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The Currently Reading Podcast
Season 8, Episode 6: Octogenarians in the Spotlight + Diving into Reading Deeply
01:08:09
On this episode of Currently Reading, Meredith and Kaytee are discussing: Bookish Moments: being told what to read by our past selves + insomnia reading on my kindle Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we’ve been...
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:11]
B
Hey, readers, welcome to the currently reading podcast. We are bookish best friends who spend time every week talking about the books that we've read recently. And as you know, we won't shy away from having strong opinions. So get ready.
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A
We are light on the chit chat, heavy on the book talk, and our conversations will always be spoiler free. Today we'll discuss our current reads, a bookish deep dive, and then we'll visit the fountain.
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B
I'm Meredith Monday Schwartz. I'm both a mom and a Mimi and a full time CEO living in Austin, Texas, and I love it when my calendar bosses my reading.
- [00:45]
A
And I'm Katie Cobb, a homeschooling mom of four living in Arizona, and my books are my faithful companions. This is episode number six of season eight, and we are so glad you're here.
- [00:55]
B
Oh, Katie. Yes. I have had like three conversations in the last couple of days with people saying, I'm going through X, Y, and Z, but I am so glad that I have X in my ears because it is calming me down. Or I'm reading Y because it's distracting me in ways that are really helpful. Just that way that our reading comes alongside us sometimes.
- [01:15]
A
Yes, definitely. Hey, y'.
- [01:18]
B
All.
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A
We want to let you know that our deep dive today is about reading deeply. And it's going to be a little bit of a primer, how to do it and then why would you want to? Both of those things are good questions. But first, we're gonna get started the way we always do with our bookish moments of the week. Meredith, what is yours?
- [01:37]
B
All right, Katie. I opened up my calendar this morning, first thing, as I always do. And even on a Saturday, which we're recording, Today is Saturday, August 30th, which is gonna come into play because on my calendar today, I had a reminder from meredith back in 2023, and Meredith in 2023 says Meredith of the future, you need to read the September House this year. You've had plenty of time between when it was brought to the show. You started it back in 2023 and were really enjoying it, but you realized that by the time you brought it to the show, it would no longer be September. And it just feels like the kind of book you need to bring in September. So read it now. Future Meredith. That's what Past Meredith said. It literally said all of that.
- [02:27]
A
She's so smart. We love Past Meredith.
- [02:29]
B
And so I was like, you know what? Past Meredith. That's a really good idea. So I had just finished a book and I was like, I'm gonna immediately just open up my Kindle, cue myself up, and as soon as we are done recording today, Katie, I am gonna jump into the September house, which you all will hear about in the proper timing in September, whether I like it or not. I don't know if I'm gonna like it, but you're gonna hear about it when you still could appropriately read it in September.
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A
Ugh. So brilliant, right?
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B
I just. I feel good. Which, you know, Katie, every once in a while, we need to feel like we know what we're doing. We need to feel like we have some sense of control and agency in our lives.
- [03:07]
A
This is true. That's why I was randomly taking walls out of my house this week. It's fine.
- [03:13]
B
Because you could.
- [03:14]
A
I wanted control over that one tiny little space in my house. Yes. So it's fine. All right, Meredith. My bookish moment is about insomnia. And while being struck with insomnia is not any reason to, like, celebrate, like, yay, bookish moments, I am so grateful for my Kindle because it is on warm, light setting. Maximum warm light, almost. I think it's on either a level one or level two backlight. It is the perfect companion for middle of the night sleeplessness. I never look forward to a sleepless night, but I do occasionally get to snag either a few extra minutes or even an hour, like I did last night, of reading time. That constant companionship is what I need right now. Books don't side eye me for tossing and turning. They're not like, girl, get it together. What are you doing? Right? My Kindle never judges me for reading in the middle of the night. My audiobook never suggests that I get a life and go talk to real people. Never. It's never like, katie, are you doing okay? It just stands by me when I need it. My faithful companions, steadfast books, they're just always there for me. And I was just struck again by the fact that I can be in any place in my life or any place in the world, and my Kindle in the middle of the night will turn on and say, here's where you were reading. Would you like to continue? And the answer is yes. It makes me so happy.
- [04:42]
B
Absolutely. No. There are so many times where I think the exact same thing. That middle of the night wake up is definitely. I mean, this is not what you're dealing with, but perimenopause and menopause, that middle of the night wake up is a thing. Get your hormones checked, ladies. There are things that can be done about it. But I totally know what you're saying, and sometimes you have to look for upsides on things and you have to be like, well, I'm awake. The upside is I can get some reading in that I wouldn't have normally gotten in. There's got to be an upside.
- [05:09]
A
Exactly. Exactly. If we can't celebrate that little win, then, you know, we end up tearing out walls.
- [05:16]
B
Exactly.
- [05:17]
A
For no other reason.
- [05:18]
B
Exactly. It's a net positive thing in our lives. That's also a control mechanism.
- [05:25]
A
Mm. Which is fine. But that does mean we've been reading some, even if it's middle of the night reads. Meredith, what is your first current read this week?
- [05:34]
B
This is actually one weirdly that I did do quite a bit of middle of the night reading on because I was going through a spirally period of time. But this one was great because it gave me a total distraction. This is a distraction book, which I really, really love. This is a book called the Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Frackasy. Here's the setup. Our lead character is Rose Dubois, and she is definitely not what we think of when we think of your typical final girl. Rose is pushing 80. She's living her best life at the Autumn Springs Retirement Home. She's playing bingo. She's playing a little bit of maj. She is generally minding her own business and perfectly happy about it. But when the residents of the home start dropping dead at an alarming rate, Rose begins to wonder if some of these accidents are really just the unfortunate realities of aging, or if something more sinister is happening in the halls of the Autumn Springs Retirement Home. This was my first book by Philip Fracassi, and I have heard about him multiple times there. He has several really highly rated horror slash suspense horror books, and I loved this one from page one. The opening is genuinely one of those ones that just reaches out and grabs you and immediately sets up that this is a book that is both darkly comedic because it does have that tone and it has high stakes. Rose Dubois, our main character, is a delight. She is an absolute delight. She brings exactly the kind of sharp observation and that kind of life experience that I'm loving in some of these older protagonists. And I loved the fresh take on the final girl trope because instead of some college girl in her undies making questionable decisions, we get a woman in her 80s who's lived long enough to know when something is off. This book is campy and it's fun in all the right ways, but make no mistake, this book does not shy Away from genuine gore, especially as we go along. There is an early scene, I will tell you, where a woman gets her neck snapped under the killer's boot that will remind you immediately we are not in cozy mystery territory, friends with this book. What the author's doing here feels a lot like in this particular book, Richard Osmond, but make it campy horror. He's taking that clever ensemble cast, that mystery vibe from the Thursday Murder Club, and adding these very real horror elements. You could also think about Grady Hendrix, that comedy sensibility that we see in Grady Hendrix, but make it horror and then apply it to a nursing home setting. Honestly, I love the trend that we're seeing toward older protagonists. I am being drawn to that more and more. And we're getting it more and more. Not just in fiction, but in mystery, thriller, horror. There's something refreshing about these characters that have lived full lives with these extraordinary circumstances because they bring a level of wisdom and discernment and perspective, not just youthful stupidity. And I'm really loving it. Also, we get here and in many of these other books, elderly women as active protagonists, not as victims. Here's what gets tricky for me. This is probably 25% too long. This is a book that's juggling a lot of different elements without fully committing to any single angle or approach enough. So we've got campy horror, genuine thriller, social commentary, ensemble mystery, character study. I kept waiting for it to, like, pick a lane and genuinely excel in that lane or that space where the way that Hendrix, for example, nails when he gets in on a theme and then he really nails that theme by the end of the book. We don't have that happening here completely. But that said, Phraxi clearly has talent. His backlist, like I said, speaks for itself. And I definitely am going to read more of his work. There's real skill here, especially in the sentence level writing, and his concepts were really, really good. So he swings for the fences here. Doesn't completely work, but this was a solid four stars for me and really brought something fresh to the horror genre. This is the Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Frakasse.
