Season 8, Episode 27: We Control Our Reading + Boss My TBR

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 both a mom and a Mimi and a full-time CEO living in Austin, Texas, and I make the rules of my own reading. And I'm Katie Cobb, a homeschooling mom of four living in Arizona, and a local bookstore is always part of my travel plans. This is episode number 27 of season eight, and we are so glad you're here. Oh yeah. Local bookstores are sometimes the absolute best finds. Indeed they are, Meredith. And because we're on YouTube, I will point out that those travel plans, I am wearing my San Francisco shirt today that I just got on my recent trip. It's so pretty. It's so sparkly. I love it. I love it. I am not dressed up today. I am like, you know what? We record too dang many of these for me to be dressed up every time. You're just going to see me straight out the gym. This is a real thing. I took off my hoodie that looks exactly like that maybe four minutes ago. If you are taking a look at our actual YouTube video, yeah, you will get to see the real us. All right, Katie. So a couple of things. First, I'm going to tell you that we are going to do our deep dive today on Boss My TBR. Fantastic regular segment. We actually hadn't done it since August. Is that right? Yes, it's been so long. Yes. So we are going to boss two people's TBRs today. And we also are going to debut a little something different at the end of the episode that will replace the fountain. RIP the fountain. You know, I loved the fountain. it it did have its detractors but it was a faithful companion for a few years so we are grateful to the fountain well i couldn't sleep last night katie so i'm just going to tell you now that i am making sweatshirts for you and me that say ping splash so we're gonna have we are gonna have commemorative sweatshirts oh i love it all right so let's get started though before we do all of that with our bookish moment of the week. Katie, what have you got? Let's do. I'm so grateful that Roxanna was here last week to sub in for me while I was on vacation with my family in the Bay Area. This was a big deal. My parents, my best friend Shad, and all four of my kids and I went to Monterey for three days and San Francisco for three days, that's the shirt, and we packed every moment as full as we possibly could. That means I only had one semi-free afternoon to add a bookstore to our itinerary. So we went to City Lights, which is billed as the nation's first all-paperback bookstore as their claim to fame. This store started in 1953 as a literary meeting place, especially for beatnik poets, and it still is a kind of cultural hub for the center of the city. The main floor has a pretty literary bent to it. It's like fiction and nonfiction stacks, but very heavy on both. Genre fiction is in small corners of the basement, and poetry takes up nearly the entire top floor because of the long and storied history that City Lights Bookstore has with poetry. They also have their own publishing house, and I loved wandering this old bookstore, wandering the stacks, partaking of the history there. I only got two books for myself, and then I had a couple kids with me, and they each got a couple. My parents couldn't find parking. So only half our party went to the bookstore, but it was a great capstone to our trip. I always love visiting bookstores in places that I haven't gotten to go to. I did also drive through Half Moon Bay though, Meredith, and I thought about you and the reading room that you love to talk about in Half Moon Bay. So that made me think of you. Well, the Half Moon Bay also is where Johnny and I got married. And it's where when I'm cremated, I want to be sprinkled. scattered amongst the waves scattered sprinkled or scattered exactly I love Half Moon Bay it is it is one of my favorite places in the world all right Katie well I am the boss of my own reading did you know that yeah yeah sometimes it's hard for me to remember that sometimes I I let other things begin to boss my reading but so what made me think of that this week is that I am doing and you are going to hear me talk about it all throughout the year. But I am doing the slow read of Wolf Hall or the three Cromwell books, Hilary Mantel's three Cromwell books, starting with Wolf Hall, doing this through footnotes and tangents. I've mentioned this before, and I'm really, really enjoying it. So we are about 35% through Wolf Hall. I'm happy to report that it is much easier going this way than it was when I've been any of the three times before that I had tried it. There's been just a couple of things that really unlocked Wolf Hall for me, but I just am so enjoying reading it with Simon Hazel, who heads up Footnotes and Tangents. His weekly podcast episodes that he releases that kind of go over that week's reading are incredibly helpful and really, really well done. So they come out every Monday. And so we have a reading schedule. so over the course of a week you know that you're supposed to read the x part of the book it ends up being about 35 to 40 pages it's not a lot it's really a very very doable amount of reading it's just a few minutes of reading each day but katie life happens it's last week i was really really sick and i had to work and all the things like i could life wasn't going to slow down for me to be to be sick last week, but something had to give. I got a little bit behind in my Wolf Hall reading. And I got up in my feelings about that because I'm a very strict, like if I'm going to do something, it needs to be done exactly this way all the time. And then all of a sudden I was like, you know what? There is no like reading principle that's going to send me to the office. If I get behind by a couple of weeks, a couple of days, a couple of weeks, a couple of months, I'm still getting, like I can move through this as slowly as works for me. This seems like a very obvious thing, unless you're in Enneagram one, where it is like a bunch of light bulbs going off over your head. I'm doing a read within the read within the read with Liz Hine and Holly Farrell. So the three of us are doing this little nested buddy read of it. And we all agreed like, oh, right. I guess it's totally fine if we don't actually keep like, you know what I mean? It's going to be there for his emails are going to be there for us no matter what. There's no stopwatch on it. There's no, you know, no one's going to publicly shame anybody if you get behind. Anyway, it seems obvious. But if you struggle with this in your reading, because you've made up any sort of should, I just wanted to let you know, once again, you are the boss of your own reading. You read whatever you want to read and you read it as quickly or as slowly as you want to read it. But it's such a good reminder. We all need that sometimes. Right? You wouldn't think that I would, but I do. And I did. And I'm better for it. All right, Katie, let's talk about our current reads. Let's talk about what we've actually been reading. What are you going to lead us off with? All right. My first book this week is called History Lessons by Zoe B. Walbrook. Our