October New Book Releases
In this week’s episode, both Gayle and Nicole have researched what books will be released during the month of October. They do a short list of 3-4 each and share with you what made them pick those. They sure are great picks to read during the pumpkin season!
As always you can find below the whole booklist they run through during the episode:
Dear Ms Metropolitan by Carolyn Ferrell | Amazon | Bookshop
Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones | Amazon | Bookshop
One Step Too Far by Lisa Gardner | Amazon | Bookshop
Too Good To Be True by Carola Lovering | Amazon | Bookshop
Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen | Amazon | Bookshop
Can’t Look Away by Carola Lovering | Amazon | Bookshop
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng | Amazon | Bookshop
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng | Amazon | Bookshop
Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro | Amazon | Bookshop
Jackal by Erin E. Adams | Amazon | Bookshop
When We Were Sisters by Fatima Asghar | Amazon | Bookshop
The White Mosque by Sofia Samatar | Amazon | Bookshop
Hester by Laurie Albanese | Amazon | Bookshop
The Complicities by Stacy D’Erasmo | Amazon | Bookshop
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie | Amazon | Bookshop
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell | Amazon | Bookshop
*Books linked above are our affiliate links through Amazon. There’s no additional expense to you, but if you make a purchase through us a small portion of that contributes to the costs associated with making our podcast. Thanks so much for listening and for your support.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Nicole: Welcome to another edition of the Readerly Report. Today Gayle and I are gonna be talking about some October new releases that we’re looking forward. We’re glad to be together again. As you heard last week, I did a solo episode on books that I did not finish, and the various reasons why I did not finish books.
So like we said, Trying to keep our weekly cadence. So every now and then you will have an episode that one of us is solo. So that was my solo, So , right?
[00:00:32] Gayle: Solo. So I like that.
[00:00:35] Nicole: All right. So Gayle, what have you been reading? Let’s catch me up.
[00:00:38] Gayle: Yeah, so when we talked last, I mentioned that I had been in a reading slump and it’s kind of persisted.
I think you with one book? Well, no, I mean, I got a couple, like audio is still really working for me, so I can, I can hammer out the books on audio. So I think last we talked was I had, I finished counterfeit, I guess I was just reading counterfeit Counterfeit is the book about the, she’s a woman stay at home mom living in San Francisco, who is like, her husband works all the time and her toddler’s really challenging and she’s pretty unhappy with her life and.
Someone reemerges into her life. It was a woman that she had lived with as a roommate her freshman year at Stanford who had then disappeared under like a kind of potential potentially scandalous circumstances. And this friend shows back up, that’s Winnie. And after a couple of months of them sort of starting to hang out, he finally reveals that she is involved in the complicated counterfeit luxury handbag scheme where she goes to China and.
Obtains, very realistic looking handbags that look like expensive ones. And then she like buys real handbags, returns them with the fake one, and then resells the real one. So like she manages to make a lot of money off of each of these bags. So she gets her friend, the one who’s the stay-at-home mom kind of embroiled in this scheme.
So I actually thought this was really a fun book to read. I like it. Whether or not this scheme is realistic. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about hand luxury handbags, but it was just a fun book to see how this woman got embroiled and sucked into this kind of dark world of, of counterfeiting and the relationship between the two.
And it’s told in the confessional style, the one, the one who’s the stay-at-home mom, is confessing to a detective. What happened? So you kind of see. You know what her side of things was? I don’t know. I’d like this one. It was, I did it on audio. I thought it was pretty good and it definitely sucked me in.
So it was like, okay, that broke the slump, which is what I needed. And then I’ve been sort of like limping along with this book. Any other family by l r Brown, which is about four kids from the same mother, but they’ve all been adopted by different families. So, okay. The definition of family, like how this family all comes together, the, the, the parents, the adoptive parents get together and spend vacation together and get together for dinner and to keep these kids together so they feel a sense of family and, you know, in, in.
Succession. Then the parents, I’ll find this sense of family too, and it’s fine. I think like I kind of wish it were a little deeper, like it’s, it’s very character driven and you get into the heads of these different mothers. But I feel like, I don’t know, she could have done more with it. I don’t know. I’m only like halfway done and I’m doing this one in print and it, I’m slowed down again.