- [10:14]
A
It sounds fun. I like a little bit of gore in my cozy. And I realized you said this is not cozy.
- [10:21]
B
This is not.
- [10:22]
A
But like the setup and the retirement home and the elderly protagonist, it's drawing me in in the perfect way. Yeah. I also love that you said she plays a little bit of Maj. Like.
- [10:32]
B
A little bit of Maj. Yep.
- [10:34]
A
I was like, oh, Meredith, a little bit of Ma.
- [10:38]
B
You can say that when you play mahjong.
- [10:40]
A
Okay, well then it's appropriation for me to say it, because I do not. Yes, but I like hearing it. It's very fun for me. Okay. My first book also has an elderly protagonist in it, although he's not the main, main character I'm going to talk about. Here we go again by Allison Cochran. This is my second book by this author, but it has surpassed the other as my favorite by her. Logan and Rosemary were friends once, long ago. They spent every summer and as many waking moments as possible together when they were children until they had a disastrous falling out right before high school started. Now they haven't spoken for more than 10 years, but they both work at the same school. Their Alma material where they graduated from. They are stuck in their small town, still dreaming of something bigger and still avoiding each other at every opportunity. Rosemary is a type A woman after my own heart. Your own heart as well. She makes binders. Like Leslie Knope, she plans and overplans every step in her life until sometimes she forgets all the things she's supposed to do. It's all a goal to keep herself and her loved ones safe and secure. Logan is the yin to her yang. She flies by the seat of her pants. She's pretty sure her girlfriend just broke up with her, but it's no big deal because was her name Kelly or Kelsey? I'm not totally sure. Can't even remember her name. Everything is easy breezy on the surface, but only if we stay surface level when they crash into each other literally right outside of school as summer is starting. It's an actual crash in their cars. And then they are thrown back together when their beloved former English teacher Joe, the most pivotal mentor in each of their lives, confesses that he has only a few months left to live. Rather than wasting away alone at home, he wants to go on a cross country road trip from Washington State all the way to Maine. And he wants both of his favorite girls to go with him. It's the dying wish of an elderly man. So the girls put on their big girl panties and they agree to try and make it work. And that's how we get this road trip novel. It's an end of life celebration. Enemies to lovers, second chance romance in our hands and our ears. Rosemary comes prepared with her binders. Logan, however, is ready to seek adventure. They buy an old van to hold the medical equipment and Joe and his dog and they set out. Now, for those of us who are Meredith style readers, this book is full of banter and quirky Dialogue and bad decisions and questionable timelines. For someone who drove just across the country, especially questionable timelines. I'm like, wait, you can't, you can't stay there for five days and then still make it there in 26 hours. It doesn't work. It doesn't work.
- [13:20]
B
Oh man. That kind of stuff drives me crazy.
- [13:22]
A
I get a little in my head about it. It's not perfect and there are pieces that will annoy some readers in a big way. In fact, while it has overall great reviews on storygraph, the people who didn't enjoy it have very strong opinions about everything wrong with it. However, for a Katy style reader, this was great. I want to make it clear that it's a road trip that's a last rites style end of life adventure. There is death and terminal illness on these pages. There are hard things here. Joe is losing control of some of his faculties. But there's also celebration of a life well lived, long lived. There's love rekindled after decades. There's a history in the gay community and an adventure that runs far afield of the planned route. I really loved it. It pulled on my heartstrings in a big way. Got a little weepy by the end. And the way the story pulled together was just chef's kiss. But I wasn't mad about the tears. I gave it five stars. This was Here We Go Again by Alison Cochran.
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B
Okay. I feel like there's been a lot of road trip novels recently.
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A
Yeah. There's the Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett is I think, like the big one right now.
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B
And then Kevin Wilson's new book is a road trip book.
- [14:32]
A
Oh yes. Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson. Yeah, see, and I haven't read either of those. This one was a libro alc this summer, so it did come out this summer. But I just picked it up for fun one day I was like, hey, road trip, let's do it. And it worked for me in a big way. Good.
- [14:49]
B
I'm so glad. All right, well, I am continuing my theme, and weirdly, a little bit your theme too, with another book that is. I'm going to get into why I'm having such a hard time telling you exactly what it is. It's We Spread by Ian Reed.
- [15:06]
A
What? We spread? Uh huh.
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B
It's got a weird title, but it's got a fantastic cover. You should go look at the COVID I will. Our main character is Penny, who is also an octogenarian. I don't know why I got. I really got into A theme around this period of time. Okay, But Penny and Rose are very different. Penny is in her 80s. She's an artist. She's been living alone in the apartment that she shared with her late partner who was also an artist. And, you know, she's been surrounded by the collected debris of her life. But she starts having some accidents at home and she finds herself at Six Cedars, another retirement home, a long term care residence nestled in the woods where everything initially feels quite lovely. She's got three fellow residents for company. There's only four of them at this entire facility.
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A
Weird.
