Reading Envy 225: Books About Libraries and Librarians

I'm joined first by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray to discuss their joint novel, and decided to ask my co-workers for their favorite books on libraries and librarians. The episode finishes up with a few reading recommendations based on questions I've answered from listeners.

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Reading Envy 225: Books About Libraries and Librarians

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Books discussed:

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

Other mentions:

My review of The Personal Librarian
An Illuminated Life by Heidi Ardizzone
Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Lirael by Garth Nix
The Giver of Stars by JoJo Moyes
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami
Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith
The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai
A Hidden Fire by Elizabeth Hunter
American Dreamer by Adriana Herrera
Bear by Marian Engel
Kitsy Babcock: Library Assistant by Joan Sargent
Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson
The Library by Sarah Stewart
Penelope Popper, Book Doctor by Toni Buzzeo
Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen
Wild About Books by Judy Sierra
Help! I’m a Prisoner in the Library by Eth Clifford

Related episodes:

Episode 138 - Shared Landscape with Lauren Weinhold

Stalk me online:

Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy

All links to books are through Bookshop.org, where I am an affiliate. I wanted more money to go to the actual publishers and authors. I link to Amazon when a book is not listed with Bookshop.

Review: The Personal Librarian

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Belle la Costa Greene was J.P. Morgan's personal librarian (and rare books and art collector) who went on to run The Morgan Library after his death, converting it into the public serving institution he always planned. Her story is fascinating, having to pass as white to live/work/move in the circles she did, how this issue separated her parents, etc. The authors did a great job at blending research with imagination; Belle may have burned her personal papers but all the people she wrote to and did business with over the years did not!

An interview with the authors will come up on the podcast but in the meantime I can recommend this book of historical fiction!

View all my reviews

Review: Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my last read for the Tournament of Books Camp ToB, and I think this is my favorite, although none were five-star reads for me.

Johannes Kepler is known for his astronomy discoveries but the context of that work is the era of the plague, and people not understanding disease, much less the universe. His mother Katharina is accused of being a witch in her old age and this is the (fictionalized) story of the trial, largely told through testimonies of her neighbors, who looking back now blame all ailments, failures, and deaths on her. There are also letters from Katharina to her son and others. It is historical fiction, recentering a female character, with some humor and conjecture. The ending was rather fun.

The audiobook is narrated by Natasha Soudek she does a lot of different voices for the characters.

And kudos to me for making it through a historical fiction novel, which is just usually not my thing. 🥴

View all my reviews

Reading Envy 207: Innocent and Ruthless with Tricia Deegan

Jenny records across the sea to talk to artist and English teacher Tricia Deegan. If you hear any words that seem stretched out, blame the internet under the ocean! I did what I could in the editing but there are a few unavoidable blips. Nothing too bad, so please enjoy this new guest to the show.

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 207: Innocent and Ruthless

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Books discussed:

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova; translated by Ann Goldstein
Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
Travels with a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Other mentions:

Leila Slimani
Maupassant
Delpine De Vigan
The Years by Annie Ernaux
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Elena Ferrante
Grimm's Fairy Tales
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
Darwin
Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier (William Blake)
The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier
Native Son by Richard Wright
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Becoming by Michelle Obama
These Truths by Jill LePore
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi
Stamped! Racism, Antiracism, and You by Ibram X Kendi and Jason Reynolds
A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
Kim JiYoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab

Related episodes:

Episode 071 - Bad Priest, Good Priest, No Priest with Scott
Episode 098 - Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened with Bryan Bibb

Stalk us online:

Tricia is @trishadeegan on Instagram
Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy

All links to books are through Bookshop.org, where I am an affiliate. I wanted more money to go to the actual publishers and authors.

Reading Envy 195: Muchness

Nadine is back to talk about books we've read and liked recently, and we also end up thinking more about campus novels, mighty tomes, and short science fiction. If you want to contribute to the 200th episode, please see the link in the show notes.

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 195: Muchness

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Books discussed:

 

99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai
The Eighth Life by Nino Harataschvili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin
Bunny by Mona Awad
The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels
Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann


Other mentions:

Contribute to the 200th episode (words, not money)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights by Anon
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes
Eric Karl Anderson, LonesomeReader - interview with Nino, Charlotte, and Ruth
International Booker Prize
Barkskins by Annie Proulx
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad
The Pisces by Melissa Broder
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Moo by Jane Smiley
The Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes
Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

The Empress of Salt & Fortune by Nghi Vo
P. Djeli Clark
Tor.com ebook club
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
2020 Locus Awards
Murderbot series by Martha Wells
Clarkesworld
Kate Baker
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Frederick Douglass by David W. Blight
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho


Related episodes:

Episode 118 - Reading Envy Readalong: To the Bright Edge of the World
Episode 129 - Coming Back to Books with Nadine
Episode 152 - Kill 'em and Leave with Nadine 
Episode 185 - The Loyal Swineherd (Odyssey readalong)
 

Stalk us online:

Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy
Nadine at Goodreads

Review: The Book of Longings

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you are a fan of myth retellings or Biblical tale reimaginings, this is likely a book for you. Sue Monk Kidd also takes the material she wrote a memoir about over a decade ago and uses it in this novel. That memoirhad an impact on me when I first read it so the connection - The Dance of the Dissident Daughter - about her discovery of Gnosticism, feminist spirituality, and how that changed her perspective of her own faith. It was easy for me to see how those ideas are wound through this novel.

Okay, so if that didn't scare you away, I feel I should also say that you will get more out of this book the more you know about the Biblical/Historical Jesus. But many who know a lot about that may be turned off by the idea of Jesus having a wife. The author addresses this very well in the back of the book, and I would encourage reading that if it is something you are not sure about. She acknowledges which things she changed from the traditional Biblical narrative, which things she borrowed from other places, and which came from her own mind. If anything, Kidd is a master of threading her research into her stories. I read The Thunder: Perfect Mind first when I read Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels so I definitely recognized it when it came up in this story; I was relieved to see her credit it and explain where it comes from after the end of the novel.

