Transcript

[00:00:00] Nicole: Welcome to another edition of The Readerly Report, today Gayle and I are back to report on paperbacks that are coming out in the upcoming months or have just come out. That’s what we have for you.

Let’s do our usual, Gayle, why don’t you tell us what you’ve been reading? 

[00:00:16] Gayle: So I’ve had this thing that has happened to me now two books in a row for my print book, not the audiobook, is that I can’t get into. I don’t like it that much. And I’ve gotten mired, and it has slowed me down, and I’m so sad because I thought this summer was gonna be like a heavy-reading summer for me. Instead, I’m not really motivated to pick either one of ’em up.

So the first one I talked about, I believe on the show last time, which was True Biz. and oh, and both of these books, I’m reading for my book club, so I don’t think I can stop. Okay. And both of which I recommended.

So True Biz was the one about the boarding school for deaf students. And I finally finished it, but like, it took me forever to get through. And like, there were things I liked about it. I learned a lot. I was never motivated to pick it up. So I was leaning really heavily on my audiobook, which is always slower.

And then the second one is Seven Days in June, which I also recommended for my book club and I’m, and it was so hyped up. So many people I know really liked it. This is by Tia Williams. It’s a kind of a romance, but like, I’m just. It’s just not doing it for me.

[00:01:29] Nicole: Are you listening to that on audio or are you reading it? 

[00:01:30] Gayle: No, no, this is my reading one, really? So like, I should be yes. And I should be like zipping through it.

Nicole: I really like that book. I really did.

Gayle: You did? Oh my God. I wanna talk to you about it.  So I’m like maybe 40% in. And I find, well, I don’t wanna spoil anything. So this is a book about a woman author. She lives in New York. She writes these kind of fantasy romancey type books. They sort of remind me like.. 

Nicole: Vampire books vampire

Gayle: of Twilight or something. But maybe like a notch up from Twilight in terms of like literary sophistication, I don’t know. She’s a single mother and she goes to be on a panel of authors. And there’s a guy who sort of shows up in the middle of this panel unexpectedly. And he’s this reclusive author who writes like national book award winning novels.

His name is Shane and he shows up and he completely rattles her. And as it turns out, the two of them knew each other in high school and had like this intense, romantic relationship.

Nicole: Then, he disappeared.

Gayle: And then he disappeared. And they’ve been, she’s been writing characters that are reminiscent of him, he’s been writing characters that are reminiscent of her. Her name is Eva.

I’m at the point where they haven’t, they’ve kind of reconnected, but you know, this is where this is eventually gonna go, but it hasn’t gone there yet. So I don’t wanna like spoil anything else about this story, because everything I said is basically on the dust jacket.

But I don’t know, like it’s not there. Maybe it’s because they haven’t delved yet too much into what happened in high school. I’ve got some piece of it, but not that much, but it seems very unrealistic to me the whole. Their histories don’t seem like, I don’t know, like people that would really happen. Does that make sense to you?

[00:03:29] Nicole: What? you don’t think that they’re the people? 

[00:03:32] Gayle: No, they could just like. Eva’s childhood is very chaotic and like, it seems very fictional.  I have a hard time sort of like realistically viewing this, their lives as having unspool in the ways that they did.

[00:03:49] Nicole: But is it because the lives that they would’ve had up, and their upbringing would’ve been like really foreign to you? Because it doesn’t seem fictional. I mean, people have chaotic lives. So…

[00:04:00] Gayle: I don’t know, like her mother, it seems like she, there was sort of too much on her shoulders at a young age that it feels, I mean, it feels like I’m reading a book, but it doesn’t feel like. A life that like, I don’t know. It’s very hard to describe why it’s not… why I’m having trouble with it.

[00:04:25] Nicole: It seems like it’s just something you can’t envision because you don’t have the basis for it probably that’s you don’t have the basis. Probably true. Being the, a kind of neglectful parent like Eva’s mom is.

