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? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read. Every week we'll talk all things books and reading and do a little literary matchmaking with one guest.
Readers, it's been a busy and also fun time here at What Should I Read Next? HQ, where we've been working hard behind the scenes to prepare your 2025 Summer Reading Guide. Summer reading season kicks off with our guide, it'll be our 14th annual, and it continues with all sorts of bonus reading adventures in Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club and in our Patreon community.
[00:01:02] Order your Summer Reading Guide and reserve your spot for our live unboxing at modernmrsdarcy.com/srg for Summer Reading Guide. That's modernmrsdarcy.com/srg.
Readers, if you are feeling burned out right now, you are not alone. In our team meeting last week, we talked about the fact that things are hard right now. Somebody admitted, it may or may not have been me, to spacing out on something, and one team member reassured us all by saying, "Hey, it's 2025. We are doing the best we can."
That space we're living in is why this feels like a great time to revisit a favorite past episode from another time not so long ago when we were feeling burned out.
Today we'll hear my May 2021 conversation with journalist Anne Helen Petersen, which originally aired back then as Episode 284. Anne Helen Petersen writes the weekly email newsletter Culture Study. I am happy to be a paid subscriber to that one, and she knows a lot about burnout because she literally wrote a book about it.
[00:02:09] In our conversation today, we discuss how we've collectively experienced the burnout associated with the global pandemic and seen its effects in our reading lives. While this topic was definitely timely in May 2021, it continues to feel on point for right now.
In her everyday work, Anne highlights people's stories and illuminates big-picture ideas around society, culture, and modern living.
In today's episode, she shares her personal experience with reading during a grueling season. Also, advice and hope for readers who feel stuck in burnout and backlist favorites from her own bookshelves. No matter how your reading life has evolved over the last few years, or even if it hasn't, I think you'll find comfort and insight in today's episode.
Now let's get to it.
Anne Helen, welcome to the show.
ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: Oh, I am so happy to be here.
ANNE: And you know, I have been having conversations with you in my head and via mutual friends for a long time, and it's a pleasure to actually have you here in person on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
[00:03:05] ANNE HELEN: You know, there's nothing I want to talk about more than reading during the last year. It's just so complicated in my brain about why I've been able to at different points and haven't been able to. I love talking to people about it. So I can't wait.
ANNE: Well, I'm glad to hear it. And I'm really excited to dig into this for our readers. We often serve as public book people as the confessional for people just needing to say, this is the thing I'm experiencing. Like, is that okay in this past year? No matter what they're experiencing, it's normal. It's happening to other people too.
And today I'm really interested in just talking about that openly with you and with our listeners, but also digging into the reasons why. But first, let's talk about why you're the person who's so great to have this conversation with. Like many of our listeners, the first book I read by you after following you as a journalist for many years was Burnout, which I read last summer before it came out.
[00:04:00] It was wonderfully timed coming out in September. I really liked the way you integrated the pandemic into the book, which I imagine you did at the very last minute and said, these things have been going on for a long time — like this is why millennial specifically, I'm a touch older, but related to everything in the pages — more than I would have liked. And felt like you also really put words to experiencing, but had just been fuzzy and inarticulated until then. And I found that really affirming.
You've written about burnout. Americans have experienced an increasing intensity over the years, and now we're in the middle of a pandemic. So you wrote the book. I'd love to hear, how have you experienced that since the pandemic began?
ANNE HELEN: Well, it's really interesting because I wrote about burnout for the first time in January 2019, articulating what burnout is and what it was in my life. Like it was actually a very therapeutic and very useful way of dealing with my own burnout. It didn't cure it in any capacity, but at the same time, it did give me language and insight and the ability to identify it.
[00:05:11] And then that article that I wrote for BuzzFeed turned into a book and writing the book, like writing any book became somewhat of a burnout experience. That just always happens. If you're writing a book on any sort of timeline, it's just going to happen. But I also like sought for what it was.
Right as the pandemic hit, I was actually submitting the very final copy edits for the book. This big thing was going to come off of my plate. Then we go into lockdown, my editor asked, can you write a new intro, kind of a prologue to the book, trying to connect some of the dots with the pandemic? Because it'd be weird if this book came out four or five months into the pandemic and there's just no mention of the fact that like we're dealing with all of this, like a very seismic shift in society.
So I hastily wrote something, basically said everything that I'm talking about in this book in terms of how burnout is connected to precarity, how the way that we parent today makes it very difficult to grapple with our burnout, how we are the results of our parents' burnout in many cases.
