This week we have created a motley episode of different segments all about or set in OH in some way.  Think of it as the Frankenstein’s monster episode. First we will be chatting with Britt Lovett, who is the Project Manager for the Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison Project.  This year-long celebration running from February 2026-February 2027 focuses on the life, literature, and legacy of Toni Morrison, a native of Ohio and the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

While Amy has gone to Ohio this year to visit Hocking Hills and the Columbus Book Festival, Carrie has driven to Ohio three times because her youngest son had surgery in June at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Because this year feels like it has been “All Ohio, all the time,” we’re giving you recommendations for books set in the Buckeye State.

Books Mentioned in This Episode:

1- Assassination Nation by Sarah Vowell 

2- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 

3- Sula by Toni Morrison 

4- Beloved by Toni Morrison 

5- Paradise by Toni Morrison 

6- I'll Watch Your Baby by Nina Viel 

7- Clutch by Emily Nemens 

8- Murder Your Darlings by Jenna Blum 

9- Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer's World Through the Women Written Out of It by Emily Houser 

10- The Night Hunter by Natalie Moss 

11- Guess Again by Charlie Donlea 

12- A Harlem Wedding by Tiffany L. Warren 

13- A Hunger to Kill by Kim Mager with Liza Pulitzer 

14- Love is a Contact Sport by Frederick Smith 

15- The French Winemaker's Daughter by Loretta Ellsworth 

16- The Jilted Countess by Loretta Ellsworth 

17-We Were Promised: How an Appalachian Grandmother Fought a Corporate Giant by Julia Flint 

18- Mosquitoland by David Arnold 

19- The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, The Woman Who Pursued Him, and the Murder that Shocked Jazz-Age America by Karen Abbott 

20- Buckeye by Patrick Ryan 

21- The Fertile Earth and the Ordered Cosmos by M. Elizabeth Weiser 

22- Kent State by Deborah Wiles 

23- To Slip the Bonds of Earth by Amanda Flower 

24- The Wright Sister by Richard Maurer 

25- Harvey Pekar's Cleveland by Harvey Pekar 

Media Mentioned:

1- Death by Lightening (Netflix, 2026)

2- Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison - https://ohiocelebratestonimorrison.org

This week, we chat with Dorothy Roberts, the author of the book The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family.  As an esteemed professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and a social justice advocate, Dorothy Roberts has written many scholarly books and academic papers about reproductive justice, child welfare, and bioethics, but her most recent book is a much more personal one.  She is the child of a white father who was an anthropologist and a black Jamaican mother, both now deceased. When Dorothy’s sister gave her boxes of her father’s files, she began to read transcripts of research he had done on interracial marriage over a 60-year period. She had no idea how these files would affect her memories of her childhood, her parent’s marriage, and her own racial identity.  This book is a fascinating look at racial history in Chicago as well as a very touching memoir about a father/daughter bond.  

And for our book recommendation segment of the show, we turn to one of the most iconic parts of an American summer. August is here, which means people are having their last hurrahs at amusement parks. With this in mind, we decided we would feature books about these places where people go to be entertained, eat overpriced food, and argue with their relatives. The books we’ve chosen are set in various amusement park venues, such as a western theme park in Arizona, an arcade park where reality disintegrates, a place called Dreamworld where everyone is happy, a real-life New Jersey amusement park that was certainly ride at your own risk, a North Carolina park that was the site of a murder mystery, and an amusement park set in the mind.  