Gayle: Yeah.

Nicole:  But I do see people have those.

[00:04:38] Gayle:  For sure they do. And I, God knows. We read about them enough in the books we read. I think I expected this one to feel more. Like, yeah, maybe I just was expecting, like, I could relate to this one more. I don’t know. There’s a lot of like, sort of realistic, like not name dropping, but there’s a lot of references that are very current and maybe that’s… I’m having trouble reconciling what feels like a very fictional childhood with what feels like a very realistic adulthood.

I don’t know, for whatever reason, it’s just like, not grabbing me. Do you thi is it gonna change at all or is that just sort of that’s the book?

[00:05:18] Nicole:  If you don’t buy into the legitimacy of Eva’s experience or Shane’s experience, then, I mean, that’s, that’s who they are. And the childhood that they have is the one that they have so I don’t think that there’s gonna be any clarifying. I think that the way that they go about rekindling their relationship and examining what happened to them and how it influenced them and you know, like whatever, of course, there’s always something that kept them apart, you know, there’s something that has kept them apart for so many years. And I guess they kind of get to explore some of that. But I don’t know. I mean, if, as your baseline, you just don’t believe in the lives of these characters. I don’t know that much is gonna change because yeah. I mean, that’s them. 

[00:06:02] Gayle: Yeah. All right. well, I was hoping that this would be like a real engrossing read and I get in bed to like read before bed and then I go on TikTok and then that’s that.

Now part of that is the talk’s fault. That’s not the book’s fault, but like I’m opting to choose to do something else other than read. Which for me is like, you know, that’s a, whenever that happens, it’s because I like the book is I’m not connecting with  the book. So anyway, that’s what I’m doing right now.

And then in audio, I’m reading…

[00:06:31] Nicole: Do you gonnafinish or will you let it go or..?

[00:06:33] Gayle: I’ll finish it because it’s book club, right? Right. Yeah. I’ll finish it. I rarely DNF, which is, as we’ve talked about many times. So I’ll, I’m sure I’ll finish it.

And then, on audio I’m doing a book called It All Comes Down To This by Therese Anne Fowler. Who’s… I know is one author you and I have both read. And I that’s one, I like this is a family. Drama about three sisters who their mother dies and there’s a house in Maine that they’re supposed to sell, but one of them kind of goes to the house and decides, you know, maybe she wants to stay there. And it’s really just about these three sisters’ lives and how they kind of haven’t turned out the way they expected ,and how they can turn things around.

So it’s, it’s not amazing, but I’m doing it on audio and it’s definitely capturing my attention on audio so that one’s moving along. That’s where I am right now.

I need to kind of just power through Seven Days in June, and then, I’m feeling like I need a book that’s gonna just suck me in, that I can just get lost in where, you know, TikTok will be like, have no competition.

[00:07:44] Nicole: What do you think that might be? I don’t know. What is it that you’re looking for?

[00:07:46] Gayle:  I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, it’s, for me, it’s rarely a thriller, although thrillers often do the trick. I don’t know. I’d like a really good, I don’t know. That’s a great question. I have no idea. And I feel like I keep sort of like picking up books and hoping that’ll be the one and then I put it down.

I’m such a mood reader. I’m trying to figure out where, when we last talked, what I hadn’t read, I finished… I think we talked about the book, Sorrow and Bliss, that was one that I really enjoyed. I did that one on audio, but I ended up switching over to print cause I really liked it.

That was the book about the woman with mental illness who is married and in the beginning of the book, her marriage is coming apart because it’s untenable for them to be together with her illness. It’s interesting because physical illness plays a big part in Seven Days in June, you know, to the point where her life was very governed by these, incapacitating headaches that would come on, and then she would have to interrupt whatever she was doing to try to deal with the pain she was having.