bookish friend Jessica Howard put this on my TBR. It's bookish, it's history, and it's murder. What's not to love? Love it. Our main character is named Daphne Overture, which is a French last name, because she's a college history professor who specializes in French colonialism. She's managing a full schedule. She's like a junior professor. So she's really like she's trying to work toward tenure. She's busy, busy, busy. She's writing a book. And she's oftentimes plagued with awful dates, which is important in the story. Her love life is a mess. But then her colleague, Sam Taylor, dies suspiciously. And he and Daphne didn't see eye to eye. They didn't get along great. Some of the evidence points a little bit Daphne's way. So there's an attractive but dogged detective turned bookseller sniffing around her home and her bookshelves because booksellers want to know about our bookshelves, of course. There's a killer on the loose who's maybe the same person who thinks Daphne has something that belonged to Sam and is looking for it. And there's a deadly cover-up that she's got to solve before she's the one in the crosshairs or potentially the morgue. This book was, sometimes it's filled as cozy mystery. It's not that cozy. It's a bit more suspenseful than your typical cozy, but it is really voicey with a capital V. We do have a lot of newer listeners over the past few weeks, so I'll remind people or introduce the term again here. When a book is voicey, it doesn't mean the narrator of the audiobook has a notable voice. It means that the character and the way they're written have very distinctive personality, perspective, and voice. It's a different experience. It's a distinctive experience that leads to the reader feeling like this character has something special to offer. I loved Daphne and the way that she has to navigate academia, a murder mystery, systemic racism, and patriarchy, and her dating life. We are complex creatures, all of us, and she reflects that really well. She's not one-dimensional, and I appreciated that. There is a bit of coziness to this mystery, despite the fact that murder does happen on the page, because we do have a love interest. Remember the disastrous dates. But this remains closed door, rather, and it's rather closed door and mystery focused. I'd love to see Daphne stay safe, but still get to solve additional murder mysteries in future novels. Although the online listings don't indicate that that's going to happen. They don't list this as the first one in a series. or say this is Daphne number one or anything like that. The author, Zoe Walbrook, is also a professor. So the academia portions of this mystery, this academic mystery, are particularly on point. You feel like you're on the college campus. You feel like you're in the office meetings. All of the minutiae around academia and writing really sinks off the page. I ended up giving this one four stars for a little bit of slogginess and the way that it wrapped up at the end. but I will absolutely pick up more from this author in the future whenever she releases it. This is History Lessons by Zoe B. Walbrook. You know, I love a voicey book. And that term is so perfect. Of course, from Sarah Dickinson from Sarah's Bookshelves Live coined that term voicey. And it's one of those things that I learned about myself as a reader that I'll read almost anything if I really, really love the voice of the narrator of the book. Again, Not the audiobook narrator, but the actual person who's voicing the book. And I love to know that about a novel before I jump into it. It makes me more interested. Okay, my first read is something that if you're claustrophobic, you might not want to listen to this. All right, this is Sphere by Michael Crichton. Old school. Kicking it backlist. Here, here's the setup. When psychologist Norman Johnson gets an urgent call from the U.S. Navy, he figures he's in for a consultation because maybe there's been a plane crash because he's done those before. What he doesn't expect is to find himself a thousand feet below the Pacific Ocean, trapped in an underwater habitat with a team of scientists investigating a massive something that has been sitting on the ocean floor for a long time. I will say the blurbs on this, anywhere you find the marketing material, they're terrible. They give away way too much. This is all you need to know. The crew includes a brilliant mathematician, a marine biologist, and an astrophysicist. And they all are really excited to be a part of whatever this thing is that they're supposed to be figuring out. But when they discover something, which I can't tell you what it is, everyone goes from being super excited to being crap your pants scared. That's all you need to know. You don't need to know anything else. This is Michael Crichton, who I love. R.A.P. I love him so much. I love his books. I just all of a sudden got in this mood. I just really wanted an old school, really good Michael Crichton. And I realized that I hadn't read many of his, but I hadn't read Sphere. Just like over Christmas, I was taking Christmas down and I listened to so much of this book in one day. But this is what he does really well. He takes smart people, isolates them with something terrifying and or inexplicable, and then watches what happens when he turns the pressure up and up and up. So when I'm in this mood for science fiction, Michael Crichton is a place I know I can go and I'm going to have some good results. and this one did not disappoint. It's got all the things that you've learned to love from him. Tons of action, plenty of gore. You should know that about this book. Lots of gore and enough intellectual meat to really chew on. Then he does ethical questions really, really well. And that alone makes this book really memorable. The scientific concepts are the kind that make you feel like your brain is getting a proper workout. And I love being in that place where you've got a ton of action, but you also feel like you're learning something you didn't know before. Now, this book is not perfect. It's not Jurassic Park. There are definitely some moments, especially with how Michael Crichton writes women in this story, that made me cringe. Not just a little bit. Nothing horrible, but enough that really made me remember over and over again. This book came out in 1987. It was a whole other world back then, as far as women in science or women in the military. But if it okay with you to contextualize that as a product of its time and not let it completely derail your reading experience then you be fine But it is worth being in that posture when you go in As I said I listened to this one on audio and I really think that was a great way to go if audio is something that you like to do. There's something about being in the underwater habitat trapped with these characters and this mysterious, whatever it is, sphere that worked really beautifully in the audio format. There's claustrophobia and tension that worked really well all the way through. And the ending is perfect. No notes. Crichton sticks the landing in a way that is very satisfying. And that's not