The Best Books of the Year So Far: Live at Powell's!

Summary

Book Riot - The Podcast: The Best Books of the Year So Far – Live at Powell's!

Release Date: July 14, 2025

Event Overview

On July 14, 2025, Book Riot - The Podcast hosted a live event at Powell's Books titled "The Best Books of the Year So Far." The event featured Book Riot's Jeff O’Neill and Rebecca Schinsky, along with guest panelists Vanessa Diaz, Managing Editor, and Keith Mossman, Powell's esteemed Purchasing and Publisher Relations Coordinator. The session revolved around each panelist presenting their top five book picks for the year, engaging in lively discussions, and offering insights into their selections.

Interview with Keith Mossman

The episode began with Jeff O’Neill introducing Keith Mossman and delving into his role at Powell's. Keith humorously clarified his title as "Purchasing and Publisher Relations Coordinator," explaining that his responsibilities extend beyond typical buying duties to include featuring books in promotions and various communications.

Notable Quote:

Jeff O’Neill [02:34]: "Keith Mossman is our book buyer extraordinaire."

Keith elaborated on his daily tasks, emphasizing his extensive reading regimen, estimating that he reads approximately 250 books annually. He highlighted the challenges of selecting books that resonate with Powell's diverse customer base and the strategic considerations involved in featuring certain titles.

Notable Quote:

Keith Mossman [05:22]: "I'm probably going to hit 250 this year. I mean, that's like format agnostic."

Book Picks

Each panelist presented their top five book selections, providing detailed reviews and personal reflections.

Jeff O’Neill’s Top Picks

1. "Believe It or Not: A Memoir in 30 Cats" by Courtney Gustafson

   • A heartfelt memoir about caring for a feral cat colony in Tucson, Arizona.
   • Notable Quote:

     Jeff O’Neill [15:37]: "It's one of my favorite things I've read this year."

2. "Pronoun Trouble" by John McWhorter

   • An exploration of the history and usage of English pronouns.
   • Notable Quote:

     Jeff O’Neill [24:03]: "Each chapter is about one of the pronouns, a history of it."

3. "This American Woman" by Zorna Garg

   • A comedic memoir of an Indian woman’s journey from Mumbai to stand-up comedy in America.
   • Notable Quote:

     Jeff O’Neill [33:04]: "This book does that. So that's something you can use."

4. "Exit Zero" by Marie Helene Bertino

   • A collection of short stories blending whimsy with profound emotional truths.
   • Notable Quote:

     Jeff O’Neill [35:57]: "I'm never sad. These are also short."

5. "The Institute" by Stephen King (Mentioned Promotional Content)

   • A chilling new original series from MGM discussed briefly in the closing segments.

Rebecca Schinsky’s Top Picks

1. "We Do Not Part" by [Author Unspecified]

   • A quiet, lovely novel exploring the blurred lines between reality and illusion.
   • Notable Quote:

     Rebecca Schinsky [18:11]: "This novel is really quiet and lovely."

2. "Life in Three Dimensions" by Dr. Shigehiro Oishi

   • A psychological exploration of happiness, meaning, and psychological richness.
   • Notable Quote:

     Rebecca Schinsky [26:40]: "It's a philosophy. More like here's how to think about your life."

3. "Happyland" by Dolan Perkins Balditz

   • A fantastical story intertwining personal family history with the legacy of a free black kingdom in North Carolina.
   • Notable Quote:

     Rebecca Schinsky [28:04]: "She tells her this very fantastical story about a kingdom that used to exist in North Carolina."

4. "Stone Yard Devotional" by Charlotte Wood

   • A meditative novel set in the Australian outback, chronicling the daily lives and inner turmoil of a woman in a monastery.
   • Notable Quote:

     Rebecca Schinsky [44:08]: "It's really beautiful and lovely. I found myself not wanting to put it down."

5. "Searches" by Vahini Vara

   • An innovative exploration of AI and art, juxtaposing human and machine-generated narratives.
   • Notable Quote:

     Rebecca Schinsky [55:08]: "She set out to ask a question... it proves that books are going to be fine."

Vanessa Diaz’s Top Picks

1. "Everything Is Poison" by Joy McCullough

   • A YA novel intertwining historical elements with contemporary issues through the lens of Artemisia Gentileschi’s fictional daughter.
   • Notable Quote:

     Vanessa Diaz [12:41]: "If you haven't read any of Joy McCullough, again, she does these really fantastic things with real people who existed."

2. "Harlem Rhapsody" by Victoria Christopher Murray

   • A historical narrative focusing on Jessie Redmond Faust and her pivotal role in the Harlem Renaissance.
   • Notable Quote:

     Vanessa Diaz [20:08]: "It tells you all about her, how she came to New York right before the Renaissance was about to pop."

3. "Malinally" by Veronica Chapae

   • A reimagining of La Malinche’s life, offering a nuanced perspective on her role in Mexican history.
   • Notable Quote:

     Vanessa Diaz [36:05]: "It's about a woman who serves as translator for Hernan Cortes when he came and conquered Mexico."

4. "Warm and Safe" by Marie Helene Bertino (Honorable Mention)

   • A delightful foray into magical realism through the lenses of middle-reader protagonists.
   • Notable Quote:

     Vanessa Diaz [58:35]: "A detective auntie... something about women becoming a certain age."

5. "Is the River Alive" by Robert Macfarlane (Favorite)

   • An evocative nature writing piece exploring river ecosystems and their significance to communities.
   • Notable Quote:

     Keith Mossman [51:17]: "It’s transportive in the best way, and it covers a lot of ground."

Keith Mossman’s Top Picks

1. "Spent" by Alison Bechdel

   • A graphic novel exploring the complexities of life in a troubled TV adaptation.
   • Notable Quote:

     Keith Mossman [14:07]: "It's full of whimsy, but it's also about living in this terrible moment."

2. "Tilt" by Emma Patit

   • A gripping debut novel set against the backdrop of a catastrophic earthquake in Portland.
   • Notable Quote:

     Keith Mossman [22:37]: "This book made me think seriously about what you do in the days after an emergency."

3. "Murder at the Museum" by Alastair Beckett King

   • A middle-reader mystery featuring a young detective and her grandfather solving high-stakes crimes.
   • Notable Quote:

     Keith Mossman [29:46]: "There is an actual murder in a middle reader book. It's full of one-liners and great jokes."

4. "Flashlight" by Susan Choi

   • A profound narrative delving deep into familial relationships and personal healing.
   • Notable Quote:

     Keith Mossman [38:01]: "Her mastery of prose is totally transfixing."

5. "Women Seated" by Zane Guran (Coming Attraction)

   • A translated novel from Chinese, offering a suspenseful character study within an autocratic regime.
   • Notable Quote:

     Keith Mossman [72:19]: "It's a thriller, but really it comes down to a wonderful character study."

Honorable Mentions

• "Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil" by V. E. Schwab
• "The Dream Hotel" by Leila Lalami
• "Detective Auntie" by USMA Jalaluddin
• "Murder by Cheesecake" by Rachel Ekstrom
• "A Murder for Miss Hortense" by Mel Pennant
• "New and Collected Hell" by Shane McCrae
• "The Museum of Unnatural Histories" by Annie Weinstrub
• "Love and Exile" by Shan Fay
• "The Doorman" by Chris Pavone

Coming Attractions

Keith Mossman highlighted several upcoming releases:

• "Likeness" by Samson Knight (University of Iowa Press): A novella exploring intricate narratives in a compact form.
• "Women Seated" by Zane Guran (Riverhead): A translated Chinese novel focusing on personal and political upheavals.
• "Mona's Eyes" by Thomas Schlesser (Europa): A novel intertwining art history with personal discovery during a young girl's bout with blindness.
• "Tuck Me In!" by Nathan W. Pyle: A whimsical picture book that blends humor with imaginative storytelling.

Conclusion

The live podcast event at Powell's offered a comprehensive look into the panelists' literary tastes, showcasing a diverse array of genres and themes. From nature writing and historical narratives to innovative explorations of AI and art, the selections reflect the multifaceted world of contemporary literature. The engaging discussions, enriched with personal anecdotes and expert insights, provided listeners with a curated roadmap to some of the year's most compelling reads.

Notable Quotes from the Event

• Keith Mossman [05:22]: "I'm probably going to hit 250 this year. I mean, that's like format agnostic."
• Jeff O’Neill [15:37]: "It's one of my favorite things I've read this year."
• Rebecca Schinsky [26:40]: "It's a philosophy. More like here's how to think about your life."
• Vanessa Diaz [12:41]: "If you haven't read any of Joy McCullough, again, she does these really fantastic things with real people who existed."

