Season 14, Episode 275 Books with Betsy Podcast with guest Betsy Tomszak (Copy)

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