Season 8, Episode 29: A Website Refresh + Curating A Bookstagram

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. 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 readerly deep dive, and a little something bookish before we go. I'm Meredith Monday-Schwartz. I'm a mom and a Mimi and a full-time CEO living in Austin, Texas, and even book podcasters get slumpy. And I'm Katie Cobb, a homeschooling mom of four living in Arizona, and our website is a treasure trove of goodness. This is episode number 29 of season eight, and we are so glad you're here. Katie, did you notice when I came in just at that intro that for a split second, I completely forgot what podcast I was supposed to be opening up? And that tells me I have been recording too many things. It's a thing, especially when, I mean, it happens to me too, even though almost all the things I record are for currently reading. If I'm doing three or four episodes in a single weekend, I'm like, who are you? What are we doing here? Right. That split second, I was like, oh, wait, no, it's a big show and here we go. We got this. We got it. We got it. All right. We will let you know that our deep dive today is going to be on how to find your book twin on Instagram. We can't guarantee you're going to be able to do it, but I think we can steer you in the right direction. All right. But before we get to that, Katie, let's talk about our bookish moments of the week. What have you got? All right, Meredith. As you know, we have been spiffing up some pieces of our website And that means I've spent quite a bit of time with the books we want to press into your hands section of the site over the past, let's say, two weeks. Links needed to be updated and redirected. But I essentially went through every single title for five years worth of episodes when we used to end every episode with a book we wanted to press into y'all's hands. These are so good. Like, in the moment, we were like, this is really good. This is a lot of fun. I like doing this. And we started getting overwhelmed and a little burnt out on it. And we weren't sure how to keep it going. But going back and looking at it years later with fresh eyes, it's good. It is so good. There's so much good stuff there. I've read more than half of them, of course, because half come from me directly. And I've got a good amount under my belt of the ones that Meredith pressed into our hands because of the overlap that we have in our reading lives. But it also blew up my TBR again. in the best way. In the same way that sometimes you hear about a book two years later and you're like, why haven't I read that yet? I was interested in the time, but why didn't I pick it up then? So along with that list is our favorite books for babies and kids, which we regularly get asked about in email or in messages. So both of those will get linked in show notes. It's just a really delightful selection of titles. And I think you should all go check it out, especially because I just did so much work to make sure that it's all where it's supposed to go. So yeah. Yeah. We are going to be adding some more pages to our website that I think will be really useful. We also, I think, are going to do kind of a recurring thing on social media where we highlight one of those books that we've pressed in the past. So we'll be seeing more of that. We just got an email today, Katie, I'm sure that you saw it from a fantastic listener who mentioned Castle of Water, which I think we pressed in our very first episode, if I remember. I think that might have been episode one. Within the first three. Within the first three, yeah. And that by Dane Hucklebridge. I press that book into people's hands in my real life all the time, and it's so under the radar. Yes, it's so good. Gosh, that book is so good. Yeah, Castle of Water. Don't sleep on that one at all. All right. My bookish moment of the week is, not surprisingly, that I am a little bit slumpy. And I am slumpy in a way that not only have I not been reading as much, because I've been doing a lot, my brain has been in a very work mode. Like I've been firing on a lot of cylinders there. And so this isn't the kind of slump that I've had before, which is like, I just can't focus on anything. because I have that happen to me. This is more, I can focus, but I'm really wanting to focus on work-related things. I'm doing a lot of things for Here Comes the Guide, doing a lot of things for Currently Reading. And so that's where a lot of my brain power has been going. So I just have been more likely to stay up late in front of my computer instead of reading. My number of books, my cushion number is getting too small. This isn't good for either of us. Exactly. also getting small. Yeah, right. So that is happening. But also, I am really finding myself drawn toward these super plot heavy books. I'm reading a lot in mystery and thriller, which of course has always been my go to genre. But I try to really mix it up. Especially in the last few years, I've tried very hard to every episode have multiple genres that I'm bringing, not just always, but we're getting into a fraught situation where I have just read a lot of these kinds of books. So, you know, we bring what we read, we read the seasons of our lives, we let the seasons unfold as they're going to, but it, you know, so I get slumpy. But the other thing is, I also have been liking a lot of TV. So I want to mention, this is a little bit book related, but I just love it so much. It's the Night of the Seven Kingdoms. Now, this is a spinoff of Game of Thrones. So it's set in that world, but I think like a long time ahead of where the events of the end of Game of Thrones, but set in Westeros. But it just couldn't be any more different in tone. Like it's incredibly well written. Every episode's like a hot 35 minutes. So it's short. It's about Sir Duncan the Tall and his squire, Egg, who's a boy of maybe about 11. And there, Sir Duncan is such a good, he's like a young guy. He's just a fledgling, like he's really trying to make his name as a knight. And he's a hedge knight, which basically means he's a knight who's, he just like, he's, he just doesn't have a lot of the things. He certainly isn't from a house of great repute. And he's sort of trying to like break into the tournaments and like all of this. And then Egg, he happens upon Egg and they join up. I am waiting for these episodes to come out as much as I'm waiting for The Pit to come out. Like every time it goes live, we press play like at 9.01 on Sunday nights. Oh my gosh, yeah. Like the second it goes live. Is this book bookish? I mean, yes, in the Game of Thrones books, and apparently there is a novella that this is based on, but I'm really honestly not, I'm not trying to shoehorn that. I'm really just trying to say that I've been in a little bit more of a TV mood. And don't get me wrong, I've got lots of great books to talk about today, but sometimes this happens. I just want to normalize that this happens to every single one of us. Well, we all have so much time in the day, right? If we're gonna spend some time with things we also love which of course you have also gotten me into the pit so i am like on thursdays like children can you go away which is interesting because you don't watch a lot of tv i don't at all and then guess what now heated rivalry too because rebecca was like let's talk about this on love and chili peppers oh gosh now i'm obsessed with heated rivalry guess what i've also read more books in february than january so it's working like something's working it's fine it ebbs and flows there's it we just have to let it ebb and flow we can't get like locked up into like oh my gosh it should be another way i'm gonna get back into literary fiction that's gonna come back to me yeah i'm gonna get