[00:00:01] ANNE BOGEL: Are we just looking hotel books or is that one example of what's working for you?

KAYLA CRUM: That's one example. It's sort of a stand-in and a favorite, but I'm happy to have a summering book, people who summer in a different location, a boat book.

ANNE: No, I'm sorry. Why am I laughing? I think I'm laughing because it sounds so delightful.

Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogel, and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read. Every week we'll talk all things books and reading and do a little literary matchmaking with one guest.

[00:00:50] Readers, early summer is our busy season around here, and we know that's the case for many of you as well. We like to build in intentional breaks to keep up with our TBR piles and everything else in our lives. So we are taking next week off to give our team an early summer breather. We will be back in your podcast players the following week, and in the meantime, we hope you enjoy exploring our archives of over 500 episodes. Visit us at modernmrsdarcy.com/podcast to explore both recent and backlist episodes.

Readers, today's guest is looking forward to a summer of books with heart that won't be too emotionally draining during a season of grief. I'm sure she's not the only one navigating a tough season, and I love this focus on what she calls light but not fluffy reads.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Kayla Crum to the show. Kayla's an RN and freelance writer living in Grand Haven, Michigan, where she enjoys making the most of her Lake Michigan proximity by spending time outside with her family and reading on the beach when she can fit it into her schedule. That sounds like the dream.

[00:01:54] Lately, Kayla's been navigating the grief of losing a loved one, and she's turned to favorite authors and stories to help her through. Kayla would like to add more books like these to her summer reading list, but she's not exactly sure what will scratch that itch.

She knows she's identified a specific type of story that is really working well for her, as you will hear today. Okay, I'll tell you now. Those are hotel books. And Kayla is hoping I can help her understand why this specific setting is working so well because she'd really like to discover more books that satisfy in the same way.

Let's get to it.

Kayla, welcome to the show.

KAYLA: Thank you, Anne. I'm delighted to be here.

ANNE: Oh, the pleasure's mine. Thanks so much for coming on today. Thanks for sending in your submission with an enticing topic.

KAYLA: Yes, I've sent several over the years. I think I've listened for almost 10 years, so it was so exciting to get the email that I got to come on.

ANNE: I often know this in advance, but I didn't realize that you'd sent in several times. Do you know when your first one was? Because I just searched my inbox and I can tell you.

[00:02:57] KAYLA: I don't know. Would it be like five years ago?

ANNE: Longer. Ooh. It was Sunday, November 17th, 2019.

KAYLA: Oh, wow.

ANNE: At 9:31 PM.

KAYLA: They tend to happen late at night, I think.

ANNE: Any idea what you may have loved and hated?

KAYLA: Oh, gosh. I mean, I think I used to always throw Anne of Green Gables out there as my lifetime favorite.

ANNE: You did.

KAYLA: Yeah.

ANNE: You did.

KAYLA: Yeah, but I don't know the others.

ANNE: They were Chris Cleave's Little Bee.

KAYLA: Oh, yes.

ANNE: And Lori Frankel's This Is How It Always Is.

KAYLA: Mm, good reminders of good books.

ANNE: And the book you wanted to love but just couldn't was...

KAYLA: I have no idea.

ANNE: It was Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles. You did not like Patroclus.

KAYLA: I just didn't even finish it, which is... I wanted to. I've never tried again since then.

ANNE: Well, Kayla, I'm glad we're finally having this conversation on the show and not in the submissions inbox.

KAYLA: Me too.

[00:03:53] ANNE: Thanks for persisting. Readers, if you want to be on What Should I Read Next? in Kayla's seat, timing is everything. So if you've filled out that submission form before, there is no harm in doing it again. We're always looking for the right themes at the right time and books that we haven't talked about lately or haven't talked about at all, and would love to feature. I mean, would love to by virtue of the fact you're bringing them up mostly, but we're always looking for a wide array.

But Kayla, thanks for coming today. Would you tell us more about yourself than you've listened for a long time and submitted before? We always like to give our listeners a glimpse of who our guests are.