Timestamp Highlights

• [02:34] Introduction of Keith Mossman
• [05:22] Keith discusses his reading habits
• [12:41] Vanessa Diaz introduces her first book pick
• [18:11] Rebecca Schinsky reviews "We Do Not Part"
• [28:04] Rebecca discusses "Happyland"
• [44:08] Rebecca introduces "Stone Yard Devotional"
• [55:08] Rebecca presents "Searches"
• [72:19] Keith introduces "Women Seated"

Final Thoughts

The panelists not only shared their favorite books but also provided deep dives into the narratives and themes that make each selection standout. Whether you're a seasoned reader or new to Book Riot, this episode serves as an invaluable guide to navigating the best literary offerings of the year.

Transcript

[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Vanessa Diaz]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Vanessa Diaz]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Vanessa Diaz]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Vanessa Diaz]

Spotify that's greenlight.com Spotify all right, here it is.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The best books of the year so far that we recorded at Pals Live just a couple days ago. Rebecca and I were joined by Vanessa Diaz, our managing editor, and Keith Mossman, who's book buyer extraordinaire at pals. Talk to him about what that job entails. We do picks, five each for a couple minutes on each book. I cut it off before we get to the audience. Q and A because the audience wasn't mic'd and it's. You can't really hear them at all. I did keep my son in at the last even though he wasn't on a recording mic because I thought some people might like to strain to hear that. Turn it up for a few minutes, even if it's not ideal. Better recording than last year. It's a live room, but good enough where you can hear it. Thanks everyone who came out to join us. Always a good time there. So let's get into it. We're not going to do our normal podcast countdown, but thank you so much for coming out tonight. It's nice to see you all so much here. Oh, clap.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Yeah, we could do that.

[Jeff O'Neill]

This is the second Powell's Book Riot crossover event. How many of you were here in March?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Nice.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Awesome.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And all the rest that didn't come back are suckers. So here's what we're going to do tonight. This is the best books of the year. So far, the four of us, we've each picked five books. I'm Jeff o', Neill, CEO, co founder of Book Riot. Vanessa Diaz is our managing editor. She's in Portland and she has five picks. Rebecca Schinsky, chief of staff, Jack of All Trades, and Keith Mossman from Powell's. We're going to talk to for A few minutes. Because you, Keith, have the most enviable job in the world of books. Would you like to, I was told book buyer extraordinaire, and that's what I've been saying. Do you have like an official plaque or something? Like, where does that. Where does that show up?

[Keith Mossman]

I saw that in the copy. And I assume that means you got that from somebody in our marketing staff who doesn't know what my book.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Probably Jeremy. Jeremy doesn't know what you do. So he said that. But I think it works. Keith Hoffman is a buyer for Pals, but that doesn't really describe it. So we're going to do 10 minutes with Keith because I just want to know. I don't care if you care, but I need to know more about this. So you read a lot. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. Can you give us a sense of what you do and what your day is like here at Pals?

[Keith Mossman]

Okay. So I'm one of a team of buyers. I sometimes call myself buyer without portfolio. The other buyers have specific sections they're buying for. So they're going through the catalogs that come from publishers and they're thinking, like, which are the cookbooks I want to feature, which are the ones I just want to have in small quantity? Which do I skip? I don't actually do that. So my job title is. I'm going to hold it in this hand. My job title is purchasing and publisher relations coordinator.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay.

[Keith Mossman]

I used to be in our marketing department. I was a buyer. I moved to the marketing department. I moved back. I'm sort of got feet in both worlds. Most of what I do is looking at books to be featured in promos, in comms, in a bunch of different places. So whereas other people have directed browsing through the catalogs and directed buying, I sort of try to look at everything and think essentially I play the IP book of the month every month.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, you made a podcast. Specific reference, Keith?

[Keith Mossman]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, my God. You've listened to the show. Oh, no.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Well done.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well done. So if you've gotten an email from Pals or been downstairs to see. Here are pics of the month. Here are the best books. Is that just you? Do you have like some cabal of secret that you go to?

[Keith Mossman]

Depends on the display, the picks of the month, which is our marquee program, that there. There are a bunch of people in the order office, in the stores elsewhere, who weigh in. And then it's sort of my job to look at the boats and try to find Consensus and sometimes I wedge in like my own picks, but usually it sort of comes before. And we also, we do distinguish between the stores, which for a while it was company wide, but now we sort of let our Cedar Hills store in Beaverton have a little more genre and. And it's like trying to match the. I mean, Burnside's such an expansive store. It's sort of like everything goes to Burnside, but the other two stores have a slightly different identities and we're trying to like lean into that and, and you know, based on our understanding of the customer. And sometimes it's guesses and sometimes we guess real wrong. But that's the fun of new books, is it's hard to. Accountability is hard because like that book didn't work. But how could we have known? And there's another couple hundred next month.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm given to understand this entails a fair amount of reading on your part. What does that look like in a month, a week, a year? What do you get through and how do you do that?

[Keith Mossman]

I'm probably going to hit 250 this year. I mean, that's like format agnostic. So like when I'm doing a kid's catalog and I read some of the picture books, like those take five minutes and they go in the list. But I'm doing the Mark Twain bio right now. Like that's a project that's on Tuesday morning for me. It's going to take a while. Yeah, but about 250. And I try to. I really find that my reading tracks what I'm buying for. So in a previous iteration I was buying the politics and the history books and it was a lot of that and. And now it's just, I'm like trying to like, romance is a project of mine this year. I sometimes feel like the French general who said, you know, where are my people going? Tell me so I can meet them.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Keith Mossman]

So I'm like, I'm chasing our readers as much as I'm trying to anticipate what I think they'll like.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And then how many do you abandon if you finish? 250? Like, are you abandoning twice that many, thrice that many?

[Keith Mossman]

I really don't abandon much.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, you're one of those.

[Keith Mossman]

I'm pretty targeted. Like if I've picked it up, I've probably vetted it enough that I'm probably going to stick with it. When I don't finish a book, it's mostly negligence. I put it down and I'm like, I'm going to get back to it. It's worth my time. And then it's like, oh, that was published three months ago and backlist is dead to me.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So do publishers try to bribe you? They put stuff on your doorstep or make threats or do you get any kind of pressure from the sell side?

[Keith Mossman]

I mean, the publisher relations part of my job is that I meet my boss and I meet with sales reps every season, and they know what I like. But the good ones also know not to push it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So for good folks like this or me who come into Powell's regularly, what would we be surprised by on the purchasing side, as someone who is a book lover and I work in books, but I don't know anything about how that works. What do you think people would find, I don't know, surprising about the process of deciding what goes on the shelves and how many and all of that.

[Keith Mossman]

Well, so when I got this job, I thought repeating an anecdote I just told you, but. But now everyone gets it. I thought I'd have some fun transferable skills, like maybe I could go work procurement for, you know, a government agency or something. But no, we don't have budgets. We don't have, like, we don't have space constraints. Like, Pals is the machine that can take almost all the books and then let them decide, like, reorder this will win cart.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Actually, this is all you've done, all of this.

[Keith Mossman]

So I worry about what if I put in front of you that you may not have noticed otherwise will catch your eye and become your new favorite book. I don't have to worry about the ones that we're not buying because there's plenty of books we don't buy. But for the most part, it's not due to a lack of resources or space, which makes this job unlike, I think, any other bookstore that I know. Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Thanks so much, Keith. I look forward to your picture in a second.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

All right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm going to pass it to Rebecca, who's going to walk through logistics, which I am certainly. I definitely know what we're doing right now. Absolutely.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

People who listen to the show know how this is going to go. So we each have picked five of our favorite books of the year. We're going to do a round robin style. So Jeff will start. We'll go to Keith, we'll go to Vanessa.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Vanessa's going to start.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Vanessa's going to start.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Oh, cool. Great.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And then we'll go to Keith, and then we'll go to Jeff, and then we'll go to me, and then we'll just do that for five rounds.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Talk about the bookmarks and stuff.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

If you have not put your name on a bookmark and dropped that bookmark into a basket at the info desk, please do that before the end of the event because we have 10 pairs of passes to the pre sale for Powell's big warehouse event this weekend. The warehouse sale is on Saturday and Sunday and all of the timed entry tickets are gone. So this is the actual last opportunity anywhere for anybody to get pre sale access. So we're going to draw 10 of those out at the end and then you'll have a ticket for you and a ticket for someone that you like enough to bring them to the PALS Pre sale.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Today's episode is sponsored by Harlequin Publishers of let's Give Em Pumpkin to Talk about by Isabel Popp Textile artist Sadie Fox did not sign up for this when she agreed to come home to Pea Blossom, Indiana. It was to care for her father's beloved pumpkin patch. The deal was that just for the summer, she would grow a ginormous pumpkin, win the Indiana State Fair's pumpkin contest, and finally win back her father's grudging respect. Instead, a horde of wild hogs destroyed the entire patch. Which is precisely when the annoyingly sexy sunshiny next door neighbor shows up. Josh Thatcher is a tech millionaire who traded in the office for growing gourds including experimental squash hybrids. And for the life of her, Sadie can't understand what he sees in her sweary tattooed prickly self or why he's offering to help his biggest competitor. But a storm fueled kiss proves there's something growing between them. Maybe it's just an attraction. Maybe it's more. Whatever it is, it's already bigger than Sadie's fast growing pumpkin or the secret that Josh has been hiding. This is a spicy small town fall romance that you can read in one sitting. The perfect kind of read to transition from summer to fall. And this book is by one of our very own Book Riot contributors, Isabel Poppy. The book is available [e-mail] thank you once again to Harlequin for sponsoring today's show. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body.