back into sci-fi that you know those things are always gonna happen we just need to relax take a deep breath deep breath everybody do it all right well let's get into talking about some of our current reads because although I haven't been reading like as much as normal, I have been reading. So Katie, what's your first book? My first one is called The Secret Library by Kecla Magoon. This is a middle grade novel and it was a finalist for the National Book Award, which until I read that today, A, I didn't know. And B, I didn't know that National Book Awards could be awarded to middle grade novels. I didn't know that was a subsection. So we're all learning something new right now. No, I'm sure plenty of you knew that, but that was exciting for me. However, National Book Award does not usually lead me to pick something up. So if you don't care about that, pretend I didn't say it. Instead, this was one of many books I grabbed on our epic cross-country road trip last summer. Here's the setup. Dali is our main character, which is short for Dalia, which I love. She is 11 years old, 11 and a half, if you please. This matters to my kids. We celebrate half birthdays in our house. So we get a little small treat and we mark you on the ruler. So they're very aware of that half year mark. You need to know when the half birthday is. She's almost 11 and three quarters. It's important. She is being raised by a single mom who is driven and detailed oriented and determined and holds Dali to the same very high standards. It's part of living up to her family legacy, which built, you know, the money that they live on. And it's, it's important to her, something mom has been trying and striving for her whole life. Even when Dally asks to join an after-school program because it might improve her many years down the road applications for schools, her mom is hesitant to let her have any leeway or freedom in the way she spends her time. But when Dally finds an envelope addressed to her in her mother's purse and discovers it was left for her by her late and beloved grandfather, she opens it despite her mother controlling every other part of her life, and she finds a map. That map takes her to a secret vault where she finds a library. No. Yes, this is not a regular library. Rather than your standard books and stories and games and puzzles and videos and more, which we already love libraries so much, but this one's special. It's full of secrets. Each book opens up to a very specific moment in time where the reader of the book, the person who opened it, gets to dive into that moment and experience it as part of the story. and therefore has the secret revealed to him or her. Through the secret library, which is both a secret and full of secrets, Dally starts to dive into her family's history, the good parts and the not so good parts. She learns more about her parents, her beloved grandfather, what the future might hold for her now that she understands his past, her mom's past, and her own past a little better. This book was captivating me once I got my feet under me, right? It feels a little slow to get going, especially because it's a middle grade novel. And those tend to be like, boom, we're starting a story. Let's go, right? This one was a little bit more like, hi, I want you to meet Dali. Let's introduce ourselves to this little town we're living in. It could have been my personal capacity at the time. Like, am I bored? Maybe I'm bored. No, I'm going to stick with it. Let's see what happens. But it's something to note. Once I was into the library and sifting through Secrets with Dali, I was reminded of other books I've loved, like The Book Wanderers by Anna page, mixed with Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Safon, or even a little bit of The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Like a lot of middle grade, this one pulls on various pieces of the human experience, like racism, gender and sexuality issues, and how our past and our ancestors shape and inform our present and our future. It's really wonderfully crafted. It's filled with great characters within the real world and the world of secrets, and it has a villain that you might not expect. There are some unanswered questions for this reader by the end of the book, but I don't think a middle grader would really care. I think my kids would love this book beginning to end. No problem. No questions asked. It did, as an adult, annoy me a little bit. And again, with that slower start. So I didn't give it five stars, but I did really enjoy it all the way through. This was The Secret Library by Kecla Magoon. Excellent. Oh, I love the idea of this. It sounds so good. The map, the library, the secrets. Oh, it's so good. All right. My first book is one that is really, really different for me. And this is one that really has stood out for me because it is not my normal genre. It's not something I would normally choose even within a genre outside of my comfort zone. And it's going to stick with me for that reason. This is Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Deniman. I had to ask you, Katie, if you had read it because it's been so popular. I've seen it so many places all of the sudden. It's kind of one of those books that I feel like I had no idea about it. I had no idea that it was this kind of juggernaut. And then it was everywhere for me. So I got it from the library because I just wanted to, I was like, I'm probably going to hate this. I'm just going to read the first page just to see what all the hullabaloo is about. Here's the setup. Our lead character is Carl, and he is having a really, really bad day when we first meet him. He's just found out that his girlfriend cheated on him. He is pet-sitting her show cat, Princess Donut, and that's bad enough. And then aliens show up and destroy every man-made structure on Earth, killing most of humanity in about two seconds. So anybody or thing, anything that is in any interior space is crushed into the earth, like immediately, like boom, gone. Okay. Okay. So imagine it's like the middle of the night. It's like one o'clock in the morning in Seattle when this happens. So obviously it's not the same everywhere on earth, but there, there's not a lot of people outside, right? At that time. All right, so the survivors, like just a minute or two after that happens, the survivors who are kind of like frozen in place are given a choice. They can, because it's wintertime, they can freeze to death or they can enter a massive underground dungeon that has been carved into our planet. What Carl doesn't realize until it's way too late is that this dungeon is not just a survival challenge given to him by the aliens. It's the set of an intergalactic reality TV show that's being broadcast to billions of alien viewers across the galaxy. So like very close comp would be Hunger Games mixed with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Okay. Yeah. Like this would be a very close comp with a lot of video game stuff kind of layered into that too. So Carl in Princess Donut, who becomes very quickly, not a spoiler, a talking cat crawler of her own. So she's her own participant in these games. They have to fight monsters. They have to like level up. And they also have to stay entertaining enough to their viewers to get sponsors so that they'll have the gear they need to survive. So some of those like Hunger Games elements. Oh, it's a little chain gang All-Stars-y too. There's that element of it too. But what it is, even with all of those elements kind of pulled together, it is definitely completely its own thing. All right. So I thought as I dipped into this for a variety of reasons that this was going to be kind of a book for gamers, right? Like people who love video games or maybe like Dungeons and Dragons that