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B
But Penny is painting again and the meals are surprisingly delicious. Then the days begin to blur together in a peculiar way and Penny starts to notice that different things are not quite adding up. Soon you're left wondering whether what she's experiencing is the natural confusion of an advanced age or something far more sinister happening at 6 cedars. Very similar setup. I mean, not completely, but there's a lot of through lines between these two books. But these two books could not be any more different than they tried. But I liked each of them in their own way. I went into Wii Spread with High expectations because I loved. I'm thinking of Ending things Right and Foe by Ian Reid. Both of those were absolutely spectacular five star reads for me. Both of those different from the other. But all three of these books do some of the same things really, really well. I was ready to have my mind thoroughly messed with again. And Ian Reed always delivers on that front. The man is a master at keeping the reader slightly off balance, making you question everything you think you know about what's happening on the page. There's a real staccato structure to this particular book because the chapters are very, very short and they fit this narrative really well. Penny's world is coming at us almost in real time. It feels like the way that Reid messes with our heads about location and the kind of linear nature of time passing gives us that perfect sense of maybe what we think is true isn't, but maybe it is, but maybe it isn't. But here's the thing about Ian Reed. He knows exactly how to spool out the story. He gives us enough to stay interested, but never so much that we're bored or. Or overwhelmed. And few authors inspire that much trust in me. I'll strap on a blindfold and go anywhere with this man because he has proven to me that he can navigate these twisty psychological waters without making me feel like I'm being manipulated just for the sake of it. Like, just to mess with me. There's a purpose behind his madness, even when, and maybe for Ian Reid, especially when I can't see that purpose coming. That said, I do have to say that this book is probably very triggering for anyone who is dealing with dementia or memory issues. So please take that into account when you're thinking about this book. Reid does not shy away from the very real fears that we have about aging and losing our faculties, and he explores these themes with what I would describe as unflinching honesty. So I really want to be clear that that's one of the things that we find in this book. If you've struggled with Ian Reid's previous works, like I'm thinking of ending things, you are going to find similar challenges here. He definitely isn't subtle. He figures out how fear distorts everything that we see, and it makes us vulnerable and it makes us not see things completely clearly. And he capitalizes on that. And he loves making you feel unsettled and off your game. So some Goodreads readers mentioned wanting more concrete answers or finding the ambiguous nature of the ending frustrating, which you find in all of his books. He doesn't hand you easy solutions, and that is not going to work for every reader, but it absolutely works for this reader. This was we spread by Ian Reid.
- [19:41]
A
Interesting. Sounds like he's a master and a menace in some way.
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B
You have to go into it knowing that he's gonna mess with you and that that's what he's trying to do. But he's so smart.
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A
I like it and I like the theme we have going on here. I'm gonna break it. Good.
- [19:59]
B
I'm going to with my third read.
- [20:00]
A
Too, but so far I like the theme. Also, I did look up the COVID and I love the COVID And I'm not totally sure if it's veins or tree branches or roots, and I think that's purposeful and I really like that.
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B
Exactly. I really, really love that cover. The name of it, also, before I read it, is the reason why I read it. Third, because I was like, I don't like that title at all.
- [20:29]
A
Yeah, me neither.
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B
But when you read it, you start going, it's a really good title.
- [20:35]
A
Oh, no. Dang it. They knew what they were doing. Ugh. Yep. Rude. Okay, well, speaking of great covers, the second one for me, the COVID got me. I'm going to talk about the Stardust Grail by Yumi Kitase. This book entirely made it onto my radar because of the tentacles on the COVID In fact, I had to Go back to the bookish friends one day and ask them what's the science fiction book with red clouds and tentacles on the COVID Because that's all I could remember about it. Thankfully they knew, so I finally picked it up. I say finally. It's only a year old, it's fine. But usually the octopus tentacle something will get me right away. Here's the setup. This is a heist novel set in space, but then also make it anti colonization and filled with all the alien creatures you might dream up. Maya Hashimoto used to steal art in order to return it to the civilizations it came from. She was the best in her field, the best in the galaxy at what she does for 10 years. Just fully rocked it until a screw up led her into hiding. When she's approached by an old friend about a job she can't get out of her head, she's pretty sure that completing this last one will get those weird visions she's been having to leave her alone. So she agrees to look for a final artifact. It could be the key to continuing a single alien species that's on the edge of extinction. So we've got to find it. There are theories that this is how they breed, but no one knows where it is, how to find it, or even what it looks like. And Maya is not the only one on the lookout. Maya sets out on a breakneck quest through a universe teeming with strange life and ancient ruins. But the farther she goes, the more those visions that she was having cast a dark shadow over the found family of friends that she brings on her adventure with her new and old betrayal is lurking around every corner and she finds herself facing impossible choices along the way. Like what if I grab this thing and then humans go extinct instead of this alien species? What then? That setup. Oh, it got me right. But this was a bit more subdued than I thought it would be. And certainly more than the setup makes it sound like it should be. The highest portion of it is wrapped in quite a bit of internal dialogue. Existential dread, which really works for some readers, so it's worth mentioning. For me it was a little bit like, but why are we doing this? Like more action please. I wanted more page turniness. It gave me some of the vibes of Station Eternity by Mira Lafferty, but a little less madcap. It also has a bit of that legend in the field returns from retirement for one final adventure vibe, which we find in the Adventures of Amina Al Sarafi by SA Chakraborty, but less sweeping, less moving, less Good. Correct? Yes. All of this is to say that while I did enjoy my time in this universe, I also think it was poorly affected by other books I enjoyed quite a bit more. Like, if I wanted this, I should have gone back to that series. If I wanted this, I should have waited for the next in this series. It didn't hit on either of those levels. The pacing and pensiveness felt at odds with the ways I expected it to go. And expectations are the mother of disappointment. Right. By the end, I was just ready for it to be over. So while reader Roulette has mostly been going great for me, this one ended up being just mid. It is the Stardust Grail by Yumi Katese.
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B
Yeah, I mean, you have to think at some point, read a roulette. I mean, certainly my, like, library serendipity doesn't hit all the times for sure, so.
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A
No. And when you're playing actual roulette, you can't hit every time either, so.
- [24:19]
B
Exactly. Or it wouldn't be a game.
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A
Right.
- [24:21]
B
All right. Like you with my third read, I am not going to have an octogenarian protagonist. You guys are going to be really happy to hear that.
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A
Oh my gosh. I almost do in my third book.
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B
Oh, really?
- [24:32]
A
So we're going to have four of six altogether. Oh, wow. Okay.
- [24:36]
B
Well, you guys know we don't plan our books, right?
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A
Go on.
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B
This is a five star read for me. This one probably will be on my top 10 of the year. This is Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood.
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A
Mm.
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B
Here's the setup. And I actually feel like this book has been a lot of places, but I didn't actually know what it was about. So I want to say you guys have heard about this, but maybe not. We do have an unnamed narrator here as our main character. But stay with me because I don't like that normally either.
- [25:06]
A
Okay.
