think last year was, I mean, it's not my money. You know what I mean? It's my day rate. I think we'd done a little bit less last year. And then I thought, let's just, let's just do 10. And I think it was, it's six, close to 650 kids and each kid got a, got a book and that was about 10,000. And yeah. And they're, and anyway, it's great. Cause they'll, they'll set it all up for you. They have a system in place. It is easier to work with a school where they have done,

a book fair before, and they have experience with it, I will say. So Maureen was really great, because she, you know, she was a school librarian, she contacted, connected me with another school librarian, it really, it was a school in New Orleans East, it really fit the bill in a lot of ways. And, and so and she was great to work with. And the librarian last year was great to work with.

So yeah, so I think we're starting with Scholastic, we can give you the information for how much money you need, and can help you organize your thoughts as to what kind of school you're looking for, you know, are you looking to do 300 kids school Scholastic can help you figure out how you know, for how many kids you want to sponsor, what kind of needs are

the school has everything like that. They're really good about like just working with your step-by-step. And, and so I really recommend reaching out to them just even just to get basic information. And then you may or may not already have a contact within the school. You might be somebody, you know, like it was me. It was like, I was surprised. And,

And then I was delighted that I got that it was somebody that I already knew that I could work with. So you're in touch with Scholastic, you get hooked up with the school and you're like, I'm here. I have $10,000 to sponsor this book fair. I want to make sure every kid gets a book. How does that work? Do they get vouchers for it? How do like, what are the logistics of making sure the kids get books? And I assume that this is a like, every kid walks in knowing that they can pick something. Yeah.

Every kid walks in knowing they can pick something. So that's what it is. There's a display that's set up in the school and it's set up in the library. And Maureen did a really great job because she was a bookstore professional in her past life. Bless the library. So I was like, this is the most beautiful display I've ever seen in my life.

And they walked in and they were so excited. They were just bursting with excitement to be there. You know, I talked with them in the past, the librarians in the past about this, where they said that equity was really important in the school. It was something they talked about. And that sometimes around there was some sort of, you know, people could get upset around this glass to book fair if you didn't have money. So it was like something where like every kid was going to walk out of there with something and there were no tears that year. And that was...

That was really sweet. So you're avoiding the like, everybody knows which kids get free lunches kind of scenario. Correct. Yeah. And so they were allowed to choose one of one kind of book or two kinds of books. And they brought in like, you know, one class at a time. And it was over like a two-day

two or three day period. And then they had nighttime events as well. So parents could come if parents wanted to spend a little bit of money on the kids to end the book fair. So I was literally only there for like a couple hours, one afternoon, but hanging out when it was really great, really fun and seeing how just like they were so excited. And honestly, I don't really talk to that many kids. Me neither. I also don't have kids. Like, what are you? Yeah.

So I was like, what's going on? Like, what are you guys into? And, you know, we, you know, we just want to encourage kids to keep on reading and, and also have like a positive experience with like, with a, with a bookstore kind of environment, I think is really great too. And I, you know, I'm not a teacher at parent or anything like that, obviously, but, you know, I think that there's a certain amount of confidence you get when you walk in somewhere and knowing that you can have something that was really sweet and,

That a book fair is a thing that's available to them and that they should have access to. That's really wonderful. You mentioned, so they could get one of one type of book or two of the other type of book. Is that also just like a setup that Scholastic already had? Were you involved in like curating any of the titles or anything like that? Yeah.

No, it was just like a price. I leave that to that. I leave that to the experts. I think it was based on the price range. And then what was great is because I knew we were paying a little bit more, they had like a wiggle, they had some wiggle room, I think, if kids wanted a little something extra, or maybe a more expensive book or something like that. Again, I'm not sure about all of the, you know, the inner workings there. But that's, again, why it is really good to have

I mean, I could never have just walked in there and set up a book fair myself. You really have to have some kind of contact in the school if it's, you know, an assistant or you have to have some friends that would come in there with you that really knew what they were doing. So I would not just, I would not recommend just, you know, guns a-blazing necessarily. I would definitely do a little bit of research and definitely...