[00:06:17] But everything that I said in the book is just more true during the pandemic. The only things that actually, I think, felt maybe less true is there's some parts where I talk about like, oh, when you travel, you feel like you have to represent your travel in like a commodified way. Like you have to Instagram it to make your travel seem like it's successful. Like, oh, okay. So we have different difficulties with Instagram during the pandemic, but not so much with like fun vacations.
But I do think that I was surprised and... heartened isn't the right word. I didn't understand just how swiftly burnout would become part of the conversation with the pandemic. Like in the first couple of months, in that first month, I think everyone was just really scared and also dealing with the new realities of I'm in my home all the time. I'm not seeing anyone. What is this going to be like? How long is this going to last?
[00:07:14] But then as the pandemic kind of rolled on and these new realities became everyday realities, the feeling of burnout, especially with work, with parenting, the lack of any sort of differentiation, just that kind of sameness and also accumulating stress that accompanied vigilance to deal with COVID, created this... everyone's storm of burnout was different, but I think by the time the book came out in September, it was something that was not at all difficult to describe.
Like, you know, when I was doing press for the book, it was always, everyone knows what this is. Like everyone's experiencing this right now. And that was not necessarily the case even a year before.
ANNE: I do think everyone knows what it is. And yet when you have to describe it to someone, like put it in a little nutshell, how do you do that?
ANNE HELEN: The phrase I like to use is like you hit the wall and then you scale the wall and then you keep going. Our bodies tell us when you hit a point of exhaustion, when you work really, really hard that then you should recover. And this is physically, but also mentally. Like there are things that encourage us to stop working.
[00:08:20] And I even think of like at the end of a really hard day at work, you know, how you've been staring at the computer and your stomach feels kind of weird and hollow and your eyes hurt and your back feels bad. Like that is your body telling you to stop working. But we don't listen to those signals because our list of things to do or our necessity to keep working, you know, like whether you're working a second job or you have to go home and do all of the domestic tasks in addition to the tasks that you're already doing or during the pandemic, you have to go to a different part of your home and fulfill those other domestic tasks.
You do not get the rest that allows you to feel any sort of catharsis, to feel rejuvenated. Like you just keep going on this plane of exhaustion. I really think that there's a diminishing returns. It might be slight, right, but like every day you have a little bit less wherewithal to deal with frustrations, a little less ability to confront new challenges, a little less patience, a little less joy, a little less ability to look into the rest of your life and be like, I'm looking forward to that. All of that slowly diminishes.
[00:09:28] I do think that there are crossover components with depression as well, and it's hard to disarticulate those things. But I do think that the primary thing with burnout is a lot of it has to do with work.
ANNE: Which is so interesting because while work may be the driver, the thing I really want to focus on today is how the pandemic has affected everyone's leisure activities. Now, I read for work, you read for work. And yet so often we hear from readers, we hear "I no longer find joy in this thing that used to bring me joy. I don't have the attention span to do this thing I love," or "I'm trying to tune out the real world by reading like crazy in ways that is interfering with my ability to do work". What's going on there?
ANNE HELEN: Well, this is the thing when people say like, Oh, you've figured out how to identify when you're going into a period of burnout, like burnout behaviors. When people ask me that, I always say the way I know I'm in a burnout period is that I can't read fiction.
[00:10:22] I love to read at night. That's my time when I usually have allocated space to read. It's just such a weird feeling to like not have the ability, the desire. Like I can't articulate what it feels like, but I'm sure people who have dealt with this understand it.
The book is right there, right? The book is right there. I'm really excited to read this book. I really want to read it. I cannot roll over and put my phone down and start the book. It drives me nuts. But that is what it feels like is that you can't do the thing that you want to do.
ANNE: You know what I think is so interesting is two years ago, I bet a lot of readers would have been like, just pick up the book.
ANNE HELEN: Yeah.
ANNE: But instead, I think today, a lot of people are just nodding going, "Oh my gosh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I see it." So what is it about reading fiction specifically? I mean, clearly, if you know that this is an indicator for you, it's something that's meant a lot to you in the past. I mean, tell me about your reading life.
[00:11:20] ANNE HELEN: Oh, I'm just a voracious reader and have been since I was four years old. Like that kind of a classic, like your mom tells you to go outside and you're like, Okay, I'll go outside and I'll read the book under a tree outside books from the library, books that I would spend all of my allowance on, like pulpy books like Lois Duncan and Baby-Sitters Club that my mom would be like, "I'll buy you one of those but then also, you need to read a book that's not like that."