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B
It actually won't bother you here at all, I promise. She's a middle aged woman. She is so burnt out from her life as a wildlife conservation specialist in Sydney. So we're in Australia here for this book. In her job, for years she's been watching the world literally burn away and trying to save endangered species as it's happened. So at some point she just burns out and walks away from everything. Her career, her husband, her entire life. She doesn't have any kids, she doesn't have a breakdown. Exactly. She simply returns to the part of Australia where she grew up. Which is, by the way, the landscape, the setting is a character. Here she moves into a small religious community. But what makes this interesting is that our main character doesn't believe in God. She doesn't even know how to pray. Our narrator finds herself living among fewer than 10 aging nuns, cooking their meals, tending their gardens, and somehow settling into the rhythms of monastic life. Almost by accident, she goes there for a retreat and then just kind of stays. But then three disruptions shatter this new life that she has made for herself. We get a biblical level plague of mice. We will put a pin in that. We have the return of the skeleton. Like bones are found belonging to a nun who disappeared decades ago. And there's an arrival of a visitor from the narrator's past. Put a pin in that too. These visitations force the narrator to confront the very things that she was running away from. Like, I came out here to get away from this stuff. Guilt, grief, climate crisis. The uncomfortable question of whether withdrawing from the world is wisdom or is it just being a coward. This is literary fiction for sure, but it is propulsive as a thriller. If thrillers were about the terror of being alive in a desperate and depressing world. Here's one thing I love about Stone Yard Devotional. It is one of those Booker Prize nominees that proves exactly why I always, always read at least one book from the Booker list each year. I usually let Liz Hein make that choice for me. This was one that she really loved too. To me, the Booker lists are the most accessible of all the literary prize lists. So this is not an impenetrable navel gazing literary exerc. This is literary fiction that actually moves, even though it appears to be standing still. Charlotte Wood writes with incredible restraint that somehow makes every small thing that happens feel seismic. The whole book hums with this underlying unease that keeps you turning pages again, even when not a lot of it is happening. We're moving through time in these ever rotating concentric circles. So we've got present day, we've got her near past, we've got the distant past. And Charlotte Wood controls this movement really specifically. It's very beautifully done. You're never lost, but you're also never quite settled, which is exactly where she wants you. And listen, I need to give you a heads up about this mice situation. This is the most mousy book I have ever read. I had a reader reach out to me when I put on Instagram that I was reading it. She said, on a scale of 1 to 10, how mousy is this book, friends? It is at least an 8.at least an 8 out of 10 in pure mouse level intrusion.
- [28:48]
A
Only Stuart Little is more than this.
- [28:50]
B
Right? I mean, this is not Stuart Little. These are not cute little field mice having tea parties. This is biblical level skin crawling infestation that Wood describes with such visceral detail that you will be checking your own baseboards while you read it.
- [29:06]
A
No. I was. No.
- [29:08]
B
If rodents are a hard no for you, this is not your book. That's completely fair. And I just want to be really upfront about it.
- [29:14]
A
Yeah.
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B
But here's what makes this book extraordinary. If you can get past the mice, it delivers these gutters punches without ever being histrionic or emotionally big. In fact, these gut punches hit so hard because they sneak up on you. She doesn't telegraph emotional moments. She lets them emerge naturally from a bunch of, like, small observations and tiny cruelties being remembered moments of grace that went unnoticed at the time. It is masterful, really, how she builds this emotional architecture without you realizing that the walls are going up around you. If you love the introspective power of, like, the Gilead series or the way that Elizabeth Strout writes the ordinary but makes it feel profound, then you will find a lot of similar DNA here. This is literary fiction for people who want to think deeply but also want to feel something real. This is Stonyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. And I love, loved it. And I do like books about nuns or cloisters.
- [30:23]
A
Right. For this, we are not surprised.
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B
That's something I will never. I will never understand that weird part of my reading, but I love it.
- [30:33]
A
But that's such a cool thing to know about yourself. Yeah. Let's all find that weird little niche that always works for us, which is kind of what my third book is. There are a lot of similarities between what you were talking about and what I have to talk about. Okay. Except for the mice. That's not part of this Miceless. And it's not in Australia. That might be a weird little niche for me. I love books set in Australia. I don't know. I don't know what that is.
- [30:58]
B
I mean, done well. It is an absolute character.
- [31:01]
A
Yeah. And it has such variety in the outback versus the forest versus, like, the coast and the cities.
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B
Like in the city. Yeah.
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A
Yeah, I love that. All right. Well, it does sound really good, though. I don't have, like, an existential terror of mice, but I have had some mousy situations in my life where I'm like. They give me a little bit of heebie jeebie. So. Yep. I can see this going either way.
- [31:26]
B
For me, that's exactly Why I felt like it was something that I did have to acknowledge.
- [31:31]
A
Yeah, okay. My third one this week is called this is Happiness by Niall Williams. Now, you don't have to wait for either of us to talk about sweeping literary fiction, because Meredith just did. But same here. This is a sweeping literary fiction novel that will utterly transport you. Storygraph calls this one quiet and luminous. Those two adjectives, perfection. First, I'm going to tell you how it found me. As I finished up my road trip this summer, I was just getting ready to leave my bestie Heather's house. She mentioned this book only in passing, but said it was absolutely going to end up on her Favorite Books of the Year list. It released in 2019, so I was able to grab it right away from the library. I started it on the next leg of my journey, knowing essentially nothing about it except that it's Irish, which is another big win for me in my reading. For that reason, I'm going to go a little light on the setup, especially because this is a book in which not very much happens at all. The small Irish parish of Faha is facing a big change. They are finally getting electricity in town. It's the mid-1950s, but these residents and this community has managed to stay the same for going on a thousand years. Now, that's not all. The rain has also stopped. It feels like it's rained every day of those thousand years. The very first line of this book, though, scratch that, the very entire first chapter is the rain had stopped. That's it. That's the whole first chapter.
- [33:01]
B
Oh, that sentence.
- [33:03]
A
That's it, yeah. Chapter one. And then you're like, chapter two. It had been raining for like, you're like, wait, what? That's it. A sudden and unexpected return to sunshine has left these residents alternately bewildered and off their routines, just like it would do for the rest of us. But this story specifically centers on 17 year old no, which is spelled N O e, but is pronounced like no, like knowledge or no, like yes and no, no crow. And the summer he spends with Mr. Christie, who ambles into town right as the rain stops and the advent of electricity is announced from the parish pulpit, no less. Three small but momentous occurrences at a Mr. Christie the rain, the electricity. This novel spends the rest of its 400 pages unwinding what they mean. No teams up with Kristi and visits the people of Faja, introducing them to the idea of electricity. This book is partially coming of age in that no is experiencing some of his own firsts. And it's also a Retrospective on a life well lived, as well as its mistakes. Each person in this community is someone to fall utterly in love with. Each moment of sunshine is one to explore with both eyes open. The connections and traditions in this small Irish parish are enough to make you sigh with longing. This is a beautiful book about nothing. Of course it's about something. But it's not a grandiose page turning plot. Instead, it's tender and funny and endearing and kind. It's luminous electricity. Right. And kaleidoscopic. There's something new everywhere you look. Our 17 year old main character is narrating from his own old age. He's 78. 70. So not an octogenarian, but very close. Right?
- [34:46]
B
But that's a really important part of it, right?
- [34:49]
A
It is important.
- [34:50]
B
Like, are we in the head of a 17 year old? Are we in the head of a.
- [34:54]
A
17 year old boy?
- [34:55]
B
Yeah.