always a given with sci-fi thrillers. This is Sphere by Michael Crichton. I really, really liked the way he ended this one. I love it. We reread, for Popcorn on the Pages, we reread Jurassic Park just a couple years ago. and they just yes to the way women were written in the 80s and 90s especially but oh such good books yeah jurassic park is what it's like one of my all-time favorites yeah it's just excellent and the andromeda strain is really really good timeline time that's the nights one right the one like the night the time travel and nights timeline is really good that's one that i should reread i should re-listen to timeline man if you like outlander but also science fiction and jurassic park timeline is so good love that book i love it okay my second one this week is non-fiction i mentioned it briefly in our top top books of the year episode but i had not yet brought it as a current read so today i'm going to talk about eager by ben goldfarb do you remember when I talked about this, Meredith. This is the beaver book. I'm just going to need to leave the room. I'm just going to. Take out your headphones. Okay. I read this one with Katie and it was part of our read about an overlooked animal series that turns us into rabid fans of weird creatures, especially when you get to then gush about beavers. There's no way to have this conversation, y'all. I'm sorry. As I said, it showed up briefly in my top 10 roundup in that it's a book that's hard to talk about because Eager is about beavers. The subtitle of this book is The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. It was published in 2018, and Ben Goldfarb falls deep into the world of beavers and the people who love them and advocate for them. I know. I'm so sorry. I see you. I'm all right. It turns out, and he shows us through a compelling narrative nonfiction style, that beavers can basically save the landscape and the water table and maybe even the world. In this book, we travel back through history and especially to the era of colonization and settlement that we see throughout the Americas and Europe in the 1800s and 1900s. During this time in the United States and Canada, especially, beaver pelts were so highly prized in Europe that they were being trapped and killed and sent back at a bounty. So people were getting $5 per pelt, right? This had really far-reaching environmental consequences because beavers are a keystone species in many parts of the continent. As settlement continued and farming and agriculture took over much of the economy, they simply became considered like destructive rodents, kind of like how we think of mice and rats today. Like, they're going to eat your stuff. They're going to ruin your landscape. You got to get rid of them because they're a nuisance, right? So while they were no longer hunted for their fur, they were removed. usually still at a bounty, reducing populations from millions to thousands. Just in the continental United States, there used to be millions, and now there are thousands. Now, luckily, we have what are known as beaver believers, who are intent on restoring beavers to their natural habitats and finding ways to cohabitate peacefully with beavers and humans sharing space. It turns out, and many studies have been done to this effect that the ways that these animals shape the landscape actually leads to more diverse species thriving, higher water tables across a region, streams, wetlands, and lakes either returning or thriving to landscapes that have dried up. It's really amazing. The human impact on the beaver population and the ways that that population impacts us right back was 100% not on my radar until I read this book. I love it when that happens. When an author find something they're super into, and then they use their God-given gifts to convince me that I also am super into it. Like, I did not give a rat's tail about beavers prior to this book, but bring on the octopuses, the turtles, the birds, the beavers, and the baby woolly mammoths, which I talked about a couple weeks ago. I want to care deeply for the weird and overlooked animals of this planet and Ben Goldfarb convinced me to do exactly that with his excellent book. I gave it five stars. I do now count myself among the beaver believers, but I won't tell anybody else that. This is Eager by Ben Goldfarb. I mean, I'll say it before I've said it again. It's good. It's the best title ever. It is. Beavers are awesome. Truly. I wish that we could have a conversation about them without having to use every bit of discipline that we have not to be laughing because it's inappropriate because beavers are great and we should gush about them and they're like hey also they're so cute right once you read about beavers the internets know that that's what you're doing so now katie and i both find like reels about baby beavers they're the cutest things that ever existed on the internet. I saw this. And I won't be able to talk about that without it being weird. Right, exactly. I feel like we need to call it something different. And, you know, or again, I think what I said before is big beaver needs to take their name back. Yeah. I saw a video about a woman who had taken in a beaver as a pet. And what this beaver would do, like within the bounds of her home, just as a part of his normal way of like building like you can't stop the beaver yeah from you can't you can't stop it from doing what it's gonna do and it's and they're smart and can use like this beaver was was like taking chair i mean not that i would ever want this in my house because i'd be super pissed if i came home my dining chairs were it was like dismantling her chairs and them down into usable pieces and it's amazing yeah i mean it i i just i it's it's so it's totally amazing i actually really would love to read that book but i can't i can't stomach us having to talk about it again on the show i don't think i can get through it maybe next year it's too much content it's so good though my second book is a book by an author that i really really really love but maybe this one wasn't my favorite this is a book called and again god i should have known from the title this is a book called the sleeper lies what does that even mean The Sleeper Lies by Andrea Mara, who I love. Okay, here's the setup. Lead character's Marianne. She lives in a V-isolated cottage in Ireland, and they're in the middle of a big freeze, which we certainly understand here in Texas, when all of a sudden you don't normally get weather like this, but all of a sudden you get the kind of weather that just locks you in. You're completely locked in. So she's by herself in this cottage out in the middle of nowhere. And there's this freeze and there's snow on the ground. And she discovers footprints trailing from her garden. Footprints that stop right at her bedroom window. She lives alone. She works from home. And until this point, she's been pretty unbothered by the weather warnings and all the roads being impassable and everything else. But now she is genuinely freaked out. As the stalker begins leaving increasingly disturbing mementos and the snowstorm