And I love them all, right? I love them all. I love re-reading. I loved reading books above my reading level and below my reading level and still do. Even in grad school, when I was reading so much theory and heavy nonfiction stuff all the time, I would still find time to read books, which was like something about a marvel and a weird thing.
Sometimes I would read them while I exercise, like on the elliptical machine, I would read my fiction then. It was such a nice brain break from all the things that I was supposed to be thinking about.
[00:12:20] I think a lot of that was made possible by the fact that I didn't have a phone. I had a phone, but I didn't have an iPhone until after I finished my PhD. So there wasn't that ability to even be like, Well, I'm just going to scroll my phone while I do this or oh, I'm on the bus. I'm going to scroll my phone. Fiction provided a distraction but also wasn't competing with something as immediate and addictive as my phone.
So I think that even today, I read a ton of nonfiction books all the time for work and also am reading the internet constantly. People oftentimes are like, oh, you should read this nonfiction book that's really interesting, that doesn't have anything to do with anything that you're researching right now. And I oftentimes buy them and then I just don't read them. What I really want as escape from my work is fiction.
People have all sorts of tricks that they've told me about to get them back into reading, and my trick has been genre stuff. And it's been very successful.
[00:13:22] ANNE: Tell me more about that.
ANNE HELEN: Pulpy mysteries, thrillers, especially. I think the thing that really kicked me out of a three-month drought, three months of not reading any fiction.
ANNE: Is that making history in your reading life?
ANNE HELEN: I think there had been periods before, but approximately the same amount. I think when I was writing the Burnout book, I was just so full of information all the time that there was no more space for anything else.
But this fall, I read Long Bright River by Liz Moore, which is a phenomenal book and doing a lot in terms of working with genre, but also so skillfully done and really good character development, incredible sense of place that was like, oh, okay, this is it. I was very immersed in it. I read it for many hours at a time, several times, and I thought, Oh, what I need is something that is irresistible.
ANNE: It's funny you should mention her. We might talk about that later. So mysteries right now. Now my anecdotal experience, just in my own reading life and talking to other readers… because I really struggled too, even though it's my job to read.
[00:14:27] It took me a little while to realize it's not that I stopped reading. It's just that I'm reading the internet instead of reading books, which was necessary at the time because of some decisions we had to make, but was processed very differently by my brain.
Something that I found easier to read than heavy, weighty literary fiction that I so often love was mysteries. I just wanted to see there's a problem, there's a puzzle, and oh, look, we solved it in 300 pages. Ta-da. Satisfaction. That is what felt good to my brain.
ANNE HELEN: Yeah, well, and I think a lot of that has to do with if you read theories of how melodrama works and mysteries are definitely a form of melodrama. Melodrama is like a mode of storytelling and the primary motivator with our attraction to melodramas, whether they're action melodramas, mystery melodramas, what we think now of drama dramas is that there is this moral legibility. There's this ability to see, here's things that are wrong, and here's things that are a little bit more right.
[00:15:27] And even in something like Long Bright River, which is a pretty nuanced take on what's going on with policing, there still is this feeling of, well, something got solved. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, the end. Especially, I was reading it against the backdrop of everything that was going on leading up to the election. I was like, "Oh, that is untenable. My brain just cannot grapple with all of the difficulties of that. Here is something that allows me to see things clearly a little bit."
ANNE: And I can see how a book like that, while not every plot line is resolved, which feels realistic, the tied up with a bow can feel really aggravating to some readers right now who are just, that's not how the world works. And yet you do get the satisfaction of some resolved mystery.
So fiction is something that you keep going back to, that you want to be reading. What does it bring to your life that other things don't? Do you know? Is this something that you're able to articulate?
[00:16:25] ANNE HELEN: Yeah, yeah. I think it allows me to not think about all of the other things. It allows me to not think about my to-do list. It allows me to really remove my brain from work. What it does is it provides the rest that I'm not getting during the rest of it. Even my dreams, I oftentimes dream of work and that sort of thing, and my subconscious is trying to process a lot of stuff. But if you are immersed in a world while you're reading fiction, I find this with film too, then it gives you freedom from other people's minds, which is one very good definition of solitude.
ANNE: I like that. I continue to find it fascinating that reading about other people's, well, fictional people's problems is restful.
ANNE HELEN: Yes.
ANNE: Now, you've said that you read this irresistible book back in the fall, but right now I'm picturing the books on your nightstand. I don't know if that's what you really do, but I read before bed. That's my core time.
ANNE HELEN: No, I have a nightstand, yes.
ANNE: And you're not picking them up right now?
[00:17:19] ANNE HELEN: I'm a little bit better. And part of it is that I went on a quasi vacation last week. I say quasi because I went on vacation with my best friend and her two small children. I don't have kids. I have heard people talk always about how going on vacation with kids is just like a work trip, especially for a stay-at-home mom. Like you're like, Oh-
ANNE: It's travel, but maybe vacation is the wrong word, that kind of thing.
ANNE HELEN: It was wonderful. There is no joy quite like going to a new zoo with a four and seven-year-old. While I was there, I was able to, I think, jumpstart my reading habit again, and went through three books last week.
ANNE: Oh, I'm so happy. Yeah. So what was different? Clearly, you were in a different place, different kind of mind.
ANNE HELEN: Different place. There were a couple of books that I had been wanting to... you know, I say it like, oh, of course, I had been wanting to read. I always have books that I'm wanting to read. But I had a new book that's a galley that I have been anticipating for a very long time, which is God Spare the Girls by Kelsey McKinney, which is about the daughter of an evangelical pastor in North Texas. And I grew up a Presbyterian house that had this twist of evangelical stuff going on, which was very common in the late 90s and early 2000s. I'm so excited for this book. And then, you know, the momentum carries you on to the next book.
[00:18:43] ANNE: What else did you read on your trip? Mexican Gothic, which was a perfect example of like a melodrama. We were like, "Oh, there's some crazy stuff going on here. Like, this is totally unrelatable. Wow." And like so transportative in that capacity that like, oh, my gosh, I have to find out what other crazy, totally unrealistic thing is going to happen next. So I really liked that.
ANNE: For those who are like, Yes, I am burned out, and I don't like what it's doing to my reading life. And I don't see a way out... Now, we are not looking for easy solutions. There aren't any. Like, this is the way the world is right now. But what are some things that you've observed in your, you know, conversations with, I imagine, hundreds of people about what they've experienced both pre-pandemic and during? I'm trying really hard not to ask this in a really like Pollyanna way. But what are some possible ways they could think about where they are now and how they might be able to move forward?
[00:19:43] ANNE HELEN: Well, first of all, being incredibly compassionate and generous with yourself in terms of like there's nothing wrong or bad or there's no failure involved, right? Like we are all in this place of unprecedented weirdness and like wherever you found yourself, and that means like in terms of physical health, mental health, financial health, like all of these different components, you are where you are.
I think our country even now is very, very bad at practicing that sort of generosity and that sort of understanding and compassion, especially when it comes to individuals. There's just a lot of judgment of like, if you don't come out of the pandemic better shape, with more money, more productive habits, like somehow you aren't the most optimized human being. But like, oh my gosh, there are so many reasons why that would not be the case.
ANNE: There's no like the power of positive thinking. We'll get you out of your reading rut. Like that's just not going to happen.
[00:20:41] ANNE HELEN: And also to understand that just because people are increasingly getting vaccinated, that doesn't flip a switch that is like allows you to recover from your burnout. It's not how this works.
I think a lot of people are dealing with low-grade PTSD in some form or another. That's very hard to understand or recognize. And it's going to take a long time to emerge from that. And so patience too. I didn't wake up after I got the vaccine and be like, Oh, I can read now.
ANNE: No, because books require this active kind of attention that, I mean… which is what makes reading so wonderful, and also what makes it so hard right now.
I really am glad to hear you say that because it directly contradicts, in a positive way, the shame I hear people say like, "Oh, I shouldn't be telling you this, Anne. I'm so embarrassed that I can't read." Like it affects their value as a human being.
And while I really want people to be able to do this thing that brings them joy and sometimes that you really need to do for their work life, that doesn't mean that they're a terrible person. It means that it's hard to read right now. And those are different things.
[00:21:46] ANNE HELEN: Yeah. I want people to give themselves runways and a lot of room for recovery from all of this. Like this is a year of trauma. It is a year of trauma. You know, the same way that there's this like understanding that like, oh, as soon as a woman has a baby, that their body should bounce back. And if your body doesn't bounce back, it's somehow less than ideal.
Giving ourselves and our families and our friendships and all sorts of things, like giving some space to just kind of ease into things. You know, some people might like next month, be like, I am back to every single habit from before. Everything is great. Blah, blah, blah. That's not going to happen for everyone. And also there are a lot of things about before that weren't great either. Thinking through and taking time to time to figure out how you want your life to look like now, it's a process.