- [34:55]
A
Good lord. Yeah. So we're not wrapped up in the minds and actions of a child slash young adult. Instead, we're reflecting on a pivotal summer of change for himself and his community. If I could turn this book into a blanket, I would wrap myself in it when I needed comfort. Instead, I'll have to settle for moving it from my ears to my keeper shelf and staring at it with affection and touching its spine every time I walk by. This book was exceptional and I knew nothing and Heather just mentioned it in passing. It will also be on my top 10 books of the year. I loved it with my whole heart. And that is so weird for current Katie to say about this, but it captured me so beautifully. This book is called this is Happiness by Niall Williams.
- [35:46]
B
Yeah, this is one that I heard about years ago on the Diving in podcast, the Australian podcast.
- [35:53]
A
Okay.
- [35:54]
B
Which they don't do anymore, which is such a bummer because, man, I loved that podcast. They like, absolutely loved it. And it has 4.2 on Goodreads, over 25,000 ratings. So this is one that I can totally see being one that would lead me to the question is this one that you would say would lend itself to a deep read?
- [36:18]
A
It probably would, right? It's had a bit of a resurgence this past year. Ish. Because he had a sequel come out called Time of the Child. And that one has been even buzzier, I would say, than this one was in 2019 when it came. I've been told you don't have to read them in order that you can pick up either one first. But. Oh, this one is just so. It's just so lovely.
- [36:44]
B
I love it. Do you Think it'll be a top 10 of the year.
- [36:46]
A
I do that. And the one I talked about two weeks ago with Roxanna, which were both this, like, bookish serendipity. That one was called take what you can carry by Gian Sardar. Both of them, you know, just, like, dropped in my lap, walked away. No, nothing. Absolutely exceptional. Phenomenal.
- [37:03]
B
I love that. I love that so much. When you find a book that you're like, why aren't we all reading this?
- [37:08]
A
What is happening right now? Yeah, exactly. All right, but let's do talk about reading deeply because, yes, I could see myself sitting back down with the paper, one of this one, and getting into the minutiae of, like, how he made this community sing off the page for me.
- [37:23]
B
Right, exactly. And it kind of begs the question, like this question of why read deeply?
- [37:29]
A
Right.
- [37:29]
B
Like, why would we want to consider doing that? I wanted to talk about this because we had a listener reach out, Nikki, who said, I would love to hear you talk more about reading deeper. Especially when Meredith refers to doing a deeper read on a journey to Three Pines with her iPad. I need all the details, like, what do you highlight? What color coding do you use? Does deeper reading mean slower? How do you do a deep read? Why does the iPad make it easier versus, say, a Kindle? Is a deep read different than annotating just a book nerd here with lots of questions. And I think those are all really, really good questions. And obviously every reader would have slightly different answers to these. I will just tell you that for me, when I think about a deep read, for me, it does involve annotating. Okay, it could be annotating a print book. So physically annotating with flags, with highlighters, with pens, with writing in the, you know, marginalia, making notes in the front of the book as I go. These are all different ways that you can annotate. And then of course, I've been doing my journey to Three Pines work using my iPad, which has really, really helped me in reading deeply and preparing for that show. But in doing that, because when we do the show, we have very specific beats that we want to hit, right? We want to read the book so that we can talk about certain things in the book. It's not just a free ranging conversation around the Louise Penny series. It's really specific. So I need to prepare so that I'm ready to talk about some of those categories that we've set up for the show. But in doing that, I have found that it has increased my not only skill and kind of strategies that I use for deep reading. But it also has really helped me understand why certain books really lend themselves to that, what I get out of it, and why I'm doing it more often than ever before. But Katie, what's your experience with this concept of deep reads or even annotating?
- [39:40]
A
That's a great question, Meredith, because I don't read, really do this at all. And I aspire to be able to do it. I love the idea of a color coded highlights and color coded flags and choosing at the beginning of the book. These are major plot points are blue and character development is pink and green is for, I don't know, setting maybe. I don't know what else you would annotate. And I also love picking up a book that somebody else has read deeply and getting to see see their notes, comments, reactions. I have done that where I wrote in the margins and then passed a book along to somebody else and then they gave it back to me when they were done so we could see what that experience was like for both of us. I'm trying to remember. There was one we passed around the bookish friends group that was like that. I think it was one of the Brigid Kemmerer books. Not a Curse. So dark and lonely.
- [40:35]
B
Yeah, maybe in that series.
- [40:37]
A
In that series where we made notes in the margins. I love that type of reading, but I don't make time for it very often. Even when I'm reading in paper, even when I'm reading slowly, which I always do. Again for popcorn in the pages, which is my own deep reading, comparative literature versus film side podcast side project. I never take the time to do exactly that. I'll make mental notes. Sometimes I'll write down, you know, this character is important for this reason or this is related to this other character. And that way I'll make just a little physical note. But I don't annotate in this way. But I aspire to and I love it.
- [41:17]
B
Yeah, I find that very interesting. So the difference for you between deep reading the book that that popcorn in the pages is related to versus preparing for the show because clearly you do prepare for the show.
- [41:31]
A
Yes.
- [41:31]
B
I just would have thought that the twain would meet between those two things. But they don't for you.
- [41:37]
A
They don't really. And I don't know if that's because, I mean, I wait until we're pretty close to A watching the movie and B, recording the show in order to read the book for popcorn. So it's still very fresh for me as opposed to current Reads on the big show. Those could be two months old, three months old. And I'm more about the main plot and the vibes and what this experience was like for me overall. Whereas popcorn books are very closely interlinked and I just had it reinforced by the movie watching experience that goes along with that book. So I've got those comparisons and contrasts in my head already when I sit down to prepare for the show, which I usually do the day after I've watched the movie. So all of it is very fresh. I finish the book, I watch the movie, I prepare for the show. All right, In a row, it's all in a stew together. Okay. And so that's probably why if I was like, well, today I'm going to read that and then next month we'll watch the movie and then a month later we'll record the show about it so I have time to let them mull. I would need to take better notes is what that would come down to.