Like I, I, I’m finding that when I have the option to reach for my phone or reach for my book, I’m reaching for my phone a lot more, which is always a bad sign for me. Cause that’s when the readings, this, the reading pace really slows the audio. I could kind of keep up all the time cuz that’s, you know, when I’m not gonna be on the phone.
But when I. having free time and I’m reaching for the phone. It’s bad , so I don’t know if it’s, if it’s the book, I’d say it’s probably 60% the book and 40% my distracted mind. But I kind of need to like find something else that’s gonna be more compelling to me than TikTok. It’s just hard.
[00:04:10] Nicole: TikTok for the win on this
[00:04:11] Gayle: one.
TikTok for the Win. And then on audio, I’m doing our our podcast book, club book. So I won’t talk about that. Now that’s can’t Look Away by Carol Lovering. Okay,
[00:04:19] Nicole: good. Yeah. I hit a part with that book and it’s just like, Oh, is it gonna be this book? So I’m hoping to get past that piece and get reengaged again, but I hit one of the first
[00:04:29] Gayle: twists.
Oh, okay. Don’t tell me no. Cause I’m only like, Of course not. I won’t tell. A third of the way, have I had a twist? Oh, I guess I did. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I did and actually I hit a twist and I gasped like out loud. I was like, Oh, oh my
[00:04:44] Nicole: God. Really? I was kind of suspecting that that was gonna happen.
[00:04:48] Gayle: I mean, I had a feeling, but just to, just to like, I was like, really hear it.
Yeah. Well, let’s save the discussion cuz I’ve got some thoughts so far. Okay. Save it for our discussion on, on the. But I’m glad we’re both actually reading it. . Yeah,
[00:05:02] Nicole: that’s, that’s good. We’re making progress. That’s a good start. That little snag and I’m just like, Oh boy, it’s gonna be one of those. So I’m, I just kind of lost momentum at that.
And it’s not cuz the book is bad or anything like that, it’s just kind of like, I don’t know, a trope, something that I feel like has been done
[00:05:17] Gayle: quite a bit. Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:19] Nicole: By this author, . She, she likes, she likes things the way she likes. Yeah. Okay. So we got Mary wrote into us about reading slumps and she says that she gets the reading Slump blues, and she also recommended a fast pace, not challenging book to get back in rhythm.
And she suggested Lisa Gardner’s one step too far. And I’m just thinking have I read some Lisa Gardner and I have, and when I looked up the book that she was talking about, so actually the second in a series, because Lisa Gardner writes a ton of books like the Mystery Thriller types, and she just started a new series with this woman called Frankie Elkin, who I think it was supposed to be a stand standalone book originally, but then it became, I mean, I guess now she’s on her second book about her, and all we know about her is that she’s this woman who is guilt written.
There’s something that she did, did in her past that she feels like she has to atone for. So what she does is she kind of monitors the news for cases that aren’t gonna get maybe enough resources or attention that they require, or if someone’s missing or she We’ll travel to the town, kind of set herself up as a resident and help out to solve the industry.
So actually, I’m, I’m so glad Mary mentioned this because it would not have registered with me mm-hmm. to follow up with this, and so now I’m glad, so I can like, kind of put it on my list and. Get to it eventually, cuz I did really like the first one. I thought it showed promise. So she’s recommending this one.
I don’t know. I don’t know if it will work for you, Gayle. Cause I don’t know that you, you read suspense books, but I don’t think that you read like detective or investigative ones. True. I
[00:07:08] Gayle: usually avoid those. Anything that says mystery, I usually avoid ,
[00:07:12] Nicole: so this would work for me. I wonder if
[00:07:14] Gayle: that’s a bad, like I don’t, why do I dismiss an attire genre road books?
Like I might really like them.
[00:07:19] Nicole: I don’t know. You might, and I do find Val McDermott once said that mysteries, thrillers, detective novels, or not thrillers, detective. Detective novels, I think in particular are kind of always looking at a side of life. I don’t wanna say seedier, but I just like more. Just like normal people more that have had things happen to us.
I think when, when dealing with literary fiction, it’s a lot of affluent families or you know, families that are firmly upper middle class and. The problems that are reflected are similar, and I think in mysteries and thrillers, it’s just kind of like more everyday people who are living, you know, normal lives.