[Keith Mossman]

Relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And breathe. Oh sorry.

[Vanessa Diaz]

I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on My first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts.

[Keith Mossman]

Your burger is served. And this is our finest Pepsi Zero Sugar. Its sweet profile perfectly balances the savory.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Notes of your burger.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That is one perfect combination. Burgers deserve Pepsi.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Why don't we each talk about ourselves as readers before we do a break? Okay.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So Jeff wants to talk about ourselves.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No, no. But, like, when. Vanessa, you do tell you who you are and what you like to read.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So we'll each introduce ourselves for who don't know us. Actually. That would be interesting. Can we have a show of hands? Like, are you a Book Riot? We'll do Book Riot people first. Like, do you know the Book Riot podcast? Is that why you're here? Hands.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Cool, cool.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Great. And then anybody who just found out about the event through Powell's or you were wandering around, great, we're so happy to.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Super cool.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm so sorry.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So we will introduce ourselves and talk a little bit about our reading preferences and sort of how we've arrived at our list, and then we'll do around Robin.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And that's how we're gonna do it. You're up.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Can y' all hear me?

[Keith Mossman]

Okay, louder, louder.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Which is never a thing anybody has ever said to me. Ever.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Hold it close.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Yes. So I'm gonna start us off. So for those of you who don't know, I am Book Riot's managing editor. I read a little bit of everything, but I'm definitely a genre girl if you've ever listened to me. You know, there's a lot of mythology, a lot of folklore. Anything witchy, give it to me. Obviously, love to read Latin Elit. I write our Latin lit newsletter. But really, I'll kind of read a little bit of everything. But I'm definitely feel like bringing an accidental history theme to today's, even though none of them are one's nonfiction. So shall I drive into my first pick, or do we all want a.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Little bit of a bio?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Take it away.

[Vanessa Diaz]

We're going. Does anybody know or does the phrase Aqua Tofana mean anything to any of you? And if so, you're my people. There's a couple of you nodding at me, and we're probably both on a watch list. So there was a woman named Giulia Tofana who lived in 17th century Italy, who is thought to be a prolific poisoner. She allegedly killed like 200 men. What the reason for that is, we'll never know. But my first pick which is everything is poisoned by Joe McCullough, who is the author of Bloodwater Paint, which was a really cool kind of fleshing out of the story of Artemisia. Gentileschi now took a book where she fictionalized the daughter of Giulia Tofana's life, imagining that they work in an apothecary and that, yes, there is this special thing that they make behind the counter that we don't talk about. We don't talk about Bruno, but that we do if, say, the woman that comes to you asking for this is in need either because she cannot go through with another pregnancy, she has a husband who is abusive, et cetera. So the story imagines what it would be like to work for that apothecary and what would happen if that secret got out, even though it was for, like, good intentions. Fill in the blanks. This is partially told in verse. And if you haven't read any of Joy McCullough, again, she does these really fantastic things with real people who existed. And it just makes you go. So I loved this book. It's technically ya, but it reads like adult. And it's one of my favorite things I've read this year. So that is Joy McCullough's Everything is Poison. Ta da.

[Keith Mossman]

Okay, so we talked a little bit about what I read. I sort of try to read everything. I would say lit, thick, graphic novels, poetry are sort of my favorite genres. Speaking of graphic novels, I'm starting with Alison Bechdel's Spent, which is a subtitle of Comic Novel, which is very good. Alison. So this is a fiction graphic novel that she's mostly done nonfiction to date. She's best known for Dykes to Watch out for and Fun Home. This is a continuation of a bunch of characters from Dykes to Watch out for, though you don't need to have any familiarity with that old strip. And also there's a character named Alison Bechdel in it. And this character is very similar to Alison Bechdel, but also different in a lot of ways that are fun. This character, instead of her book Fun Home being turned into a musical, instead it was her book Death and Taxidermy, that was turned into a prestige TV series that is sort of going off the rails that somebody else has creative control over. It's one of the many things that gets worked. So there's sort of wacky characters in Vermont. But really what the book sold me on is that it's full of whimsy, but it's also about living in this terrible moment in this wretched hellscape and trying to live a good life that way. And it's a lot of fun, it's bright, but it's serious minded in a way that I really appreciate it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So I'm starting off with Believe it or Not. Poets Square. A memoir in 30 Cats is the least nerdy of my picks tonight, Believe it or Not. So I thought a memoir in 30 cats. I thought this would be fun and cozy and not rip my heart out. And boy, was I wrong. It's a memoir. Courtney Gustafson moves with her partner to Tucson, Arizona, and the house that they move to turns out to be kind of the locus of a feral cat colony. You hate to see that when you move in. And in coming to terms with what that means, she begins to care for the cats in this feral cat colony. And then she meets people who also care about these wild cats. And then she realizes there's 30 wild cat cat colonies in Tucson. And I started doing the algebra about how many cat colonies we met we had in the States and freaked myself out. And what I didn't know is that Gustafsson is a writer and a beautiful one at that, and that this would be a way for her to engage with the world and to engage with how to care for things that people don't care about, how to engage with neighborhoods that people don't care about. She eventually becomes TikTok famous for her cat videos. She made Thanksgiving dinner, like a mini Thanksgiving dinner for 30 feral cats. And the Internet went, I think the technical term is butt wild about this and like has a million TikTok followers and then became a feral cat influencer, which is a real 21st century thing that happens. But through it all, she writes about this as a real kind of life mission to take care of these animals that have been abandoned, that are not wild, they're not meant to be wild, nor are they domestic. And they're not meant and can no longer be domestic. And she goes out with her cat traps every night to get cats and have them spayed and neutered so that it doesn't get any worse. And it's I thought it was extremely moving and I wasn't prepared for it. I did it on audio. You can get audiobooks from pals through Libro FM if you're an audiobook person, like I am. As you can see, those of you who know the show, one of the principal virtues is right here. It ain't long. And this is something I look for more. And so far we're doing Great. Look at those three picks. You could do these. Keith could do them. He actually just read them while I was looking away. He's all done. But that is Poets a memoir in 30 Cats by Courtney Gustavsson.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

All right. Keith and I were talking about our shared appreciation of this pick and I'm going to get it out of the way because it's the hardest one to talk about, I think.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, this is brave.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, this is, I don't know, brave. Foolhardy. This is We Do Not Part by Hong Kong Nobel Prize winner. She has a Nobel Prize for a reason, and it's because she's better at saying things than I am. But this is a really quiet, lovely novel. A woman receives a text from a friend who says, I need you to come to the hospital right now. She goes to the hospital and sees her friend and her friend asks her, please go to my house, which is a couple hours away by a very arduous and multi step process of public transit. I want you to check on my house, check on my pets. And what happens is just this woman is going on this journey, but a little sideways. It's really dreamy. You hit a place where something has happened. The character comes to after this thing happens and she's not sure what's real and what's not. And there are parts of the book where we're not really sure what's real and what's not. And so if you like that kind of fiction where the author is asking you to dwell in the vibe that they're creating. Not very plot driven. Not a whole lot of stuff happens. She thinks about some things and it's really, really stunning language. Do you want to add anything? You want to save me?

[Keith Mossman]

I'm glad it was on your list because I have not a lot to say about it other than it probably would be my number one book because it was such a transportive reading experience and it broke. A lot of things that would annoy me in a lesser book, like disorientation as a reader are part of the charm. A lot of people know the vegetarian. She has another book called the White Book, which is really closer to a poetry collection than a prose book. There's a lot of this and that, and that's prior to this. That was my favorite workforce. So it's nice to see her sort of fusing her different books into a masterpiece.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Do you know if that's selling, Keith? Is it selling?

[Keith Mossman]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So glad to hear that. Since we do not part by Hong Kong.