- [42:43]
B
Sure, absolutely. Well, I really do find that and kind of riffing on a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago. When I do deep read a book, I remember it in a completely different way than books that I just read in a normal way. And that's not a better or worse. That just is true. That for me, annotating deep reading, taking notes, reading for not just plot or like, what's going to happen next, but reading for things like theme, you know, reading for a discussion where I'm going to be talking with Roxanna about the book itself and how it fits within the rest of the series and all of those things. It does mean slower for me. No question. It takes me a good two times longer to read a book, if not more. Roxanna and I deep read babble together and we read that book for months. We were into it the entire time was just that. When you're highlighting quotes that really speak to you, for example, which is a big thing that I like to do with my deep reading, we usually want to make a note about why that spoke to me, what idea did it bring up for me, what feeling did it? What do I want to say to Roxanna about that particular thing? So it does mean slower. We know that there's a hand brain connection when you take things in and you work with them with your hands. That's why when you take notes during a lecture, you will remember much more, not just from the rereading of the notes, but just from the very act of doing it. You'll remember that book Better. So if one of the things you want in your reading is to go slower, but go deeper and have it settle into your DNA, more deep reading like this can be a way to get that in your reading experience. Just because I want to be sure that I answer the question that Nikki asked. So on my iPad, I have found that it's really working well for me. I like to read a lot on my iPad, but it works well for this deep reading because it has the color coding that Kindle does not have. And that really is the single biggest game changer for me. When I'm doing the prep for this show, because there's three colors available, I use all three of them. I use blue for finding my superlatives. So as a part of what we do in Journey to Three Pines is we have different superlatives for every book. Like, what was your favorite food scene? Well, who was your least favorite character in the book? Who was your MVP of the book? What was the best quote? We have things that we find for each book. So blue is my. These are contenders for my superlatives in that category. So I want to grab those as I'm reading, because there's no way that if even the moment I close the COVID on a book, if you said, what was your favorite food scene from that book? I am not going to be able to remember. Oh, it was, like, about a third of the way in when they were eating turkey sandwiches.
- [45:33]
A
Right.
- [45:33]
B
I'm just not coded for that kind of detail at this point in my life. I want to grab it there. So blue. Pink is for notes on themes. That is a big thing that we talk about with the Journey to Three Pines. Pink is anything that, as I find the themes, and then usually about halfway through, I've really found the themes that I want to talk about. And then I will go deeper in. Kind of like when you were writing papers for college. Right. Or writing papers for high school. You want to find quotes that support this theme. Pink is for that. And then orange I use as I kind of struggled with this and figuring out how I wanted to do it. But now I do this for every book that I deeply read. Orange is just when something comes up for me. So orange will always have a note next to it. So I will make a note along with my highlighting on my iPad. And, of course, you can also do all of these same things if you're doing it with your hands in a print book. But orange will always have a note because there's something specific about it that I wanted to Mention on the show to Roxanna that I wanted to be like this made me think about, you know, when Peter Morrow in the fourth book did, da da da da Orange is a catch all. But it's not just, you know, we all know that anything that's marked as miscellaneous. Miscellaneous is meaningless. We know this to be true. It's not miscellaneous, but it has a very particular usage. But it can be a lot of different things within that particular usage. So that's how I do my color coding. When I'm done with the book, then I have color coded highlighted quotes from the book and I also have a bunch of notes that I've made. I then use the functionality to download all of that into a document, into a Google sheet. I have my template for the show alongside those notes and I just go back and forth fleshing out my show. We don't call it a script because obviously it's not scripted, but like my show prep document. And I will go back and forth between those two documents until I've included everything that I want to include. So that's how I deeply read the Louise Penny books for A Journey to Three Pines. And that then has become the structure that I use to deeply read other books. Which brings me back to Katie. When you read this is happiness that feels to me like a book that I kind of immediately mark in my mind as a book that might lend itself to a deep read, given the things that I've said about how I do deep reads. What do you think about that now?
- [48:02]
A
Yes, I absolutely agree. And actually, when you brought up Babel, that's the last book that I sat down with a pen and highlighted and made notes in the margins and underlined things that really struck me and made broken hearts and sad faces and surprised faces. Like drawing in the margins.
- [48:21]
B
Light bulbs is a big one for me.
- [48:23]
A
It took me forever to read Babel, even though I wanted to read all of it in a single sitting, but I wanted to also be in it for such a long time that I had to hold both of those things in tension. And it was worth it to me to take the time to do it. So now I actually have two copies of it on my shelf because one is really pretty with sprayed edges, but the other one has my experience of it in it. So I can never get rid of it because that book holds me in it as well.
- [48:51]
B
Yeah, right. And that is the reason to me, if someone says, but why would I want to deep read that? You just said it. If you want to immerse yourself in a book and to have it hold you in it. Deep reading is the best way I have found to do it.
- [49:10]
A
Yes.
- [49:11]
B
There are other ways. You know, that it can be done. One thing that Roxanna does that I definitely have experimented with is she writes quotes in her commonplace notebook. So you don't have to necessarily go through and annotate the entire book. But when you find a quote that is especially interesting to you, for whatever reason, you may decide that you want to just copy that quote down into your commonplace notebook, cite it, you know, as the. This is the book, and this is why it was interesting to me. And that's another way that you can kind of grab something from that book and have it become even more meaningful to you, have it last longer than just your experience. The other thing that a lot of people do when they'll talk about deep reading, a lot of people will define that as when they're doing a tandem read. So they're maybe reading while they're also listening. They may have the print book in front of them or the Kindle in front of them while they're listening to it. And that two in one can create a deeper experience, too, kind of slows us down. It uses different pathways.
- [50:16]
A
It's more immersive.
- [50:17]
B
It's more immersive. So those are all some ways, I mean, there. I'm sure many more. But there's a lot to be said for allowing yourself the time to deep read.
- [50:27]
A
Yeah.
- [50:28]
B
And having on your shelf, on your keeper shelf, a book that has like, my copy of 10,000 Doors of January is. It's a beautiful book to begin with. And then I used these gorgeous bronze metal flags.
- [50:42]
A
The book darts.
- [50:43]
B
Yeah, book darts. So now when I look at that book, not only does it look really pretty, but it has all of those places that I can immediately just flip to, to just very quickly immerse myself again into the experience. Not unlike the way that a serial killer keeps, like, trophies. I can just go to my shelf and flip to my. What I call metal book flags. What you apparently call book dark, which.
- [51:11]
A
Is what they're called.
- [51:12]
B
Which is what they're called. I can just go to it and immediately be like, oh, remember this moment of reading this book? And I can kind of experience it. Again, not unlike a serial killer.
- [51:22]
A
Well, yes, if you kept the IDs or the library cards of all the places you vanquished, it would be the same. Right. But I do have a number of books. One of them is from an author that we were just talking. Right. Before we started recording this episode off mic about how now there's some complex feelings, but his book is just chock full of book darts for me. And now I have to say, like, okay, well, how do I. What kind of feels do I have about this book? Knowing some different things about the person who wrote it and kind of take some of those into account. But it doesn't change the fact that that book profoundly impacted me. And I filled it with book darts because I loved the writing.
- [52:02]
B
You had that experience and I loved.
- [52:04]
A
The experience of reading it. So they're all still in there. What do I do with that? Now A piece of me is in that book. And also there's a different feel about that book, so.
- [52:15]
B
Right, right. It can be complicated. This is what we're talking about. When you read deeply, you are making yourself more vulnerable because you are giving yourself more to the book. You're also taking more from the book.
- [52:30]
A
Yeah. It becomes like a symbiotic relationship. Yeah.
- [52:34]
B
Well, I want to make like a lust versus in love comparison there.
- [52:37]
A
Ooh.