Books Mentioned In This Episode:

1- The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family by Dorothy E. Roberts 

2- The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson 

3- Martin Marten by Brian Doyle 

4- The Keeper of Lost Children by Sadeqa Johnson 

5- Jane Kenyon: The Making of a Poet by Dana Greene 

6- The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and Obsession by Michael Finkel 

7- The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel 

8- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 

9- A Five Star Read by Fellow Book Lover Elizabeth S. @fireplacebookworm - Beartown by Frederik Backman

10- The Free Lunch by Spider Robinson 

11- Krazyland by Mar Romance-Moore 

12- The Insignificant Events in the Lives of a Cactus by Dusti Bowling 

13- Joyland by Stephen King 

14- Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rosen 

15- Anxietyland by Gemma Correll 

 Media Mentioned: 

1- The Odyssey (2026)

2- Emily Wilson review of the Odyssey - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man

3- Class Action Park (2020, HBO Max)

At the end of May, we attended a Carmichael’s book event featuring author Emily Franklin, who has written numerous books. Her latest titled Love & Other Monsters is about a time in history that most English majors look on with awe and wonder. Her novel is about the summer of 1816 when Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori traveled to Switzerland and, as the legend goes, told scary stories to each other, which ended up leading to the first vampire story and the book we now know as Frankenstein. But Franklin’s novel focuses on a member of the party who doesn’t get any acknowledgement—Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairemont. Emily did a great job making the Carmichael’s audience want to learn more about Claire’s story, so we invited her on to share it with our listeners.  

And for our book recommendation segment of the show, we are talking Shakespeare, the Bard, the Swan of Avon, Willy Shakes.  Shakespeare is such a touchstone in literature in ways that we don’t regularly think about like classic phrases and tropes.  But you don’t have to be (or not to be) a Shakespeare scholar to enjoy the books we talk about this week.  We have a historical mystery, witty nonfiction, historical fiction, a memoir, a middle grade novel, and a novel in verse.  All are influenced in some way by Shakespeare’s plays or the man himself.  

Books Mentioned In This Episode:

1- Love and Other Monsters by Emily Franklin 

2- Grandma Joy & Me: A Journey of Healing , One National Park at a Time by Brad Ryan 

3- The Humming Room by Ellen Potter 

4- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett 

5- Summer of 1816: A World Without Summer by Nicholas Day 

6- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 

7- The Vampyre by John Polidori 

8- Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Mushrooms Taught Me About Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto

9- Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

10- Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbly Weiden 

11- Wisdom Corner by David Heska Wanbly Weiden 

12- A Five Star Read of Fellow Book Lover Joshua  - Devotions by Mary Oliver 

13- Daughter of Fair Verona by Christina Dodd 

14- Much Ado About Mistletoe by Christina Dodd 

15- Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson 

16- By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult 

17- Enter the Body by Joy McCullough 

18- Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench 

19- The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt 

Media Mentioned 

1- The Bride (2026)

2- Guillermo de Toro article about Frankenstein: "Why Vampires Never Die" - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/opinion/31deltoro.html

If you’ve listened to our show for a while, you may be aware that we’ve interviewed several Ohio authors. Katrina Kittle, Erin Flanagan, Christina Consolino, and Sharon Short (who has also published under the name Jess Montgomery) have all been guests and all are part of a writing group called the Cute City Bitches. 

But there was one writer in that group whom we hadn’t yet interviewed, but now we have. Meredith Doench teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Dayton and is a writer of sapphic thrillers, which is perfect since June is Pride Month. We’re delighted she joined us to talk about her latest book titled Never Say Die, a novel about a detective named Rory Scott who has to contend with her own mother-daughter issues when someone in the community for the second time in six years, kidnaps a young girl and murders a teenager. Meredith talks to us about her love of crime novels and how writing and marketing novels with LGBTQ characters has changed since she began publishing. 

Our book rec segment of the show this week focuses on books with unusual narrators. These are narrators who aren’t human, and they might not even be tangible. We’ve got books narrated by sheep, Death, and dead people, as well as a mechanically-inclined world traveling gorilla, a Mediterranean fig tree, and a centenarian tortoise.