intensifies, Marianne's mind drifts back two decades to a devastating schoolyard incident and the mysterious circumstances surrounding her mother's death in Denmark. She becomes obsessed with finding patterns between this present-day stalker and an old family tragedy and a true crime story that she's been researching. So there's all of these things happening. It's set over just 24 days and we see how everything comes crashing down around this poor Irish woman in her cozy cabin in the snow. I love that premise for a lot. I love that very first part of the premise, like the garden and the steps and they stop at the window and oh my God, no. And I wanted to love this book. Andrea Mara was especially front of mind for me when I started reading this book because I had just finished All Her Fault, which of course I love that book. And I really like the Peacock adaptation that was just on. So I jumped into the sleeper lies in my quest to become an Andrea Mara completist. This one was mid. Wasn't bad. It wasn't bad. It was just mid. And I still want to be an Andrea Mara completist. I've spent real time trying to figure out why, because, you know, bringing a mid book is the worst kind of book to bring to the show. Give me bad. Give me great. Mid is hard to make interesting content about. So I really, really took it apart because all the puzzle pieces were there. It should have worked. There's the interesting dual timeline construction, puzzle pieces that click together at the end. There's a great setting, that Irish cottage with the stalker and the crazy mementos and the storm. All of it is there. But the pacing was off. I loved the present day POV with Marianne trapped in her cottage. And there were, in fact, a few moments that were like downright chilling, right? But when she switched to these, like the past timeline stuff, it was exploring like what happened in Denmark and the mystery of her mother. I really felt myself trying to maintain my attention. Like when you're trying to meditate and you're like, focus, just focus. And I just couldn't keep my, I couldn't keep my focus there. I could see the seams in the storytelling in this one, which is not usually what you get with Andrea Mara. It felt like everything she was doing, she was having to work really hard for. Like it was, it made me tired to read it rather than to make me feel satisfied. It wasn't just flowing. That said, the ending on this was much better than the rest of the book was. it made up for at least a half star in tidy execution, bringing things together in a way that I felt made me say it was mid instead of bad. Like the ending really, really brought everything together. Again, I'm going to continue reading Andrea Mara because I genuinely love the way that she writes, but her other books, All Her Fault, Someone in the Attic, The Other Side of the wall are all ones that I would say are really worth your time if you love really smart Irish domestic suspense. This one was just an Irish meh for me. This is The Sleeper Lies by Andrea Mara. Maybe I needed an Irish goodbye instead. Except then I wouldn't have got the great ending, right? True. You know, it happens. That's what my grandson, my four-year-old, says, it happens, Mimi. Well, I feel like that happens sometimes with some of our favorite authors, which actually does bring me to my third book, which is a journey that we're going to go on because I am ready to re-talk about The Dutch House by Ann Patchett. So. Is that the book you're bringing right now? Yes. Oh, it is. Okay. So this is another read with Katie and it is a reread. Again, I mentioned it briefly on our top books of the year. It didn't crack my top 10, but I did give it five stars this time when I read it. I know Meredith and Roxanna just talked last week about rereads, and I wanted to throw my two cents into the discussion because this one's a bit of an outlier even for rereads, right? I'm going to set this book up briefly and then talk about the experience of reading it because that's the interesting part of this one. Danny Conroy is our main character. He's a young boy at the start of this novel. He's the son of Cyril and a brother to Maeve, his beloved sister. They live in the Dutch house, a gorgeous mansion that their father bought with his first real money as he made the leap from impoverished young adulthood to substantial means and fatherhood, kind of a real estate empire. When their mother leaves and Cyril remarries a woman named Andrea, Danny and Maeve are exiled from the home upon his death. They no longer get to live in the Dutch house. This book covers many years, decades, from their childhoods, young childhoods, all the way to Danny's own parenthood to a young adult. So probably 40 or 50 years altogether. It's character driven in that the characters are what pulls us back to the story over and over again. What happens to them matters, of course, but it's not the point of the book. And that matters here because of my first experience reading it. I first read and reviewed this book in November of 2019 when it was pretty new. And I brought it to the show at that time as an outlier. I didn't have the same experience other people did. I gave it three stars because I only had whole stars on Goodreads, but my review said this does not get the praise I've been seeing from me. I didn't like the characters, especially the women. Maybe Maeve, but everyone else, ugh. I would have given it two stars, except the Tom Hanks narration on audiobook is pretty awesome. His chapter headings, though, eye roll. That's my whole review. Essentially, I thought I liked the narration, but I hated everything else about it. I didn't get it, right? I wasn't a reader who likes character-driven stories, and that was sad because I had already read and loved multiple books by Ann Patchett at the time in 2019. However, I was pretty sure that this one, this 2019 release, was part of her newer style of writing that wasn't for me. In 2016, I gave Commonwealth three stars, so this continued that trend. I was like, oh, she's changed as a writer. She's no longer for me, right? I had this narrative in my head that Ann Patchett was becoming someone not for me. But then I continued reading and loving Ann Patchett after that, backlist and frontlist. And I started looking at this one with different eyes Maybe it wasn for 2019 Katie but 2025 Katie is a different person right She would find something different to love When my reading partner Katie Proctor wanted to pick it up also we decided to read it together on paper this time No Tom Hanks nonsense for me. Lord love him. He's a national treasure. But I do not need his voice narrating my audiobooks. It actually was a detraction from my experience. It turns out it was a me problem, though. Or not a problem. It's okay that past Katie didn't like this book. And it's okay that present Katie is a different reader than I was before. I'm so glad that I gave myself a chance to read it again as a different person, knowing how much I had changed. I was 35 at the time. I had a young baby, Annalie, who you all remember from those early episodes. There are so