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

This week we talk to Rachel Ray, CEO of the International Book Project, a nonprofit organization in Lexington, KY that helps make book lovers out of people all over the world. She talks to us about the logistics of shipping books and how close relationships with the Peace Corps and other nonprofits help get English-language books into people’s hands. 

And for our book recommendation section of the show, we are focusing on spies, but these definitely aren’t of the James Bond variety. We offer up 6 book suggestions that stretch our understanding of an espionage story.  We are light on books set during the Cold War or World War II but instead focus on outside-the-box spy characters.    

Books Mentioned in this Episode:

1- A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City by David Dominé

2- The White Heart of the Mojave: An Adventure with the Outdoors of the Desert by Edna Brush Perkins 

3- Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams on the Edge of Death Valley by Brent Underwood 

4- Guards, Guards! (Discworld series) by Terry Pratchett 

5- The Storyteller of Casablanca by Fiona Valley 

6- Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats by Courtney Gustafson 

7- A Five Star Read by Fellow Book Lover Jenni Scott @storytimereviews - Theo of Golden by Allen Levi 

8- Oxford Soju Club by Jinwoo Park 

9- Who is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht 

10- An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole 

11- Liar and Spy by Rebecca Stead 

12- Mr. Nice Spy by Tiana Smith 

13- The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler by John Hendrix 

Media Mentioned:

1- Murder in Glitterball City (HBO Max 2026)

2- John Hendrix's link to The Faithful Spy research - https://goose-hawk-c589.squarespace.com/bonhoeffer-research

3- Terry Pratchett Puzzle - https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-world-of-terry-pratchett-1000-piece-puzzle-a-discworld-jigsaw-by-paul-kidby-terry-pratchett/29dbddde082184ce?ean=9781399620697&next=t&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=%7Bcampaignname%7D&utm_content=6443417794&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=16235479093&gbraid=0AAAAACfld41whhyxRMyYH28KslljMJPpx&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIieS7rND8kgMVYCBECB3sphbOEAQYByABEgIRtvD_BwE

We chat this week with Eiren Caffall, a Chicago writer whose memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, sat on Carrie's shelf staring at her for a year until she finally made time to read it but she is so glad I did. In this creative nonfiction work, Eiren talks about her family’s long history with a chronic illness (specifically, polycystic kidney disease (PKD)) and connects that to the health of the waterways and living creatures in Maine. It is a master work that merges scientific writing with poetic language. We also talk about her novel, All the Water in the World, which came out less than six months after The Mourner’s Bestiary. It is also about water, but in a fictional dystopian setting where New York City has flooded due to the melting of the ice caps. If you enjoyed Station Eleven, you must give this novel a try.

And for our book recommendation section of the show, we are focusing on Old Dudes!!  Carrie has a soft spot in her heart for curmudgeonly and/ or cuddly elderly men, so we are giving you six ideas of books that feature crotchety (or not) male senior citizens.  We have a memoir, a children’s book series, a book translated from Swedish, novels featuring LGBTQ protagonists, and literary fiction.

Books Discussed in this Episode:

1- The Mourner's Bestiary by Eiren Caffal 

2- All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffal 

3- Howards End by E.M. Forster 

4- Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius 

5- Ignition by MR O'Connor 

6- Hotshot: A Life on Fire by River Selby 

7- The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Story of a Donner Party Bride by Daniel James Brown 

8- The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann 

9- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones 

10- Queen Bee by Cierra Geraghty 

11- The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey

12- A Five Star Read Recommended by a Fellow Book Lover - In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes 

13- The Very Long Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl by Bart Yates 

14- The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray by Walter Mosley 

15- The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku 

16- The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson 

17- The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle by Matt Cain 

18- Mr. Putter and Tabby series by Cynthia Rylant 

19- A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City: Murder, Secrets, and Scandal in Old Louisville by David Dominé

Media Mentioned:

1- 'Murder in Glitter Ball City' - https://www.wdrb.com/news/murder-in-glitter-ball-city-hbo-documentary-explores-2010-old-louisville-murder/article_1b4cc513-c22b-4543-b609-5b6267e1dce2.html