kind of thing But even though I am most definitely not that person I really was charmed by this book So like I said heard a bunch about it The Goodreads ratings are some of the highest Goodreads ratings I've ever seen for any book. It's like 4.5 with like hundreds of thousands of ratings. So it's like absolutely crazy. So like I said, I grabbed it from the library. I was going to read a page or two, got completely sucked into it. There is something so genuinely dear about our lead character, Carl, and also Princess Donut. I absolutely love her. I love the fact that she insists on being called Princess Donut, even though in the real world, she was kind of called Donut, but she's actually royalty. We quickly find out as soon as she's able to talk. The world that Matt Deniman has built here is so cinematic and also, like I said, really dear. So you're really invested in these characters super quickly. Now, I do need to make sure that I let you know what kind of reading experience this is so that it will find the right reader, but also the right reader at the right time. This book is so action forward, like kind of constantly action forward there's nearly always something happening there's a fight or a chase or some new horrifying challenge and for that reason it was working for me like i said that's been kind of the mode that i've been in but also i found that i needed to read this in the same way that i would watch an action movie when i was in the right mood and all at once get in get out. I don't think that if I had stayed, I think if I had like slow read this, I think it would have started to feel silly or redundant. It wouldn't have had its best impact, right? In and out, it was just the perfect way to do it for me. The tone here is really great. There are tons of gory fight scenes, like really gory fight scenes. In the first, I think, three paragraphs of the book, somebody gets decapitated. So this is gory. But also, like I said, surprisingly tender. There's these sweet moments that catch you off guard. And then I laughed out loud all the way through this book. It's genuinely funny. And it has no business than being as emotionally resonant as it is because it's both funny and gory. The relationship between Carl and Princess Donut is no question the heart of the whole series from what I've heard, and it is a series. And watching a regular guy, like a deeply regular guy, and a diva cat who's now a fully able to talk and much smarter than him cat navigate this apocalypse together is exactly as chaotic as it sounds, but it's also weirdly touching. So like I said, Hunger Games, Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. If that tone, that comp feels right to you, then I would suggest giving it a try. I do want to say, never before have so many people quickly said, why the heck are you reading this in print? You need to do this on audio. Apparently, now I tried it on audio. Is it Wil Wheaton? It feels like a Wil Wheaton book. No, I don't think that it is because Wil Wheaton is not my favorite, but he doesn't bother me. No, it's a guy named Jeff Hayes. And apparently his narration is legendary and the audio production adds a whole dimension to the experience. I have to say that to you because I tried it on audio and the timbre of Jeff Hayes' voice wasn't hitting my ear right. But I'm telling you dozens of people in my DMs after just one story that I did about this saying, oh, but you have to do this on audio. So I really wanted to put that out there. That's what a lot of people have said. Either way you do it, if this is at all interesting to you, I highly recommend you give it a try. because I'm so, it just makes me smile to even think about. This is Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Deniman. It is a series. This is the first one. I read the first one and didn't feel like I needed to continue it, but I felt fully satisfied. But if you love this world, you've got lots more. Yes. I love this. I have been smiling like a fool, partially because this is another book that I bought on our big road trip. I bought it for Micah because he's all the things that you're saying, right? He loves those stories. He's a gamer. One of the ways that it gets described sometimes is lit RPG, role play game, which is like a type of video game, right? Is there a style to the writing that feels like you are the character in a video game? Or is it more like standard prose? Let me say if that's what the author was going for, this reader wasn't picking up on that. Now, like I said, maybe that's what I was picking up on when I said it was very action forward. Like maybe that's actually exactly what you're talking about. Because there is this element of, okay, now this is happening, but we immediately have to turn our attention to this is happening. So maybe that is exactly what you're talking about. But it didn't feel forced to me or, and also I literally have no experience in those worlds. Dungeons and Dragons, video games, I have no experience with it at all, but I still really enjoyed the story and the action and all of that. Okay, so there's not like a life force left 95% read at the top of each page or something like something video gamey? No, but there are a lot of video game elements within the story, especially in the first little bit. but I actually really liked those elements because it was like, if you get this, then this skill will level up. And this kind of reminded me of that part of Jumanji where you're learning about the game. Or like Ready Player One. Yeah. Yeah, that kind of stuff. I read Ready Player One. I enjoyed this so much more. Okay. Like I just, this world is so, there's something so charming and tender and I want to use those words about it and I never would have used those words about Ready Player One. Right. Right. It's just a different book. It's not the same. it's not the same they're not trying to do the same thing so yeah definitely video game elements but i didn't find that they were boring at all i was interested in those elements okay yeah okay and then i have one question and if it's spoilery you can you can cut this or ignore me but everybody inside gets flattened inside a building right but carl and princess donut survive and princess donut as a show cat why is she outside so at the start right so in the very first paragraph we find that princess donut for reasons that we don't understand all of a sudden had jumped off the balcony of his apartment and into a tree so he literally like is in like his ex-girlfriend's pink crocs and a jacket over his boxers because he's it's like the middle of the night and he's gonna have to go get the show cat out of this tree so that he can go back to bed and that's when the whole thing happens. That's the first paragraph of the book. Because I was like, wait, what? How are they outside? It's a show cat. What would she do? She's not like a mouser, right? Yeah. No, exactly. Exactly. It was very lucky, if you want to call it that, that that's what happened. Good thing he prepared so well for his foray into the alien prison maze. Okay. My next one is not as exciting. It's nonfiction, which is why it gets the middle spot. but sadly I wasn't pleased with it. It's Six Feet Over by Mary Roach, which is very sad that I did not love this book. So in my slow but steady quest to become a Mary Roach completist, this is one of her very few backlist titles that I hadn't read yet. So it was time to dive into Six Feet Over, which was originally published in 2005 under another title, re-released in 2022. Mary Roach is approaching the afterlife in this title with the same curiosity and verve and what I like to call her nefarious gremlin interview style. Because she will go into these interviews with people who are well known and respected in their