Sorrow and Bliss is about a woman with it’s an unnamed illness. The author kind of intentionally never identifies what it is, but it’s just about how her life is impacted by this condition, which is not really diagnosed until later in life. And but it’s just, incisive and funny, and her writing is great. I really, really liked it. That one is actually my second five star book of the year, that one, I had no trouble getting through pretty quickly. Cuz I really liked that one.

[00:09:28] Nicole: You buried the lead on that. You’re just like, it was good. And then, it’s a five star read.

[00:09:33] Gayle: Yeah, no, I like it sort of crept like snuck up on me how much I liked it in the end and it just like her, a lot of it is just her writing.. She did a great job of getting in the head of this woman so that you really understood what this condition was doing to her on her mindset. Then I liked that sometimes the book followed a very linear plot and sometimes it didn’t, sometimes it was more just sort of these vignettes from childhood, but I liked how she kind of shifted back and forth and how the totality of those really painted I thought of a really good picture of this person’s life. So I like that one quite. 

How about you? We don’t

[00:10:15] Nicole: We have nothing to talk about with me in reading. I finished this book called Just Like Mother by a woman, her name is Anne Heltzel. She’s actually in my book club. So she had her book come out. I think it was, it came out in the middle of may because I was away and couldn’t go to her signing, but she has written a book.

It kind of mixes like ambivalence around motherhood or with someone who has come from an upbringing where she was basically looks like she was in this cult of women, call “The Mothers”, but it’s about a woman named Maeve and her cousin, Andrea, like who had both, I guess, up until maybe when Andrea was 12 and maybe Maeve was eight.

They had lived together with these women that they call “The mothers”. And it was clear that it was not like a great situation, but the story is told basically in flashbacks or in the two time periods. One where Maeve is trying to assimilate into living among people because she’s been raised, with these mothers and she’s afraid of men and she’s adopted by a family when she escapes. As she grows up, she just has these hangups, you know, in terms of maybe she’s in relationships that are too casual or her career hasn’t taken her where she wants to, but she knows that she does not want to have children. But she’s reunited with her cousin, Andrea, in New York and her cousin is now the founder of like this company that helps women get over if they’ve lost a baby, like they provide, I don’t know, I guess a fake baby, but a realistic one that women can practice with, or work through their feelings with these babies.

Through a series of events of them being reconnected and Maeve, spending more time with Andrea and them trying to rekindle their relationship and kind of work through their past. It just sparks off a series of events. Like she’s frequently at odds with Andrea and the people who work for Andrea, because she does not want to have children. And they are of the belief that every. Needs to experience motherhood.

So it is a book that is, it’s kind of a horror novel, and it explores like why, you know, what is it? What, what are the forces that are always driving motherhood and driving women, not being okay or perceived as not whole when they’re mothers. So it’s an exploration of that with a cult’s background.

[00:12:54] Gayle: Huh? That’s quite a story.

[00:12:57] Nicole: It would definitely fit in with my books that I’ve read about, you know, like motherhood going terribly wrong, like A Baby Teeth or…

[00:13:08] Gayle: Oh, what was that other one?

[00:13:10] Nicole:Yeah, I can’t think of the name of it, but I know what you’re thinking about. So I did finish…

Gayle: The Push.

Nicole:Yes, The Push. I did finish reading that. I think this probably falls more on the line of A Baby Teeth because it is more like overtly a horror novel. But just still has those elements of examining motherhood, the lens of motherhood or in this case, like the real cult of motherhood.

That’s what I finished.

What am I reading? I don’t know. I’m reading this book by the woman who wrote Tangerine, which I really loved. I’m really liking this one as well. It’s called Palace of The Drowned by Christine Mangan.

It’s about this author who has kind of had a meltdown. She had been living in London, I think she’s from London. She started off, she had a debut novel that had quite a bit of buzz and she’s like expected to have this successful career. But she, I think she’s writing like her third novel comes out and someone writes this anonymous review that just really gets to her. She has a bit of a meltdown and then she goes to stay in this Villa in Florence, like one of her wealthy friends has a Villa in Florence and she goes to stay there and kind of find herself. But the house is huge. Like it’s mansion huge. And she hears like creepy footsteps and people are telling her that no one lives next door.