- [52:38]
B
Where it's like when you read deeply, you're doing more than just meeting a guy at the bar and going home with him.
- [52:43]
A
Right. Because we have talked about One Night Stand books and you do not annotate a One Night Stand book.
- [52:47]
B
No, but this is like the polar opposite of the One Night Stand book. This is a book that you're saying, like, I'm going to open myself up to you really vulnerably because I think you're worth this investment of my time and my energy and my thoughts and all of this. And so the upside of that is it stays with you. The downside of that is you stay with it. That book or that author or whatever can hurt you.
- [53:11]
A
It can break your heart. Yeah. Yeah.
- [53:13]
B
So I would just say that in the same way that love is always worth it, that it is worth it to at least consider listener if you. This isn't something that you've ever done. Or maybe because also one point I want to make is that I now annotate and read deeply in a way that is in some ways similar to what I did when I was an English major in college. But in some ways it's really, really different because I enjoy it more. I do it better. I'm just more skilled in what I personally want to take out of a book or what hits me personally. I think when I was in college, I was very much about am I finding what my professor wants a of sense to find.
- [53:54]
A
Is it right?
- [53:54]
B
Is it Right. So if your only experience of doing this kind of interacting with books was in a college setting and it kind of set you off of it, it may be really different for you. Now, I just want to say one more thing, Katie, about annotating. Because I get asked this question a lot. Do I annotate mysteries? That's a question that I get all the time. And the answer to that is not all the time, but sometimes yes. There are some books that I really, really. I mean, partly it's Mood, and partly it's the book where I really want to figure it out. Yeah, I've done this with Agatha Christie. I think Agatha Christie mysteries are really great for annotation because it can very much help you. Like, I will circle things that I think are clues. I will highlight, you know, people when I think, like, is this a suspect? Like, is this the killer? Those are the things that I'm annotating. Clues. And is this the killer? When I annotate a mystery, that's the answer to that question.
- [54:54]
A
Nice. Okay, well, my other question then is obviously, you have also your trophy shelf of the Three Pines books, right? Like, we've seen them in your library. When you share your library on Instagram, do your notes from your iPad ever make it into the paper book? Or are those pristine, beautiful trophies? Like, because that's a different thing, too, right?
- [55:17]
B
Yeah, that's a mixed bag because I. I switched to this new way of annotating about halfway through what we've done with the Journey to Three Pines. And we're going into the ninth book. So some of my Louis pennies, I have multiple copies of. I have three copies of Still Life, Right. Which is the first book in the series. So where I've done annotating, I've bought, like, a new paperback to annotate. And I have kept my original hardback or the original paperback. Cause some of them have different covers because I've had them for so long. Some of them just have a different cover. And so when I annotate it, I will buy a second copy, but they all sit side by side on the shelf.
- [55:56]
A
I also have an annotated version of Still Life because we did a buddy read of that one, I don't know, in 2020, maybe 2021. Yeah. Quite some time ago. I know I lived in Santa Fe, but. So I have an annotated copy of the paperback of Still Life from that discussion, because I wanted to read it slowly and absorb it in a different way. And I liked it far more when I read it the second time with an eye toward discussing it than I did the first time when I thought it was boring. But we don't tell Meredith that, right?
- [56:28]
B
Well, I mean, no, it's a perfectly fine. Lots of people find the Three Pine series boring and that is completely acceptable way to feel about it. For sure. If you listen to A Journey to Three Pines, you hear Roxanna and I say, like, man, there's a part of this book that was just dead boring. So I get it. And this. Katie, you've also made a great argument for book clubs because done really well in its best version, which again, I do see the reason that people have book clubs. There's a really good reason to choose a book, to read it in community and to read it deeply in preparation for talking about it in community. Done right. I think book club can be really, really great and help you immerse yourself in a book in a completely different way than you would if you just read it independently, you know. But again, listener, you can choose the pieces of this that are interesting to you. If you feel yourself being. If you're like, I just freaking love highlighters and I want a reason to use them. Well, we've just given you several reasons to use highlighters.
- [57:32]
A
Yes.
- [57:33]
B
Or if you're like, I love to read in community, you could annotate a book and pass it around. Katie, that community element is what appeals to you about that. Or the prep for book club or a buddy read. Or if you're a reader who's just like, I'm a very independent reader, but I love the idea of going really deeply with a book. Even just one on one with the book and the author. This is a way you can do that. So hopefully this discussion has pinged on some part of what might interest you, listener, that you could go a little deeper on.
- [58:03]
A
Yeah, I love that. Excellent. Let's scooch over to the fountain, wrap this up and make some wishes. What are you wishing for?
- [58:12]
B
My wish is something that. And I can't even tell you how much I wish this. One of the things that I do, Katie, in my normal day to day life, and I think you know this about me, I take screenshots of different things all day long and email them to myself to remember they can be work related things. It can be something from a text when someone's like, oh, can you remind me what? And I'm like, okay, I'm no.
- [58:33]
A
But somebody could.
- [58:34]
B
I'm not. I can't stop and do that right now. But I don't Want to forget to do it.
- [58:37]
A
Yeah.
- [58:38]
B
So I will email that to myself. But what I do primarily is I will take screenshots of books that I've run into in some way in my travels on my phone. And I want to email it to myself so that I can see if my library has it, see if I can get on Libby, see if whatever, maybe I want to order it or whatever. And also I want to keep those screenshots because they help me remember where I heard about a book. Here's what my wish is. My wish is that my iPhone would make this way easier than it is right now to do. Because right now it's about four clicks before I can be done. And I wish that I could just. You take a screenshot and then you hit the like, up arrow button, the share button, right? Like, I want to do something with this. And when I go to that next screen, I wish that there was just a button that I could program that when I hit that, it would just send it to the email that I have said. This is the email I want that to send it to. I don't want to have to tell it the email over and over again. I just want it to know when I hit this particular button, send that to my email. That's what I want. That's my wish.
- [59:48]
A
This doesn't seem hard.
- [59:50]
B
And if someone knows how to make that happen on that screen, like, I'm not talking about, I don't know how to capture things. That's not my problem.
- [59:58]
A
Right.
- [59:58]
B
I want this very particular thing from that share button screen from a screenshot. I want to click one button and not have to do anything else. It's just going to send the email.
- [60:10]
A
Yeah, that's what I want.
- [60:11]
B
It feels like Apple should give me the ability to do that. I understand that there might be other things that I might want to do as a user. I don't want to only be able to do that one thing, but that one thing would be incredibly useful to me. And I run into this problem, no joke, literally 25 times a day.
- [60:30]
A
Right. And it like. But this is achievable in other platforms. For those of us who are PC users, when you plug in a USB drive, right. You can say, when I do that, I always want it to open the folder to view the files or start playing the music that's on it or whatever. Right. Like, it has these, like, default actions where you can say, mostly I just want to have this little thing pop up and it says, you said you wanted to open the folder to view the files. Is that what you want to do now that you've done this and you just click yes, and it opens up and you start doing the thing with it. Right. Why isn't that a thing on an iPhone where it's like, mostly what. Here's what you do with it. It doesn't even have to be. You said it. It could be. When you take pictures of books, usually you email them to this place. Do you want to do that? And that's the first dialogue box.