fields. And it's like she has like a shoulder devil that just says, make sure you ask him this because he's probably never answered that question before. And she's like, I can't keep the question. And she does this all the time. It's hysterical. So she jumps into all subjects and her interviews with this just excitement and curiosity, right? Here, she's trying to sift through scientific inquiries into the afterlife, physics and communication with the dead and souls and reincarnation and more. Usually, often, I find myself laughing out loud when I read through her books. And while this one did have some funny moments, it was dry. It was dry. And I think it's because she couldn't find solid footing. It felt strange because it feels like a topic she could have a lot of fun with, right? There's a lot of nonsense and tomfoolery around ideas because we just don't know about what happens after we die. Like, what kind of consciousness do you have? But she, this time, felt a little forced. And that's because of the mushiness, I think, around what has been researched in the past and what people did to convince other humans about their beliefs in the afterlife. So the science around the afterlife has a lot more intentional obfuscation in it than the science around beavers, right? Or whatever it is. There's always some intentionality behind any study. But in the afterlife, it feels like with science around the paranormal in the afterlife, it feels like people are trying to confuse us or trying to get us to believe whatever they think has actually happened. Right. Which isn't to say that we don't find similar fraudulent claims in, for example, women's health, like that the uterus wanders around your body, right? That's what hysteria is. But it felt meandering. And like she wanted to show us something or had a point that didn't exist. When Katie and I finished this book, it's one of the only times in our many reads of Mary Roach that we both kind of felt meh. Like, what was the real point of this book? She's usually such a hit for us. And I went back and looked and like over and over again, four and a half, five stars, four and a half, five stars over and over and over again. So then I went on to StoryGraph and Goodreads and realized that on StoryGraph, there were 6,000 other readers who've read this book and felt exactly the same way. It consistently gets ranked half a star below the next lowest rated title in her catalog. It just doesn't hit in the same way as her other great books like gulp or bonk or stiff oh my gosh stiff so good right so while I'm glad to continue my journey through Mary Roach's backlist and at this point nothing can derail my love for her overall I would probably jump up and down like a little kid if I got to meet her one day I am glad that I've read this one now and it's behind me and no longer ahead of me so it's kind of like some of your Agatha Christie's where you're like yeah this one I wasn't excited about but I gotta read it so I only now have Grunt, The Science of Humans at War, and her newest release, which is called Replaceable You, Adventures in Human Anatomy, left to read. And getting toward the end of an author's back list or front list and being like, oh, well, what happens when I run out? So we're just going to take it really slow. And then maybe something else will come out before we finish those two. This one was sadly not my favorite or anyone's apparently. This is six feet over. by Mary Roach. Well, I think that you did a great job of figuring out the why behind it not working for you, right? And that's the most important thing that you can do. Yes, definitely. All right. Well, speaking of my journey through the entire back catalog of Agatha Christie, I am bringing another one here. And I am bringing the first book where we meet Miss Marple. Because I decided to take a little side quest off of my, you know, I'm almost through all the parole books. So now we're going to meet Miss Marple. This is The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie. Here's the setup. So as I said, this is where Miss Marple makes her grand entrance. Our setting here is St. Mary Mead, which is famous for being one of those English villages where everyone knows everyone's business. Our narrator is the local vicar, Leonard Clement. He's a thoroughly likable guy who's got his hands full with a very mischievous young wife. and a parade of very eccentric parishioners. And one Colonel Prothro, a man so universally despised that even the vicar himself has been known to say that murdering him would do the entire village a favor. This guy is bad news, right? And we always love it in Agatha Christie where the big bad is truly big bad. Well, of course, Colonel Prothro ends up dead in the vicar's own study. And so that offhand comment that he made doesn't seem so funny anymore. There's no shortage of suspects. Enter Miss Marple, the elderly spinster next door who sees everything from behind her lace curtains and who understands human nature better than anyone gives her credit for. All right, what's fascinating about this book, The Murder at the Vicarage, the entire book operates on staying under the radar, right? And nobody does this better than Miss Marple herself. Well, Hercule Perrault is known from page one. We are told so many times that he is the greatest detective in the world. Miss Marple almost goes out of her way to not be seen as someone who might be able to figure things out. She's just that elderly spinster next door. And that underestimation is her superpower. So Christy keeps Miss Marple under the radar for the reader too. We don't really know much in the way of biographical detail. Christy herself said that Miss Marple was born at 65 years old and stayed that way through 50 years of writing. So we really don't get a lot of backstory. She's more of a presence than a very particular person, which sounds like it shouldn't work, but somehow it absolutely does. The mystery itself here is solid Agatha Christie. We have, you know, the bad guy, a lot of suspects. Miss Marple figures it out. And I love the way that the vicar narrates. We see him, of course, bumbling along. And Miss Marple will quietly piece things together and kind of feed them to him so that the whole thing can get figured out. There are dated elements. There's a character named lettuce there's a character named lettuce oh let's stop there for just a moment i kind of like it actually it's spelled l-e-t-t-i-c-e no i don't like that but the narrator definitely pronounced it lettuce the whole way through and also can we while we're parked here on the side of the road having a picnic around lettuce can we also talk about the profligate use of the word ejaculation as a verb. It's all the way through this book. These are 1930s sensibilities. What struck me most, and something I learned from Mark Aldridge's fantastic compendium, Agatha Christie's Marple, expert on wickedness, is how different this debut is from what we expect in detective fiction. There's no grand introduction. There's no establishing credentials. There's no explanation of her methods. She just there knitting and watching and knowing human nature better than anyone gives her credit for And that really what has always been the superpower of the knowledgeable woman right She is that person, the woman who really knows much more than all the businesslike men around who are the ones who are supposed to put everything together. The writing here is Christy at her craftsman-like best. It's short, clever, full of red herrings that feel fair even if they're there to mislead you. It's not her most complex plot. Christy herself later said that there were too many characters and subplots. Again, something I found in Mark Aldridge's book, which I highly recommend if you're