I talk to people, but the resources are there. And Scholastic, you know, I think really wants people to succeed at this and bring their books into the school. So, you know, everyone was a pleasure to work with. And it really a great joy and something different than what I normally do in my career, because I, you know, obviously I write adult books.

adult books, mainly novels. And so I'm not, I'm not usually going into schools, like I don't, you know, I have friends who write YA and kids books and things like that. And they do a lot of school visits. And you might catch me at a university, but that's about that's about it. So it's pretty fun. I love the piece from your sub stack. That's just why wait to make someone's day. And

that this is your favorite day of the year, getting to see these kids pick up books. I know so many of our listeners and members of this community have been, especially in this political environment, really looking for how to get plugged in into their local communities, how to support literacy efforts and be involved in some activism. And not everybody is going to run for school board.

So hearing that this is a thing that you can do and that there are structures that enable it and you don't have to like not only should you not go in guns blazing when you don't know what you're doing, but you don't need to because the professionals exist and can guide you through this process, I think is exciting and empowering.

Yeah, it was really, it's really sweet. It's really, it was really organic. You know, everything with a thousand words summer is organic for me. Like I just follow any little path. I think, you know, being a professional writer, you feel like you can sometimes get stuck in

the way people market you or sell you or, you know, and that you were trying to get reviewed or interviewed or things like that. And so for a thousand words, it's always felt like, like a part of me and a part of my creative self and professional self, but also just completely free to free to be me, you know, free to do whatever I want. It doesn't have to have some like secondary agenda to it. No, it's just like a, it's just like a lovely vibe. And also like the people who donate to this every year, um,

are just like kind of trusting me to do something good with their money so I like I really want to honor this that spirit of the community you know this writing community that we've really all created together out of scratch so it's it's my pleasure it's like a it's a little bit of a little bit of research a little bit of time but it's like fun research and fun fun time spent to make it happen and now I'm sort of addicted to it and I'm just like guess what you guys forever

As long as I can do this, I'll do this. Like everybody, I had this like fantasy of like, you know, someday meeting somebody who had had these books every year, you know, school or something like that, that they, you know what I mean? Like, you know, yeah, it would be really cool to like meet, meet somebody along the way. And it's like a, it's just a fun experience.

Again, it's just like I'm enacting the thing that everybody else has kind of put together. So it's a fun legacy, not just for me, but for everybody who's involved in the project. Oh, I love that collective contribution and legacy. I wish listeners could see how much your face lit up talking about what a great day it is.

That is every day to get to go and see the impact of it. Was there anything surprising about the process? Anything that was like a harder than you expected it to be? Or that maybe you wish you had known going in the first time? No, no, I don't know. No, no, I don't have to answer that. Sorry. It's fine. Actually, if it's easy, and there's not a bunch of surprising hard stuff. That's great. It's not that it's

It's not that it's easy. It's just the challenges are not worth reflecting upon. That's good writerly clarification. It's like you do this for a living. Anything I didn't ask you about for this that you want to share about it or that you think folks should know?

Nothing. Just that the thousand words of summer is going to start May 31st and run for two weeks next summer. We have like great writers that are going to contribute to it. It's wonderful if people can come and contribute some money, but also it's something that exists for everyone to encourage them to write. So, and so I'm always just trying to make this, these things,

you know, free and available and accessible to people because I love writing and reading and books. And I just want people to feel the joy from it that I do as well. Wonderful. Anything else? Where can folks find you if they want to follow your work?

Oh, I have a new book that just came out or reason to see you again, which is a novel. I am gonna, I'm gonna be in Nashville tomorrow. No, that's not really relevant. I think I don't know. I'm doing I have some tour dates this spring, but I don't remember what they are. I loved a reason to see you again. I talked about it on the show. So you have the book riot endorsement folks pick it up. Jamie, thank you so much for being here. And folks, you can find the sub stack links to all the references that Jamie mentioned will be in the show notes as well.