KAYLA: Yes. I'm a lifelong voracious reader. I make my home, born and raised, in Grand Haven, Michigan, which is a little beach town on Lake Michigan. I was a nurse by trade, and I'm still licensed, but left that several years ago to be a freelance writer, communicator, podcaster. I sort of help others communicate their stories, which has been very fulfilling for me. I love reading on the beach or anywhere, eating ice cream. I'm a summer girly, summer birthday. Love to play with my husband, my two-year-old, and our dog. So that's sort of me in a nutshell.

ANNE: Favorite ice cream flavor?

[00:05:10] KAYLA: I mean, I can't argue with a good just plain chocolate, especially if it's homemade by the ice cream shop. But grocery store ice cream, Ben & Jerry's The Tonight Dough is my go-to.

ANNE: That's a Bogel family favorite as well.

KAYLA: So reading-wise, I loved The Chronicles of Narnia as a child, were my home base for reading. I think I read all seven books seven times, and I was very proud of that. I feel like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was my entrance into reading. It was a read-aloud at school, and then that kind of kickstarted everything for me. I've always been a bit of an opportunistic reader, so anything that's readily available, you know, if it's lying around, my parents had it, my grandparents had it, whatever, Reader's Digest is there, I'm going to read it, even though I was like eight years old.

[00:06:04] ANNE: That sounds so much more inviting and complimentary than compulsive reader, which is what I've always used to describe myself, and others who will read like the back of the cereal box if that's the only reading material nearby.

KAYLA: Yes, like reading the shampoo bottles in the shower. Yes, if words are around, I will probably be reading them.

ANNE: Okay. Opportunistic.

KAYLA: Yes, opportunistic. Definitely, in high school, got into some of the popular fantasy series. Hunger Games was coming out at the time, Harry Potter, the movies were finishing up while I was in high school. So fantasy was big for me as a teenager. And then in college, I was pretty busy with college reading and nursing school things, but my roommates would make fun of me because I'd always have a fiction read going just while I brushed my teeth. So I had to have something going, and I had no time to read it, but I would read about one book per semester just by brushing my teeth and reading. So that was my little escape every day into fiction world, and probably got my teeth cleaner too.

[00:07:07] ANNE: I think so. Kayla, what's your reading like these days?

KAYLA: I became a mom two years ago, and I've shifted more towards audio. I had a big reading renaissance a couple years ago, probably in part due to the pandemic, and then had my daughter in 2024, shifted half and half pretty much to audio and physical or Kindle. I always have something going on audio, something going with my eyes.

I have recently been in a season of grief. My sister lost her husband to cancer in February, and have been reading as an escape. So leaning hard on Elin Hilderbrand, other beach-type reads, but also just really moving character-driven novels with heart that kind of meet me where I'm at emotionally, but don't devastate me. I feel like that's sometimes a tricky line to walk. But yeah, reading is definitely an escape for me from various things.

[00:08:12] I specifically saw your post recently about hotel books, and I love a hotel book. Many of my favorites are set in a hotel. I think way back to Eloise at the Plaza as a child, and this has been a favorite setting for me over the years. And so I wanted to talk to you about that today.

ANNE: Ooh, we can definitely do that. And we will explore more... or maybe we can do this now. First, I'm so sorry for your loss.

KAYLA: Aw, thank you.

ANNE: I know many readers, including myself, resonate with the idea of turning to books to escape into another world. But also I hear... so character driven novels with heart. I don't know, I think what's standing out to me is escape, but not avoidance.

KAYLA: I like that characterization, yes. And maybe something about a hotel book is even that hotels by nature are temporary, right? With few exceptions. It's like a temporary break from real life, and that's what I'm looking for in a book, too. I'm not looking to move to Alaska or you know, wherever.

[00:09:26] ANNE: Oh, so maybe hotel books are a nice place to escape to.

KAYLA: Yes, and in a temporary way, and then you know that they're going back to their real lives and I'm going back to my real life.

ANNE: But what if they're not, because the book is set in a hotel, but it's more about the staff than the guests? How do we feel about that?

KAYLA: I do like those, too. I recently read The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hildebrand, and I felt like that focused mostly on the staff. I do love when the staff and the guests are characters, and you kind of get a peek into both.