And she’s also introduced to this mysterious young girl called Gilly, who claims to be the daughter of one of her friends, but she can’t quite place her. Like she thinks the daughter may have had different colored hair or something doesn’t seem right. But of course with books when something doesn’t seem right, instead of just, you know, excusing yourself from the relationship, our heroin doubles down and like starts to see this woman. Even though she has misgivings about the situation.

So it’s set in 1966 and it is just kind of all about what happens between them like this relationship. And it’s set in 1966 specifically because there was a big flood in Venice at that time. And I, so that’s the backdrop, but so far, I mean, I really liked Tangerine.

Like I thought that one was said in Morocco, this one, it is in Venice, but she just is really great at creating these atmospheres that make you feel like you’re really there and really feel like you’re in that person’s life. So I am anxious to get back to that. I’ve actually been carrying that one around and I had stopped carrying books.

[00:15:49] Gayle: Got it. 

[00:15:49] Nicole: All right. So why don’t we segue into paperbacks?

[00:15:54] Gayle: Okay. I did not find that many paperbacks that had come out this summer that were ones that I was terribly excited about, but I did find a few. Okay. So the first book that’s come out in paperback this summer is one that I read earlier this year.

It’s called A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson. And this was a quiet, but very moving book about a small town in Canada. I forgot exactly where it is. It’s about three lives that intersect there there’s a woman whose husband has died. Then, there’s a man who comes to take care of the house that she is living in because she is sort of temporarily in the hospital, this older woman.

So this younger man comes, moves into the house and is taken care of it. Then, there is a girl who lives next door to them. That’s the neighbor who’s kind of keeping an eye on the house from a distance and wondering who is this man who has moved in and what’s the connection. It’s about these three people who are living a very challenging and lonely lives and their backs stories and how they kind of come together.

I had not read anything by Mary Lawson before. I don’t remember how that book got on my radar. I think I read it for book club earlier this year, but we all loved this book. It’s very … it’s kind of a quiet and gentle story, but it’s very moving. It has lots of sadness to it, but also some hope at the end.

That came out this summer, and I wanna look at some of her older books. Apparently she has a lot of other books, Mary Lawson, and I don’t, I’ve never read anything else by her, but I really like that one. 

[00:17:32] Nicole: That’s good. I always like that. When I read a story that was really satisfying and it’s my first time reading an author.

I can look forward to getting into that. So I’m just gonna mention a few that came out end of May, beginning of June that we’ve talked about. And I feel like we’ve talked about quite a bit.  So Seven Days in June came out in paper back on June 7th, and so did The Other Black Girl. So if you were looking to read those books, then they are already out and available.

A Slow fire Burning by Paula Hawkins came out on June 21st. And the first book that I will talk about came out in June as well, is Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney. I feel like I had mentioned that book recently. I really like Alice Feeney novels.

This one was about this couple who are married. They’re having some relationship issues. They’re about to go away to this cabin that they have that’s like in the woods, that’s kind of isolated. The plan is to get away and kind of work on their marriage, but the wife has very different Expectations of how this is gonna go. I think she kind of feels like her husband might be planning something so that she won’t be around and he can kind of be free of her.

So there’s all these secrets attached to this house and this relationship it’s, like I said, it’s in the woods, they hear creepy noises. There’s strange sightings of people, but it all comes around to their past and how their relationship started.

I guess the atmosphere is kind of creepy because this couple is really at odds, and even though they’re supposed to be working it out, neither one of them really trust each other or feel safe around each other. And then there’s like this secret circling from the past that could really affect one or both of their lives. So even though they may not particularly love or wanna be with each other they might have to stick together against whatever it is that is coming for them while they’re away.

So that’s out. I really like that book.

[00:19:34] Gayle: Have you read anything else by her?

[00:19:36] Nicole: Yes. The first book I read by her was Sometimes I Lie, actually that might have been the one that I talked about recently where the woman she’s in a coma. But she’s kind of awake from that coma, but they don’t realize that she’s awake yet, and she’s getting like these visits from her husbands her friends and. she’s trying to figure out how she got there.

She only knows a few things. And one of those things is that sometimes she lies. So you have a feeling that she’s not the most reliable narrator, but she’s trying to figure out how she landed in the hospital, like who was trying to kill her, what it’s related to, you know, is it someone close to her or is it something else?

I have a couple of Alice Feeney books that I have not read, which is kind of exciting, cuz I like her.

[00:20:21] Gayle: Yeah, I sort of associate her with you. My next book is one that I also read I guess it was in January and is, but is now out in paperback. It’s called A Little Hope by Ethan Joella.

This is a debut novel about a cast of characters in a small Connecticut town and the joys and sorrows of their lives. There’s definitely a lot of sad stuff that happens in this book. Like one of the characters has facing a cancer diagnosis and many of them are grieving people who have died in their lives.

Like it’s definitely a sad book, but each of the characters kind of get some sort of hope at some point, some sort of obviously look at the title. The book is called A Little Hope. The thing enough kind of positive things happen that you don’t leave this book feeling just, you know, desperately sad for everybody. You feel like there’s gonna be some turnarounds.

It just was a nice kind of engrossing character story where I felt invested in these people and just wanted to see how things turned. Kind of a typical book for me, I felt like he saved the book from feeling cliched at times, because you would sort of expect things to go a certain way, but then there’d always be like a little twist or a little detail or something in there that made you, they’re sort of unexpected and fresh and kind of made the book feel like something new. I think I gotten this from book of the month. I can’t remember now, but it, I liked it quite a bit.

So that is now out in paperback.

[00:22:00] Nicole:  Okay. My next one, I can’t remember if you read it. It’s called ghost by Dolly. Okay. Did you have that on your list?

Gayle: I did not.

Nicole: Okay. So ghost is about this woman who is not in a relationship. Her name is Nina. She’s not in a relationship. She’s not bothered that she’s single though. She has her own apartment. She’s about to publish her second book. And I think she does cookbooks. She has friends. She has a good relationship with her ex-boyfriend she really doesn’t find anything as particularly missing in her life.

But she decides to download a dating App and she meets like this really nice guy. He’s handsome. You know, has a job, has a stable job and she’s interested in him. They have chemistry, like, you know, they’re going on picnics. They’re having a really cute time. And then he suddenly ghosts her. And when he ghosts her, it’s basically. It throws her for a loop, but it also starts forcing her to examine some things in her life that she is not necessarily dealing with.

Like the fact that her father has Alzheimer’s the fact that her mom is kind of not really dealing with it. She’s in denial. She has some issues in one of her relationships with like her best friend from childhood, you know, her best friend has children. She doesn’t have children. So that’s been causing some friction as well.

It initially turned out it’s this kind of fun dating story but it turned more serious as she kind of begins to explore some of the issues in her life. It still has like a light touch, like there are some things that are comedic about it, and I thought she just did a really good job of blending those two kind of the trauma and trauma with some lighter moments there.

[00:23:44] Gayle: I couldn’t agree more with everything you just said. And I love the title because it’s got a lot of meanings. Like there’s the ghosting, which comes from the guy who kind of disappears. But I thought that the, I took the ghost to be kind of the memories of her youth and more innocent times and certainly like, you know, her father in a different state, these are kind of always lurking in the back of her mind, floating around, reminding her of how her life had been in the past and just of how things had changed over time. 

[00:24:20] Nicole: Yeah. Kind of like all the ghosts of your past lingering around. So that came out on July 5th and paperback.