[Vanessa Diaz]

All right, where to go Next, I think I'm going to go with Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray. I love books, as you probably picked up on from my last book, that tell a story about somebody real. And I especially love it when it's history that I'm like, how did we never, ever, at least I didn't get taught this at all in school. So this is about Jessie Redmond Faust, who is the woman that basically single handedly kicked off, like, the literary portion of the Harlem Renaissance, but I did not know her name. I'm looking at a lot of faces that are also telling me you didn't know her name. And that is because it's something we're not taught. But so the book is great for that.

[Keith Mossman]

Right?

[Vanessa Diaz]

It tells you all about her, how she came to New York right before the Renaissance was about to pop, and she was going to start being the literary editor for the Crisis. And it's great. And she meets W.E.B. du Bois. The book is messy. Like messy, messy, messy, because she starts up an affair with WB Du Bois, and of course he's married. And it's a whole thing. And it just does this beautiful job of weaving in the kind of mess that keeps you turning those pages, but also is teaching you a whole lot about a thing about a person that we should all know by name and unfortunately don't. And that's my favorite kind of thing. That theme will recur later. Act surprised. But I really love this book. She's also the author of the Personal Librarian, which is about another very prolific woman who people don't always know about, Belle Costa Green. Some of you are nodding. Love that. Yeah, this is another really fun one that's going to teach you something and that's going to give you that satisfaction of a little bit of reality TV in a really cool woman from history. So that is Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray.

[Keith Mossman]

And my next book is Tilt by Emma Patit. There's no way I could not include this on my list. I mean, I spent much of the end of last year walking all the halls of pals with pots and pans, banning them, saying, we have to feature this book, we have to go big on this book. We went big on this book, and I think it paid off. So I also don't need to go into too much detail because podcast listeners already know plenty about it. And people who are on Powell's mailing list also know a lot about it. But it is a debut novel about a very pregnant protagonist who was at the Portland IKEA store when the big earthquake that Katherine Schwartz Schultz warned us all about how happens. And then it follows the immediate hours after Hashi has to walk Portland on a quest. So I guess really powerful reading experience. It's one you can read in one sitting. I didn't read it all in one sitting, but I read it almost in one entire sitting in Lower Host park, periodically looking up and thinking about the things that would fall over.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You're going to buy water. You're going to buy a big jug.

[Keith Mossman]

Of water and put it in your.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Basement after you read this book.

[Keith Mossman]

But the thing that actually I was really grateful to this book for was that I think, like, a lot of people had a tendency to sort of think like, well, when the earthquake comes, hope I'm crushed. And like, don't have to. Don't have to worry about it after that.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Big 2025 vibes from Keith.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I mean, that's me and the zombie apocalypse. I'm just done.

[Keith Mossman]

Yeah. Yeah. But this book made me think seriously about what you do in the days the second stays after an emergency. And that has come in handy lately. So. Tilt by emma15.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I will second that emotion. That one just grabs you by the throat and it's like, you don't plan on this, but you're going to sit here for the next few hours and read it until you.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm not sure there are many rooms I could recommend my next book to because you're all book nerds. But I'm going to do it because here we are. Pronoun Trouble by John McWhorter. John McWhorter is a linguist. He also writes a column from the New York Times that probably has enraged you, like, has enraged me from time to time. Don't always agree with his pieces there, but if you're looking for a book about language, look no farther than McWhorter. Each chapter is about one of the pronouns, a history of it, how it came to be. The chapter on they is especially interesting if you have someone in your life that maybe needs to be turned around on they pronouns. I can imagine that might be the case. A very interesting case for that. But just like English is so weird, I could read a thousand of these. I would read a book about, I don't know, prepositions. Maybe he's working on one of those. I don't really know what's coming up next. Definite articles. Just, you know, the book of the. Is that a thing? The book of the.

[Vanessa Diaz]

I think you could write.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I just. Vanessa says that's a book I should write. It's really fun and entertaining too. And it's the kind of thing, if you ever read something about language, you start noticing it, right? Like, for example, aren't I funny? Don't answer that. That's rhetorical. When you think about it. It's like, wait, that's a subject verb mismatch. It should be, am I not funny? Why is it that it's okay for us to say aren't I funny? And then you get to learn Here it's because of the Scots. Spoiler alert. But that's John McWhorton also so beautifully short, spelt so sexy in purple. That's pronoun Trouble by John McWhorter.

[Vanessa Diaz]

You got a nice slim pile going.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I know.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We're going to go into, like the self improvement zone, which, if you listen to the podcast, know that Jeff and I like books in this shape. This is Life in Three Dimensions by Dr. Shigehiro Oishi. He's a psychologist. He's building on the body of research about what makes a good life. And for the last several decades, that that has been a thing that psychologists research. They have historically talked about it as being comprised of happiness and meaning. And like that, most people tilt more in one way than the other. It's not like right or wrong to favor happiness or meaning more, but each person sort of has their own balance. And Oishi is proposing through his research that there's a third leg on the stool and that it's psychological richness, which is a life built of experiences that are interesting, challenging, surprising stuff that maybe isn't fun while you're going through it, but that changes your perspective on life. I see some nodding heads. You ever get lost in a city that you travel to and in the middle of it you're like, I'm jet lagged and I don't know where to go to the bathroom and I don't speak the language. I'm like, oh my God, what's happening? And then you get home and it turns out that was an experience that shaped in some way. He's talking about that on grand and small scales and how this shows up in our lives. And I thought it was a really lovely invitation to just think about what's the right mix for me, what do I value? And then if I value psychological richness more than meaning or happiness more than psychological richness, how do you put together a life that gives you those things in the right proportions so that at the end of it, you're happy with how you spent your time? And a lot of, in my experience at least a lot of self help doesn't do that. It's a step by step thing. But I like one that's a philosophy. More like here's how to think about your life in a different way. And this was the best one that I've read quite a while. So life in three Dimensions.

[Vanessa Diaz]

It wouldn't be a book riot podcast. No, we didn't have slim pronoun books and like self improvement stuff. And then here I come. So my next pick is Happy Land by Dolan Perkins Valdez. I love this book so much. Yeah, remember, I have history. It's kind of an accidental theme, but forget that for just a few seconds. So the story is about a woman who gets a call from her grandma, from whom she sort of, she inherited an estrangement from her mother. But the grandmother's like, get, get here now, please come to North Carolina. And so she does, she leaves dc, Goes to North Carolina and her grandma just immediately kind of starts scolding her, is like, get in where you're going to cook and you're going to learn how to garden. And she's like, well, why am I here? So she gets to know and eventually kind of weasels her way into finding out, like, why do you and mom not speak? Like what's going on? And she tells her this very fantastical story about a kingdom that used to exist in North Carolina, in Appalachia, that belonged to formerly enslaved black folks and that they set up shop there, literally made it a kingdom. There was a king and a queen and that they stayed there for, you know, decades. She's like, uh huh, grandma. Turns out she's not lying. It is a very real thing. And then we get this story told in two timelines that harkens back to basically Reconstruction era. And that is when we, we. I looked up, because I'm one of those people, I'm sure many of you are too, that you're like, is this real? I gotta do a quick Google. It's a real thing. This actually happened, folks, that we believe anyway, from the few records that exist, just came on foot from South Carolina looking for a place to be free where they wouldn't be persecuted and set up shop in the hills and on the two different sides essentially built this kingdom and eventually even got the funds together to get the deeds to this land and just made this beautiful community for themselves. That unfortunately, for reasons for that I probably don't have to tell you, because of history didn't pan out as well. As it should have. But this story kind of imagines like, what would it be like if we knew the descendants of that land? And what would it have been like for them to hold on to that land and lose it? Because people are shady. And I'm very much talking about the white people in this book. But it's again, it was one of those where I immediately googled like, this can't be real, like we should have known this. But I would know by now. And no, I didn't. And it's so, so good. Story is really juicy. And for all my audiobook listeners, I can't remember the name of the second narrator, but the first one is Bonnie Turpin, who just Queen, Queen of all queens and delivers this like chef's kiss. So please pick up this book. That is Happyland by Dolan Perkins Balditz.

[Keith Mossman]

And my next book is Montgomery Bon Bon in Murder at the Museum. This is a middle reader book. They don't maybe get mentioned a lot on the, on the podcast, but. And I don't think I would have mentioned it if I did not think that this was a book that any adult reader could pick up and really enjoy whether or not you were reading it with a middle reader. As a bookseller right now, having middle reader books, it's hard. It's one of the many here I am doing it again. But it was one of the many societal trends that's really troubling is just how hard it is to sell a middle reader book right now. So I really do take efforts to highlight the great ones. This is a really great one. So it's by Alastair Beckett King with illustrations by Claire Powell. It's very heavily illustrated. The illustrations are great. It's sort of like a Roald Dahl book. But no problematic elements here.