That is a lot of overture and caveat, but any reader of Sue Monk Kidd should not be surprised by feminist underpinnings to this novel. It is about Ana, the wife of Jesus, from her childhood to later in life. Ana begs her father to allow her to learn how to read and write so in an era of expensive parchment and lack of education for women, she learns how to read and write, and in more than one language. Learning and writing, inspiration and calling are all important themes in the book as Ana navigates feeling called while also being told it isn't appropriate (from her family) or possible (once she is married and much poorer) by the people around her.

And what do you do with a woman who believes she has something to say? I enjoyed the thought experiment of such a woman and what the man Jesus (based on a blending of Biblical text and historical documents) would have done with such a wife. I kind of hate that I enjoyed it but growing up in fundamentalism it's pretty hard not to want to imagine the what if's from the women excluded from stories.

The other thing that I think Kidd does very well is the way she weaves in the stories of the New Testament into Ana's story but gives them a little twist. The first time this is hinted at is when Ana visits the temple in Jerusalem, but you really see different contexts for the stoning ("let he who is without sin cast the first stone"), the "Good Samaritan," and that's just the beginning.

Ana loves Jesus, but she only really knows him as a kind man, who has a calling of his own. The way they release each other into that calling is an incredible act of love, but she never sees him as magical Jesus; she never sees any miracles for instance. There are reasons for this in the text but I like how it gives her a very specific personal version of him, and she loves him.

I had a copy of this from the publisher through Edelweiss; it came out April 21, 2020.

View all my reviews

Reading Envy 191: Stealthy Yet Sparkly with Gail Carriger

Author Gail Carriger sits down with me at the Reading Envy Pub, and we discuss her voracious reading habits, and topics in books ranging from little squiddies to magical chocolate pots. Ms. Carriger must have a happy ending, and Jenny is content with fragmentary reads.

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 191: Stealthy Yet Sparkly

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Books discussed:

 

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Sorcery & Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina MacSweeney
Warprize by Elizabeth Vaughan

Other mentions:

Defy or Defend by Gail Carriger
Romancing the Inventor by Gail Carriger
Meat Cute by Gail Carriger
Soulless by Gail Carriger
The Lightning-Struck Heart by TJ Klune
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ranson Riggs
Wolfsong by TJ Klune
Court of Fives by Kate Elliot
LitHub The 50 Best Contemporary Novels under 200 Pages
The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish
My Enemy the Queen by Victoria Holt
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
Grace Draven
Taji Beyond the Rings by R. Cooper
The 5th Gender by G.L. Carriger
Earth Fathers are Weird by Lyn Gala
White Trash Warlock by David R. Slayton
Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn

Related episodes:

Episode 015 - The Time for Exclaiming Over Costumes with Jean and Karen
Episode 060 - A Good Era for Communists with Rose Davis
Episode 187 - Sentient Snails and Spaceships with Paula


Stalk us online:

Gail Carriger website (includes more social media links)
Gail Carriger on Twitter
Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy

Reading Envy 187: Sentient Snails and Spaceships

Paula joins Jenny from New Zealand, where everyone is getting a little antsy from having to stay home. Jenny chats poetry and non-fiction while Paula brings historical and science fiction, and one gritty regional novel winning all the awards in Australia. In fact, we talk about several book awards. One of these books doesn't come out in the USA until June, but that's publishing for you!

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 187: Sentient Snails and Spaceships

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Books discussed:



Shadowplay by Joseph O'Connor
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko


Other mentions:

Marriage Material by Sathnam Sanghera
@cathythoughts and @carolynm on Litsy
Costa Book Awards
Dracula by Bram Stroker
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Nebula Award
Hugo Award
Arthur C. Clarke Award
When My Brother was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz
See the poet read "Ode to the Beloved's Hips"
Miles Franklin Award
Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko
Tim Winton
Books on the Go podcast
Stella Prize
Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi


Related episodes:

Episode 119 - Bread and Butter Writing with Paula
Episode 154 - Is If If with Paula
Episode 176 - Best of 2019
 

Stalk us online:
Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy
Paula is @centique on Litsy

Reading Envy 146: Complicated, Crazy, and Loud with Karen

Karen comes for a visit and once our dogs get along, we run off to record a podcast episode about books!

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 146: Complicated, Crazy, and Loud with Karen


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Books discussed:



The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
The Customer is Always Wrong by Mimi Pond
The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews
Giant Days by John Allison et al
Bottled Goods by Sophie van Llewyn


Other mentions:

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Pulitzer Prize - Fiction The Clan/ El Clan (film)
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
Best Graphic Novels of 2017
-Entertainment Weekly's List
-AV Club's List

-Forbes' List

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Time and Again by Jack Finney
Sword and Laser Book Club on Time and Again (Jenny mentioned SFF Audio but that was wrong)
From Time to Time by Jack Finney
Dakota Building
The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis
The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone


Related Episodes:

Episode 004 - Home, Frightening and Banned with guest Karen Acosta
Episode 015 - The Time for Exclaiming Over Costumes with Jean and Karen
Episode 051 - Dreaming in Books with Karen Acosta
Episode 066 - When Time Stops with Karen Acosta
Episode 100 - 100 Reasons Why 
Episode 101 - A Different Kind of Time Travel with Karen Acosta
Episode 114 - Raised by Wolves with Karen Acosta 


Bonus Pictures:

 

June Bug meets Doyle and Winnie

Karen recommends this one!

Reading Date

 

Stalk us online:
Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy