[00:00:00] MELANIE: Thank you for coming out and supporting independent bookstores and great authors and literature and keeping the culture in this mountain town vibrant.
ANNE: ANNE BOGEL: Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogel and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? Around here we take a personalized approach to the reading life and give you the information you need to choose your next read.
This week we have a timely episode for you in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Like so many people across the country and even around the world, I have such fondness for Asheville and the Blue Ridge Mountain area, and now they are desperately hurting in the wake of Hurricane Helene. We've been reading the news out of the area with our hearts in our throats and can barely process the degree of devastation they've experienced and are experiencing there.
[00:01:01] As I'm recording this, it's Wednesday, October 9th. Hurricane Milton is a Category 4 storm over the Gulf and is expected to make landfall tonight. I'm not sure what state the world is going to be in when it reaches your ears, but I'm very conscious of the moment in time which I'm recording this.
We've been thinking constantly of those affected and are seeking to help as we can from afar. It feels like nothing we can do can even touch the enormity of what those in Helene's wake are experiencing on the ground or those scrambling from Milton right now, but we are going to do what we can anyway.
And here's what that looks like today. I'm going to share fond memories of my very first visit to Asheville and the Blue Ridge Mountains, along with actual literary matchmaking audio of my first visit to Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville's downtown. Then I'll share a handful of my favorite North Carolina books.
We are also donating all proceeds from today's episode to two organizations. We're going to split it 50-50. And when I say all proceeds, that means the income we receive from advertising and the affiliate revenue we receive from your purchases through our bookshop and Amazon affiliate links.
[00:02:09] Those are available on our show notes page at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com or modernmrsdarcy.com, if that's how you navigate to our site. They both work.
The first organization is Beloved Asheville, a community-based organization that provides needed assistance to the underprivileged and underserved people of Asheville, and is doing so much in terms of hurricane relief right now.
The second is the Binc Foundation. That stands for Book Industry Charitable Foundation. And what they do is support bookstores everywhere when bad and often very expensive things happen, like the flooding going on now.
If you would like to make a donation yourself, that is great. We will share links to these two organizations. We chose them because they were highly recommended by many people that we talked to in the Asheville area. We'll share links to them in our show notes, but I'll share them with you now as well.
[00:03:02] The website for Beloved Asheville is belovedasheville.com. The link for Binc is bincfoundation.org. That is bincfoundation.org.
Now, I'd like to tell you, I mean, really, I'd like to invite you to come along on my first visit to Asheville in November 2017. And yes, I didn't get there until, oh gosh, my late 30s, my early 40s, but I had always wanted to go and I'm not sure I can even tell you why.
I read about it in Outside Magazine. I talked to friends, travel mags. I probably heard book lovers tell me over and over again, you've got to get to Malaprop's. And I really wanted to.
So it happened like this. My first book, Reading People, came out that September, and in the late summer leading up to the release, I sent Malaprop's a mostly cold email. An author friend of mine had given me the email address of their events person, who at the time was Melanie McNair, who was a gem and now working at Brooklyn Center for Fiction.
[00:04:07] But I sent her an email that said, "Would you please, please, please host me at your store," and I made a little pitch. We ended up scheduling an event for the first weekend in November. It was a peak leaf. It was gorgeous. The weather was wonderful. I think I had a little bit of a cold situation going on. Post-COVID, I wouldn't even have traveled. But then they were so nice in getting me tea and everything. It was magical.
This was my first time visiting Asheville and Malaprop's. My whole family went for the weekend, and both were magical. We were blown away by everything the area had to offer, and we immediately started scheming and dreaming about when we could go back. And we've been back many times since, both for book events and just because we needed to get back to that lovely little mountain town and area.
I love Malaprop's. It's such a great bookstore and cafe in the heart of a vibrant downtown area. And the book scene, it was thriving then. It's going to be thriving again soon.
[00:05:11] I had been itching to visit Malaprop's for years and getting to finally experience Malaprop's. And many of you know the feeling of just dreaming of going to a bookstore that you can't wait to step in in your actual physical self, and then what it's like to finally have that happen. An amazing location, wide variety of staff picks, beautiful well-stocked shelves for browsing, tons of fun literary gifts.
At the time, I remember being struck by the biggest blind date with a book section I had ever seen. We were there on a Saturday night, and the place was packed with enthusiastic and also just super friendly and kind readers. And it was such a joy to be in a room of readers so excited to talk about books and reading.
Then I got to talk about Reading People, and Melanie McNair was game to do this really fun thing for me in her role then as director of marketing and events and also assistant manager of the store.
[00:06:04] If you were there that night, here's what you would have experienced. You would have heard Melanie getting up front and introducing me. You would have heard me talking about my book, Reading People: How Seeing the World through the Lens of Personality Changes Everything. And then you would have heard Melanie and me do this fun mini-matchmaking session with the audience there.