many things I could say about that time in my life that made me a different person than I am now, about where I was living, about who I was with, about what my family looked like. But it was worth it to me to read it again. And it paid off in dividends, in droves. I loved this book the second time. I loved the characters. Danny and Maeve are phenomenal, unforgettable. The house as a character captured me. Andrea, the stepmom, is a character we love to hate. She is horrendous. And I adored her for that. Like, I didn't need to just hate her. I could be like, God, Ann Patchett did an amazing job creating Andrea and the dynamic between her and these stepchildren. Now, do I reread Commonwealth as well? Maybe that was also an outlier. We'll see. Time will tell. But for this reader, rereading something that I did not like the first time really paid off. And I gave it five stars. This was The Dutch House by Ann Patchett. I think that's a very, very interesting lens to look at this in. And I think that that is a place where rereading is very, very interesting. Not going back to the thing. I mean, it's also fantastic when you want to go back and revisit something that you loved because you want that comfort. you want to, you know, all of, for all of those reasons, but rereading stuff that we hate. Cause I was thinking like, how much would someone have to pay me to reread Tom Lake? And that would be a high six figures. Right. I do not. And when I finished the Dutch house, I would be like, absolutely not. Never reading that again. I was bored. I hated it. Those characters, awful, nothing. But if I did it again, like you, I wouldn't do it on audio because that was Meryl Street. National treasure. We love her. Exactly. 100% love Meryl Street. And yeah, I would do it in print. But it is interesting. If you revisit books that you really hated several years later, that's a very interesting way to reread. Yeah. I mean, because we know that we're all changing constantly as readers, right? We're always bringing new life experiences or a wider lens or a narrower lens because we've got that new thing that we've been thinking about, or we're going through a thing that narrows our lens for whatever reason, it's okay to change and to change your opinion about it, right? I'm so glad I didn't say like, well, that's my opinion. Like put it on my tombstone. Katie Cobb hated the Dutch house. Like, because I love it now. And I was allowed to hate it then. And that's okay. Yeah, exactly. We just have to hold all of it really loosely. We need to be open for reconsideration. And if we had been in book club together, I would have taken a real run at trying to convince you that Andrea is not as bad as you think she is. Right. Yes. Because even at the time, we had very different opinions about this book. So very interesting. Okay, my third book, I had to bring a five star mystery or thriller because I brought a mid one. And anytime we bring a mid one in that genre, I just feel incumbent upon me to bring a really, really good one. So this one is a book called snap by belinda bauer here's the setup on a really hot sweaty summer day 11 year old jack bright and his two little sisters are waiting in their broken down car on the side of a motorway while their pregnant mother goes to get help because their car their car's broken down she says jack's in charge i won't be long and she walks off she never comes back three years later Jack, now he's 14, is still in charge with their father gone, consumed by grief from not knowing what happened to the mom. Jack has become the sole provider for his sisters, Joy and Mary, desperately trying to keep their household running and trying to hide the truth about this scenario that he is the one in charge from social services because obviously 14-year-olds cannot be the head of the family. So he's doing whatever it takes to keep the family together, even if that means becoming the burglar that police have dubbed Goldilocks because he goes in to the houses in the middle of the night and he eats their food because he's hungry. Across town, meanwhile, a pregnant woman wakes to find a knife beside her bed and a note that reads, I could have killed you. As these seemingly separate threads begin to weave together, Jack finds himself pulled deeper into the mystery of what really happened to his mother on that afternoon. This book is very, very good. So it seems like from the premise, it's going to be a really straightforward thriller about finding a killer. But this book is actually that, but so much more. Belinda Bower, this is my first one by her. Elizabeth Barnhill had recommended her books a few times. But for some reason, when I was at the library just a little bit ago, this one really stood out to me. So I grabbed it and started it. And it was one of those within the first two paragraphs you're pulled in. The misconception that I had was that I was going into a fairly standard whodunit. But this is a story that is doing a lot of high level work, because you are working on three separate narrative threads. You've got Jack's story, you've got what happened to his mom, you've got this pregnant woman who's got this, this threatening note that's been left by her bed, right? So she's dull. Belinda Bauer, though, is doling out information on each of those in a way that keeps you interested and keeps the connections coming together the whole way through. Where the Andrea Mara book, The Problem with the Pacing, here the pacing is top notch. I was turning pages, even though this isn't written in a thriller-like shocking twist kind of way. It's just really, really smart. And the other thing that you might not expect is how much from the start of the book to the end of the book, your allegiances will shift. Bauer is flipping the script on who you think you'll sympathize with. I found myself rooting for really unexpected people. In fact, there's this one side character. he's a 19 year old bad guy but he also is a 19 year old dad i can't even tell you how much i i want that character to have like a book of his own but so he's a side character and i was very invested which just gives you a sense of the writing that she's doing here because jack of course our lead character this kid broke my heart 14 years old obviously i have a 14 year old son He's the sole provider for these two kids. His father abandoned him, abandoned them after they, I mean, there's just a lot going on here. My heart was with him through every single page. So if you like Lisa Jewell, Catherine Ryan Howard, the best of the best by those two writers, this is one that you are going to want to pick up really soon because it is fantastic. This is Snap by Belinda Bauer. It sounds excellent. It's really good. Really, really good. All right, Katie, let's boss a couple of TBRs. All right. So for those of you who's just joined us, this is our recurring segment we do every few months where we pick a couple of victims from our Bookish Friends Facebook group, people who've joined us on Patreon, and they've joined us in the Bookish Friends group. And we say like, hey, give us five books that are