reading your way through Agatha Christy. This is perfect for readers who love cozy mysteries with a little bit of bite, especially if you love it in a village where everyone knows everyone and has an opinion on everyone. This is Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie, my first of several Miss Marples. I've already got another one under my belt. Okay. I like it. I like that we're able to take this journey through this other aspect of Christie's writing. I know that you stan Hercule. I do. I do. And I'm really seeing how they are, the way that each detective is put into the story is very, very, very different. and it affects a lot of things about the way the story turns out. Yeah. It's interesting. It is interesting. Does it feel cozy-er also? Because it's like small town, vicarage, knitting lady as our detective. It feels a little more village mystery than a lot of hercules do so far. The two that I've read so far definitely do. But we'll see. We'll see as we move forward. TBD. I like it. Okay. Interesting. Okay. So for my third one this week, I'm bringing a book that you've read, Meredith. It's The Safe Keep by Yael Vanderwooden. Yes, I love this one. This one's a way back. So this was an indie press list pick in November of 2024. But I think, Meredith, you had already read it by the time it was picked because it was put on the list by Charter Books in Rhode Island. And I think they hand sold it to you when you went. Yeah. I was intrigued by it at the time. But because Meredith had already read it and then we talked about it on the show, it felt like, okay, well, as y'all know, now I can't bring it for a while. I'm just going to let it sit there, right? I set it on my shelves to simmer instead, and I finally picked it up, what, a year plus later. This novel is described as taut, and it feels like the best word I've seen for it. It's not quite tense, but it's more than terse, right? It's even in the dictionary. It kind of works right there. Here's the setup, because it's been a while. Isabel lives alone in her family's home in the 1960s in Holland. It's a rural home. It's the one which she grew up in. It's cozy and compact, and it's filled with especially her late mother's possessions. She's comfortable there if a bit rote or stayed, right? She's always following her routine. Things are going exactly as planned. Right at the outset, though, right at the beginning of this story, she attends a family lunch with her two brothers where she meets Louis's newest girlfriend, friend Eva, but they never stay around for long. So Isabel doesn't even try to be polite to this one in a long series of women. When Louis leaves Eva on Isabel's doorstep to move in with her while he's facing a busy season at work, it becomes clear that maybe she should have paid attention to Eva at that first lunch because Eva is everything that Isabel is not. She has no routine. She stomps around the house. She leaves messes in her wake. She's constantly putting her nose in Isabel's business, very curious. When certain sentimental items or even ordinary ones, like a spoon or a bowl, start to disappear around the house, Isabel starts to suspect that Eva is absconding with them somehow, which is weird because why would someone take a bowl in a house where they're staying, albeit not welcomely staying, right? Kind of reluctantly staying. As suspicions start to fester between the two women, that heightened tension leads to other heightened feelings, and they find themselves alternately drawn toward each other and then repulsed by each other, pushing away. Paranoia and lust walk hand in hand in this novel, alternating faces like those Greek drama masks of early times. This is not a long book. It's 215, 230 pages. So everything is, like Isabel, rather tightly controlled. It's written in a way that made me want to grind my teeth together as I read, holding that top feeling right between my molars. It's one of those books where I didn't actually like the characters. I didn't feel like I had anyone to root for, but I'm really glad I stuck with it because I liked it by the end and I thought it was really well done. The ending especially is like fantastic. This book does have some spicy scenes in it, but it's literary fiction, so I'm not totally sure if chili peppers are appropriate. Do know that we have named body parts and open door depictions of activities that happen in bedrooms. It reads kind of like a book in three acts, exposition, conflict, and climax resolution as our three very separate sections. While I felt like I was gnawing my way through the setup and characters in the first third, it became less grisly. This is going back to Meredith's meat metaphor, less grisly and easier to consume by the middle. And then I was able to wash it down easily by the end. So I could have easily given up. And I think that if 2024 Katie had tried it at the time and said, well, Meredith liked it and it's on the indie press list and I should just push through because I'm interested enough, I don't think I would have liked it. I think I either would have DNF'd or rated it poorly. But 2026 Katie is a different reader and I'm glad I pushed through and finished the story because I really think the ending paid off. And by the time I got there, I cared deeply for these characters that I found abrasive at the beginning. So Charter Books in Newport, Rhode Island, thank you for putting this on the indie press list. Even though it took me more than a year to get there, this was a great recommendation. It was The Safe Keep by Yael Vanderwoeden. Yeah, that was one of my top 10 books of the year that I read it. I really, really liked that one. It's so interestingly done. The way this author gets us to change our minds about what's happening in this house and who these people are and what we should feel about them is just it's pretty phenomenal. Yeah, it's really, really well done. Yeah. Well, my third book actually is an interesting flight maybe with the book that with the safe keep. This is a book called Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan LaFenue. Have you ever heard of this book? No. It's another book that is like I'd never heard of it and then all of a sudden it was everywhere. Here's the setup. 19-year-old Laura lives a very, very quiet, super isolated life with her father, who's a widow, in a castle deep in the forests of Austria. Her days are pleasant enough, but super lonely, until a carriage accident delivers a mysterious young woman named Carmilla to their doorstep. The girl is beautiful, charming, and immediately captivating to Laura, who's thrilled to have somebody around who's her own age. But Carmilla is also deeply strange. She refuses to speak about her past. She sleeps until the afternoon and displays an intensity of affection toward Laura that is both thrilling and unsettling. Meanwhile, young women across the countryside are falling ill and dying from a mysterious wasting sickness that no doctor can explain. This is published in 1872, a full 25 years before Dracula. This is a gothic novella and is the vampire story that started it all. No way. I don't think there's been another book ever that has come to me in such a strange way. So I use this astrological app every day. It's called CoStar. It's my favorite astrological app. It recommends, as part of what it does for you every day, it recommends books and movies and art that depending on your horoscope each day, you might be interested in. Normally, I kind of just scroll through those things. They're really fairly esoteric. But one day this book popped up and for whatever reason I clicked through. My library had it available, which felt like a sign. So I put a hold on it. Didn't think about it again. Then like a week later, Johnny goes, picks up my holds. And the