ANNE: I'm trying to articulate, like envisioning my mental cobbled-together vision of The Hotel Nantucket lobby. But I'm imagining how even though the staff is somewhat, you know, it's semi-permanent, the hotel is still built around the idea of people coming and going, like of impermanence.

KAYLA: Mm-hmm.

ANNE: Okay. So it's a holding place?

[00:10:28] KAYLA: Yeah. I'm trying to scratch out what it is I like about hotel books because a setting, I guess, is what it would be, because hotel books can spread genres, mysteries, and otherwise. But I do like when the hotel... I want to picture it in my head. I've read a few where you think you're getting a hotel book, but it's really more of just background. And I really do like when I feel like I could walk in in my head and picture everything, and it's almost a character in itself. I like the idea of nooks and crannies, and all the secrets of all the people that have stayed there. You know, it's just kind of whimsical and magical to me.

ANNE: You mentioned something about the idea of a book being set in Alaska.

KAYLA: Mm, yeah.

ANNE: How do you feel about a book being set in Alaska versus a book being set in a hotel? I'm just thinking there's the vastness of the one place and the minuteness, relatively speaking, of the other.

[00:11:26] KAYLA: I think Alaska appeals because of its remoteness and uniqueness. I've found that I also am drawn to island books, English manor houses, or on a boat. Like these closed sets, so to speak, to use a movie term. Like a locked-room mystery. I like something about there's like a container holding all of these various people in some way. And a hotel is just my favorite form of that. But I also like, you know, you're not getting to Alaska by accident. Does that make sense?

ANNE: It does, I think. Well, sometimes the truth emerges in contrast, thus bringing Alaska into it, but we'll set Alaska aside for now. That's a different conversation for a different episode. I wonder if there's something about the way a hotel setting is like the world made small.

[00:12:23] KAYLA: That sounds right to me. I like how people rub shoulders with people they might not meet on the street back home, right? Like it brings in various versions of people. I think I like the idea of play-acting a little bit. It's fun even if, like, I were to go on vacation, you're like, "I could be anyone. I could have made 1,000 different life choices." And just to kind of imagine a different life, or what if I lived here? And yeah, just seeing the possibilities, like you said, writ small within a hotel. It does feel like a world within the world.

ANNE: I'm playing with an idea of like you already have the solution, you have everything you need. Everything and everyone that is needed for the story is there or will come to you. I wonder if that's pinging anything for you.

[00:13:16] KAYLA: Yeah, like almost the opposite of a vast wilderness. Like the opposite of Frodo's journey in The Lord of the Rings where you have to trek forever and find everything. It's like everything's here and contained, and we almost just have to look among us or within us. I did like living in an apartment back in the day. I felt cozy, like nestled among the other families and lives. I think that's part of it, too, the communal living aspect.

ANNE: Or in another genre we might call that forced proximity and the interesting things that may happen as a result.

KAYLA: Right, like how the hotel brings together characters that you might not find side by side in another scenario.

ANNE: Yeah. Okay. And then in the blog post you're referring to that was written by our team member Ginger, she said that, sure, she's intrigued by what is sometimes a glamorous setting or sometimes the cozy one if we're talking about a little inn. But also there's the question of, like, what are the characters doing? Are they with a group? Are they alone? Are they a couple? Are they running to something? Are they running away from something?

[00:14:27] Hotels are where people go on purpose to make memories or to disappear or to get a needed escape or at times of transition. There's a lot of potential for drama there. But drama is actually not what I'm hearing draws you.

KAYLA: I do like the appeal of the glamour a little bit, and sometimes drama, but it doesn't have to have drama. I think I like to sprinkle more drama, glamour, rich people behaving badly. I do enjoy a book like that, but I need to mix it up with more inner heart-driven stories as well. And you can find both with hotel settings, it's just trickier sometimes.

ANNE: You can. All right, so it sounds of these, the idea that you've got a whole world that you can hold between your hands is a big part of the appeal.

KAYLA: I think so.

ANNE: And it gives your brain like someplace very concrete to visit.

[00:15:29] KAYLA: Yes. I mentioned reading Narnia as a child, and obviously that's a vast land, but I think that's similar. Or Anne of Green Gables is another childhood favorite. She lived on Prince Edward Island. Like, you go to these places, or with Ellen Hilderbrand, it's Nantucket, it's like, now I'm transporting to this specific place that's going to hold the whole story. I like that.