Some of quiet desperation, some fairly happy, happy until something happens to them and it, they just take on a lot more of our societal. Ills, whether it’s like racial conflict or G B T Q I A issues or drug addiction and you know, housing inequality, poverty, there’s just so much richer in the everyday working person experience and I feel like we get a lot of like doctors and teachers and professionals in other ways that don’t have certain frictions that are apparent in other classes.
Just like this series. Mm-hmm. . So I’m happy for that recommendation. Thank you Mary.
[00:08:42] Gayle: Yeah. And if anyone else has any,
[00:08:44] Nicole: we might be needing them for reason. Recomme,
[00:08:47] Gayle: what is the best way for people to write into us? We are newly back on Instagram, so that’s one way, right?
[00:08:53] Nicole: Yes. You can respond to a post on Instagram.
You can email You can email either of us individually. My email that I’m using right now is nicole bonk.com, just because I’m not sure what’s going on with my other email. I’m trying to fix it. And you can comment on the blog. That’s how Mary found us. Okay.
[00:09:11] Gayle: All right. What are you reading?
[00:09:13] Nicole: So I finished Token Black Girl by Danielle Prescott, and I’ve really enjoyed that book.
She talks about growing up in a white community and then going on to kind of work in very white magazine companies. I think she interned at Nylon, worked at Teen Vogue, I think she worked at In Style. bt.com. So just lots of things in media, and she talks about how that affected her in terms of having an eating disorder, being very young and really not consciously aware in certain ways that she was black.
You know, kind of being shocked in the mirror and just how. Because where she lived, she always stood out, I guess like self erasure and the, the doubt and always trying to keep her blackness at bay and to fit in and it kind of made her a mean girl. So I think she grew up, maybe she. Was born in the early to mid eighties, so just talking about how different the landscape was back then in terms of representation and you know, the slow changes that have been made and how she’s kind of healing herself of some of that.
I thought it was really well done. I always, like in memoirs, when people give honest assessment of themselves, she was fair in herself to herself or in her portrayal in the sense that she doesn’t come off. You don’t think she’s nice and warm and fuzzy, Like she’s very honest about what she was going on, what was going on with her, how she was trying to hide things, and how it made her very critical of others, and how she passed on information that she wish she hadn’t.
So I thought it was like, you know, just like a really accurate self-assessment of someone who feels like they’re still struggling with these issues, you know, trying to do better. And just honest about, you know, how their struggles didn’t necessarily. Make them a great person. Mm-hmm. . So that was really good.
The second book that I had been reading last time we spoke was Easy Beauty by Glowy Cooper, so I’m still getting through that one. And I’m also reading Dear Miss Metropolitan by Carolyn Farrell.
[00:11:13] Gayle: Oh, I have that book and was so interested in it and I just never picked it up. It’s so deals with such a tough subject matter that I feel like it was.
Like easy for me to pass, you know, be like, Oh, I’ll read it later. I’ll be so interested to hear what you think. Right. So far
[00:11:27] Nicole: I do like it because like you said, it is difficult. Subjects matter, and I wondered if I was actually going to be able to read it. Like I’m reading it with my, you know, my friend, we have our two person book club.
Mm-hmm. , and so we choose three at a time and this was one of the books and. Yeah, I was, I was very worried about like starting this and just like, am I gonna have to tell her that I can’t do this cuz it’s too grim, You know, how I feel about people being held cap. It is about these three women young adults who are found, I think when they’re 23, but a man had been holding them.
Captive in his queen’s home for like 10 years. And there is this one elderly reporter who kind of takes it to heart that she didn’t know what was going on. You know, like how something so monstrous could be happening in her neighborhood. And you know, a place that she grew up, she knew the house. Of course, everyone after this is discovered, you know, they’ve had dealings with this man.
So the description would have you think that it’s gonna focus on the aftermath, but the book does start out from the perspective. Of the three women who’ve been held captive. And you know, it gets a little bit into their backgrounds, their histories. I don’t know yet much the mechanics of how they were taken, but you get to see, you know, kind of what their life was like before and, and whatever challenges they were dealing with before this happened to them, just got a distinctive voice for the characters and a way that they relate their captivity.
It’s really well done about halfway through, so I will update you. Yeah,
[00:12:59] Gayle: I would like to, Oh, what’s your blow
[00:13:00] Nicole: dry book
[00:13:01] Gayle: or do you not have one? I don’t really have one. I guess my blow dry book has just been whatever I’m reading or listening to. Signs of a true slump . Yeah, I know. Maybe I should just allocate one specifically for that.