[00:24:28] Gayle: Okay. So the next few that I’m gonna mention are ones that I have not read yet. They’re ones that I have in the house and want to read, but I do not actually have. And one of them is a book that I have been really interested in and I’ve been really daunted and have not read it.

It’s called Dear Miss m¡Metropolitan by Carolyn Ferrell and it’s about three girls who were held captive in a house in Queens. It’s, I don’t know if you remember when this happened in, I think it was Ohio, there was like a house and somehow somebody manages to escape from the house and it turned out that she and two other women had been held captive by a man for like, a decade or something.

One of ’em had been forced to have a child or maybe more than one of them had. So this book is kind of a fictionalized version of that, where there’s a house in Queens, there’s three women. And then there’s a woman who lives across the street and she is an advice columnist. And her. Her name in the column is “Miss Metropolitan”. So that’s where the title comes from and she had lived across the street. And so you get, I think that it’s a lot of the book is told through the perspective of someone living across the street. Who’s like, how could we not have known, you know, the guilt that comes from living in this neighborhood and being so close to these people all this time and not being aware that of what was going on.

The reviews, I think I’ve read about this are very positive, but I’m just like, it’s just kind of a daunting topic. I just haven’t picked it up and I would like to read it and I actually won this one. This is like the first and only time I’ve won a book on Goodreads

Nicole: Oh, really?

Gayle: Yeah. And it’s probably because a lot of people did not enter for this particular contest because the subject matter is so grim. Yeah. But I did win it and I was really excited about that.  I haven’t read it and I’d like to read it.

So anybody who has read it, I’d love to hear what you think of it and whether or not I should take the plunge?

So it comes out or it came out on paperback on July 12th. So just recently.

[00:26:33] Nicole: It does sound interesting. And, and it is a book that I’ve seen everywhere and was very well reviewed. 

[00:26:38] Gayle: Yeah. I think at one point I picked it up and sort of read the first few pages and then I was like, eh, I don’t know about right now.

and so I, I didn’t do it. It’s compared to The Nickel Boys.

[00:26:51] Nicole: Gives voice, see how that would be scary.

[00:26:53] Gayle: Yeah. Character surviving, unimaginable tragedy.

[00:26:57] Nicole: So my next one is Intimacies by Katie Kitamura. Have you read any of her books yet?

[00:27:01] Gayle: No. And that was one of the ones on my list and I knew that you were probably gonna do it.

And now I didn’t read this and I didn’t read A Separation and they’re both in the house and I know you liked them both. And I want to read them. 

[00:27:12] Nicole: I think I liked this one better than I liked a separation. I liked, I mean, a separation is just one of those books that is just kind of odd and. Like her writing is really good.

She is also someone who sets her books, usually at some foreign hotel that has an air of mystery. This one, you know, is set in the Hague and is about this young interpreter who is trying to figure out her life. 

But A Separation was just kind of odd, like this woman was looking for her husband and right in Greece, I believe, and it’s unclear if they were still married, maybe he disappeared. Did something happen to him? Seems like maybe she start is having sightings of him. It was just like an interesting book, interesting location, like really well written. But at the same time, these odd things were happening, that it was just. It’s a little strange.

But I really liked this one Intimacies. Just because it’s about, it was just something I’d never thought about before, like a translator, she has accepted an assignment for a year at The Hague where she’s gonna be on the war court, where they prosecute war crimes and criminals. And it’s about how her relationships change.

She’s in this relationship with this man who is married, has two kids, like they’re in the middle of this separation, but it doesn’t seem like they’re really separated. Then, she’s got a friend who is living in this complex and like something violent happens there and she kind of becomes obsessed with that crime. Her father has just died. Her mom has moved back to Singapore, cuz I think they had lived together as a family in the United States. So she’s kind of left that part of her life behind and is searching. But it does talk about like what happened to the person when you are basically the voice of someone who has done awful things, how does that inform your translation? How does that kind of bleed over into your normal life. How does that affect your sense of safety? Your idea of yourself.