Books Mentioned In This Episode:

1- Never Say Die by Meredith Doench 

2- Crossed by Meredith Doench 

3- This American Woman: A One in a Million Memoir by Zarna Garg 

4- Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontes by Devoney Looser 

5- Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt 

6- Lord of the Flies by William Golding 

7- Heartwood by Amity Gaige 

8- Deer Season by Erin Flanagan 

9- The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau 

10- Predatory Natures by Amy Goldsmith 

11- A Book Recommended by a Fellow Book Lover  Michele Terranova @bookwhisperer22 - I See You've Called in Dead by John Kenney 

12- Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann 

13- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 

14- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold 

15- The Murderer's Ape by Jakob Wegelius 

16- The Island of the Missing Trees by Elif Shafak 

17- The Tortoise's Tale by Kendra Coulter 

Media Mentioned:

1- Remarkably Bright Creatures (Netflix, 2026)

2- Lord of the Flies (Netflix, 2026)

3- I Know My Name is Steven (1989)

4- Sheep Detectives (2026)

5- The Book Thief (2013)

6- The Lovely Bones (2009)

If you’re a historical fiction lover, you’ve probably read something by Alyson Richman. She’s the author of 11 novels, including The Missing Pages, which was published last fall. We were delighted that she agreed to come on the show and speak to us about this book, although we did sneak in a question about The Velvet Hours published in 2016, which our book club read many years ago. It is about a real Paris courtesan in the Belle Epoque who in her later years as World War II approaches shares her life story with her granddaughter.

The Missing Pages is a historical fiction novel that is about a man’s love of books, but it is also a ghost tale, a romance, and a story of the Titanic all rolled into one. Richman is known for making the reader feel the sumptuous details of the world she is writing about, and she does it again in this book.

Our book rec segment of the show is all about musicians, but we’re not talking solely about musician memoirs, although we do have one of those. We’ve got a children’s nonfiction book about a Ukrainian pianist who performed for Nazsis, a National Book Award winner, a mystery about a stolen violin, a story about a wedding singer whose own relationship is on the rocks, and a coming of age story set in the 1970s that includes a rock star. 

Books Mentioned in This Episode:

1- The Missing Pages by Alyson Richman 

2- The Velvet Hours by Alyson Richman 

3- The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray 

4- All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley 

5- Buckeye by Patrick Ryan 

6- The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal 

7- Underlake by Erin L. McCoy 

8- The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion by Beth Brower 

9- A Five Star Read from fellow Book Lover Anima D. @autopsyofbooks - And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie 

10- The Encore by Juliet Izon 

11- Songs For Other People's Weddings by David Levithan and Jens Lekman 

12- Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis by Susan Hood and Greg Dawson 

13- Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau 

14- The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by David Grohl 

15- The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb

We were sad last fall that we weren’t able to record with our favorite bookseller, Sam Miller, manager at the Frankfort Ave location of Carmichael’s Bookstore for our Holiday Book Buying episode. But she is back for summer, telling us all about the new titles that will get you excited to sit back on a hot afternoon, either at the pool or in the air conditioning, and read to your heart’s content. 

Books Mentioned In This Episode:

1- The Last Garden in England by Julia Kelly 

2- The Grand Paloma Resort by Cleyvis Natera 

3- Angel Down by Daniel Kraus 

4- A book that Changed a Life - Sisters of the Yam by bell hooks recommended by Briana Lathon Bluford 

5- Yesteryear by Claro Claire Burke 

6- American Fantasy by Emma Straub 

7- Whistler by Ann Patchett 

8- Puck by Samantha Allen 

9- Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett 

10- Fortune of Sand by Ruta Sepetys 

11- Go Gentle by Maria Semple 

12- Country People by Daniel Mason 

13- These Days by Lucy Caldwell 

14- Devotions by Lucy Caldwell 

15- Opening by Lucy Caldwell 

16- Pirate Queen by Ariel Lawhorn 

17- The Keeper by Tana French (Cal Hooper #3)

18- Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth 

19- Killer Vibes by Jack Friday 

20- Fishbone Cinderella by Elizabeth Lim 

21- Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman 

22- Sublimation by Isabel Kim 

23- Book Witch by Meg Shaffer 

24- We Burn So Bright b y TJ Klune 

25- Moss'd in Space by Rebecca Thorrne

26- American Rambler by Isaac Fitzgerald 

27- Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess by Ben Mezrich 

28- The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery by Kaitlyn Tiffany 