[Vanessa Diaz]

We love that.

[Keith Mossman]

Yeah. So the premise of this book, Montgomery Bon Bon is the finest gentleman detective. He wears a trench coat. He has a bushy mustache. He's also a 10 year old girl named Bonnie Montgomery. And the only people who know that Bonnie Montgomery is the world's greatest detective is Bonnie and her grandfather who helps her on her cases. And one of the things I like about this is the stakes are high. There is an actual murder in a middle reader book. A kid reading this will not feel talked down to. It's full of one liners, it's full of great jokes and it's sort of that Pixar idea that some of the jokes are just for the parents. I actually think all the jokes are for everybody. And one of the things I really liked about it is how cogent the prose is. There are jokes and they just work in. They keep the momentum going. There's no break for a joke. It doesn't have that Family Guy aesthetic, which is real pervasive in a lot of scenes where we stop everything cold to make it funny. It's just incredibly witty. Beckett Kane is a comedian in the uk. I don't actually know that much about him. I think my mental image is that the UK still has a lot of venues for people to just be good personalities on TV and radio. And he's one of those. But he's got this great book. This is from Candlewick. And one of the very kind things they did for us is they held on to publish them in America. So there's already two more. This came out earlier this year. There's already two more writing for you. They're quick, wonderful reads.

[Jeff O'Neill]

They're out now or they're coming out?

[Keith Mossman]

Yes, out now. So there's a lot to get into.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Terrific. I want to read that right now.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay, that sounds super fun.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm going to stay on the funny book pick. I think I had more fun with this book than any book I've read so far this year. This is this American Woman by Zarna Garg. It's a memoir. You may have seen her on probably Instagram or TikTok or something already. We I first encountered her, she opened for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler when they played Motor center here a little while ago. She was really funny, but I forget people's names and didn't really follow her. And I was going through the catalog and I saw this. I bet that's pretty funny. I like a good memoir by person who does X for a living. And comedians are especially good. And I was talking to Rebecca about this before. I think we've been chasing the what's the Next Born a Crime Trevor Noah book that's really funny but also means something and has something to say. And I'm here to tell you this book does that. So she is born in India, grows up in India, Things happen. She doesn't want to stay there. She runs away. She lives on the streets of Mumbai for a while. She comes to America, tries to be a lawyer and in her 40s, decides to be a stand up. And it works. And she has like a TV show coming out now. You're probably going to see her all over the place. And first of all, it's hysterically funny. I did it on audio first. She narrates it's terrific. And then I bought a copy because I just wanted to have it because I wanted to see how actually these jokes and how this actually looks on the page. It also did something else I didn't know I needed or I wanted or I could use, which is the Statue of Liberty on here is ironic, but also not ironic for her. The idea of America and what America can do changed her life. And she talks about it in a positive, affirming way. Like, if you're wondering what can be saved, what should be saved, this is like Document Zero. It's like the Bill of Rights. And this can tell you what we're trying to do here.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

They're gonna put that on the paperback.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. I mean, right? Yeah, she's doing fine. She don't need me. Her blurbs are Polar Faye, Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart, and Padma. So she's okay. I think I'm gonna be like, you know, you're gonna have to. You do a big one. But it's really terrific. So I'm really excited. I'm sad that her career is blowing up so much because we're probably not going to get another book, But I would read one like, what happened after she got famous I think would be really funny, too. So if you're looking for something that scratches the getting entertained, but also a little motivated, inspired, saved just a tad. This American Woman by Zorni Garner.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

All right, if it's a book riot, best of something show, there's going to be a Marie Helene Bertino book. There were two the last time we were here. This is her latest. It's a collection of short stories called Exit Zero. If you don't know Bertino, she does here's Life, and it's a little whimsical and a little weird, but all of the emotional stuff is very true. So one of the stories in here, a woman's father dies, and she's dealing with, what do I do with all this stuff in his house and these things that he's left behind. But one of the things he's left behind is his pet unicorn. And, like, it's hard to do. You put the unicorn in the car. Will the unicorn come with you? What is she supposed to do with this? What is her father saying to her with this message? There's one about a couple who, like, want to be intimate with each other, but something that they can't identify, like, some force is preventing them from, literally from doing it. And they are trying to figure out, like, well, if we go out on the balcony. Will this mysterious thing follow us there? What if we go to a hotel room? How do we talk about this thing? And through it all, Bertino is really doing. How do we talk about the relationships that we have with each other? How do we navigate loss? How do we navigate how weird it is to be a person who has relationships with other people? There's one where a couple are having a lovely day in the Hudson Valley, and they stop and buy some peaches at a farm stand. And it's her whole vision, but also they're having a terrible fight the whole time. So they're acting out the vision of a really lovely Saturday, and everything's awful. And later, a spirit emerges in the house and is screaming at them. And the spirit has come from the beaches. Like, all of these things sound totally bonkers, but they're completely believable in Bertino's hands. You're like, yeah, that could happen. Of course, when your marriage is rotting, the fruit is going to yell at you. Obviously, this is what we do. I feel a little bit like a crazy person trying to summarize what happens in these, but it's. It's more of a vibe that you will want to inhabit. I'm never sad. These are also short, and her books are one of the cases where I'm like, I would take 500 more pages of this in every go. I'm like, a Bertino book every year would be wonderful. So that's exit zero. And even if you think you don't like short stories, I think this is a good place to find out that maybe you can like some short stories.

[Vanessa Diaz]

All right, my next one is another one of my absolute favorites. It's called Malinali by Veronica Choppa. Does anybody know who La Malinche is?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes.

[Keith Mossman]

Cool.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Some of you do. Awesome. So she's one of the most controversial figures in history, but specifically Mexican history. I grew up, like, if you said, oy, malenchista, that meant, like, you are a traitor. And so she is the woman who served as translator for Hernan Cortes when he came and conquered Mexico. This book imagines a thing that I've asked myself so many times. Every time there's a really maligned woman in history now. Not that women are not allowed to be evil and terrible. Like, we are allowed to have anger and be complex. But also, in history, whenever a woman is painted this way, it makes me go, who got to tell that story? And how did we arrive at that conclusion? Because if you just do a little bit of thinking, she was almost Certainly a victim herself. Right. Like, Hernan Cortes wasn't being nice to her. And this imagines what it would have been like to know her from birth, you know, the family she grew up in. She's sent to a temple to basically go study to eventually be a priestess, gets captured, unfortunately, and then enters into a life of servitude. But the thing here is it also paints Moctezuma as, like, complicated. He's not necessarily like the good guy in this story. It very much is like, what happens, you know, of course the people there were oppressed because terrible conquistador, but also patriarchy like this, that system is also oppressive to the women around. And so reading her story, oh man, it like punched me in the gut several times because you just see her wanting to get bloody vengeance for all the people that have wronged her along the way and she dares to reclaim that power. So if you're a person who has loved books like Circe, right. Or what's the Kaike? Like books that take again, a woman who, like, we have all kind of collectively decided is the baddie. Like, but what if, but what if, but what if? And you'll at the end, so love this book so much. And you'll learn a lot if you didn't know who La Malinche is. So that's Malinally by Veronica Chapae.

[Keith Mossman]

Okay. My next book, another book that's gotten a good bit of coverage on the podcast Flashlight by Susan Troy. I think your review is sort of like, positive, Mixed.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. But you do you, Keith, talk about me for this?

[Keith Mossman]

Sure. Counterpoint, like, total rave. Like, what a flawless book this is. So this is the long awaited. Well, not the highly anticipated follow up to her National Book Award winning trust exercise. This is a very different book, but I think no less masterful. It's been talked about a lot. So I'll just skip sort of the summation stuff and just say it's a book that has several things in it. It's longer than I want novels to be. My ideal novel is a translated novel that's like 180 pages. And when I saw in the catalog how many pages this was, I was, oh, Susan. But she.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think she's a first name basis.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Yeah.

[Keith Mossman]

To my mind, she earned it because I think her mastery of prose is sort of totally transfixing. And the way that she uses the length and the time jumps in very meaningful ways. There's a sequence where a character is just sort of narrating, or rather it's not the character. It's the third person narrator, but they're sort of infected by the character. As we follow characters anyway, there's a description of the difficulty of using crutches to go to the store get food. And I'm one of those tedious people who's totally obsessed with the Robert Caro LBJ books. And the first book in that there's a sequence where he describes how agonizingly difficult it is for Texas Hill women to do laundry pre electrification. And that's just a thing that's going a bit of human experience and a description of it that's going to live with me forever. So with the crutches, there's one other moment I want to highlight, which is so subtle that other people I know who have read this did not. It didn't hit them, but it hit me, which is we've been following one character who's having difficult interactions with a family member, and then later in the book we have that other family member having a difficult interaction from the other perspective. And the book doesn't highlight it, but it just sort of explodes the idea that there's been one party in the wrong for a decade plus. And there was an interview I heard of her, where she sort of said, I needed to take this character who was really damaged and get her to a place where she could give and receive love. And in the writing of it, it took her decades in that character's life to do it. And I'm grateful that she took the time and she took the pages to do it. And that's Flashlight by Susan Choi.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Damn. Now I think I like it better.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Keys would know.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think whatever the opposite of a measuring contest is what I'm doing right now because I'm going small again.