currently high up on your TBR list and also tell us a little bit about what's been working for you lately. Give us a little bit of info and we will then choose three of those five we think you should prioritize and we'll give you the order that we think you should read them in. All right. So Katie, do you want to give us our first, our first victim? Yes. Our first victim this week is Gretchen. A lot of times I ask for a little bonus something within their stack of five. So this time I asked about traveling with books. And that's because it was top of mind for me having just gotten back from San Francisco. But I said it could be an actual place you traveled to, or it could be where you've been traveling to mentally, right? And we have one of each of those in this stack of two victims. So Gretchen says, I love these. I love getting a peek at others TBRs. Here's her list of five. First is For Whom the Bell Tolls by J.C. Lynn. Meredith made me do it. She did just talk about this a couple episodes ago. If it's ringing a bell for you, you can go listen to that episode. Next is When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McClain. Third is Bride by Allie Hazelwood. This is paranormal romance. Fourth, we have Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers, and she specifies as the two books in one because that is two books. It's a psalm for the wild bill and a Prayer for the Crown Shy, but she's talking about reading them as a series because they're two novellas. Fifth is Gilded by Marissa Meyer, and she finishes up by saying, and traveling, oh traveling. My goal this year is to hit more independent bookstores in the Portland area, and there are so many. I bought Monk and Robot at Field Day Books and Bottles in Portland, Oregon. It's Portland's only book and bottle shop. I bought Bride at Cannon Beach Book Company in Cannon Beach, Oregon. I love the Oregon coast. It's so dramatic and has haystack rocks and other rock formations in the ocean. And she did attach a picture. It says, Haystack is in the background hiding behind this sparrow. I've been to all those places. So this was especially personal for me. So with this stack of five, Meredith, which one or how do you want to prioritize Gretchen's TBR? Okay. So I wanted to go, I mean, she's got some great books on this stack. I really, really like it. And I just felt like there were three that just are the, they're so different one from the other that I just felt like they'd make a perfect one, two, three. And that is starting with For Whom the Bell Tolls by J.C. Lynn, which I did just talk about. That book is really fast. It goes so fast. It's so light and frothy. And then, and I think you could get like do a one, two, you can flip the order of these, of these two. Then I think When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLean. This one is a novel. It weaves in a lot of elements of the in real life crime of polyclass. It's on the Mendocino coast, kind of brings in all of those pieces of things, but it's dark and it's harder, but also very propulsive. And then of course, I think you have to go into Monk and Robot after that to soothe your soul. So that threesome, I think is just really calls to me because each book is so different from the last one and you're never in one place for too long. Yeah, I like it. I was planning my books for these today and I had a hard time getting out of my own head. So I said a lot of us are in the in case of emergency break glass section of our TBR right now. So I put monk and robot first because that belongs in that section of your TBR. If you've got it on your TBR. It's perfect for that moment. So I prioritize that one mostly as almost like a palate cleanser from life, right? And then I went with For Whom the Bell Tolls. Again, I can't get out of my own head. This is the top of my TBR because Meredith made me do it. So I'm putting it second because it's going to get her reading life going again after that break glass moment. It's like quick and fun and it'll give you some momentum, some buzziness. A lot of people are talking about it right now. So you're going to feel like in the zeitgeist. It's a great way to keep your reading life momentum going right now. And then I put Bride by Ali Hazelwood III. This was one of my top romances of 2024. And I love the idea of getting Gretchen to pick it up. It's werewolf, a megaverse fiction with a vampire bride to a werewolf alpha, which is a lot of words, right? She should know and probably does that it's pretty spicy, but for a werewolf book, it's pretty tame. So there are different chili pepper levels and they change quite a bit depending on which sub genre of romance you're in. And Bride is a good kind of starter course for somebody that's interested in the Omegaverse and werewolf fan fiction or werewolf fiction, werewolf romance. So I felt like it was a fun way to press it into somebody's hands by using the boss my TBR segment to tell her that I wanted to read it. I love it. I think that, I mean, she gave us a lot to work with in this group of five, right? There's a lot of different ways that it could work together because Gilded by Marissa Meyer has been on my list for a long time because it's fairy tale retelling, which of course I really, really love. So I'm eyeing that one. All right. Our next victim is bookish friend Lauren, who gave us this list of five. I Medusa by Ayanna Gray, Meet the Newmans by Jennifer Niven, Fear and Fury, The Reagan 80s, The Bernie Goetz Shootings and the Rebirth of White Rage by Heather Ann Thompson, Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey, and Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Deniman. She says, lately I've been hanging out in Middle Earth because I want to hang on to the notion that determined people can band together to defeat evil. Right. So she chose fictional traveling. I love it. It was so smart. All right. So Katie, what three are you choosing for Lauren? Okay. I'm obsessed with the variety that she put on this list, right? We've got sci-fi, we've got an RPG book, we've got nonfiction, this like historical fun, and then a fantasy Greek mythology retelling. Lauren has already been doing some fantasy with her hangout time and Middle Earth. So I'm going to let her hang out in history, but bring her back to the Planet with Meet the Newmans. I'm excited to read this one as well. It's high on my TBR. It's buzzy and definitely has some top book of the year potential for a lot of readers, which is what we said on the Indie Press List episode when Fabled brought it to us in January. So Meet the Newmans by Jennifer Niven first. Next, I decided to go with nonfiction because we can escape again right afterwards So this is one of those wild swings that I like for my own reading life This is a new release from Heather Ann Thompson selfishly going on my TBR as well So thank you Lauren for making sure I knew about it I had this author on my radar already because of Blood in the Water which is about the Attica prison uprising But I love something that totally peels back the layers on an event that I was otherwise unaware of right I