ANNE: Well, there's some great hotel scenes in the Anne of Green Gables books. I'm thinking of her and Diane wanting to eat chicken salad at the White Sands Hotel.

KAYLA: Oh, so true.

ANNE: Or they go eat dinner with Aunt... Is it Josephine?

KAYLA: Josephine.

ANNE: It might be tea in Charlottetown.

KAYLA: Yes. Yes. And it's such luxury to the little girls who are used to country life.

ANNE: It's a whole different life. All right. Well, we'll see where we can take you away to in the pages. Are we just looking hotel books, or is that one example of what's working for you?

KAYLA: That's one example. It's sort of a stand-in and a favorite, but I'm happy to have a summering book, people who summer in a different location, a boat book.

[00:16:28] ANNE: No, I'm sorry. Why am I laughing? I think I'm laughing because it sounds so delightful. Summer as a verb always makes me giggle a little bit.

KAYLA: That also feels like something wealthier folks do, like, "I'm going to go summer on the coast." I like a book like that, or really any sort of, yeah, I'm traveling to X location type of book.

ANNE: Okay. Now, some of these books are very warm, and some are snarky, and some are murdery, but I guess you already told us, character-driven novels with heart.

KAYLA: Yeah. Any of those things are welcome, but I do need character development as a primary tenet of the book.

ANNE: Okay, Kayla, what kind of genres do you find do and don't work for you? Or maybe it's more helpful to say they feel hospitable to you right now.

KAYLA: It's funny I grew up loving fantasy, but have not found any five-star fantasies for myself as an adult. So I'm not completely opposed, but that's just not typically what I read anymore. I love family dramas, historical fiction, classics, book club picks. That's kind of my usual.

[00:17:41] I do like murder mystery, think like Louise Penny or The Thursday Murder Club, so not gruesome, but not... I hesitate to use the word "cozy". I think cozy mystery has a bit of a nebulous definition.

ANNE: You said in your submission you were fantasy-curious. Does that apply today when we're talking?

KAYLA: Yes, although with the hotel theme, I'm not sure that that is an overlap we could find, but if anyone could do it, you could, so we'll see.

ANNE: Oh, were that only true, but I may have an idea or two. Kayla, this is important information about your reading life. Can we pile on more by talking about the books you love and don't?

KAYLA: Yes.

ANNE: You know how this works. You've brought three books you love, one you don't, and what you've been reading lately to the show, and I'd love to hear how they connect to what's working for you and what you're looking for right now. How did you choose these?

[00:18:40] KAYLA: I'd been thinking about books that, like I mentioned, were character-driven, had heart, and were sort of cathartic or moving, but didn't bring me low during this season of grief. And that's a tricky path to walk, maybe even bringing me to tears, but not in a devastating way. So these three books, and after I chose them, I realized they all have a female protagonist who could be considered somewhat unlikable, but you really peel back who she is at her core and why she ended up the way she is. That's sort of a theme I didn't even realize until I put them all down here. But they all-

ANNE: Wow. Okay, I love that.

KAYLA: They all scratch that itch of the character developing over time and feeling the emotions without being left in a desolate place, if that makes sense.

[00:19:41] ANNE: Yes. Okay, if I asked you to put me together a list like that, I think that would be impossible to do. But look, you did it accidentally.

KAYLA: I did.

ANNE: All right. Well, what do you have? What's book one that you love, if not already strongly implied?

KAYLA: The first book I loved was The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman. First of all, any long title like that is going to draw me in, especially if you reference a street, like The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street as a middle-grade novel, or even just a name like The Penderwicks, just thinking back to my childhood. So the name alone caught my eye in the used bookstore, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street.

And this is a book about a young immigrant girl who moves to America with her family in the early 1900s, ends up taken in by another family when hers passes away, and rises to be this super powerful ice cream magnate. And it sort of has a Forrest Gump feel in that you get to walk through the essential points of American history through the 1900s, but with the lens of this woman's life.