I am sorry to say that I remember absolutely nothing, like not a word of what I said about Reading People, and we don't know where that audio is. I don't. It is lost to time. If you were there and you remember, please tell me.
But what you will hear today is the literary matchmaking portion of the evening, and I'm about to share that audio with you. Melanie joins me, and we both... Well, here's what we do. As readers arrived that evening, we handed them a little slip of paper that asked them to... I mean, it was kind of like, Hey, if you were a guest on What Should I Read Next?, this is what you would tell us. Three books you love, one book you don't, and what you're reading now."
[00:07:11] And we said, "If you would like Melanie and me to maybe draw your piece of paper from the stack and make personalized recommendations to you based on what we see, then fill out this little piece of paper." So people did, and they passed them back to us.
And when Melanie rejoins me after I talk about Reading People, and we sit down on our stools in the front of the shop with all the readers in front of us in the audience, we have this stack of slips of paper between us that has so many guests, books they love, books they don't, and what they're reading now.
But first, I was so happy that Melanie was game to do what I asked. She came prepared with her own three favorite titles, and you will hear what those are in just a minute.
It was really fun to revisit this audio, oh gosh, seven years after my first visit to Asheville, and just remember what the whole weekend was like, what that evening was like, and to hear how my perspective on some of these books has evolved. And also to realize how many of these readers I met for the first time that evening, and I still hear from them in our community all the time, and that was such a gift.
[00:08:27] Now, without further ado, let's go back to Malaprop's circa 2017.
MELANIE: Welcome to Malaprop's Bookstore and Cafe, Asheville's independent bookstore for 35 years. We're still here because of you. Thank you for coming out and supporting independent bookstores and great authors and literature and keeping the culture in this mountain town vibrant.
Without further ado, you all know her because you got here at five o'clock, which is almost unheard of on a Saturday night in Asheville. But she's a tastemaker, she's a blogger, she's a writer, she's a mother of four. She's incredible. Please welcome Anne Bogel.
ANNE: I'm glad you're here tonight. Are you ready to do some literary matchmaking?
[00:09:22] MELANIE: I brought three books that I love that I want to tell you about. This one... well, I'll start with fiction. You might have heard about this book because it's shortlisted for the National Book Award. It's by Jesmyn Ward. It's called Sing, Unburied, Sing. It's a beautifully written book. Every sentence is a beautiful song.
It's about some really difficult subject matter, but she manages to tell a story about difficult things in a way that leaves you feeling like you just encountered a work of art, and it doesn't leave you feeling depressed or devastated. So she transforms really hard things into art.
ANNE: I like it.
MELANIE: Have you read it?
ANNE: Well, I have. I started it... It was a couple months ago, and there's a bookmark in it about here. Okay, you heard it here first. I have a podcast guest on Tuesday who's going to tell you that she reads 10 books at once. I would like to say I'm still, present tense, reading it, but it's true that the bookmark has not moved since about September 15th.
[00:10:25] MELANIE: I have a lot of that on my bedside table.
ANNE: It's a hazard. And sometimes I just forget. I pile things on top of it. I mean, does anybody have a scary nightstand right now? Coffee table, office desk, wherever you keep your books? Yes. Okay. You are among friends.
MELANIE: It's my favorite problem is having too many books to read. It's the best problem to have. Another one that I loved so much this year is Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You, was a huge hit. So I was curious to see if she'd be able to follow it up well. And she really does.
This is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, which is one of the first planned communities in the United States. It's intentionally racially diverse, great schools, some of the best schools in the country. And yet there's still stuff underneath that gleaming surface.
She manages to pull in the story of three different families in a way that's so compelling. This is one of those books where I stayed up all night reading, even though I knew I really needed sleep.
[00:11:30] The kids in the family... there's a bunch of kids in the story. It could almost be a young adult novel. If it were somebody else who weren't Celeste Ng who published it, they may have pushed her to make it a young adult novel. Because she gets the voices of teenagers, so she gets it done so well.
She manages also to tell stories about people in a way that avoids judging people for maybe some of the parts that lesser writers might be a little bit more condemning of.
ANNE: I would like to say that this is another book that had a bookmark in it about right there for two months. And then I took it on an airplane with me, and I didn't put it... This was with my husband's family reunion. So that was the setup, and all I wanted to do was read. And I had to assure him, "No, it's the book. It's the book. It's not your family. I love your family." I thought that was so well done.
MELANIE: The last one is one that surprised me. It's a self-help book. It's by Jen Sincero. She came here and did an event, and I'd never really heard of her writing before. But her first book was called You Are a Badass, and this is the follow-up, which is You Are a Badass at Making Money.
[00:12:36] Her voice, her writing voice, and her speaking voice is so compelling. It's so funny. She's very entertaining, and she manages to educate. I mean, it's kind of like all the same stuff with the self-help stuff. It's like you have to do these things and think this way, and you will manifest everything into your life.