I feel like I did recently and then it somehow morphed back into one of the ones that the regular book. Yeah, but that would be a good idea to just have one there, that this is specifically for that
[00:13:22] Nicole: purpose. So next up, Gayle, do you have any book news?
[00:13:26] Gayle: No. I don’t actually have any book news. Nothing that jumped out at me as like notable, but I think you do.
[00:13:32] Nicole: I mentioned briefly before the show that Amazon is changing their ebook policy. I guess it used to be pretty liberal that you could basically read a book and return it, you know, and they would refund the money. And I guess, you know, the authors are charged, like whatever royalties they’ve been paid out based on the purchases.
You know, they have to return once people return the. So I think they’re tightening up their policy with that. You mentioned book talk and I think that was one of the drivers that, you know, just had people and authors outraged and having them take another look at this policy because I guess book talkers were recommending or mentioning how you could read, you know, like.
Read a book and pretty much return it. So now it is, you can return the book. If you have read less than 10% of it, you know, meaning, I guess you pick it up, you try to get into it and you feel like. It’s not for you. If you don’t go past the 10% mark, you can still return it. But I guess if you get past that point, it’s like, not that they won’t refund you, but it’s just more of a process.
Like you have to contact customer service and you know, they will be just monitoring like, who’s doing this more closely? So I guess a few times maybe you can do it, but if, if you’ve, you’re read like 15 or 20 books and you’re returning them, then that’s probably not gonna fly anymore. Mm-hmm. , I mean, that
[00:14:54] Gayle: kind of seems fair.
Yeah. Do you think 10% is the right percentage? Like can you get a sense after 10% of whether you wanna make the investment in the book?
[00:15:03] Nicole: That’s kind of hard. I think maybe I would go for 15% just because with a regular book, you’re 10% can be a true 10%. But with an ebook, like are you, are we counting the cover?
Are we counting the table of contents? You know, it’s like your miles may vary with. 10% of an ebook because some books, there’s a ton of stuff in the beginning, and maybe you only get to read a couple pages by the time you’re hitting the 10% mark and maybe some books you know right away. And two, it depends on the length.
I mean, if it’s a 400 page book and I’m getting to read 40 pages, you know, I don’t know, maybe 60 pages. Maybe it’s a page mark. I don’t know that 10. Maybe it’s 15 to 20%. You know, I think I would have a good idea enough, but yeah, I mean, I, I really don’t think if you have made a, a good faith effort to read a book and say you reach 30%, this is not gonna be an issue.
If it’s just like, Look, I, I tried and I just can’t get into this book and I wanna refund. . To do that once or twice I think is different than you’re just reading, you know, tons of books for your book talk or your Instagram or whatever and returning them. So yeah,
[00:16:16] Gayle: I mean, I don’t usually side with Amazon on stuff, but
[00:16:19] Nicole: well, and I don’t think Amazon just did this.
I think it was, this is something that has been a tender point for years, but I think it was like the book talk thing and it just skyrocketing over the last year. Like this kind of abusive behavior that is just like, okay, so we have to take a look at that. And I think they did something similar around Audible that I think if you return a book after seven days, then they do not ask the author for that royalty payment back.
Got it. Okay. But stuff is always so interesting when you’re dealing with like new technology, you know, for so long it was just books and now it’s eBooks and audiobooks and stuff. Right. Are you still doing Book of the month? I
[00:17:00] Gayle: am still doing book of the month. Did you make a pick this month? I did. And it’s actually one of the books that we’re gonna talk about today for the October books.
Okay. But I’ve been skipping more than I have been picking, and I almost skipped again. I came very close to skipping. I find that book of the month is, Is heading in directions that are opposite or just different from the types of books I like to read. So like every month there’s a thriller. Every month there’s a romance.
It seems sometimes there’s like dystopian. I don’t know, it’s just, it’s rarely now like literary fiction in my wheelhouse. And so I’m either using book of the month for stuff that broadens my horizons or I’m skipp. Oh, okay. Are you, you’re not doing it anymore, right? No. ,
[00:17:45] Nicole: I have read, I think I’m at 28 books this year, so I just don’t read enough to do it.
And I think last year it was the opposite problem, which is why I stopped was I was just reading, had too much stuff to read that I just didn’t need the additional books coming in.