[Keith Mossman]

This episode brought to you by MGM.

[Jeff O'Neill]

From executive producer Stephen King and an executive producer of Frog Comes the Institute.

[Keith Mossman]

A chilling new original series from mgm.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Kidnapped and trapped in a sinister facility, gifted teen Luke Ellis must join other children to fight for their survival. Starring Emmy Award winner Mary Louise Parker, Ben Barnes, and introducing Joe Freeman. The institute, premiering July 13 on MGM. Amazon One Medical presents Painful Thoughts.

[Vanessa Diaz]

I've been on hold to make a doctor's appointment for 23 minutes now. The automated voice has told me 47 times that my call is very important to them.

[Keith Mossman]

Hmm.

[Vanessa Diaz]

I'm starting to think that they don't think my call is important at all.

[Jeff O'Neill]

With Amazon One Medical 24. 7 Virtual Care, you'll get help fast without having to remain on the line to make an appointment. Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got less painful.

[Keith Mossman]

It's the Smucker's Uncrustables podcast with your host Uncrustables. Okay, today's guest is rough around the edges. Please welcome crust.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Thanks for having me.

[Keith Mossman]

Today's topic, he's round with soft pillowy bread. Hey. Filled with delicious PB and J. Are you talking about yourself? And you can take him anywhere.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Why'd you invite and we are out of time. Are you really cutting me off? Uncrustables are the best part of the sandwich.

[Keith Mossman]

Sorry, crust.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Here we go.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm going to give you a little homework while I'm we have two more picks each and we've each saved our favorite for the end. So that's how we're doing this. I'll do a little crowd work at the end. If you have a book you've loved that's a 2025 release and are willing to tell us about it, I will bring the mic to you. This is a warm, safe space. It can be anything. We will mock you when you're gone.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It can even be a book that when you described it the last time we were here, I thought was made.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Of this is a commitment to the bit that no one cares about. But. But it's true. I joked that a book I was reading that I really liked on the last live event was a book about phosphorus. And I am here to tell you that it holds up. It's White Light by Jack Lohman. It's about phosphorus, but it's only that long. It's also beautifully illustrated and I thought I would do something a little bit different too, because you hear a book about phosphorus, you think it's going to be ponderous and terrible. I'm just going to read the first little section here just to give you some sense of the thing that separates this from book about, say, I don't know, hydrogen. I don't know what the other books about elements are. So this is from the prologue called Whale Fall. In the moments that follow the death of a whale, when the light disappears and is swallowed by the dark, the body's weight draws to the base of the sea and compresses. It settles in the mud. It forms an environment known as a whale Fall, a world that will last for decades. So this has this poetic, enveloping sense. And it follows biology, history, politics. It'll take you to places you don't know to go to, you would never think to go to. Jack Lowman was look working on his college thesis and traveled to a small island off the coast of Australia to research this city, city, state, island, state that had been stripped, mined for phosphorus and then turned into a penal colony by the Australian government. Like super dystopian that's going on here. And he's sort of a rare scientist with a poet's mind, poet with a scientist curiosity. And that means it is extremely my jam. So I don't know how to get you to read a book about pop phosphorus, but I just tried.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think that sets me up for Australia and like a meditative vibe. This is Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. This is set in the outback of Australia. It's about a woman in her mid-40s who has left her husband. She has left a lucrative career, we never know why. And she has moved into a monastery, a religious community. She's been there for a few years. She has not become a nun, she has not joined the order, but she doesn't have any plans to leave. And we're basically reading her journal. She's telling us about the daily life in this place. A lot of it is very mundane. How they are bickering over how much grain and which type of peas should we have in the soup tonight, what are we going to do about the mouse infestation. But also someone is coming to visit the monastery and everybody's a little worked up about it. Something else has happened that. Is it sinister, is it weird? This is not a mystery. But there is a, like there's a tension at the heart of this, of the daily lives of the women in this place. That's really beautiful and lovely. I found myself not wanting to put it down every time I sat down to read it, but also wanting to make it last longer and doing a. Okay, I get a snack right Now, I get 30 pages of stone Yard Devotional and then I'm going to save myself a little bit more just to make the experience last. I think this one's hard to describe because it is really not much happens. You have to know that that's what you're getting into, that she's going to tell you about the day to day of their lives. And there's drama in those small things, in these tiny moments with people or in the. The barbed comment that somebody made three years ago that the two of those people are still mad about and everybody knows and are they ever going to have a conversation about it or are we all just going to live in this feeling forever? Really, really wonderful. I think it's the best novel. Well, it's the second best novel of the year so far. Jeff won our battle. We had a rap battle for who is going to get to talk about our shared favorite. This is my second favorite. It's right up there. The Stonyard Devotional. Charlotte Wood and oh yeah, it won the Booker Prize last year. Or no, it was shortlisted. I lied.

[Vanessa Diaz]

It should have won. Those who didn't hear, Jeff said, I got bars, but I would tell you all that. So this is actually my last bit because I went first and remember that the top. But I was like, I love folklore and mythology and all things witchy and mystery. And then I didn't recommend a single one of those things.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We're going to do honorable mentions in a minute.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Great, great. So again, I mentioned earlier that the accidental theme was kind of history. And I think it's because for reasons, I'm just wanting that sense that, like, things turned out okay eventually. This book is sort of a reminder of that in a really beautiful way and one that some of you may have attended this event and that is so many stars. An Oral History of Trans, Non Binary, Genderqueer and Two Spirit People of Color by Carol De Robertis. This book phenomenal on audio, great on obviously in print as well. But Caro actually started this as a fellowship with Jacqueline Woodson where they were just doing an oral history of queer folks of color, I think, in general. And she started it and it was so revelatory that she said, I need to make a book out of this. Like, I need to contact some people. So she did. She just went and. Or they, pardon me, they reached out to a ton of folks and said, can you just tell us your stories? And then instead of writing the book and connecting it narratively, essentially they just broke it up into different sections that are about, you know, history, like discovering queer identity, what it was like to come out, what it was like to find found family, what it's like to be an activist, what it's like to evolve and to find evolving language for yourself, etc. And the thing that's so important about this book that I keep telling everybody is that while we hopefully all intrinsically know what a gift it is to have elders to get wisdom from the queer community does not have anywhere near as many elders as they should because of stuff like the AIDS crisis and just folks like the trans community dying at record numbers. So it really is just this beautiful treasure to have all of this testimony in one book in a way that hearing it sometimes made me tear up and I had to stop. And then sometimes it just was Raucously funny because man, like the queer community just just hangs on to humor as a way of being resilient when the world is trying to kick the crap out of you. So again, I highly recommend this one on audio if you can. It's great both ways, but the structure of it was something that I really enjoyed because you're just getting what feels like a bunch of people are just sitting around a campfire telling stories in a way that felt so impactful. And again, I think this is just a treasure to that we have always been here thing is extremely, extremely true and this book proves it in a really stellar fashion. So that's so many stars by Caro de Robertis. And this is my pick for my favorite of the year so far. Thank you. Okay.

[Keith Mossman]

And my favorite book thus far is Is the River Alive by Robert McFarlane. McFarlane is the best nature writer in the English language. The best living nature writer in the English language. I do want to shout out, sorry to mention Lit Hub, but there's an essay on Lit Hub, it's all right by Dagan Miller, who once I finished this, I went and that essay clarified some things. And so I want to credit him because I might be reproducing some of his ideas. So if I think about my list as a whole, really, it's like very pleasantly surprised by some follow ups to some great previous books and then a couple new debuts that were exciting, but I didn't mention it. But Alison Bechdel's previous book, the Secret to Superhuman Strength is like total masterpiece. I think it's her best book actually. And Susan Choi and now Robert McFarlane. His previous book, Underland, is a book that a lot of people around palace really, really loved. It's a truly great book. But it being about being underground, it was about really a lot of isolation. This is about community more than anything else. So the basic premise is, I mean, it's a question and questions and headlines in newspapers, the answer is always no, not so. In questions. In a book title, the answer is yes. And he's pretty open about that. And so essentially the question is a river, sort of something closer to an entity that should have protection. And it's not like a legalistic book where he's trying to argue that although there's some legalism in it, it's really about like, what is a river? What is a river system? What does it represent to itself, to nature, to communities? And he does so by talking about the three rivers. One in Ecuador, one river system in India, and then in Quebec. And he profiles people he meets along the way. I think there's more profiles than any of his other books, and they're truly exquisite. So succinctly drawn. His prose is basically poetry. It's really just like a captivating read that really just propels you along to use river puns. Yeah. I'm trying to think there's anything else that I really want to throw in to sell you on it. I don't know. It's transportive in the best way, and it covers a lot of ground. And he really is just one of the best writers of books that is working right now.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That book rules. Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Great.