But she does it in a way that's highly entertaining, and also rings true because she relates it to her own stories. And because when she says she got interested in this stuff when she was 40, and she had tumbleweeds blowing through her bank account, and she was living in a converted garage, and she'd already published a couple of books, and she thought, I think I can do better. And so she went on this journey to do better, and now, trust me, she's doing much, much better.
And she's helping a lot of other people. So we have a bunch of signed copies of this because she was here. And it's just really fun. Even if you don't take her advice, it's a really fun read.
[00:13:33] ANNE: I would not have picked that one up because it's... yeah, I don't know. Do you like a good business-y book?
MELANIE: No. I don't read business-y books, but I love this book.
ANNE: So don't add more to your pile is what you're saying?
MELANIE: I would add her books to your pile, but I don't... I actually have some other books in my pile that I may not ever read. It's one of those things where it's like, if you need to clean the house, and you go out, and you buy cleaning products instead, that's the business books. That's what I do. It's like, I know I need to deal with these things, so I'm going to get some books. And then that's as far as I get a lot of times.
ANNE: So what I'm seeing here is, obviously, you like the literary fiction.
MELANIE: Yes.
ANNE: But you also like a strong voice.
MELANIE: I love a strong voice, yes.
ANNE: Strong voice, well-turned phrase, good stories well told. Okay. You have any ideas for Melanie?
MAN: The Resurrection of Joan Ashby.
ANNE: You know, it's funny, I have a book at home... I have that book at home with a bookmark. I'm not even kidding. It's on page 40. Have you read that?
[00:14:32] MELANIE: No, but it's in my pile to read. It's a little chunky, and so I'm like, okay. There's... yeah. I love really long books too, but I have so many books that I want to read that sometimes I put those off and think, Oh, I'll do that when I have a lot of time, which, of course, I never will.
ANNE: Okay. That was The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, which I think I saw on the front table.
MELANIE: Yes, yes, it's right up there.
ANNE: Okay. Any other recommendations for Melanie? I'm wondering if you've read The End We Start From.
MELANIE: No. Who wrote that?
ANNE: Okay, I don't know. It's on the table. It was on the table over there earlier. It's a Megan somebody. Megan Hunter. Okay. Interesting story. Very strong voice. It's more like novella length. You could get through it really fast. And apparently Indie Next is on it, which sounds like it would cluster well with yours.
[00:15:27] Okay, who had a hand up?
WOMAN: How about No One Is Coming to Save Us?
ANNE: Ooh, No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts? Okay.
MELANIE: She was here this year, by the way.
ANNE: The Gatsby retold in the South? I hope so.
MELANIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ANNE: I like it. Awesome. Okay, so here's what we're going to do, Melanie, if you're game.
MELANIE: Game.
ANNE: We've got your stack. We're going to take the top few, and one of us will make a book recommendation, or both if we're feeling ambitious.
MELANIE: Okay.
ANNE: Okay. I just want you all to know, those of you who wrote on the top "do not call on me publicly", I saw that, and I will not. So no need to hold your breath. That isn't happening. Okay, but if your name's here, I'm going to say hi, but only your first name.
Okay, so this is from Amber. She loves A Midwife's Tale, Ballard, Based on Her Diary, and... wait a second. Are there four books here? Where's Amber? Are there four books here, or can I just not understand this first title?
[00:16:34] AMBER: A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary.
ANNE: Ohhhh.
AMBER: [inaudible 00:16:39]
ANNE: That's a new one to me, can you tell? Okay, her first love, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Second is Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing. The third is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
Okay, one book you hate is She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb. Would you care to expound, because I have a bookmark in that one at home. No, I really do. I started the other night, because I loved Wally Lamb's, I know this much is true. So much. But She's Come Undone is-
AMBER: I could not even tell you this. I read it years ago, and all I remember is I got up in the middle of reading it from my bed and went and threw it in the garbage.
ANNE: Okay, if you didn't hear that, she got up in the middle of reading it from her bed and threw it in the garbage.
AMBER: So, I can't even tell you what it was that made me so angry, but I went out to my garage, opened it, and threw it hard in the garbage. I don't even know. I can't remember...
[00:17:45] ANNE: Well, I'm on about page 200, and it's grim. Something really bad happens at page 100, and then something really bad just happened at page 200. And I went to look to Goodreads to be like, "Okay, people told me to read this, and what were they thinking?" I probably Instagrammed this book, and now, did people read it because of me?
Reading now To The Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey, and Crossing the Safety is her all-time favorite. But it's reviewed a lot, so she didn't choose it on the podcast, or she didn't choose it on her forum, because mm-hmm, yeah.
AMBER: But that's why I started listening to your podcast. I just ran across it, and I happened to listen to one... I think it was Episode 33 maybe, and you talked about how much you loved it. I'm like, okay, she has me for life, because she loves Crossing the Safety.
ANNE: So that is a testament to the past. If somebody loves the same book that you love, yeah, you should hang out.
MELANIE: Definitely, yeah.