[00:18:00] Gayle: Yeah, I kind of like just, I like seeing what the books are and I like, like following. . You know, there’s various, like Facebook groups don’t book the month that are, you know, sometimes people talk about predictions.
So sometimes it’s just for me, a good book source, just like one of the many that I do to sort of just see what’s out there. Right. And learn about books and see what people talk about and think about them. But I have been pretty disappointed with the picks lately.
[00:18:24] Nicole: Mm-hmm. . Okay. Well, yeah, my other piece of news is that luckiest girl alive.
by Jessica Noll was, is an awful that I read and enjoyed about this woman who’s planning for her marriage. She’s got the perfect life, but there is some type of reunion going on at her school or something that she’s gonna go back and participate in, and we see that she’s like really worked hard to get this perfect life and that there are things in her past that she has not shared with her fiance and things that will probably be very publicly coming to light.
So, This is a movie. I think it’s gonna be, it’s one of those dual releases where it will be on Netflix, also out in the movies. I think Cammi La Kunas plays the, the engaged woman she plays. A finale. So I’m really excited to see that. I’ve been, I follow the author on Instagram, so I’ve been seeing sneak peaks and seeing when they were filming, and she actually was the one who adapted the book.
You know, that’s like very kind of a rare thing for an author to be the script writer for their work. But she did that and I think this was her first novel. So this is something that has been a very, very long time in coming. You know, from her writing the novel, it being published, Getting It option, you know, being the one who writes the script.
So I’m excited to see how it turns out. I actually need to pick up the book and kind of flip through it, because I remember a lot, but I just want a bit of a refresher before I watch it. So if anyone saw Luckiest Girl Alive, you know, it’ll be on
[00:19:59] Gayle: Netflix. All right, well, so let’s talk about some October books.
Let’s do it. What did you find when you were looking for October books? Like did you find a. Not a lot.
[00:20:08] Nicole: Well, no, I mean I wasn’t looking for a lot. I wanted to par it down to, cuz I know sometimes we do these shows and it’s just like we each have six to 10 books and it can be massive. So I’m definitely trying to par it down and be more selective and just talk about the ones that I most excited about because, you know, we talk every week so we can get some more in there later.
So I have three that I wanna share. Okay. And I have four. Okay, great. All right. Why don’t you kick us off? All right, so my first book is Celeste ING’s new one. It’s called Our Missing Hearts, and it is about. I don’t know the United States right around the corner or maybe in a few years. It is about this bird.
Gardner has been growing up with his father, who is a former linguist, and he shells books at the University Library. It’s like a very restricted environment. No one asks a lot of questions because there is this policy in place in the United States that basically if you are misbehaved or. Just in any way, I guess viewed as a threat or having too strong an opinion or anything, they will come and relocate your children and it seems like they particularly target children of Asian origin, so, So yeah.
So there is a culture of fear. It seems like birds mother disappeared. When he was younger and he really doesn’t know that much about her, but she was kind of a dissident. I think she was a poet and she had writings that were something that are our taboo, but he’s feeling this pull to learn more about her.
So the interesting thing I, I read Little Fires everywhere. I did think it was a little bit heavy handed, but I did like her, the story that she told. So I’m really interested to read this one and. Little fires everywhere is on Hulu. Did you watch that series? I didn’t, yeah, I watched a few episodes. I didn’t like a lot of the changes they made from the book and I just kind of lost interest, dropped it, never finished it.
So I’m looking forward to this. This is only her third book, which I guess surprises me. Mm-hmm.
[00:22:17] Gayle: I’ve read her first two and I did not like either one of them that much. And so I’ve seen this book everywhere, but I’ve kind of written her off as not an author for me. Right. Yeah, and I didn’t watch Little Fires Everywhere just cause I didn’t like the book and.
I don’t know. This one seems interesting. The premise seems interesting and timely and maybe a little, I don’t wanna say heftier than her other ones, cuz her other ones dealt with some pretty, Yeah, they were pretty hefty. They were hefty. Maybe it seems more broad because it’s, her other ones have been kind of more family focused.
Like, and this one is more affects, you know, more people. But I don’t know. I mean, if the reviews were great, I would, I’m sure I would consider picking it up.
[00:23:01] Nicole: Well, I will report back.