ANNE: That's a really interesting analogy about having a baby. I had not heard that before.
ANNE HELEN: Well, it's also like such a new phenomenon of this like optimization of the post-pregnancy body. Also this understanding, particularly in the United States, that like after moments of trauma, you somehow recover. Like, Oh, you get divorced. You should get dating right away, you know? Or, oh, someone dies, let's give you one day for bereavement.
[00:23:05] ANNE: We're going to encourage everyone to think about their reading runways, if that's something that's important to you. And honestly, if you're listening to a show called What Should I Read Next? it's probably important to you. We're glad you're here. Thank you for sharing your burnout insights with us. I wish they weren't so relevant, but I'm glad that since we are, we can have the vocabulary to talk about it.
Now, there's one thing I specifically want to ask you before we get into our books. Like so many readers, I love getting your email newsletter and I love the format, which is unusual. And I just love to chat about that for a second.
Our show is unique in that we don't feature like headline guests. We want to talk to readers about their reading lives. We want you to feel week after week that, Oh, that guest could be you or your mom or your neighbor or your teacher, you know, the guy who walks his dog by your house at six o'clock every morning, or your friend from English class, or... That's not common. Like usually the people who make the rounds on the podcast circuit in the guest chair are people who are authorities in some way or another, but everyone is authority about their reading life and their own experience. And that's why we do what we do.
[00:24:07] And something I love about your newsletter, Culture Study, is how you feature people whose names no one's going to recognize, except the people who know them in their real lives, who are authorities though, because they're living their regular experience. And that is why it matters.
I would just love to hear what made you think that people living their lives have stories, of course, that are useful and interesting to highlight. How did you come to doing that in newsletter format?
ANNE HELEN: Oh man, I just think people are so interesting. Like everyone has such an interesting story. And this is at the heart of a lot of reporting is just the idea that like, Oh, I could write a profile of like 75% of the people that I meet, like a really interesting, like 8,000-word profile, you know?
Sometimes I think that my belief in that comes from my local newspaper from North Idaho, The Lewiston Morning Tribune. There was a feature in this paper, every Friday, a reporter would open up the phone book randomly and pick a name and then call that person up and then just write a story about them.
[00:25:10] ANNE: What? That's amazing. I've never heard anything like that.
ANNE HELEN: Where I'm from, the town is like 30,000 people, but the paper serves a very large outlying area. It's like the big town for many miles. So there's lots of people who are living out on the prairie, living out and farming and ranching and in the mountains. So you'd get people from all sorts of walks of life of all ages. And I read that religiously. And so I think that that taught me in a lot of ways, like, oh, there's something interesting about everyone's lives.
And then, you know, I think going through academia, I found so many different thinkers, theorists, writers who just aren't recognized. Like they're very specific and fascinating knowledge bases. You get a PhD and you know so much about a pretty small thing, but can talk about it in really, really interesting ways.
I often am trying to find people who have these really niche knowledges and making that knowledge accessible to others. And a newsletter format is really useful for that because interviews like that, you can't get those published usually on mainstream sites because it's hard to come up with a headline that's sexy and would like share well on Facebook. But I found that my readership is really interested in people who are interesting.
[00:26:29] ANNE: That is not the origin story I expected. I'm so glad I asked. Okay. And Helen, are you ready to talk about your books?
ANNE HELEN: Yeah.
ANNE: You know how this works. We're going to talk about three books you love, one book you don't, and what you've been reading lately, and I think we might try to put some irresistible reads on your nightstand. So they're there to entice you. How did you choose these books? People approach it in myriad ways. How did you think about this question?
ANNE HELEN: I was trying to decide on them and I was staring at my bookshelf. And I was like, what are the books that just stay with me, that when people ask me for recommendations, I return to again and again?
ANNE: I like that approach. What did you choose for book one?
ANNE HELEN: Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire.
ANNE: I haven't read this one. Tell me all about it.
ANNE HELEN: You know how there are books that you... the romance in it is something that speaks to you in a way that you just want to underline every sentence and send it to the person that you are attracted to?
ANNE: No, no. This is not something I know.
[00:27:29] ANNE HELEN: I used to feel that way about The English Patient, which is about a really messed up relationship in a lot of ways. One relationship is good and one relationship is not good in that book. The Great Fire, I think, supplanted The English Patient as that book that is my heart or conveys a lot of my heart.