[Jeff O'Neill]

All right, Rebecca, why don't we try to do this together for a second?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, you're gonna let me share?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I know. Well, the problem is I don't want to have to do this because I don't know who's read some of have read this. You listen to the show. Come on, who's read this?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Do you want to tell me why I'm right? Am I right about this book? I really put you on the screen.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We just talked about how hard.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I know. It's like kind of give ourselves this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Audition by Katie Kitamura.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Katie Kimura. Look at that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay, so it's really small.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But Kitamura, all of her books are really short.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And it's a big book of famous female protagonist that has some kind of strange thing going on. Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And this one is a woman who's an actress who's maybe past the prime of her career. The book opens and she's having lunch with a man who's much younger than she is. What's the nature of their relationship? What do other people think? The nature of their relationship.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You're doing so well. Keep going.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And about halfway through the book, something happens that makes you, the reader, not so sure that anything you believed in the first half of the book was real, but also not so sure that what's happening in the second half of the book is real. Are they both real? Is neither one real? What is she doing here? This is like the most pleasant brain fuzzy reading experience that I've had. Katie Kitamura in a year. That there's a Katie Kitamura book. Like, that's going to be the best reading experience I have. And it came out. We've been talking about it for months already.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that makes it special is the most difficult thing to articulate because you don't know how she's doing. What she's doing as she's doing it to you. Because the sentences on their own, you take one by itself, it seems good, but there's an accrual of mood, tone and intentionality that you start to feel in a way that goes beyond sort of understanding what is happening to, like, some of, you know, the show I like to close read. This is sort of like beyond my ken of, like, I don't know, like I need craft people or witches or, I don't know, you need witches. I think that's right to do something like this. So it's super stimulating. It is not for everyone. Like, if you need an answer about what happened, run away from this book.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

If you want to dwell in, like, ah, yeah. If that feels good to you, this is the right kind of.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And if you just are looking for a unique reading experience, like, this is an unusual flavor, you may not even end up liking it. I think we're both like to go back to the Oishi psychological richness in prose is what we're seeing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And I think when you hear, like, reviewers use the phrase economy of language, like someone who can say a whole lot with few words and you immediately know who these people are, what this morning ritual that they've been doing forever is, and why one of them is kind of over it but can't say it to the other one. Just as one piece of one of the tiny things that happens. But that means so much more. It's impossible to actually describe the feeling of reading Kitamura, but I think that's the thing that recommends you want to have those reading experiences where you're like, I don't even know what to say about this. I need you to read it because we need to talk about it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And for us, I think there's no greater compliment we give a book than only books can do. Whatever is happening here, this is not something that you can get from music or other wonderful arts, but this is a prose, words, language, incantation that kind of goes beyond art. Thank you so much. Welcome to the pod dynamic, where I don't know how to say something. Rebecca does it for me. You've got one more. And we're going to ask Keith to talk about some coming attractions. We'll do a few honorable mentions, and I promise you I'm going to come out to the crowd and put this mic in your face.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

He insisted on having the cordless mic so he could work.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And Ames, I didn't tell you this, but Keith and I were talking about how good Sunrise at the reaping was and I think my son Ames, if you're interested in telling us about it. You did so great last time. You have 45 seconds to decide if that's a good idea. Rebecca's going to talk then.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is searches by Vahini Vara. This is the book I have thought about the most this year. It's about AI and art, but it's not like an argument about AI and art. She doesn't have a perspective. She's trying to convince us to take Varo went viral in 2021, I believe before ChatGPT existed, she was a tech reporter and the folks at OpenAI gave her access to a beta version of it. She had lost her sister and started writing an essay about the loss of her sister. And she had this thought of like, what if I fed this essay into this chat software and I asked it to talk to me about my art? Can AI understand art? Can it actually, if it reads an essay, can it actually tell you what that essay is about? Or can it just tell you what the words on the page are about? So this is kind of a book length version of that Experiment in Thought. She's working on a memoir. She writes you get a chapter of the memoir here and then she has fed it into ChatGPT and you get the feedback the ChatGPT gives her about it. And her response to ChatGPT, you move farther in where she's like, okay, here's a day that I experienced with my sister. Help me write about it. And you get to see the way she writes about it and the way that ChatGPT would write about it. And she just lets those two things stand by themselves. So you can draw your own conclusions. It's easy to draw your conclusions there about which one feels like art and which one doesn't. And by the end, she's moved fully into what if I were imagining an AI startup? I'm going to use this piece of AI technology to help me generate a pitch deck. And this very meta on meta way of thinking about when we're in a time where we're being told that technology can create art that feels like it's human. What does it mean to be a human who creates art? What does it mean to be a human who loves art? How do we think about our relationships to art? Why it's important that those things are made by humanity. But instead of villagers with pitchforks on the Internet raging about why AI is bad, she's like, let's just actually see what happens when we do this. And I thought that letting that speak for itself in a way that she didn't set out to prove something. She set out to ask a question. And you end the book, I think, feeling like there are more questions. But it certainly made me feel much less doomy about what might be happening with technology and much more. Not quite secure, but solid in my belief that books are going to be fine. We're going to be fine, and art is going to be fine, and books are going to be fine because we care that they're made by people. And I'm just realizing as I'm saying this, that makes it a really perfect thing to end on.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Very nicely done there.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Thank you. So that's searches. That is among my favorites of the year. I didn't really do a ranking, but that's the one. I read it months ago and I find a reason to talk about it, at least. It keeps coming back up in my thoughts. So I hope you'll.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You want to kick off honorable mentions. Thank you so much. Those are our 20. You have one.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Honorable mentions. Let's see. I really liked Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E Schwab. Toxic Lesbian Vampires is the pitch. It's super fun. Vanessa and I got to read that together for the show. So if you haven't read it, you can hear, like, the book club discussion of it.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Don't do the audio.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. Oh, yes. Don't do the audio. Apparently that's not a great narrator experience.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I love the Dream Hotel.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, yeah, the Dream Hotel. Leila Lalami. I really liked that it's in a slightly future. It's a slight future dystopia. Or it's supposed to be slightly future, but it's one where the government has access to all of the information about you ever. Like every text you ever sent, the thing you got in trouble for in sixth grade, what happened at your last doctor's appointment? And they're using it to rank how likely it is that you're going to commit a crime. And the main character is flying back into the US from being overseas, and they check her number and they're like, I'm sorry, ma', am, we have to take you into detention because your risk number has tilted. It's too high now. And so we're going to put you away for a couple of weeks so that you won't commit this crime that the algorithm says you're about to commit. So she finds herself basically in prison, but they're like, well, you're not in prison. Because you haven't been convicted of anything. And if you just behave while you're in here, you'll get out in two weeks. But everybody who's in there has been in there a lot longer than what they were originally told. They're not quite sentence would be their stay. And she finds herself in that situation and there's this tension of, should we try to follow the rules? Because they're saying, if I just. If I just follow the rules, I can get out. But also I'm looking around and everybody who's tried to follow the rules is still in here, so maybe we should try something else. And it came out the week that Doge went into the White House and started accessing all of our information about everything. And I was like, does not.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We were both waiting for the sirens, right?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And I read it on a plane coming in from being outside the country. Like, I was like, I'm about to go. Go through customs. Like, is this what's going to happen? So it's frighteningly believable for what she's talking about. Really easy to read, super engaging. So that's the dream hotel.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Me, you, me, me. Okay. If you've listened to the podcast, you already heard me. But my other accidental theme for this year is Old Lady Mysteries. They're like my favorite. So I'm gonna give you a three. I'm gonna keep it brief, but so there's Detective Auntie by USMA Jalaluddin, which is about a woman in Toronto whose daughter calls her and is like, ah, somebody just died that I know. And I'm this prime suspect.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Come help me.