librarian says to him as he's checking it out that she just finished that book and that it had, and I'm quoting here, changed the way that she looked at books and reading completely, which is really high praise, right? So he comes home and tells me that. So I get the book home and I take a picture of this gorgeous cover because the version that I had was really, really had an amazing cover, which has bats on it. And I share it with my 666 book club. And one of our members is Ellen Campbell, who's a literature professor at Auburn University. She's a member of that group. She immediately responds and says, that's a book that I teach as a part of my class on vampires and literature. She's like, you have to read it. So within three days, the universe had grabbed me by the shoulders and said, read this book from three different, very disparate sources, right? As I said, the edition that my library had, I didn't say this part yet, was edited by Carmen Maria Machado. And I really recommend that version of the book because her introduction and the contextual notes added a really valuable layer to my reading experience. Also, this particular version has some incredible illustrations, beautifully done line drawing illustrations, definitely not safe for work or little eyes, that provided additional perspective and made the whole thing feel like a literary artifact rather than just another classic that's on the shelf. So Carmilla is absolutely a vampire book. But because it was published in 1872, 25 years before Bram Stoker's Dracula, as I mentioned, you get to watch the markers of vampirism kind of being established in real time. We're so versed in vampire lore now that it's almost impossible to think about a reader encountering those tropes for the first time. But Lafaneu's original audience, they didn't have this decades of vampire movies and TV shows and twilight discourse baked into their brains. So reading this now is like an interesting way to see the blueprint for all of that, that house kind of being built. There were several forehead slapping moments as we remember again and again that people in Victorian times were very strict. There were some very strange social mores. I was texting all the way through Ellen and she just kept saying, yeah, Meredith, people were really strange in the 1870s. I'm not going to spoil any of it, but if you read it, you'll understand what I'm talking about. And every good vampire story in my mind is sexy, right? There's something to me that's inherent in that particular genre that's just that way. And this book is especially so. The sapphic romance, the grooming, maybe, depending on how you read it. It's, well, let's just say it's very, very well done. La Fanu doesn't shy away from the intensity of the relationship between his two main characters and that charge just kind of pulses through every chapter. I decided to do it in a chapter a day slow read. It's a novella. It's not very long at all but that ended up unlike Dungeon Crawler Carl. This one is perfectly done this way. Just a little chapter short enough that you can absolutely easily devoured in one sitting, but it slowed me down and allowed me to take my time and savor each chapter like the literary bonbon that it is. And it made the atmosphere just feel even more immersive to me. This is a classic that is very readable, which is not something you can say about a lot of 19th century fiction. The prose is accessible, but you still get that gothic mood. So I like to read a classic every year. I'm genuinely thrilled that this classic did not feel at all like homework. This one, if you love that, Carmilla will fit the bill. This is Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan La Fanu. And don't miss Carmen Machado's version of it. And you need to read, and then as you're going through the book, go back and reread the short introduction at the beginning. interesting i love carmen maria machado and i did look up the cover while you were talking and that cover is fabulous it's really really good it's really good yeah and the line drawings inside are really well done and they just bring the story alive for sure this is one i need to pick up for sure yeah this is a good one all right let's get into our deep dive katie we're gonna talk a little bit today about a topic that comes up for me in my real life, especially as I have friends that maybe have just kind of decided to pick up reading as their hobby of choice. And automatically, they're like, I have no idea who to follow. Like, what do I do on Instagram? Yeah. How do you turn Instagram into Bookstagram? Exactly. And I have the exact same question. I'm like, people talk about Bookstagram, But what does that mean? So obviously, we know this, I think, a lot more now, but there is no separate Bookstagram. Bookstagram just means the accounts on Instagram that mainly talk about books. Yes. Right. Also, acknowledging anybody who is a binge listener, we're pretty sure we talked about this at some point, but it was long enough ago that we forgot. We can't remember when it was. So if you recently heard it and you're like, what? They already had this discussion. It's OK. It's been long enough that it's OK for us to tackle it again. Tell me you've had a long running podcast without telling me you've had a long running podcast. Yeah, I went through our whole episode docket, searching different terms, could not figure out which episode that was. But if Megan can find it, she'll put it in the show notes for us. Right. So, Katie, I think that when I think if the goal for a big part of what you want to do on Instagram as a reader, if the deep dive is for you, if what you want to do is use your time on Bookstagram to help you find books that are going to work for you. And that can be done in a couple of ways. The number one way I think we're all trying to use it is to find our book twin. That elusive reader who, although we all contain multitudes, contains mostly the same multitudes that you do, right? That's what we're always searching for. So in order to do that first, I just really quickly want to say before you can go out and find your book twin, you need to know yourself as a reader, right? So a lot of what we talk about on the show covers that. You can follow our newsletter or follow us on Substack. We are taught we are leading everyone through that kind of piece by piece. But that's a really important part of it. So once we have a sense of what we like, what we don't like, Katie, what is your go-to recommendation for how to find a book twin on Instagram? Well, I think, like you said, the most important thing is knowing your favorite things that really get your reader mojo going, right? So you might start by just searching for book reviews or books on Instagram to see if you can find the same people coming up over and over again. Why would you do that? Because all social media is built on algorithms. As you start paying attention to more bookish stuff, more bookish stuff is going to rise to the top over and over and over again. So if you keep telling Instagram or any other platform, no, look this way. This is what I'm interested in. and then you scroll through that and you watch videos and you like things and you comment on things, it's going to say, this keeps this person around longer. So we're going to show her even more or him even more of that type of content, right? So the first step to finding your book twin is to make your Instagram into a bookstagram and make it bookish by intentionally interacting with that type of content Then you can hone in more on the things you found that work for you like searching for fantasy or searching for literary fiction or nonfiction that's propulsive or whatever catnippy tropes you can find that really work for you as a reader. Exactly. So, you