And it's just a beautifully written meditation on what love is from a distance. It's ostensibly about an ex-soldier after the war, after World War II, who is traveling in the East and happens upon this younger woman who he develops a very intense emotional relationship with. And then their relationship continues over letters, which is also a love language of mine. Because of my age, I'm an elder millennial and used to write a lot of letters.
Shirley Hazzard used to write about a book every 10, 20 years. She would spend a really long time crafting it into this very immaculate form of prose. It is so rewarding upon rereading. I think I have read it five times. If you like sweeping love stories, this is a great one.
[00:28:45] ANNE: I should say that we are talking at a time where we just released our Summer Reading Guide, which means I've been spending months reading brand-new releases. Anything 20 years old sounds real good right now.
ANNE HELEN: Yeah.
ANNE: What did you choose for your second book?
ANNE HELEN: Louise Erdrich's The Master Butcher Singer's Club.
ANNE: I haven't read this one either. Okay, tell me all about it. I've read a lot of Erdrich, but not this one.
ANNE HELEN: She's one of my favorite writers and has been for a long time. A lot of her books focus on either the past, the present, or the future of Indigenous life. And this one is very much... It's in the past, but it's this intersection, as her own family is, of various immigrants to North Dakota and the Midwest. In this case, they're German. And then the Indigenous population and all of the different intersections and ways of life and making things work in North Dakota.
[00:29:37] Like a lot of her other books, like Love Medicine, for example, there's different perspectives, different narrators, different things that are revealed over the course of the book. To me, it's just a big, robust, beautiful, heartbreaking book that gives an incredible sense of place of North Dakota and of just a different way of life.
ANNE HELEN: And I love it very much.
ANNE: That sounds wonderful. What did you choose to round out your favorites list?
ANNE HELEN: I'm going to choose Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, which is another book that I think rewards rereading. It's also, I think, an impossible book to adapt. Oftentimes I think that the books that would be the most difficult to adapt are the best books, just because they're doing so much. Like so much is happening in that book.
I first read it when I was studying abroad in France in the early 2000s. I was incredibly lonely. So I read it in English and then I bought it in French so that I could challenge myself. I was living with a woman in her early seventies. Kind of the past parts are set around the time when she would have been the same age as one of the characters. And she just loved it.
[00:30:50] It was one of the many things that we would talk about over dinner, her correcting my bad French. So I have very fond just place memories of reading, which oftentimes I think are part of why we love the books that we love. But then I also think that it's intricacy and the way that it reveals itself is very masterful.
ANNE: What did you choose for a book that's not for you? And how did you choose that? Was this easy to land on?
ANNE HELEN: It was not. I think that I don't usually actively dislike books. Sometimes I'll be like, huh, that was okay, or I wasn't thrilled about how that ended or something like that. But I think I'm pretty choosy about the books that I do select in a way that makes it so that there isn't a lot of books that I end up actively disliking.
ANNE HELEN: So how did you land on this one?
ANNE: Well, at first I was like, I'm not going to do this. I refuse. And then we're like, Oh, you have to. One that I think has given me a fair amount of frustration is Tana French's The Witch Elm, because I think to me, it demonstrates some of my frustration with what's happened to Tana French's books over the course of her career. I cannot say enough good things about the early books and the likeness in particular, I think it's just a masterful mystery.
[00:32:11] ANNE: That's my favorite.
ANNE HELEN: Yeah. And it just feels like they've become larger and less wieldy and too much going on at the end that just doesn't work. I go back to it and think about In the Woods and how ambiguous the ending was, how in some ways the beauty of it was that it refused to offer a really concrete ending. This to me felt almost like a slasher horror ending or something like that. There was just like a lot going on.
I think when you feel really strongly about an author and a lot of anticipation, like, ah, yes, there's a new one, I want to read it, it would have benefited so much from a little bit more shaping. And as an author becomes more and more powerful, sometimes I think you can see the resistance to that shaping. And whether it's coming from the author themselves or from the reticence on parts of editors to push back, I just want a slightly more refined product, I guess.
[00:33:10] ANNE: Which is interesting because it's now been long enough since I read The Witch Elm. I can't remember precisely how it ended. But you really enjoyed Mexican Gothic and how it's a melodrama. The Witch Elm, I remember the first half has a lot of that hazy "what exactly is happening here?" kind of vibe that I could see being a really nice counterpart and yet not the way it ended up.
ANNE HELEN: Yeah. It's just Mexican Gothic was so cartoonish that I could get on board, right? But like, The Witch Elm lives in this world. Does that make sense?