- [61:18]
B
And it used to have something like that. For a while, it would have, like, my email. I could see that I could send an email, and I could click that. It would preload my email, and then I could either add, like, maybe I want to send myself a note, put a note in that email or something, but just, like, within two clicks, I could do that. And then they took that away, which was extremely frustrating to me. So that's my wish. Ping, splash.
- [61:41]
A
Okay. I do feel like this is doable, and it might just be an Apple problem, because, like, when I copy my wordle, my phone is like, so you want to send this to your sister? And I'm like, yep, sure do. And I just click her face, and it knows that that's where I want to put it.
- [61:55]
B
Let me tell you, I am positive that this is technologically possible.
- [61:58]
A
Yes.
- [61:59]
B
We can go to the moon. I'm positive that we could figure this out.
- [62:02]
A
Put a man on the moon. Meredith.
- [62:05]
B
I'm just saying that I would like it if Apple would make it easier for me.
- [62:08]
A
Correct? Yeah.
- [62:09]
B
Okay, Now I'm an Apple girl, right? Start to finish, top to bottom, tied in the wool. Absolutely. So I am not. I mean, Apple makes a lot of things extraordinarily easy, so don't get me wrong. But this particular thing, like, Tim, throw your girl a bone.
- [62:26]
A
Yes. Let's do that. Okay. My wish is very achievable. I wish that we would all come up with our list of slam dunks. So this comes from one of our forever bookish besties, Sarah Kilpatrick. She shared that she was approached for a list of book recommendations from a person who just got back into reading, rather than just rattling off some titles. Hey, try a curse. So Dark and Lonely in Still Life. Right? She made a cute image in Canva, printed it off, and shared it with this person the next time she saw her. It's beautifully designed. This cute little graphic. I love it so much. And she calls them her slam dunk wins for each genre that she reads in There's a romance. Pick a thriller, a mystery, something witchy, et cetera. As I read through her list, I was reminded of my sister also letting me know that she has recently joined a book club and they've decided to use the Currently reading list of books we'd like to press into your hands. Oh, great. As a baseline for choosing their next book club books. I think for all of us. This is my idea, this is my wish. We should come up with a list of five to ten books that we think are slam dunks and carry them around like business cards or bookmarks. Right. It's just a little like, oh, yeah, of course. I have some recs for you. And it's a little printed thing that you can hand over to somebody.
- [63:43]
B
You want it to be actually in print.
- [63:45]
A
Yes.
- [63:46]
B
So not even just like a photo that you could just send.
- [63:50]
A
No, that would also be cute. But I love the idea of being like, put this in your wallet and next time you're at the bookstore, you can pull it out. Right. Sarah also kindly included a recommendation for Currently Reading as a place to get additional book recs. Right. If somebody who's just getting back into reading and she's like, here's 10 surefire wins. And also you can stack your TBR if you listen to Currently Reading every week. Girl, you gold star to Sarah. We love her.
- [64:16]
B
Yeah, we love her.
- [64:17]
A
This would also help with the perennial bookworm problem, which is someone finds out you're a reader and they say, what do you recommend for me? And then you forget every book you've ever read. Yeah, we're like, I don't know. I've read a lot of books. I'm sure you'd like some of them. None of them are in my head right now. Why not just have a set of seven ready to recommend right there in your pocket? Or that little secret pocket in your purse where you just pull it out and be like, here's some ideas. Ding. I love it.
- [64:43]
B
This is a great idea. And Sarah is wonderful. I don't know her personally, but I would imagine she's an enneagram too, because she's a very two thing to do. I just. I think it's so thoughtful. And the graphic she created is really beautiful. And I love this idea. It's like a reader ID card.
- [65:01]
A
Yes. Right. Yes. Right.
- [65:05]
B
Or like a reader business card.
- [65:07]
A
Right. That's why I was like, business card size would be fun because then it would be like, here's my cred. Right. Like my.
- [65:13]
B
Here's my cred. But Then you could have a different one that's like, you know, Meredith Schwartz. I'm like a mood reader who hates heist books but loves serial killer book. Like, and then it like a reader mixer. You could, like, give your card out and then wait to see who contacts you.
- [65:30]
A
Find your book twins. It's like speed dating for readers.
- [65:33]
B
There needs to be hinge for readers.
- [65:35]
A
There should be hinge for readers. Okay, wait. I have one more story to tell you about Sarah, which is still bookish. She and I read together the Five Senses by Gretchen Rubin. And when we finished, she sent me a box, and it had gifts for each of my five senses in it. So there was tea for taste. There was a little squishy octopus that was soft and that was for touch. And there were like all these adorable little things in there. And she was like, I loved reading this book with you. She's such a too. She's so lovely. She's so darling. But she thought through a sensory gift for each of the five senses to send to me at the end of this book experience. Wow. I mean, Sarah is just above and beyond phenomenal.
- [66:20]
B
Get you a friend like Sarah.
- [66:22]
A
Get you a Sarah, guys. She's so great.
- [66:25]
B
For sure. That is wonderful. All right, well, that is it for this week. As a reminder, here's where you can connect with us. You can find me, I'm Meredith, Meredith Monday Schwartz on Instagram and you can.
- [66:36]
A
Find me Katie at Notes on Bookmarks on Instagram. Our show is produced and edited every week by Megan Puttivong Evans and Chrissy. And you can find her on Instagram at most of megansreads and Chrissy on Instagram as well.
- [66:49]
B
Full show notes with the title of every book we mentioned in the episode and timestamps so you can zoom right to where we talked about. It can be found in our show notes and on our website@currentlyreading podcast.com youm.
- [67:00]
A
Can also follow the show @currentlyreading podcast on Instagram or email us your book cover screenshots@currentlyreading podcastmail.com yeah.
- [67:10]
B
Or your reader ID, your reader cred list.
- [67:13]
A
Yes. Your slam dunks.
- [67:14]
B
Your slam dunks. I love it. If you really want to help us, you can join us on Patreon. You can become a bookish friend. You get a ton of content, you get a ton of community, and you keep this show commercial free. You can also shout us out on social media and you can do one more thing.
- [67:35]
A
Rate and review us.
- [67:36]
B
You can rate and review us on Apple podcasts. That's really helpful, especially if your review is really, really good. All of those things help us to find our perfect audience.
- [67:44]
A
Yes, Bookish friends are the best friends. Thank you for helping us grow and get closer to our goals.
- [67:49]
B
All right, until next week. May your coffee be hot and your.
- [67:52]
A
Book, the unput downable.
- [67:54]
B
Happy reading, Katie.
- [67:55]
A
Happy reading Merit.