know, those more honed in hashtags like domestic thriller reads, cozy mysteries, lit fic, you know, literary fiction, best backlist, those kinds of things get you a little more honed in on what you're looking for. One of the things that I think is a really quick way to get, not only, I think you're totally right, Katie, that's a great way to get your algorithm saying, hey, this person wants just a lot more book content. Now, this is another reason why, reader know thyself, we encourage all of you to make a list of your top 10 books every year, collecting that over time. This is a part of putting together our collection of who we are as a reader. You can take those book titles and then do a hashtag search for them and see who comes up. Start watching those videos, reading those reviews. And if you absolutely loved it and they did too, give them a follow. And that's going to start to hone in even further. So my 10 top books for 2025, I'm going to take 15 minutes. I'm going to search them up. and I'm going to choose one or two new accounts to follow who felt as passionately about that book as I did. That's a great kind of single task per, you know, in a day to tackle. Yes, definitely. You can also follow some of those, like if you feel like, okay, I just found currently reading. I'm just getting back into reading. I don't even know what type of reader I am. I don't know if I like plot driven or character driven more because I haven't been tracking it. And so I don't half the time, I don't even know what you all are talking about, right? You might consider a you definitely should be following us on Instagram. But B, you might consider some of those kind of broader book accounts like Hello Sunshine by Reese Witherspoon. Some of the ones that kind of focus or book riot, which is really big New York Times books is another one where you're getting a broader swath of reads so that from there, you can say, okay, here's the stuff that's kind of surging in pop culture right now. And this is the type of thing that piques my interest. Or this one gets me a little bit curious about what that means. I just saw New York Times books post about what do spicy romance terms mean? Because it's February. And it was like, oh, well, for somebody that's kind of new to romance, maybe they just watched Cheated Rivalry for the first time, and they don't understand some of the terms around it. this is a great starting place, right? So being able to find the broader sources in order to hone in for that, Meredith and I both love I Am Black Harry, who reads popular fiction of all genres, and really loves books. He just is effusive and excited about books, going to the bookstore, talking about books at home, everything. But it's a lot of the stuff that you see everywhere right now. He's a great kind of intro follow, or everybody should follow him, really. Because Yeah, he's really good. He's kind of all over the literary map. And he'll tell you about fantasy and sci-fi and Dungeon Crawler Carl. And he just talked about where the wild things are, right? There's just all this huge swath of books that he's jumping into and addressing as somebody who is newly passionate about reading and excited to share it with us. So those broader things and then honing down into, okay, now I've read some things and I have a favorite book. I want more Count of Monte Cristo, or I want more classics that are in novella form, right? Something that's 160 pages that I could read in two days, and then I can start really getting a groove going. Yes. Search for novellas. Search for classics. Search for Emma and Lion. Gosh, the whole internet is talking about Emma Lion right now. Search for that. Yeah, exactly. I think, too, if you've been on Instagram for a while, and you're like, okay, I've done the foundational things that Katie's talking about. And I really now I like I'm pretty good at picking out books for myself, but I really want to find I really want to find more people that I want to follow. Like I'm not necessarily looking for books. Now I'm looking for people, these follows that that I want. I would say that I really, really recommend having like a couple of litmus test books, right? So maybe now the algorithm is serving you a lot of bookish content, including a lot of potential, you know, people to follow. Having two or three or four litmus test books that you kind of can quickly go through their grid, you can open up their grid and you can go through it like in the three by, you know, the nine up view. And you can, if they've got book covers, like I'll go through and I'll be like, okay, great. If I see that you read Silent Patient, tell me how you felt about it. Yeah. That lets me know whether or not we are going to be book twins. God of the Woods is another litmus test book for me. You know, I just have a couple of books that you feel really strongly about one way or the other that are pretty common. Like, like if you, if you read and hated Project Hail Mary, that's a good litmus test book for you because you're, you know, looking for book twins, you're going to want to look for people who are like, okay, I was an outlier here, but this didn't work for me for X, Y, and Z reason. Go looking for that. The other thing is that it is as useful to follow your anti-book twins as your book twins. And again, Katie's been doing a great job of giving you some more foundational, maybe you're new to Bookstagram. This part of the advice is, again, for that person who's been around for a while and wants to level up who they're following. When you find someone whose reading taste seems aligned with yours, look at the books that they didn't like. If their reasons for disliking it are the same reasons that you would dislike a book, that is your book twin. But if you regularly can see someone who posts and has the opposite opinion of yours, then you can follow them knowing that when they hate a book, that's a book that might really work for you. That's an anti-book twin, and that can be an equally effective way for you to find books that are really, really going to work for you. And it's kind of fun too. It definitely can be. And it might mean that the book they hated, you add to your TBR. And it might mean the book that they loved, it's time to take off your TBR. We talked about this a little bit, I think it was last week, Meredith, when I used the word madcap to describe a book. And you said, that's one of those words that I know it's not going to work for me, right? So if they are saying, oh my gosh, I loved the safe keep so much because it was taught and you're like, listen, I want frothy. I want milkshake. Taught is not in my happy place vocabulary. You can then say, okay, anytime this person really loves this specific thing, I know to take it off my TBR, which is great information if your goal is to make a TBR that's going to serve you well as a reader. Yeah. So yes, anti-book tunes, but you do need to keep track of who is who. Which leads me to the last piece of advice that I want to give, which is something that I just heard Sarah at Sarah's Bookshelves Live talk about on an episode that I was listening to late last night. She said when she is tracking her recommendation sources, she is not necessarily just tracking the first place that she heard about it. She is also tracking maybe a couple of other sources that were the second or the third place where she heard about a book, but the ones that really made her change her mind or made her raise the priority on her TBR. So I think that is very interesting for those of us who track a lot of stuff. I'm going to start saying like what were maybe the two or three places that I heard about this book instead of just one, because I think that will get me even closer to a great list of recommendation