29- The Carpool Detectives by Chuck Hogan 

30- The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh by James Lasdun 

31- True Biz by Sara Novíc 

32- Mother Tongue by Sara Novíc

33- The Left and the Lucky by Willy Vlautin 

34- London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe 

35- 4 Janes by Marian See 

36- Love and Other Monsters by Emily Franklin 

37- This Is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman 

38- Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment by Rhae Lynn Barnes 

39- Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano 

40- The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland 

 Media Mentioned:

1- White Lotus (2021 - present, HBO Max)

2-2026  Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction - https://www.pulitzer.org/news/2026-pulitzer-prize-announcement

This week on the podcast we welcome middle grade and young adult novelist Aaron Starmer whose most recent book, You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This, is a quirky middle grade novel about a Toe Beast and a girl who travels with a pack of dogs and a boy named Roman who learns some family secrets.  That sounds like a lot so we are glad Aaron joins us to explain it all in a much more succinct way than we ever could. And his 2025 YA novel Night Swimming just came out in paperback this week.

And our book recommendation segment of the show is about aliens because what pairs better with a quirky novel than some extraterrestrials? We have Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning titles, a book about alien garbage, a wacky buddy road trip adventure, literary fiction about a girl who doesn’t feel human, and a philosophical first contact story starring the Catholic Church.

 Books Mentioned in this Episode:

1- You Are Old Enough To Hear This by Aaron Starmer

2- Night Swimming by Aaron Starmer 

3- The Last Garden in England by Julia Kelly 

4- Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

5- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir 

6- The Humans by Matt Haig 

7- The Riverman by Aaron Starmer 

8- The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler 

9- Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy

10- The Art of Vanishing by Morgan Pager 

11- A 5 Star Read by Fellow Book Lover Tess @books_andthebeach - Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers 

12- The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1) by Becky Chambers 

13- The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell 

14- Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky 

15- Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino 

16- Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card 

17- The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis 

Media Mentioned in this Episode:

1- Whitehall Book Club - https://www.historicwhitehall.org/whitehall-book-club

2- Resident Alien - (2021-2025, Netflix)

3- Project Hail Mary (2026)

Now you may be familiar with the Folger Shakespeare Library’s editions of Shakespeare’s works. In fact, Carrie is still using some of  hers from high school. But she had no idea this world-famous research library in Washington DC had a book club. As a Shakespeare enthusiast, she was definitely intrigued, and we are so excited that emma poltrack, the Arts Engagement Program Manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library, agreed to join us and tell us all about the book club. 

Our book rec segment this week are books about…..book clubs! We’ve got two memoirs about book clubs–one made up of professor friends and the other between a mother and son. We’ve got a horror novel with a book club that battles vampires, an intergenerational mystery-solving book club in England, a women’s fiction novel about a book club that asks its members to present the book that matters most, and a writing and reading group for Punjabi women in London that’s breaking boundaries.

Books Mentioned in this Episode

1- The Last Garden in England by Julia Kelly 

2- The Calculating Stars (A Lady Astronaut series) by Mary Robinette Kowal

3- The Martian Conspiracy by Mary Robinette Kowal 

4- Dating Dr. Dil by Nisha Sharma 

5- Tastes like Shakkar by Nisha Sharma 

6- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 

7- The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu 

8- Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell 

9- Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson 

10- Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton 

11- Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons 

12- Well Met by Jen DeLuca 

13- Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett 

14- Booth by Karen Joy Fowler 

15- The Fraud by Zadie Smith 

16- It Goes So Fast by Mary Louise Kelly 

17- The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehman 

18- The Night We Became Strangers by Lorena Hughes 

19- Shibby Magee by Carrie Kabak 

20- A Five Star Read by Fellow Book Lover Abigail @nobadbooks - Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser 