2- Our Episode with David Dominé - https://ThePerksofBeingaBookLover.podbean.com/e/season-5-episode-108-sex-drugs-and-true-crime-vibes-with-guest-david-domine-10-13-21/

3- True Detective Night Country (HBO Max, 2024)

In this week’s episode, our focus is on houses that are so important to a story that they essentially become a character. When we started thinking about this idea, we realized that Chicago writer Christina Henry would be a perfect guest because her last two novels are focused on houses. Her most recent is titled The Place Where They Buried Your Heart and is about a neighborhood house that lures people in, causing heartache for neighbors as well as a sense of family among a handful of them. Prior to this novel, Christina wrote The House That Horror Built. We talk to Christina about the importance of houses in her stories and how a house can straddle setting and character. 

In our book rec section, we continue the house idea with a range of titles in which houses are critically important—-we’ve got a memoir, a National Book Award winner, children’s fantasy, classic literature, and propulsive literary fiction.

Books Mentioned in this Episode:

1- The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry

2- The House That Horror Built by Christina Henry 

3- Howards End by E.M. Forster 

3- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

3- Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen by Jon M. Chu 

4- Double Indemnity by James Cain 

5- From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir by Alain Silver and James Ursini 

6- Out by Natsuo Kirino 

7- Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata 

8- Earthlings by Sayaka Murata 

9- The Mantis by Kotaro Osaka 

10- Three Assasins by Kotaro Osaka 

11- Bullet Train by Kotaro Osaka 

12- The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir

13- Night Shift by Alex Finlay

14- A Five Star Read by Fellow Book Lover Kris Wyatt @froggyreadteach - The Labors of Hercules Beal by Gary D. Schmidt 

15- Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman by Patrick Hutchison 

16- House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

17- The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom 

18- Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones 

19- The House with the Clock in it's Walls by John Bellairs 

20- Behind the Waterline by Kionna Walker LeMalle 

21- The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

22- Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier 

Media Mentioned:

1- If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)

2- Platonic (Apple +, 2023 - present)

3- Train Dreams (2025)

4- The Studio (Apple +, 2025)

5- Howards End (1992)

6- Howl's Moving Castle (2004)

7- The House with the Clock in it's Walls (2018)

8- House of Sand and Fog (2003)

9- LibroVox app for free audiobooks of books in the public domain

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

In this week’s episode, we’re talking to debut novelist and assistant professor of fine arts at Parsons School of Design Jessica Walker, whose novel Amy discovered late last year. The Secret Astronomers is an illustrated novel, which is not the same as a graphic novel.  This is a novel that is written on sticky notes between two people inside a book.  It’s in full color and really eye-catching. Although it is technically geared towards young adults, it is a feast for the eyes for any age reader.  The story is about two girls who keep their identities secret from each other and converse through an old astronomy textbook in the school library. This new take on the epistolary novel takes the reader on an adventure to solve a mystery in this small West Virginia town.  

And in our book rec section, inspired by the West Virginia setting of The Secret Astronomers, we’re giving you other books set in The Mountain State. We have a mystery, a Pulitzer Prize winner, several historical fiction, and an investigative nonfiction.

Books Mentioned in this Episode:

1- The Secret Astronomers by Jessica Walker 

2- I Am The Messenger by Markus Zusak 

3- Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe by Preston Norton 

4- Floreana by Midge Raymond 

5- What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte 

6- Yellow Singing Sail: A Memoir of an Only Child in China by Yinfan Huang 

7- Otto: A Palindrama by Jon Agee 

8- Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Address Book by Nick Bantok 

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

10- The Doorman by Chris Pavone 

11- A Five Star Read by Fellow Book Lover Karla @karla_bookishlife - Blood Like Ours and Blood Like Mine by Stuart Neville 

12- The Road to Blair Mountain by Charles Keeney 

13- The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer 

14- The Unquiet Grave by Sharyn McCrumb 

15- Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

16- The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence by Stephen Kurczy

17- The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg

18- Foote: A Mystery Novel by Tom Bredehoft

19- The Coffin Quilt: The Feud Between the Hatfields and McCoys by Ann Rinaldi

20- The Grand Design by Joy Calloway

Media Mentioned:

1- Footnotes and Tangents Substack - War and Peace

2- Eden (Netflix, 2024)