[00:18:40] ANNE: All right, Melanie. I'm wondering if you've read this book, These Is My Words by...
MELANIE: Yeah.
ANNE: Did you like it? Am I in the right space?
AMBER: Yeah. Anything by Erik Larson, too. I really do love the... Oh, I have a question. Can I ask a question about literary fiction?
ANNE: Yeah.
AMBER: There's historical fiction as a genre, right? But there's historical fiction that is fiction that's just set in history. But what is the genre that's actually based on a true event? Is that still just considered historical fiction, or is there a difference?
MELANIE: That's just called really well-done nonfiction.
WOMAN: Okay, I'm always wondering if there is... And I really enjoy... It was based on a real... Like, Shackleton, anything by Erik Larson, I didn't know if they differentiated.
MELANIE: I have an author that you might want to check out. Her name is Denise Kiernan. She lives here in town. She wrote a book called Girls of Atomic City, which is a history of the women who worked, unbeknownst to them, on the A-bomb.
[00:19:44] And she just finished and published a book called The Last Castle, which is about the Vanderbilt family and the building of the Biltmore House. So she has a background in journalism, and then she's a researcher, so she's done thorough research on all these things, and the story really comes alive, like it might in an Erik Larson book.
ANNE: All right, so that question was, what do you call a book that tells of a historical event and is not fiction? Did I recap that right? So Melanie says really well-done nonfiction. Sometimes you'll hear that called narrative nonfiction, if people call it the kind of story that reads... the kind of nonfiction that reads like a novel.
Okay, I have two books for you. I think I'm piggybacking off Denise Kiernan, who ran my panel at [inaudible 00:20:30] She was such a sweetheart. And now I wish I'd read her book, The Last Castle, already, since we're going to Biltmore while we're here.
Okay, Code Girls by Liza Mundy, I think, is... The Girls of Atomic City made me think of that, because this is about the women who did know that they had been recruited to break codes in World War II. And they were recruited from colleges with a survey that said, "Do you like crossword puzzles, and are you engaged to be married?" So one would put you in the yes pile, and the other would be an automatic no, and they went from there.
[00:21:05] And then I'm also wondering... this one doesn't come out till, I think, February, but it's called As Bright as Heaven by Susan Meissner. It's historical fiction, but there's very little historical fiction on the "Spanish flu." And we're coming up on a big anniversary of that pandemic. She has managed to tell a story of that time in a way that is engaging and doesn't make you want to cry or go douse yourself in the germaphobe stuff. So both good things.
All right, next up. I've seen this name in print before. Is it Alisa or Alyssa? Alyssa. You never know when you're seeing it in... Okay. Alyssa loves The Girl Who Saved The King Of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson, I'll Have What She's Having by Erin Carlson. So is that good? Because I keep thinking I'm going to pick that up.
ALYSSA: I think I finished it in less than a week.
ANNE: Okay. So you finished it in less than a week. And any Inspector Gamache Book by Louise Penny.
[00:22:04] MELANIE: She was here last year.
ANNE: Ohhh. All right. One book you hate, The Wonder by Emma Donoghue, but she liked Room, and now reading Stella by Starlight and Silence, a book I keep meaning to finish. Okay.
MELANIE: I stopped reading The Wonder too, I admit.
ANNE: I thought about it. What didn't you like about it?
MELANIE: It was claustrophobic. I mean, it was meant to be. But that's the thing. Sometimes a writer does something and they do it so well that you want to throw it in the trash can or you just stop reading it.
ALYSSA: I think it's that way. It's still at the bottom of the pile on the nightstand.
ANNE: That happens. All right, Melanie, what do you think?
MELANIE: I'm a big fan of Elizabeth George, and I wonder if you've read any of her stuff. It's also, like Louise Penny, a thinking person's crime novel that has a lot of really great character development.
[00:23:04] ANNE: I keep meaning to read her. I mean, for exactly those reasons. Have you read any Deborah Crombie?
ALYSSA: No.
ANNE: Okay. I also started reading her because it's possible I mentioned once that I was impatiently waiting for the next Louise Penny novel to come out, which is a circumstance I always find myself in if it's not the middle of August when she just had a new book out, and someone recommended that I start with... the first novel is called A Share in Death, which is like a British timeshare. Apparently, the Brits have timeshares, but they're classier than ours over here.
So they're British procedurals featuring two characters that you follow all the way through, so you see their ups and downs and their community ups and downs, as well as what happens within Scotland Yard, which is really fun.
I'm also wondering about a book that has gotten a little bit popular, but A Man Called Eva, just because of the quirky voice. Have you read that?
ALYSSA: It just got out of loan to me from OverDrive.
ANNE: This is a sign. Well, if you read I'll Have What She's Having... I mean, I know it's shorter, but Eva is not long, and he's good. Yeah.