ANNE: Yeah.
ANNE HELEN: It's aspiring to... like all of her books, there is a form of realism and psychological realism as well that's going on. And then you go into... the way that the plot unfurls at the end in particular feels very bombastic in a way that I did not think fit with the realism of the first half of that book.
ANNE: So not for you. And then lately, we know you've been reading God Spare the Girls. Anything else you want to slide in there?
[00:34:11] ANNE HELEN: No. I mean, that's the one I want to talk about the most. I have Sweet Little Lies as my next-up mystery that's going to distract me. But other than that, I'm trying to figure out what's next. I'm eager for some new book to come across my door and persuade me and be irresistible to me in the same way.
ANNE: All right, well, let's see what we can do. Because isn't it wonderful to have a book waiting for us that we are really excited to read?
ANNE HELEN: Yeah.
ANNE: What are you interested in exploring? Like where might you want to go? Love story? YA? We know mysteries have worked for you.
ANNE HELEN: Love story. Lots of like yearning. I like yearning in my love stories.
ANNE: I like that you know that. So you loved The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, The Master Butcher Singing Club by Louise Erdrich, and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Not for you, The Witch Elm by Tana French. Her books have gotten less plotty in the last two in a way that you're not really loving. Is that a fair assessment?
ANNE HELEN: Mm-hmm.
[00:35:09] ANNE: Lately, God Spare the Girls by Kelsey McKinney. We're looking for books that can help you break out of pandemic burnout. Now, I don't want to do this just because you said Texas. There's a new May release. It's a messy family story set in a tiny Texas town. Are you interested in going there again?
ANNE HELEN: Always.
ANNE: Okay.
ANNE HELEN: I did my PhD at the University of Texas and I've done a ton of reporting there. So like it is a place I always want to go to.
ANNE: Oh, okay. Fantastic. Say no more. The book in question is Olympus, Texas. It came out in early May. It's by Stacey Swann. This is about a family, a powerful family that is just a disaster. So the story opens with the prodigal son returning. He's been away for two years, and you find out very, very quickly, not a spoiler, it's because he slept with his brother's wife and had a long-running affair. So basically everyone in the family hated him more than her.
[00:36:08] But he's back and he has an interesting rage issue. It's a medical condition that is a little bit... I think it's over the top enough. I mean, I'm sure this is something that happens to people, but the book in general has that melodramatic element that I think you're really going to like. This is a messy family. There are lots of messy families. I was describing this to my husband as like, yeah, there's a messy family in Texas with firearms in a tiny town and all the dynamics that that involves.
But at the heart of the story is this family that was cloven in two when the husband had an affair and had several kids who grew up going to school with the children born in the marriage. But the parents didn't tell them that for a long time. And just everybody feels very bristly or sometimes literally punchy towards each other.
When the son, March, comes back to Olympus, Texas, he sets in motion this chain of events that lets the author explore the deepest tragedy but also hopes for love where people didn't see how that possibly could have existed.
[00:37:14] It's called Olympus, Texas. There's two beloved dogs named Romulus and Remus. There's other Greek mythological references, but the mythological references woven throughout, they're slick. They're not heavy-handed. They're smooth. And seriously, you can know nothing about Greek mythology listeners and still love this book. But if you do know, you'll be like, Oh, Stacey Swann, I see what you did there. How does that sound?
ANNE HELEN: That sounds amazing. Can't wait.
ANNE: That is Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann. I don't know about the romantic yearning, but I can give you a different kind of learning. Okay. Have you read anything else by Liz Moore?
ANNE HELEN: No.
ANNE: It just so happens that I just finished this one. Apparently today I'm going to recommend the books I just finished because they were good and I think you'd like them. Okay. She had a book come out maybe 2005, which is we're really messing with your pattern here. All the books you liked were about 20 years old. I wonder if that means something.
ANNE HELEN: Yeah.
[00:38:08] ANNE: Her book, The Unseen World is not a crime novel. It has a different setting than Long Bright River for sure, but a similar feel in the sense where the protagonist feels like they have got to discover something important that's happening right in front of them that affects the people they love, or they just can't. They can't figure out what this crucial thing to their life and the life of their loved ones is.
At the center of the story is a young girl. Her name is Ada. She is raised by her single father. He just could care less what society thinks he should be like as a parent. She is homeschooled. She basically grows up and is educated in the lab where he works. It's set in the 80s in Boston.