[00:23:03] Gayle: Okay. Eventually . Yeah, eventually. I wanna know. Okay, so my first one is actually one I’ve talked about on the show before when we did our fall book preview, but, Have to include it here and it is Signal Fires by Danny Shapiro, who is known probably predominantly for her memoirs, but she is also a writer of fiction and I have read some of her early fiction from a long time ago.
Signal Fires is about a car accident that happens in 1985 and impacts, you know, many lives based on what happens. In the accident, and then it flips to many years later. I don’t know if it’s present time or just years later, and a new family moves to the neighborhood where the accident was. And then I think their son develops a connection with a doctor who arrived on the scene of the accident.
And so I think everything gets tied together and I don’t know exactly how, but. The point of the book is that you find out she’s just such a good writer and I love, I loved her memoir Inheritance, which she narrated and I could still hear her voice in my head and she’s just so eloquent. So I’m really excited to read this one.
Just been a while since I’ve, you know, gotten some fiction from her. So I’m excited. This one comes out on October the 18th. Hmm.
[00:24:22] Nicole: Okay. Sounds good. My next book is called Jackle by Erin e Adams. , the premise is interesting to me. It’s a little scary because it says it’s a horror novel, . Mm-hmm. And it is about this woman who of course she is returning home.
Everything happens when you, when you go home for something, whether you are going back there to try to restart your life, or whether you’ve been avoiding home and you go back. For a reunion of some kind, but Liz Roker is going home. She’s reluctant to go home. She doesn’t have fond memories of where she grew up.
This place called Johnstown, Pennsylvania. It’s Provo, a predominantly white town. I think she was just kind of awkward when she was there, but her best friend is getting married, so she doesn’t have a choice. She has to go, you know, she has to go back and she’s not thrilled. But when she gets there the couple’s daughter goes missing and the only thing that’s left behind is this blood soaked piece of fabric.
And of course there is a search for her and Liz gets involved in the search for Carolyn, but it gets her to thinking back. Of when she was growing up in town and it seemed like another black teenager had gone missing. And so she starts thinking and doing a little bit of research and she discovers like this horrible pattern of teenagers going missing, usually young black teens and just investigating what’s going on with that.
So I’m hoping it’s more literary horror than horror horror, but we’ll see. It’s it’s coming out soon, so it’s coming out October 4th. I’ll have to check. .
[00:25:59] Gayle: You know, maybe one of the reasons that I do not resonate with a lot of October books is because people release horror books in October cuz of Halloween.
Like it’s, you know, become sort of a thing like that could be gothic mystery horror, you know, that’s which are just not my genres and maybe that’s why October and I do not click.
[00:26:19] Nicole: Well, the two you mentioned weren’t, I mean, that’s
[00:26:21] Gayle: true, but just maybe I’ve had a harder time finding books this time than I usually do.
Right. Whereas like summer reads tend to be a little more in my wheelhouse, maybe. I don’t know. Okay. Okay. So my next one is by an author I’ve never heard of before. Her name is Fatima o Oscar, a a s g h a r. The book is called When We Were Sisters and it is about three Muslim American girls who are. To raise each other when their parents die, Leaving them as orphans.
They’re, you know, they each are trying to kind of forge their own identity and live their own lives while yet being, you know, Grasping at what family they do have left and then feeling a lot of obligation towards each other. So I don’t know anything about her. I’ve never heard of her before or this book, but it’s, I don’t know.
It sounds very good. It was long listed for the National Book Award and I think it is a debut. Yes. Debut. Work of fiction. According to Amazon, it tenderly examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, names the perils of being three Muslim American girls alone against the world. It illustrates how those who’ve lost everything might still make homes in one another.
So much more up by Alley , the like gothic horrors.
[00:27:42] Nicole: All right. So that was one of my books, .
[00:27:45] Gayle: It was, Oh, I’m sorry.
[00:27:47] Nicole: Yeah, That’s okay. So I will scramble a little bit and give you, I’m so sorry, my backup book. That’s fine. And it is The White Mosque by Sophia. So maybe this is, this works out because now I get to speak about this book.
So this is a memoir that I was interested in reading. I haven’t read anything by her before, but she has written other pieces and so. It says it’s a secular pilgrimage to a lost village in a near forgotten history. It traces the poorest and ever expanding borders of identity. How do we enter the stories of others and how out of the tissue of life with its weird incidents, buried archives and startling connections as a person construct itself.