wasn alive in the 80s Well we not like aware of it as I already discussed with Eager in this episode, I like to know about things I don't know about. So Lauren, let's both read that one. And then I'm really torn for my third one, but I decided to go with I, Medusa, because I think the other one I wanted to put here is one that Meredith will have on her list, and I think that'll be plenty of peer pressure. So I'm putting I, Medusa third in order to make sure that there's sufficient pressure to read that one. I loved this retelling of the Medusa story by Ayanna Gray. Of the books I've read by her, this is my favorite. So I think that's a great third option. What did you choose? Yeah, my first two were exactly the same. Meet the Newman's is historical, but really, really fresh and a modern take on historical fiction. It's very voicey. And then yes, Fear and Fury, the Reagan 80s and the Bernard Goetz shootings. I did live through this, those subway shootings were one of the first conversations I can remember having with my parents where I was old enough. I don't even remember. I don't remember exactly what year it happened. But in my mind, I was like eight or nine. I was like young. And my parents saying like, hey, this thing happened and like, it's very messy and not there's not like a clear right, wrong, you know, kind of thing. And like, right. Asking my opinion about things and asking me to kind of think about some of these harder, you know, issues, current events that were going on. But I was a kid. So I know that there was a lot that I missed. So I too am putting this on my TBR. It's got great reviews as of now. It's got great ratings as of now. And then you were right, Katie. I'm putting Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinneman as third. I just finished this yesterday. It was an absolute delight. It was an absolute surprise. I had no idea what to expect. But if you are in the mood for determined people banding together, this is going to get you where you want to go. So I think that's a great threesome. Excellent. I love it. And that is what I was thinking, of course, that you would put Dungeon Crawler Carl as your third spot or somewhere on yours so that we would get that double press between the two of them. Yeah, and I'll be bringing that to the show in a little bit too. So that's how we have bossed your TBRs. As usual, we want to know from you, Gretchen and Lauren, let us know, what did you think about what we said? Did you read any of those books? Did you read some of the other ones? We definitely want to know what you thought about it, for sure. All right. Now, RIP The Fountain. Everyone hates The Fountain. I don't care how, there's like a tiny handful of people who are like, but I like The Fountain. Buy our pink splash sweatshirts, which we're going to have available. They're like whispering into an echoey cave. that's what they're talking about everybody hates the fountain everyone hates ping splash i i said it before i'll say it again there was a woman on the survey who put in every single field that she could on the survey even if it wasn't asking anything about it she put please never say ping splash again so she loves this episode she loves it she's gonna buy our sweatshirt too yeah i believe it. So we, however, all jokes aside, we do want you guys to like the segments of the show. And we don't want to say things over and over again that give you cringe. So we are retiring the fountain, may she rest in peace. And we are going to go with a new section, which we are calling a before we go. All right. And this is going to involve two things. Now, remember, with this ending section, Katie and I, we couldn't just revert back to pressing books because we would just be, we'd have the exact same problem that we had before, which is that we'll, it's really hard for us to press books in that exact way. Every single week. For years at a time. So we still need to have that freedom and flexibility to bring lots of different kinds of things, but we want to kind of frame it differently. So whoever's driving the show in odd number episodes, I don't know if you've ever noticed this listener, but I drive odd number episodes. Katie drives even number episodes when we're on the show together. And whoever's driving is going to highlight some post or interesting thing that came up in the bookish friends group in the previous week. That group is so active that we have a lot to choose from there. There's a million different kinds of things that could come up and the person could choose to talk about. So I'm going to take care of that for this. And then And when Katie has her turn, she's going to tell you what she had to choose from for her before we go. Yes, I am. I'm excited. All right. So I wanted to talk about, I wanted to highlight two different posts that happened in the group this week for different reasons. But both of them made me smile at the time. And both of them made me just go, I just absolutely love being in community with a lot of other readers. So you can reach out and say things like this. So in one case, we have bookish friend Danae who said, does anyone want to do a buddy read of Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson? She says, I just finished On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, which was also very, very hard to read while also being important and necessary. I think this would be a good, in quotes, follow up, and I'd love to have someone to discuss it with. And do you know, Katie, that she had 37 people raise their hand and say, yes, could we buddy read this book together? So that was a book that you brought to the show a couple of weeks ago. We both talked about our abiding love for the incredibly smart Heather Cox Richardson. And I love that Danae was like, I want to read this. And she just threw it out there in the group. And now they then arranged within the comments on that thread to move that into its own thread all by itself. And so then those people are going to go off and running to buddy read. I just like the way that that works. There's no pressure. There's no, I have to know somebody. It's just like, hey, I want to read this. Does anyone want to read it with me? So I love it. And then we had a bookish friend, Susan, who said, I'm really hoping that this group can help me. I have terrible insomnia. I often wake up around 3 a.m. and I can't get back to sleep. I get out of bed and read and I'm looking for some gentle and somewhat dull books that make me sleepy. and she had 27 different people within just a couple of hours give her multiple recommendations for gentle and somewhat dull books. And even then bookish friend Margo said, there's a podcast called Nothing Much Happens. It's designed to put you to sleep. And there were lots of books that were recommended. And so I just really love, again, bookish community, you can reach out whether you want to buddy read or you want to- other recommendations. A recommendation for whatever. So those are my two bookish friends posts in the bookish friends group that I wanted to highlight. Katie, let's talk about the other