[00:24:11] All right. Jill, you are next. What I really want to know is, are you a podcast listener, and have you been, or do we just have really similar taste? September by Rosamunde Pilcher, In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden, and the Starbridge series by Susan Howatch.
JILL: Yes, I am. I read what it said on the paper because it's cut, so.
ANNE: Oh, sorry about that.
JILL: I thought I was just immediately filling in the blanks.
ANNE: You did perfect. You did perfect. Okay. Do you know those books?
MELANIE: I don't.
ANNE: Okay, because I feel like those are niche. Those are niche books. September is a big, sweeping, thick family saga with a terrible cover, but it's not its fault.
In This House of Brede is a true story about a woman who quits her fancy job. It's not true? It's not true? Well, either way, it's apparently a compelling story. Compelling enough, props to Rumer Godden, about a woman with a fancy legal job in Britain in the 60s who gives it all up to become a nun.
[00:25:18] And then The Starbridge Series is this series about the Church of England that lots of people have picked up because they think, "Oh, I want to read religious fiction," and then find out that the Church of England has, or at least Susan Howatch's version, has a lot more, oh, sex and intrigue than they expected from religious fiction.
Okay. So whether that goes on your to-be-read list or your never-touch-it list, now you know. Okay.
One book you hate. Reading Lolita in Tehran. The only book you couldn't finish? The only one?
JILL: I'm an ESTJ, so I haven't finished it.
ANNE: You're speaking my language. And you just finished the new Jan Karon and are reading number nine of Louise Penny. So I guess this is on me, huh?
MELANIE: It's all you, yes.
ANNE: All right. So Mitford, for sure. You're happy and... yeah. See, that's what I would recommend you.
[00:26:16] All right, readers. We need a story about messy but ultimately loving families, downward mobility for the greater good, and sex and intrigue. And bishops.
MELANIE: It's not set in England, but it's set in the South, and it's called The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson.
MAN: Oh, that's great.
MELANIE: It's funny. It's got religion in it. It's got really beautiful family dynamics. It's funny. I have to say that again because Joshilyn Jackson is so funny. It's got wrestling with faith. It's got wrestling between an old idea of the South and what the South is now.
She really takes her readers gently through a learning process of accepting people who are slow to change and allowing them to be slow to change, which I think is really hard in our society now where everybody's, I'm this, and if you're not this, then you're wrong. I think she does a really beautiful job at that. And it's a great, fun read.
[00:27:35] ANNE: I love that, and I love her. And read the acknowledgments if you pick up that book because I think that tells you a lot about where she's coming from.
I'm also wondering about Dorothy Sayers. Have you read any Dorothy Sayers, Jill? Because it's got that British thing you have going, and it's snappy. It's funny. It's thoughtful, but it's also very sharp. And I can see that in your picks.
Less so in September, the sharp thing but also, maybe Maggie O'Farrell, maybe Instructions for a Heatwave. It's a story about a British family that gets a little bit upended and has to find its way again. It's not as long as September, but it's got some Rosamond Pilcher strands. Do you all know that... How many books does Louise Penny have out now? Are we on 13 or 14?
MELANIE: I think we're on 15, aren't we?
ANNE: I've only just found out that she puts a licorice pipe in every book, and also what they are. I had no idea. All right. Kathy loves The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, The Women in the Castle, and Himself. Have you read those?
MELANIE: No.
[00:28:36] ANNE: Really? Okay. So those are all fairly new picks literary fiction. You hated The Girl on the Train, and now you're reading Before I Go to Sleep.
MELANIE: The Girl... It's violent. It is really violent.
KATHY: There's no one to like.
WOMAN: Yeah, that's true.
ANNE: Have you read Special Topics in Calamity Physics? Is there someone to like in that book?
MELANIE: Yeah, I like the protagonist. I thought the protagonist was great.
ANNE: I think so.
MELANIE: Blue, right?
ANNE: Kind of. Yes. Good job. You'd think I could remember a name like Blue. Okay. So I'm wondering about Special Topics. It's a story about a girl who finds herself in a situation that she slowly begins to discover is not what it seemed to be.
And it's got... The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley has a plucky protagonist telling you her story, figuring out her father, which is what we have in Special Topics. And then Himself is another quirky read.
[00:29:40] And Special Topics doesn't have that magical element that Himself kind of hinted at to me, but I think maybe. And Before I Go to Sleep tells me you're okay to go a little dark and creepy, which was important in that decision.
Are you all liking this or is this really boring to listen to? Okay. Because usually I talk to an empty room and you're so quiet. It sounds like an empty room.
All right. We're going to do one more and then we're going to do a Q&A. Okay. So I can tell... this is Linda's. Linda, where are you?
LINDA: Hi.
ANNE: I've seen your name in my inbox. It's great to see you in person. So it's no surprise... Oh, I can tell you care because look, she wrote this on a piece of paper that was not our form. Okay.
So now I'm not surprised to hear The Resurrection of Joan Ashby mentioned again, My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent, which I keep thinking of reading, and The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman.