[00:20:48] We flash back and forth from modern day when she's elderly and undergoing a difficult lawsuit for her ice cream company, and then kind of going back to like, "Well, here's how I got here and here's why, you know, I shouldn't be sued for this." It's an interesting setup, and it's long. These days with my toddler, I don't know that I would've picked up a 500-page book, but I really enjoyed it a couple years ago. And it's primarily set in New York City, which is also a fun place I like to read.

ANNE: And in 1913, I think, which is a good ways back, how big a role does historical fiction play in your reading life these days? I'm just curious about, as far as places to escape go, how do you feel about the past?

KAYLA: I do love history. I was a big American Girl doll reader and enjoyer. I'm not opposed to it. I don't think I've been leaning on it much lately because, like beach reads, at least the ones I've been exposed to, and with the splashy beach covers that I've been reaching for, don't seem to have as much historical fiction among them as, you know, modern. But I'm not opposed to it.

[00:22:02] ANNE: Good to know. Kayla, what's the second book you love?

KAYLA: Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo. This is really cheating because I could have put either of Claire Lombardo's books here. They're just so stunning. The way she writes about human relationships and emotions is just unparalleled. She really makes you feel for each character's position, particularly in this case the protagonist, Julia, who we kind of flash back and forth between her difficult season as a young mother when she's questioning her marriage, questioning every choice she's made to get her where she is now, and then we flash forward.

And so it's not a spoiler to say, like, you know she's still with her husband, she's still with her family, she's got this job. So you're like, "Okay, she was so unsure here, and yet she's settled here." So the book kind of draws you in that gap, helps you move from that difficult season of young motherhood to when she's sending her young adults off into the world.

[00:23:10] I just think Claire Lombardo is a master of peeling back the layers of why we do certain things, and why sometimes the people we're closest to are also strangers to us, and we might feel more comfortable divulging things to others. The knots we tie ourselves in as families and friends, she untangles all that so masterfully.

ANNE: I see what you mean. And what I'm really thinking about is where the space is for you between tears that feel cathartic and ones that feel devastating.

KAYLA: So, Claire's other novel, I think it's called The Most Fun We Ever Had, is actually about a group of sisters, one of whom lost a husband to cancer. So that's very relevant to me. I really liked actually how she wrote into that tension of, like, there's a sister with a normal life and happy children, and then a sister with this loss who's a widow. I thought she did a very real raw, but gentle at the same time, examination of the tensions in that relationship.

[00:24:23] So weirdly, even if it's right on the nose for me with that, I think I'd be okay with that. When I say "not devastating", I've noticed since I had my daughter, I don't want to hear about children being kidnapped or abused. Child abuse, not for me. I did love Florence Knapp's The Names, but I read that a while ago. I don't think right now I could handle those descriptions of domestic abuse. Does that help delineate it a little bit?

ANNE: Yes. Hard things happen in this world is okay.

KAYLA: Mm-hmm.

ANNE: The world is a terrible, hard place, and then it gets harder, and then we die, not okay.

KAYLA: Right. And specifically if there's, I think, a perpetrator, I don't know why this is coming to me right now, but I'm thinking of Florence's book, and yeah, like someone in your life who's just ruining everything and it just goes on and on. Yeah, not really here for that right now.

ANNE: When the person is the object of fear in like that very clear, purposeful way?

[00:25:28] KAYLA: I think I like to believe the best of everyone. And talking about these character-driven books, I like to see, you know, we all have our flaws, and yet we have this deep-rooted goodness. So when there's a character who's just not that at all, I struggle with that.

ANNE: Okay, so a book in which the author's worldview incorporates the idea that there is good in people and not we're all destined to devastate each other willfully because we hurt each other despite our best intentions, not because of our worst.

KAYLA: Yes, that's a good way to put it.

ANNE: Okay. We're gathering so much info. Kayla, what is your third favorite book?

KAYLA: The third book I brought is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, so me and half the world. I saw this book everywhere. My mom read it in her book club and passed it along to me. I just think the biggest praise I can give it is that I was supposed to leave on a trip to Florida, and I had a little bit left in the book, and I was like, "I'll just sit at the kitchen counter and have a quick snack." It's like 10:00 at night and I haven't packed, and I just sat there and finished the whole book and was weeping, but in the best way.