21- The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix 

22- The Book That Matters Most by Ann Hood 

23- The Toni Morrison Book Club by Juda Bennett, Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Cassandra Jackson, and Piper Kendrix Williams 

24- The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe 

25- The Busybody Book Club by Freya Sampson 

26- Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows: A Novel by Balli Kaur Jaswal 

Media Mentioned:

1- For All Mankind (Apple +, 2019 - present)

2- But That's Another Story Podcast (featuring Will Schwalbe)

3 - Whitehall House and Gardens Book Club - https://www.historicwhitehall.org/whitehall-book-club

What is a food that, when you smell it or taste it, reminds you of a person or a place? Our guest this week, Daria Lavelle, has written a novel titled Aftertaste that asks what would happen if you could summon ghosts with food.  This isn’t a horror novel, so these ghosts aren’t here to haunt us in the traditional sense.  But the main character, Kostya, is a chef who helps his clients find closure from their loss and grief through food memories. Lavelle’s novel is super unique, and she talks to us about her own Ukrainian-American family’s passion for food, how Covid and Russia’s war on Ukraine heavily affected its writing, and how love becomes the crux of all the book’s momentum.

Our book rec segment of the show features women in STEM doing all kinds of cool sciency, techny, engineery, and mathy things. We’ve got women doing research in the Amazon and under the sea, women physicists, young girls learning botany, Regency period women studying fossils, and female scientists who bring back a woolly mammoth. 

Books Mentioned In This Episode

1- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 

2- Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller 

3- The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh 

4- The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow 

5- A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat 

6- Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach 

7- A Five Star Read Recommended by Fellow Book Lover Kris N. @theretiredlibrarian - Beth is Dead by Katie Bernet 

8- The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly 

9- The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel 

10- Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier 

11- The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner by Marissa Moss 

12- State of Wonder by Ann Patchett 

13- Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield 

Media Mentioned --

1- Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2024)

2- Bringing Back Wooly Mammoths - https://www.npr.org/2026/03/04/nx-s1-5704318/colossal-woolly-mammoth-dire-wolf

This week, we chat with Chicago resident Betsy Tomszak who by day is a kindergarten teacher who reads lots and lots of picture books. After school hours, though, she is a reader of all kinds of other genres and the host of the podcast Books with Betsy. She was kind enough to invite us to be guests last summer, and we’re finally able to return the favor so she can tell our listeners all about her show. We get the nitty gritty about why she started the podcast and why she wanted to talk to regular readers. 

Our book recommendation segment of the show this week is about characters in disguise. Sometimes a disguise is just to mask one’s appearance, but in other situations it is not only a physical disguise but an assumption of an entirely different personality and back story. We offer you historical fiction novels set in Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, a novel based on a medieval legend, a National Book Award winner, and a memoir.

Books Mentioned in this Episode:

1- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

2- My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar 

3- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

4- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb

5- Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capo Crucet 

6- So You Wanna Be On Top? by Sarah Hartshorne 

7- Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica 

8- I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Hartman 

9- Rules of Civility by Amor Towles 

10- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 

11- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 

12- Summerdale by David Jay Collins 

13- The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai 

14- The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy 

15- The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley 

16- Sundial by Catriona Ward 

17- A Five Start Read recommended by Fellow Book Lover Jeanine Neale @jeans_stacked_shelf - Nobody Knows You are Here by Bryn Greenwood 

18- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas 

19- Master Slave, Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyoon Woo 

20- Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear 

21- Pope Joan: A Novel by Donna Woolfolk Cross 

22- Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl 

23- The Good Lord Bird by James McBride 

Media mentioned:

1- Wuthering Heights (2026)

2- Shrinking (Apple +, 2023 - present)

3- The Good Lord Bird (2020)

4- Jateska Cultural Center - https://jasteka.org

5- Artwork by Vian Sora - -https://jasteka.org/abcs-events

6- Run and Read Chicago - https://www.readandrunchicago.com