part of this before we go segment. I like the before we go. Okay. So this second part has a tasting menu of sorts that we get to choose from each week. And it's just five little options that the non-driver gets to pick from in order to cap off the episode. So I'm going to run through them really quick, and then I'll tell you which one I chose for this week. We're not going to run through them every week, y'all. Right. Yes, this is your one chance to find it out. Right? Yeah. So the first one is called Currently Curious About, and this can just be something that has piqued your interest in your reading life, a genre, an author, and it just gives us an option to talk about something that maybe we're going to read about, maybe we're not. It's just on our radar. Yeah. Second is listener wreck of the week. This is more like what Meredith just did, but it's a shout out to either the Facebook group or somewhere on Patreon or Instagram from a bookish friend or a listener where they have recommended something to us or to all of us, which is great. Third is a sleeper hit. This will be reminiscent of our books we used to press into your hands. So a couple weeks ago, I pressed hench into your hands. So it can be something that you liked in the past that you just want to make sure people know about still. But the difference there, the important difference there, what makes a sleeper hit different than a book that we want to press, books that we wanted to press, the bar was too, was so high. They were like forever favorites. Yes. Or like it's a book we want to press into almost everyone's hands. With a sleeper hit, you could be like Timeline from Michael Crichton. Like I could bring that up and know that not everybody's going to be interested in it, but it is an under the radar, like not, like we might've totally forgotten about it, but it's really, really good. So like the pressure is amped down on that. Yes. Yes. And we love those recommendations. Of course, fourth is a book I DNF'd this week and why, which is exactly what it sounds like. And fifth is TBR triage. This one's fun. And this is actually what I'm going to do this week. So you pull a book from your TBR and make a quick call. Are we still reading this? Are we unhauling it? What are we doing with this book? I'm glad you're doing this one. Okay, good. Yeah, well, this is brand new. I'm already cheating. I have a twofer. So my family and I went to London in October of 2023. I purchased The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix at Foils, which as you'll remember, Meredith, is a gorgeous bookstore. I was like Gus Gus from Cinderella. I had so many books stacked between my chin and my hands. We had gone to Bath the day before. So title, cover, I thought it would be a hit. When I got home, I found out at a bookish friend swap that this is the second in a series. Didn't matter to me. I didn't look into it. Just liked the title and the cover. So my local bookish friend Jackie brought a copy of The Left-Handed Booksellers of London to swap. Hold up, I said. What's happening? Well, now I had both books on my shelves. A, they don't match because one's a UK copy and one's a US copy. And now that I had both, I no longer wanted to read either. So they've both sat there for nearly two full years. However, this is now a triple TBR triage moment because I'm removing them from my own TBR. I've decided they're not for me. But Meredith, I'm going to offer to send them to you if you're interested. It is a slightly alternate London in 1883 fantasy mystery series that's billed as immersive by Publishers Weekly, Whimsical by Veronica Roth, and V.E. Schwab says it's a world where the magic and the real nest together like the pages of a book. And if that doesn't sound like Meredith, I don't know what does. It absolutely does. And I 100% would take those off your hands, but why don't you want to read them? I think a lot of it has to do with that I became so disenchanted with picking up the second one and like being messed up in my head around them. So they got like sullied. They're tainted. Okay. Yeah. Got it. And so really what I would, in my ideal world, I would send them to you and someday you'll read them and you'll be like, Katie, you would love these books. And I could put them back on my TBR. You could send them back. But in the meantime, they can live somewhere else. And then they get a refreshed look later when they come back on my radar instead of sitting there and like kind of gathering dust mentally for two full years. Okay. Well, maybe I could do like an annotated version of it. And then if it ends up that we like it, then we could do that shared and then it like really could become something new. Yeah, that'd be fun. Okay. All right. Well, good. I did not think that our first TBR triage was going to mean I added two books to my TBR. Well, there is TBR triage can be. Well, now I'm glad I looked at this because I'm pushing it up my TBR. It's just this one was a little bit roundabout, but I was excited to talk about them. Got it. Okay, good. Good. Well, hopefully you guys will find something to like in our segment. I'm already deciding that I don't want the driver. I am already live realizing that I should have only brought one person to focus on, not two, because that part of the segment took too long. But you know what? We're learning in real time. We're trying new things. We're experiment, iterate, tweak, iterate, tweak. This is what we do. So you guys just get to enjoy this in real time. It's true. And we're always inventing. We're always doing something new with the show. It keeps it fresh for us, fresh for you. And hopefully means it'll keep going for a very long time. Exactly. Keeping it fresh. All right. 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 Pudavong Evans. And you can find her on Instagram at mostofmegansreads. 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. You got to take a look at those. Or you can go to our website at currentlyreadingpodcast.com. You can also follow the show at Currently Reading Podcast on Instagram or on YouTube, or email us at currentlyreadingpodcast at gmail.com. Yeah, if you want to actually see us do the show, watch us on YouTube. If you want more of this kind of content, we have so much more available to you. You can join us as a bookish friend on Patreon. For $5 a month, you get hours and hours and hundreds of hours of extra content. You get bookish community and you keep this show commercial free. You can also rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and shout us out on social media. Every one of those things helps us to find our perfect audience. Someone asked us, Katie, someone asked us, what is our perfect audience in the survey? Our perfect audience are people who just love to read and love to get great book recommendations and love to talk about the reading life. That's our perfect audience. Yeah, it's all of you. You're our perfect audience. We want more of you. That's what we want to find. Bookish friends are the best friends. And we want more of you. 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.