[Vanessa Diaz]

And so she does and finds secrets. But there's something about women becoming a certain age where you to society become invisible and that allows you to, like, be really, really extra metal Y. And that's how you solve crime. Which takes me to my second pick, which is Murder by Cheesecake by Rachel Ekstrom, Courage, which is a Golden Girls mystery. And like, it's. It was written for me. If you ever watched Gonna get real specific, Season 7, Episode 2 of the Golden Girls, which is the Case of the Libertine Bell. And we're like, I wish Golden Girls were a mystery. Of course, you know that. I really do. I put it on to go to bed. And then the last one is A Murder for Miss Hortense by Mel Pennant, which another Dose of History is about a woman who is from the Windrush generation, which is folks from the Caribbean who, after the Brits had colonized them and were like, ah, our country Our workforce is depleted from war. Hey people, we colonized, come work over here. So that is. She's of that generation and gets to solve a bunch of crimes. And so again, you just get to. I think it's really great that we're just getting to see more women of a certain age in books, especially in mysteries where they're doing that marvel powers of observation thing to solve crimes. It is my sweet spot in books. So those are three of my other favorite honorable mentions for the year.

[Keith Mossman]

Okay. And like I said, I read a lot of poetry. I feel bad there was not a collection on my list. So I'm just going to mention a couple that I really enjoyed this year. One is New and Collected hell by Shane McCrae from FSG. I think it's New and Collected Hell. A poem. It's a collection. It's kind of one poem. It is about a poet who is allowed entrance to hell. It's funny. It's also kind of a work of intellectual horror. Really, really liked it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I didn't need a full dissertation about intellectual horror.

[Keith Mossman]

And the Museum of Unnatural Histories by Annie Weinstrub from Wesleyan Press. Really kind of a formally inventive collection that I really enjoyed a lot. The poem Self Portrait has a Jackson Pollock is a real standout. Frankie by Graham Norton. Speaking of British venues for people to be funny, Graham Norton was a purveyor of that for many years. This is like his fifth novel. I haven't read any of them. Listen to this book. It's real good. Or the Listening Experience is real good.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I've heard they're great. I've never picked up one. I've heard they're illegal.

[Keith Mossman]

Yeah, like a real balm if you. If you need it. And the other one I want to mention is Love and Exile by Shan Fay. It is a essay collection kind of memory. Sean Fey is a trans writer from the UK and it's about her experience of love. It's very idiosyncratic, but also I think she had an advice column for a while. It's sort of. It's not in that form, but I think that informed the book. It's just a really wise and smart and short read.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'll do one honorable mention. Then we're going to do preview of coming attractions right after this. I don't know what to do with these kinds of books that they're not going to make my 10 best books of the year. They're not going to be on awards list. But I really like the damn book and I really enjoyed My time with it. It's the Doorman by Chris Pabone. It's a mystery set in a high end New York apartment building. So it's only murders, but grittier and a little bit not as twee, which I enjoy. Only murders. But this is someone who clearly knows this city and they know these buildings. I lived in New York for a long time. Pavone lives with his family in Brooklyn now. So he knows the ins and outs of how these people work. You get an upstairs, downstairs element to it. I just had a great time. It was one of the great plane reading experience I've had recently. We were talking before about how Sunrise at the Reaping is good. I'm going to see if my son wants to talk about. If not, I'm going to tell you, ask you to talk about why Sunrise at the Reaping is good even though it's a prequel franchise book. Aim. Do you want to take a shot or no? All right. What a round of applause.

[Vanessa Diaz]

First of all, sorry Rebecca, I was could not. I was not paying attention to this because that's the talking points.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'll let it slide.

[Vanessa Diaz]

This is the story of Haymitch Abernathy from the Hun from the original Hunger Games series. And it is what songbirds and snakes wanted to be, but better. You get the characters you see throughout the books and you get to see how kind of as Hamish is going through this hungry Amish process, how crippling the second book is. What is it called? Catching Fire.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Catching Fire.

[Vanessa Diaz]

How crippling it is to having to see all these people go against each other. The thing I think is Irena's in Maui. Very different tone from being Maui. The thing that is so crippling, that's kind of different with the other Hunger Games is how good his life could have been. He got out, but it was at what cost. He was facing President Snow at his best. At his. He was the smartest. He was over his presidential term. He was like Napoleon in the War of the Third Coalition. Most of you do not know what that means. This is my father.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Tell me someone recorded that.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Amazing. This is the sharpest he's been and the most twisted of his punishments. This is what he inflicts on Haymitch as he's going.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You're hired. Ames, what is the podcast?

[Vanessa Diaz]

So.

[Jeff O'Neill]

What?

[Vanessa Diaz]

A couple minutes ago I got full of her for this. So in the original Hunger Games books you get a little glimpse of like what his arena is. I'm just gonna spoil it real quick. Every. It's like this beautiful prairie. It's like picturesque, but everything is poison. It's just. It is hell on another level because it looks like heaven, but it's not. And so it's.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You thought it was the best of the Hunger Games we talked about.

[Vanessa Diaz]

I think it's the best of Hunger Games because it's what. And what's different from the different Hunger Games books is he's working with other people and he wants to shut the Hunger Games down. That is what he wants to do. And he kind of does that, but it costs him dearly. This is how he's turned into this kind of this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

He was a good.

[Vanessa Diaz]

He's a good man. But he's this kind of tax that he's. That's been inflicted on him over the years. And the epilogue is interesting.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Don't spoil too much.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Yeah, I'm not.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay. Yeah.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Because he writes this as he is. It doesn't really give too much of a literature. But it's as he's dying like he feels like more mortality coming upon and it like it shows how everything. It's the groundwork for the. Ah. And that's what's great about it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Do you want to talk about.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No. You did great.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That was well done.

[Vanessa Diaz]

Excellent job.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm retiring.

[Jeff O'Neill]

All right, Keith, we're halfway through the year. What do we have to look forward to?

[Keith Mossman]

Well, so I just finished fall catalogs pretty recently and we're looking at like September picks of the month right now. There's a lot of great stuff coming. I actually, I'm just going to call out some personal close term favorites. There's a book coming out later this month at the end of the month called Likeness by Samson Knight. It's on the University of Iowa Press. I love to find things in a university press catalog. It's. I think they called it a novel. It is like a novella and a short story that are pretty closely related, but not entirely. I just really like a piece of fiction that's plain a form like that. And I think it's a really smart, potent little book and seek it out. As I said, my ideal novel is 100200 page translated book. The best one I found this year is a book coming mid August from Riverhead. It's called Women Seated by Zane Guran. Riverhead is starting this project of trying to translate more works from China. It's really underrepresented. If you look at like NBA translated lists like Mandarin, very under represented. Even though it's maybe the most people in the world. It is their mother tongue. And this is a book. It's short, it's potent, it's about a nanny in a wealthy Chinese home. And while she is taking her charge on a little holiday, she finds out that the husband father is fallen out of favor of the government and the whole family might collapse. You might go from a powerful minister to in jail, which happens in a autocratic regime. And there are a bunch of twists, a bunch of turns. It's kind of a thriller, but really it comes down to this wonderful character study of three really different women. Really, really loved it. Another book I wanted to talk about is Mona's Eyes, that's also coming in August. It's from Europa. It's a French book by Thomas Schlesser. The premise is another lone one, but the premise is a young girl, Mona, has a moment of blindness that she's then taken to the hospital. They can't explain it, they don't know her vision comes back, but they don't know if she will go fully blind. It will never happen again. And one of the consequences of this is that her grandfather starts taking her to first the Louvre and then some other museums. One a week. You'll get one piece of work. They're sort of pitching it as Sophie's World, but for art instead of philosophy. And it is that it basically is a work of art history, but told in novel form. The way I've been telling everyone to read it is like a devotional. Read one short little eight page chapter about an artist and one piece of work and then go Google and don't go back to the book for a day at least. And it makes it take a while because it's about Mona's Eyes is the title, and it's about 450 pages, so it takes a while. But it's the whole sweep of Western art. It's worth it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'll allow it for the entire sweep of Western art.

[Keith Mossman]

And then the last one I wanted to mention, it's a picture book. The picture book is called Tuck Me in, exclamation point by Nathan W. Pyle, who you may know has the illustrator of Strange Planet, which is sort of a strip about the weirdness of life. This is a picture book about how one beach wants to be tucked in, that is have the tide be brought up to his chin and. But then the beach on the far side of the world, when the moon tries to do this for him, on the opposite side of the world, that beach is then not tucked in. And that's a real problem. For the Moon. It's the weirdest book. I have no idea if children will like it. Either it's going to be their favorite book or it's just going to be kind of lost on them. But I think it's worth a go. It's really the the most sort of captivated eye picture book I've been this year and I really liked it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Thanks.

[Keith Mossman]

Great. The Chinese book is called Women Seated and it is a pick of the month.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay, time to be brave. Would anyone like to talk about a book they love this year? Come on. You listen to the pod, you read books by yourself. You're dying to talk to someone about your favorite book.