3- Our episode with Meg Shaffer - https://ThePerksofBeingaBookLover.podbean.com/e/s12ep249-the-lost-story-with-guest-meg-shaffer-11525/

4- Article about Reading Resetting the Nervous System - https://www.hellomagazine.com/healthandbeauty/health-and-fitness/873671/why-reading-cures-overactive-nervous-system-experts-explain/

We are back with all new episodes, book recommendations, and, most importantly, guests!  To start the new season with a bang, we have author Archer Sullivan whose book The Witch’s Orchard is the first in a new series featuring Private Investigator Annie Gore, who travels to small town North Carolina to solve the mystery of young girls who have disappeared. What makes the cases even more creepy is that an Appalachian apple face doll is left in place of the child. Archer draws on her personal knowledge of place as a 7th-generation Appalachian, although she now resides in Los Angeles, and is always looking for a reason to come home. The novel was a nominee for the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards in the Best Debut Novel Category. The next Annie Gore installment comes out in August of 2026.

Our book rec section for this episode is a call back to what a lot of people were doing the past two weeks–taking planes, trains, and automobiles to family and friends to celebrate the holidays. We give you two books set on planes, two on trains, and two in automobiles, which you can look into whenever you’ve got travel plans in 2026.

Books Mentioned In This Episode:

1- The Witch's Orchard by Archer Sullivan 

2- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

3- Sous Chef: 24 Hours of Working on the Line by Michael Gibney 

4- Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close 

5- Brimstone Hollow by Archer Sullivan 

6- Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly 

7- The Curse of Chalion by Lois Bujold 

8- The Wizard of Earths by Ursula K. LeGuin

9- Silver Medal Lover by Tanith Lee 

10- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison 

11- Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson

12- The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo 

13- A Five Star Read by Fellow Book Lover - Babel by R.F. Kuang

14- West With The Night by Beryl Markham 

15- Circling the Sun by Paula McClain 

16- Turbulence by David Szalay

17- Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool

18- Border Crossing by Emma Pick 

19- Mrs. Nash's Ashes by Sarah Adler 

20- The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett

Media Mentioned:

1- Simon Haisell's Slow Read at Footnote and Tangents Substack - https://footnotesandtangents.substack.com

2- From the Front Porch Podcast - Patreon Conquer a Classic 

3- The Bear on Hulu 

Our first show of Season 14 will begin on January 7, 2026. We’ve been coming up with ideas for book recommendations and will soon be recording with guests. But until then, Amy is going to make merry, and Carrie is going to begrudgingly deal with the holidays. And in this episode, we’re reviewing some of the notable books that we have loved over the last 12 months. Some of these are backlist titles, and some are new releases—we cannot keep up with the publishing industry, nor do we really try. You will also hear from some of our guests from this year who share their favorites of 2025. 

 Books Discussed In This Episode:

Carrie's Favorites of 2025

1- Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

2- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder 

3- The Millicent Quibb School for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon

4- The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh 

5- Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug

Amy's Favorites of 2025

1- Miss Benson's Beetle by Rachel Joyce 

2- You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

3- Culpability by Bruce Holsinger 

4- The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives by Theresa Brown, RN 

5- Paris Letters: A Travel Memoir About Art, Writing, and Finding Love in Paris by Janice MacLeod 

Other books mentioned

1- I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

2- The Nature of Pain by Mandi Fugate Sheffel 

3- The Strange Case of Jane O by Karen Thompson Walker 

4- The Devils by Joe Abercrombie 

5- Everything's Fine by Cecilia Rabess 

6- The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb

7- I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

8- Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

9- Starling House by Alix E. Harrow 

10- Dead Man Blues by S.D. House 

11- God of the Woods by Liz Moore 

12- The Road to Blair Mountain: Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal by Charles B. Keeney

13- Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O' Yea 

14- Carpool Detectives: A True Story  of Four Moms, Two Bodies, and One Mysterious Cold Case by Chuck Hogan 

15- Anima Rising by Christopher Moore 

16- The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest by Aubrey Hartman

17- The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

18- Grace and Henry's Holiday Movie Marathon by Matthew Norman 

19- Seven Days of Us by Francesca Hornak