[00:30:40] Dislike a book I've been thinking of reading, if you want to save me some time, See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt, and currently reading the very weird, very new Fredrik Backman novella, The Deal of a Lifetime.
LINDA: [inaudible 00:30:57]
ANNE: So that says a lot about your reading life. All right, Melanie, what do you think?
MELANIE: Well, I'm going to stick with these literary recommendations. Also there's a book that comes out in December this year called The Three Faces of Eve by a Turkish author. I'm going to say her name wrong. Elif Shafak.
She's done a TED Talk. She wrote The Bastards of Istanbul and The Magician's Apprentice. Three Faces of Eve is the first one that I've read of hers. And it's literary, and it's topical, and it's surprising, and it's great storytelling.
ANNE: So this is all contemporary literary fiction. Are you able to characterize what it is about these stories that you love in a nutshell? Or do you know it when you see it?
[00:31:44] LINDA: No, I think, especially The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, I like the development of a modern woman and her evolution as she's obviously getting into a different age and time of her life, and how she transforms herself. And maybe that might...
ANNE: Okay, so Linda says she especially likes to see the transformation of a female character.
LINDA: Well, as going to The Girl on the Train, one of my complaints about that book is the fact that I think too many authors fall back on the drunken woman syndrome, where I dislike seeing a gal who's always drunk and misunderstood.
ANNE: Because it's easy... Okay, so Linda also doesn't like the drunken woman syndrome that you see authors turn to because it's easy. Is that what you're saying?
LINDA: Mm-hmm.
ANNE: Okay. So because it's hard to character, it's hard to give them creepy motives without turning to something like an addiction, so they get an addiction. Okay, have you read Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk?
LINDA: Yes, I have.
[00:32:50] ANNE: Was that exactly what you're... No? No?
LINDA: I made it in.
ANNE: Because you didn't like her?
LINDA: I didn't like her, and I just thought... I mean, she just seems to walk around the block a lot. It just wasn't a compelling story, actually, for me. It just wasn't.
ANNE: Did you read the whole thing? Okay, because at about the 80% mark, I thought, whoa, you've been holding something back on us. I'm not sure how I feel about what I just read. All right, a female transformation story.
LINDA: I just like being strong females.
MELANIE: I keep having the idea that I should bring up Clara, who's in the back, and she's saying no. I feel like she could answer this question so well. My colleagues are like... we all share a brain when we work together. It's like the hive mind. It's like, oh.
Whenever people ask questions and I'm like, "I'm not really sure, but I know this person could," but she says no. But I'm going to say The Essex Serpent. I don't know if it relates, but she's nodding her head yes. And she's been hand selling dozens and dozens of this. Have you read it?
[00:33:55] LINDA: No, I haven't.
MELANIE: So I'm going to recommend that based on Clara's love for it.
LINDA: Thank you, Clara.
ANNE: It's a beautiful book. The cover... you have it?
LINDA: Yes, I have it. I have it ready.
ANNE: Okay. I'm not sure how I feel about it. If you liked... who wrote The Miniaturist? The tone felt very similar to me, but that's not going to help you any.
I'm also wondering about... this is a little bit of a change of pace, but I'm wondering about Deanna Raybourn. Do you like heroines who are a little bit cheeky? So these are a little more lighthearted. I mean, if like women stabbing people with hat pins is lighthearted.
She's another Southern author. She's in Williamsburg, but she doesn't write Southern fiction. She writes more British fiction of Victorian heroines who she's kind of turning the tables on the typical like quiet, demure, repressed Victorian and instead, turning them into the... what does she call them? It's something like the petticoat brigade, giving them spunk and fire and personalities and missions and motives, and then sending them off in the world to do greater things than were expected or tolerated by women of that era.
[00:35:16] The first is A Curious Beginning. It's a series. They're not as literary as the books you've chosen here, but I feel like what you've chosen here is all on the shelves and you know it when you see it. So I'm trying to point you to something you might not find otherwise. And if you read it, I would love to hear.
All right. That was fun. We do this every week on the podcast.
If you ever want to be on the show, we do have more submissions than we can handle, but we still really in our hearts want to talk to everybody every week. But that form is at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/guest.
We did make you write things on paper, but we're not going to submit you unless you actually want to do that because some people don't. But I can assure you that the recording session looks like this, talking about books, except without the audience. So it really is like talking to your book friend over coffee.
So on that note, that was fun. Thank you for letting us play that live without our editing safety net. Thank you, Melanie.
[00:36:13] Oh, gosh. I enjoyed that so much. I hope you did too. And I'm so curious how this hit your ears with the time lap. It's funny to hear about Little Fires Everywhere being new and Sing Unburied Sing being newly shortlisted for a National Book Award.
I was so struck by some of the things that don't change. Like right now I have a very scary nightstand. Melanie said her favorite problem is having too many books to read. That hasn't changed for me. I don't know if that's changed for her, but I kind of doubt it.
And it was so interesting to hear reader Amber loving A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary. And you just heard me say in the audio, "Oh, that book is new to me." But that book is now one I'm very familiar with because Ariel Lawhon, who was actually on the podcast about this time last year, wrote a book in which she drew on A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard to write her novel, The Frozen River. I've heard a lot about that book since then.
[00:37:15] Melanie recommends local author Denise Kiernan, and by now I've read, I think, everything she's read. Her book The Last Castle had just come out, and now I think of that one as being around for forever.
You hear Melanie and I discuss the forthcoming book As Bright As Heaven by Susan Meissner. And I would change my epidemic terminology a little bit, but I said that we are coming up on a big anniversary of the 1918 flu pandemic, and we have been through a pandemic since then.
Also, I noticed that I said, I keep meaning to read the book Silence. And you know what? I still keep meaning to read the book Silence.
Melanie also said wonderful things about Alif Shafak's The Three Faces of Eve, and she's about to be on the podcast. So that felt like a fun full circle moment. I can't wait to share that with you.
Now, I told you I'd share some of my favorite North Carolina picks. Let's start with David Joy. My husband, Will, is a David Joy completist, and he's the one who persuaded me to give his writing a try, and I'm so glad he did.
[00:38:22] His most recent book is the one we're going to talk about. It came out in 2023. It was a Summer Reading Guide pick that year, and it's called Those We Thought We Knew. It is also responsible for one of my most memorable reading experiences, maybe ever, because I read it on a spring break trip with my family, ooh, in the course of either one day or one day and a night. But I read it in a cabin by this rushing, roaring creek in the Waynesville, North Carolina area, which is about 45 minutes from Asheville.
I didn't know this at the time, but Those We Thought We Knew is set in that very area. I remember turning the pages of the book and realizing the two sheriffs in the adjoining county are having this deep discussion at this diner called the Buttered Biscuit, and we have plans to go there the next morning.
And so we went to our breakfast. I was looking around going, who's here and are they discussing a murder? I would like to say confidently they were not, but you know, who knows?
[00:39:22] Will wrote the blurb for the Summer Reading Guide that year, and he described it like this. He said, "One summer in a small North Carolina town, two outsiders arrive, each with the aim of disrupting the status quo. One is a KKK member laying low after crossing the law in Mississippi, the other, a Black college-aged artist-activist, spending the summer with her grandma. Following vandalism, intimidation, and even a murder, some in town seek to restore a sense of peace, while others ask if there ever was any. A riveting mystery with a particular sense of place that asks more global questions about human nature and what it means to live in community."
Will called this Joy's best yet. Or actually, maybe that was me, because I felt this way.
And if you'd like those four fans of pics in the Summer Reading Guide, I said that this book was for fans of William Kent Krueger's Iron Lake and Ausma Zehanat Khan's The Unquiet Dead.
David Joy lives in the area very affected by Helene, and I don't load Twitter these days, but I loaded his Twitter account to track what was happening in the area, even though he was in Paris at the time. He tells you about it on his Twitter account.
[00:40:29] Next. One of my favorite authors is Sarah Addison Allen, and my favorite book of hers is Garden Spells that came out back in 2007. We read this in Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club in January 2019.
Garden Spells is the book that hooked me on Sarah Addison Allen's writing. And I don't know if she has actually said this or if I just got it into my head that her books are set in a town that either is or feels a lot like, in my heart, in my head, it's Asheville.
So in this book, Allen combines the idea of a woman getting a fresh start in a small town, plus a little romance and a little magic. I found it to be such a page-turner and one that has held up to multiple rereadings for me.
This is about the Waverly family. Like all the women in her family, Claire Waverly has this unique magic. Her magic is that she uses edible flowers to make foods that affect the eater in what she knows are curious ways.
[00:41:35] So at the beginning of the book, we find out that years ago, Claire's sister fled town and renounced her Waverly gift. But when she comes back to town and to see her sister again, she discovers her own sort of magic is still there waiting for her.
The romance in this book feels a little bit, I don't know, sentimental. The magic is obviously impossible. No apple tree is going to throw apples at you. But the combination of all the elements here is just perfection for me.
A few of the love scenes are a little racy. And if you're not down with supernatural food or magical apple tree, maybe it's not for you. But I love it when readers call a book a wonderful surprise. And I have heard that over and over about Sarah Addison Allen's work and Garden Spells in particular.
Next, I have a book that's actually set on the Carolina coast, but its author Wiley Cash teaches at UNC Asheville and has a strong connection to the area.
[00:42:37] And we said North Carolina, so let's talk about When Ghosts Come Home out in 2021. We had the pleasure of talking to Wiley about this book in October 2023 in the Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club, and he blew us away.
At the time when this one came out, this latest struck me as a bit of a departure for him. And I loved it. I enjoyed his previous works, but mm, I loved this one.