sources. And that's the whole reason to have this discussion, right? That's the whole reason to talk about finding book twins on TikTok or Instagram, because when you know that about a person, a follow an account. It can just help you hone in more easily on books that are really going to work for you. And that's what we're all trying to do. We're trying to clear out, like we're trying to hear the signal for the noise, right? Yes, indeed. As a final kind of tracking note about that, if you either use Goodreads tags or story graph shelves or the currently reading reading tracker, you could keep track of anti-book twins in your recommendation sources column and denote them separately, right? If you have Katie Cobb is an anti-book twin for this recommendation. She hated it. So I put it on my TBR. Maybe you put an X at the end of that person's name or at the beginning so that those people are all connected together in your recommendation sources. And you can look at them as a whole and say, okay, when I pick up something from my anti-recommendation sources or I move it up because of that propensity, it works for me or it doesn't work for me, Right. So keeping track of that as a separate thing than this person recommended it can also be useful. And there are ways to do that and make it work for you. I like that. I like that. I think that that makes a lot of sense. All right. Good. Excellent. Well, hopefully that is helpful to you. Of course, we are going to do a post on socials about this. We'll ask you, how are you finding your book twins? Who is your book twin? That's also an interesting question, right? So we can do kind of a, we can tag some great accounts in that thread. All right, Katie, before we go, let's talk a little bit about a couple more bookish things that we want to bring to your attention. I'm driving this week, so I am going to let you know about a post that we got on our, that was put up on our Bookish Friends Facebook group. Of course, this is our group with almost 3,000 of you who are our Patreon subscribers. It's a fantastic group, but this one is from bookish friend Anna, who says, I wanted to share about my grandmother who recently died. I am the reader I am today because of her. Her house was always full of books on the coffee table, in the floor to ceiling bookshelves, stacked on her bedside table, National Geographic, and three different newspapers in the mail. I would stay with her every summer and we would just read, read, read. I randomly picked The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver off her shelf when I was 13, And I don't think I got out of her wingback chair until I had read that whole book. She introduced me to Agatha Christie, Petey James, all the mystery greats. The last book she finished before she died was one of Anne Cleave's Vera series. She had started The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, but had not gotten very far before she died. Finding that unfinished book by her bed was one of the saddest moments of my life. She volunteered at the Carver Memorial Library in Searsport for 37 years. And if any of you are ever in Midcoast, Maine, please stop by. It's a beautiful space built by my ancestors. And who knows, you might even reach for a book covered by Fritzie. One thing I can say is that this show has given me so much rich and wonderful material to discuss with her. And that was such a gift. Thank you also to everyone who has shared about their own grief and lost journeys here in the group. I am finding some comfort in rereading books that we read together long ago and starting some that I know she read and enjoyed. In that way, I feel we are connected in a way that transcends time. So we are so happy to know about Anna's grandmother, Fritzie, and may her memory always be a blessing because she is a blessing now that we know about her. yes and that the bookish friends is a place that what hundreds of comments of people saying you've now shared fritzy with us and it's a blessing to the rest of us as well so good what a legacy what a legacy all right katie what do you have before we go all right meredith this week i have a book i dnf'd and why so right at the beginning of the year i publicly committed that i was going to spend the year reading the complete stories of flannery o'connor i decided to tackle this one at the beginning of the year as part of the bookshelf thomasville's conquer a classic series they've done this for years now i i love it what annie is doing over there on the bookshelf so katie and i both picked up a copy and printed a copy of the reading schedule started it in january with the intro and the first two stories they were tough to read and quite frankly they were chock full of the n-word like probably 40 incidences in two stories right a lot now this is specific to the time. Of course, these were written primarily in the 1920s. They were early, right? But it's still hard to read. So we put it down because we got to the end of that little chunk we were supposed to read for January. Next stories aren't due till February. The beginning of this month rolled around and I couldn't do it. I could not pick it up. So I made myself a deal. I said, okay, I'm going to look at it. I'm going to start story three and we're going to see how far I can get without just one more n-word. Reader, it was the second full sentence. The second full sentence already had a new one for me. So I closed it and I put it away on my outgoing shelf. I'm counting it as a DNF, even though I only read two of the stories in there because I genuinely tried and I figured out what didn't work for me in that. And classics have to be treated a different way and looked at with a different lens, but this was not working for this reader. So my DNF was the complete stories of Flannery O'Connor. I think that makes a ton of sense. You thought it through. That's the right decision. I am positive that they at Bookshelf Thomasville from the front porch are having a really nuanced and useful conversation about all of the things related to those stories. And also that doesn't mean that it's the right book for you right now. So good for you. Yes, exactly. For sure. Right. We all need to make that decision for ourselves. All right, Katie, that is it for this week. As a reminder, here's where you can connect with us. You can find me. I'm Meredith at Meredith Monday Schwartz on Instagram. And you can find me, Katie, at Notes on Bookmarks on Instagram. Our show is produced and edited every week by Megan Pudamang Evans. And you can find her on Instagram at most of Megan's Reads. 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, which are great, and on our website, which is getting greater and greater at currentlyreadingpodcast.com. You can also follow the show at currentlyreadingpodcast on Instagram or email us at hello at currentlyreadingpodcast.com. New email alerts. Hello at currentlyreadingpodcast.com because we're big girls. You can also follow us on Substack if you want to. That's where our newsletter will be. And you can sign up for our newsletter on our website. So lots of ways to get more and more from currently reading. You can also become a bookish friend. Join us on Patreon and you get a ton more content, hundreds and hundreds of hours more content. You get some fantastic community and you keep this show commercial free. You can also, of course, delight us by reading and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts. And you can shout us out on social media. All of those things help us find our perfect audience. Yes, bookish friends are the best friends. Thank you for helping us grow and get closer to our goals. All right, until next week, may your coffee be hot. And your book be unputdownable. Happy reading, Katie. Happy reading, Meredith.