So I think what really attracted me to this book was that it was talking a lot about identity, and the author has a complex upbringing. She’s the daughter of a. Mennonite and a Somali Muslim, and she was raised as a Mennonite of color in the United States. So her background just seems to be fascinating.
And then she goes and starts like, you know, doing like an investigation into her history and, and grappling with these different questions of identity. And there’s some stuff about art mixed in there. So it was just something that was on the cusp of making my list that I could bring up to my list. It sounds interesting.
So
[00:29:05] Gayle: nice recovery there. .
[00:29:07] Nicole: Always have an extra .
[00:29:09] Gayle: Yeah. No, that’s really smart with us, and I hope I’m not gonna take another one of yours because, Well, that was, I only had three, so, Oh, you only had three. Okay. All right. Well, my third one, and then I have one after this that I’m gonna sneak in, even though it’s actually technically a September book, but I just wanted to mention it.
The one that I picked from October, this is actually my book, The Month Pick is Hester by Lori Leko Albany. This one is a reimagining of Hester Print from the Scarlet Letter. I think you did too. Yeah. Yeah. Because this is something that you like, which is literary re-imagining. Yes. Of historical figures or, or literary figures.
What’s interesting to me about this one and I, I did actually spend a fair amount of time reading about it cuz I was trying to decide whether to. Pick this as my book or to skip this month is that it doesn’t see, it doesn’t seem to follow the story that closely. Like it’s not, it’s not just a, oh, let’s just retell the Scarlet letter, but from her perspective or from a modern perspective or whatever, it seems like it kind of takes her but tells it entirely different story.
So she’s shows up someone named Isabelle shows up. The United States from Scotland, she’s come with her husband, he’s in APO area. They are trying to make a fresh start in the new world, but her husband then kind of takes off and. Goes on a ship to be at the ship on the, you know, a medic on the ship.
And I, I gotta be honest, I, I read The Scarlet Letter so long ago. I don’t really remember much about the facts other than just, you know, adulterous woman who is then forced to bear the shame of that. So I can give you a little bit of
[00:30:50] Nicole: background. So it’s not like a strict retelling of the Scarlet Letter.
It’s more about Nathaniel Harth Hawthorne, who I think at the. And this point in his life was kind of like grappling with his family’s links to the Salem Witch trials or something. Mm-hmm. . And he’s in this like really introspective place in his life when he meets this woman who has been abandoned by, basically by her husband because he goes off to, I don’t know, work, or if he just kind of leaves her to fend for herself in a place that she does not know.
And I think it’s thought that her story and his interaction with her was what inspired the Scarlet. Okay. Got
[00:31:30] Gayle: it. Yeah, so that’s, so I guess it is closer to the story than I remembered, but I guess it is sort of looking at art and looking at being an American and talks about the Underground Railroad.
So there’s a lot in here and I don’t know, I thought it sounded interest. So this definitely would be up your alley.
[00:31:53] Nicole: Yeah. I had a couple that I just wanted to mention similar to you that we had. Well, I had mentioned, or either of us had mentioned on previous shows that were not out but gonna be were books that we were interested in.
So which one was yours?
[00:32:10] Gayle: Well, mine is the Complicities, and this actually is already at, it came out in September 20th, but I just wanted to mention it here. This is a book about a woman who is like a Bernie Madoff wife, so her husband, massive white collar crimes. Her life gets completely shattered as her husband goes off to prison and she files for divorce.
So it’s kind of about how she tries to forge a new path for herself under completely different circumstances from how she’s used to living and dealing with the guilt of, you know, the whole scheme and just toll from her perspective. Because a, a bitingly perceptive story about the people next to the bad guys, which I always find really interesting.
That’s like, didn’t, when that whole Madoff scandal came out, I mean, weren’t you like so interested in what was going on in the wife’s mind? Like, did she know, How much does she know? , Does she feel guilty?
[00:33:09] Nicole: Yeah. That’s interesting question cuz I always feel so split about that. I mean, it really depends on your family dynamics.
Yeah. Cuz some people don’t share anything when they come home from work. And some people, you know, people are, are all in it. So yeah. So just quickly, a couple that Gayle and I liked best of friends, but Camilla Shai came out September 27th and this one was about the childhood friend who kind of grow apart, but something happened, you know, to cause them to grow apart when they’re younger.