She's surrounded by these computer scientists who treat her like a little adult, except for his chief assistant who's like, "This poor girl needs some mothering. I'm here and I'm going to give it to her." So she's painfully shy, doesn't know how to be in the world, socially clueless. She just doesn't know.
[00:39:10] But she has her dad and she has her love of numbers and she's brilliant and she's happy. But then when she is still very young, it becomes clear... There's this one moment in conversation where David's telling a joke and he can't remember the punchline, and you're like, oh, something bad is happening.
And the bad thing that is happening is he has early onset Alzheimer's, but he's the only person Ada has. And so life as she knows it ends and she goes to live with someone else. She goes into a regular school, which is so painful. I think Liz Moore writes about her school days in a way that is so realistic. She captures the dynamics between children at that age, which makes it very painful reading. But she does, she finds her way.
Flash forward many years to San Francisco, she's a computer programmer. She is still hoping to solve the mystery of who her father really is. Because all she knew was he told her before he died that she needs to do some digging and find some people because he is not David who he obviously... I mean, your dad is your dad, but he was someone else first. And he's given her just enough to go on, but not enough to actually figure out the puzzle.
[00:40:22] This is an awful mystery she's had hanging over her since she was 12 years old. Now she's maybe 30 and she's successful, but she still has this awful pain for her past that she has to resolve. And then something sets the plot in motion, and she's going to go figure it out. How does that sound?
ANNE HELEN: Amazing. Give it to me.
ANNE: The Unseen World by Liz Moore. How do you feel... What if we went all the way back to Wendell Berry? Have you read Jayber Crow?
ANNE HELEN: No.
ANNE: I love how you mentioned a couple authors like Louise Erdrich, who are close to you geographically and in experience. That is Wendell Berry to me. He's right up the road in Kentucky, although our experiences I imagine are very, very different.
First of all, I have to say the plot sounds completely boring. I mean, it's about a small town barber who moves to the fictional community of Port William, which is Carrollton, Kentucky for anybody who knows, that's the model, because they don't have a barber. And this is how he's going to make his life after he leaves the University of Kentucky. That's all.
[00:41:25] But of course, that's not all because this is a book... It's ostensibly about this small town barber learning to find his place in these small town dynamics where people have known everybody forever and everybody has their role and everybody has their place.
It's 1932, so set between the wars. He's an orphan. He's never had people. He knows what it's like to be lonely. And he's an outsider and an observer. If there's an author that can do anything with that stranger viewing the community from the distance set up, it is Wendell Berry.
I have to tell you, I didn't read this book for years. I love this book, but I didn't pick it up for years because Jayber Crow just sounded awful to me, but that's the Kentucky spelling of his nickname, which is Jayber.
ANNE HELEN: Oh.
ANNE: The way he got it was really sweet. I liked it better immediately when I found that out. What I love about this book for you and what I hear you really appreciate in your books is the insight Wendell Berry has in human nature and that by dropping his barber into the middle of this community and letting him look around, he can talk about the human condition in a way that doesn't sound scholarly and detached like it just did when I described it, but makes you see how the way your neighbor chooses to use their tractor or treat their land or interact with their children or their spouse really says all there is to say about them, but also what it means to be a person in this world.
[00:42:51] We got into this as a love story. This wistful sense of longing and this exploration of what true love does and does not look like are prominent in this book in ways I don't want to reveal, but I assure you that you are there. And it's gentle and subtle, but also really poignant and powerful and I think you may enjoy it. How does that sound?
ANNE HELEN: Really wonderful.
ANNE: I didn't think we'd end up at Wendell Berry, but I'm never sad when the conversation takes us there. That is Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. Okay, Annie, the books we talked about today, they were Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann, The Unseen World by Liz Moore, and Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, what do you think you'll read next?
ANNE HELEN: I want Olympus, Texas first, I think.
ANNE: I was hoping you'd say that.
ANNE HELEN: But I really am going to go and look all of them up on Bookshop and get them soon.
ANNE: That sounds great. I hope you love it. Thanks for talking books with me.
ANNE HELEN: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for your recommendations.
[00:43:54] ANNE: Hey, readers, I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Anne Helen Petersen today, and I'd love to hear what you think she may enjoy reading next. We'd also welcome your thoughts on burnout that you've experienced in your reading life, in hindsight or right now. We'll have links to Culture Study along with the full list of titles we talked about today at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.
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[00:44:52] Thanks to the people who made this episode happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by Will Bogel, Holly Wielkoszewski, and Studio D Podcast Productions. Readers, that is 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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