The story unfolds over just four days and it's set in Oak Island, North Carolina, 1984. I was hooked from the very first scene. It happens when a plane crashes in the middle of the night and the local sheriff is jolted awake by the noise.
So he heads to the small airport to investigate and discovers the plane crashed on the tarmac. It's been stripped bare and there's a dead body nearby. As the sheriff begins to probe, he uncovers old grievances in this small town, plus rawer, fresher crises.
[00:43:44] I listened to the audio version the first time when I read it because I always reread our Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club selections. J.D. Jackson narrates the audio and it was superb. Also, the sheriff and his family have their own mix of familial crises going on, and those are written so well.
This is a quiet-ish, slow-burning literary thriller. And let me tell you, I think one of the reasons I love this book is I could talk for hours about the ending and I still think about it all the time, even though at this point I've read it four years ago. That's a compliment.
Next, a book that I've been thinking about so much lately. I don't know if it's because I'm ready to revisit her contemplative, heartfelt prose. I don't know if, without even realizing it... no, I don't think it could have been the hurricane because we didn't know it was going to hammer North Carolina in this way. Whatever the reason, there was never a bad time for me to be thinking of Gail Godwin's 1999 book, Evensong.
[00:44:51] The question that the protagonist faces at the opening of this book is what happens when we get the thing we desire most in life, only to find that it might destroy us. I'd love a good existential question to anchor a novel.
This one is set in the mountains of North Carolina, and Godwin takes a hard look at marriage and vocation and calling through the eyes of her protagonist, Margaret, who is a 30-something Episcopal priest who is forced to finally confront matters when three unexpected and truly unwelcome guests arrive in her sleepy North Carolina mountain town called High Balsam in the book.
This was first published in 1999, and it definitely feels like a book of its time because discussion about the millennium is all over it, and also perhaps because it's very much of its time.
[00:45:45] It feels... well, we'll see if it's timeless. I haven't revisited it in a few years, but I'm going to after talking to you about it.
If you love it, go back and read its predecessor, Father Melancholy's Daughter. But you do not need to read those books in order.
All right, now I am willing to bet something big that the greatest percentage of you, our listeners, have read this book. Emily Henry's Book Lovers is set in a community very close to Asheville, North Carolina, a fictional community, but that's where Emily has located it in time.
It's a readerly enemies-to-lover romance that has small-town charm, big Roy Kent energy, and so much banter. I'm a banter lover. And if you are too, you may enjoy this book. It's also set in the world of publishing.
There's a successful literary agent named Nora whose colleagues call her The Shark, but she doesn't care because she's mostly at peace with who she is, plus she's proud of fighting for her clients. But she knows that same fierceness has always spelled disaster for her love life.
[00:46:50] But Nora has a soft spot, and that is her baby sister Libby. So when Libby persuades her to take a sister's trip to the too-cute-to-be-real little hamlet of Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, Nora is gobble-smacked to encounter her professional nemesis Charlie, who is famously grumpy and also inconveniently handsome.
He's an editor who despises Nora, and that has made things tougher professionally at times. But it's an Emily Henry novel, enemies to lovers, so you know that soon the sparks are flying, and Nora has to keep reminding herself that she hates his guts, and... it's a good time.
Plus, a moving exploration of family, ambition, love, and belonging. It's pretty steamy too, so I don't know if that's a perk or a con for you, but now you know.
And then we have a book that I discovered by accident, Author Randall Kenan, and the one on my shelf is If I Had Two Wings.
[00:47:53] This came to me when the kind people at Bookmarks NC in Winston-Salem, North Carolina sent me a thank-you gift for something, and they accidentally included a paperback that I hadn't ordered, that they didn't mean to send to me. And they said, "Anne, you've never read Randall Kenan. You have to read Randall Kenan. Keep that book and read that book." And the book they sent was his short story collection If I Had Two Things.
And I want to tell you what the publisher says about this book. "Shot through with humor and seasoned by inventiveness and maturity, Kenan riffs on appetites of all kinds, on the eerie persistence of history, and on unstoppable lovers and unexpected salvations.
If I Had Two Wings is a rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit. Kenan's prose is nothing short of wondrous."
I haven't yet read every title in this collection, but we're doing lots of short stories in Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club and on the podcast in November, so I look forward to finishing it soon.
[00:48:55] Readers, I hope you enjoyed this special episode. Check out the full list of titles we talked about at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com. Remember, all proceeds from this episode are being divided evenly between Beloved Asheville – you can make a donation if you'd like at belovedasheville.com – and BINC, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation that helps bookstores everywhere in the wake of disaster. Their website is bincfoundation.org.
Make sure you are following along in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by Will Bogel, Holly Wielkoszewski, and Studio D Podcast Production. Thank you to the City of Asheville and Malaprop's Bookstore for providing the hospitality that made this episode possible. Thanks to our 2017 event there, we are sending all the love your way and to all those in your region.
Readers, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading." Happy reading, everyone.
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