Sshe explores some really interesting questions, you know, like, and of course never would’ve thought about what is it like to be a translator in The Hague. Trying to adjust to a different culture, you know, it’s her first time living there and like, will she renew her assignment?

Where will her relationship with this man go? So I really liked it. And she does all of these things in books that are super short and spare, but they don’t feel like they’re short. I mean, this book was probably 160, maybe 180 pages. But they don’t feel like novels. They feel like full books.

So that’s out in paperback.

[00:29:49] Gayle: Yeah. I’ve got that book sitting in the. And so I may pick that one up. I know you really liked it. Okay. So my last one, because I had Intimacies on there. So I’m gonna take that one off the list. The last one is called Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch. That came out in paper back at the end of June.

And I have not read this one yet, but I have read two other books by Katie crouch. I’ve read one called Girls in Trucks. And then one called Men and Dogs. And both of those, I really enjoyed, they were, I’ve read them a long time ago, but they’re just these, I think one of them was stories.

I can’t remember if they were both, if they were novels or stories, but she has this really perceptive way of looking at relationships. She kind of draws these independent women who are yet still, you know, involved with men. The books are a lot about relationships. 

I thought they were set in the south, but this book is interesting. And this book is actually set in Namibia and it’s about two women who find themselves in Namibia.

One of them is the Wife of a Diplomat, and one of them is there because her husband is on a Fulbright. The woman who’s the wife of the diplomat takes the other woman kind of under her wing, as you know, she gets there and sort of showing her the ropes about how to live in this foreign country and how to, what the customs are and, and you know how to just survive there.

It’s about these two women and it’s the reviews of this call it funny. Like it’s funny.  I didn’t know if it would be kind of more like a ke Kitamura, which, you know, often have these women who are out of place and living in foreign areas, but doesn’t, it doesn’t sound funny. They sound more, you know, dramatic.

This one says it’s, it’s funny and satirical. There’s a little bit of intrigue to it because. The daughter of, one of them kind of gets caught up in some sort of an international incident. I don’t know what that one’s all about, but I kind, because I like Katie Crouch’s writing so much from what I remember of it, I’ve been really tempted by this one.

So I also have this in the house and have not read it. I don’t know. Was this on your radar at all? 

[00:31:57] Nicole: Yes. I looked at that. And I was like, oh, I haven’t read it though. So I scrolled on bye. Yeah. But. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. And she does usually write these Southern protagonists. So that’s interesting that I said in Namibia, it sounds good.

[00:32:11] Gayle: Yeah. So that’s all I had.

[00:32:13] Nicole: All right. So we have an item to discuss that I just thought about. So back in the winter spring, when maybe we were feeling ambitious and you let me know if you still wanna do this, we had mentioned that over the summer, we want it to read Remains of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro works.

Neither one of us has read it. And it’s like, we feel like we should have read that book. Now, given the state of your reading, is that something you wanna do now or should we kind of table that project for the fall? 

[00:32:45] Gayle: Let’s table that for the fall.  Although it’s supposed to be great. Maybe that would be the, the engrossing novel that I need.

Let’s do it when I get back from vacation.

Nicole: Okay.

Gayle: If that’s okay with you, that’s like the end towards the end of the summer

[00:32:58] Nicole: we’ll table that maybe that’ll be our, our summer book club. Okay. With the way we’re going. We may have like four a year. we’re lucky this

[00:33:07] Gayle: year. That’s fine. All right.

[00:33:08] Nicole:  Well, that’s great. I’m glad that we got that settled. So look for us to kick off our reading of remains of the day later on in the summer on gal, that’s good. Had like a few more satisfying reads and she’s willing to commit exactly to the unknown exactly. Experience. All right. Well, on that note, everyone

[00:33:30] Gayle: Happy reading!