They both become like these really successful, cosmopolitan women living in London and some people from their past come back into their lives and they are kind of forced to. Interact with each other again and explore whether their relationship can be salvaged because they’re just, I mean, they always came from different backgrounds and is it something that they can go forward with as they confront this thing from their past?
And the other book that came out that was on my list was the Furrows by Nali Zelle, and it came out also on September 27th. It is. A seven year old boy, he goes missing. I think he’s presumed to have drowned. It goes on to break up Cassandra’s family. That’s his sister who’s five years older. She’s 12.
It follows her to an adulthood. Her father basically abdicates from the family after the loss of their son and her mother has had problems. With, you know, just the grief of losing a child. And Cassandra though, she sees him everywhere. So it, it’s kind of like getting to the mystery of who exactly is she encountering when she, when she sees him.
And of course, it’s just about kind of mourning and grief and, and what happens to a family when something so tragic happens. All right. That is our show, I believe, for today.
[00:35:07] Gayle: Yep. Yep. All right. Well, we’re gonna keep at it. ,
[00:35:11] Nicole: you have those slump books for Gayle , Keep ’em coming.
[00:35:14] Gayle: Yes. Slump Books. My my, My Good Reads goal is getting further and further out of range, but is it?
Yeah, I think I’m maybe six books behind at this point. It’s not like completely. Let’s see. I’m gonna check right. Although I have read, I’m trying to think now, if I’ve put all the books that I’ve read into Good Reads, it’s possible that they’re not all in. If I read all the books, I, I may be behind one review.
No, I think I actually read it. I think I put it in, so I’m six books behind. Yeah. That’s where I, Yeah.
[00:35:43] Nicole: I feel like your vacations are gonna be different too, because your girls aren’t at home, so they’re gonna be more focused on catching
[00:35:49] Gayle: up. Yeah. I don’t know. Like, I not, I’m not into my new, the new pace.
New life yet? Life. Yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah. The girls have been gone for a couple weeks, but I’ve had some travel and just other things that have kind of taken up my time, so it’s, I, I don’t yet know what. You’ve been insulated a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Or just I’ve been distracted, so I don’t know yet kind of what the post postcollege
[00:36:16] Nicole: world will look like.
I followed you last night because I was out late, which is I need a few minutes this morning. I was like, I’m moving slowly. I didn’t get until two. Oh. But it was one of those nights in New York, it was 61 degrees. It had rained earlier and just everyone was out. And I’m just like, What is going, Why is it, I mean, I know it’s Saturday night, but it’s just like people on the streets everywhere.
What is going on? And I thought about it and I was like, Oh yes, NYU is back. These are the college kids who are like enjoying. Last kind of seasonable weather running around without their jackets on . Yep,
[00:36:50] Gayle: Yep. My daughter at NYU this summer, she auditioned for a movie and she got it, and so she has been spending a lot of her weekends since she got to New York actually commuting down to where the movie’s being filmed, which is in.
Northern Maryland, kind of close to Wilmington, Delaware, Uhhuh. So she’s kind of missed a lot of those Nice, pretty warm weekends in New York because she’s been doing the movie. I know. So I mean she’s, it’s a great experience and she’s really loved it. But I think she’s also a little sad that she hasn’t really been around in the city too much to go out.
She came back last night, but I don’t think she got it back to New York till like 10 30 or 11. So I doubt she went out after that. She may have , maybe. Yeah, maybe . Although she was texting me late last night about. Seeing Miles. Tell her on Saturday Night Live, cuz he is also at NYU on, I think if she was watching it Saturday Live.
She must have been in somewhere. She was with the night. Yeah. Was in. Yeah. All right, well that’s our show and we will be back next week. Until then, happy reading.
Please help support the podcast and take a few minutes to leave a review and/or rating for the podcast on iTunes, a comment on Soundcloud or interact wherever you listen to podcasts and talk about books.
Connect With Us
We’d love to hear from you at any and all places that you love to talk about books. You can find us at the spaces below.
Nicole Bonia: Nicole’s Website | Instagram|Goodreads
Gayle Weiswasser: Everyday I Write The Book Blog | Twitter | Facebook| Instagram | Goodreads
The Readerly Report: Facebook |Instagram | Join Our Facebook Group
Feedback. We love it!
If you have any questions or ideas for a podcast, email us! You can reach Nicole at nicole@nicolebonia.com, and you can reach Gayle at gweiswasser@gmail.com. As always, thanks for listening and happy reading