[00:26:44] I just found Sybil, the protagonist, so... Endearing feels like too sweet of a word, but again, it's like a slightly unlikable or complex main character. But we get to peel back the layers of her relationships with various people in her life and the choices she's made along the way, and kind of see the why behind it. I thought that book scratched at how bad things can happen to any of us, and sometimes we are partly or mostly at fault, and that that is just life and how... It really examined the idea of holding yourself tenderly and trying for forgiveness and holding others the same way.

And it was, for anyone who doesn't know, written in an epistolary format with letters back and forth, which I do enjoy. And I think that too was just a fresh take and helped us take a look at Sybil in a new way. Like, we could kind of gather different clues from who she was talking to about different aspects of her character in a way that just like a first-person narrative or even a third-person narrative couldn't jump around and do.

[00:27:59] ANNE: Okay, so those are the books you loved. What didn't work for you? And please do tell us why.

KAYLA: I read Havoc by Christopher Bollen. That was a hotel book, which was why I picked it up. I will say I loved the hotel setting, the staff, our characters, the main character, who I am forgetting her name, but she... Another elderly woman, just like The Correspondent and The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street. So this is becoming a theme.

She's a guest at the hotel. You sense early on that she's perhaps an unreliable narrator, and I'm not opposed to that, but I won't say it's my favorite. So that was maybe the first red flag that it wasn't for me. The ending is what really ruined this book for me, and I don't want to ruin it for the listeners. But when you get to the end, and I had the feeling of like, it was all for nothing. I don't know. I don't need a happy ending, but I need an ending with some heart and hope, and this one did not have that. So it did not work for me.

[00:29:06] But it was a hotel in Egypt, and there was a fun little boy character, and this main elderly woman, and I wanted to like it so much, but the ending just... I couldn't.

ANNE: Kayla, what have you been reading lately?

KAYLA: I recently read The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand. I've been leaning on Hilderbrand books right now as an escape. So loved the setting of Nantucket and the hotel itself. This one is unique in the Hilderbrand canon because it has a ghost. I don't mind some light, friendly ghost. I'm not here for the scary things, but a little magical realism or like, oh, there's something a little supernatural in addition to the main plot is good with me. And loved how we were rooting for this new hotel to make it another year, and that the staff and the guests were sort of working together on that.

Also like half the world have been listening to The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion. So that's been a fun escape as well this summer. The narration is just so great.

[00:30:09] I'm almost done with Heartwood by Amity Gaige, which is thrilling for sure. It's a woman lost in the Maine woods, and you rotate between three different women's perspectives. I actually was loaned it by a friend back in the immediacy of my family member dying, and I was like, "Oh, I can't read this right now." Like, somebody lost in the woods and possibly dying is not for me.

But again, we're the opportunistic reader. Here it was laying around when I finished my last book, and so I picked it up, and it has been fun to have a book that has me like, "I have to keep reading," and I'm like staying up past my bedtime reading. So I'm almost done with that one. And that's been an escape of a different kind, you know, kind of keeping me turning the pages.

ANNE: Okay. So let's recap, if that's okay.

KAYLA: Yeah.

[00:31:04] ANNE: All right. Kayla, you loved The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman, Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo, and The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. The book that wasn't for you was Havoc by Christopher Bollen because you need an ending with heart and hope, and that wasn't it. Lately, you've been reading Elin Hilderbrand's The Hotel Nantucket, Amity Gaige's Heartwood, and Beth Brower's The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion. And there are a whole bunch of volumes of those that could keep you busy. How do you feel about having a series on deck like that?

KAYLA: That's been fun because it takes the work out of what you're going to read next, right? So just been queuing them up on my Hoopla app, and that's been a nice accompaniment to my chores.

ANNE: Okay. Glad to hear it. Kayla, is there anything else you want to put on the table as we think about what you may enjoy reading next?

KAYLA: I don't think so. We covered a lot of ground.

[00:32:01] ANNE: Kayla, I have ideas, and I definitely have emotional tone in mind, but my goal here is to give you the information you need to decide: is that a reading experience I want and that I'm ready for right now?

KAYLA: Mm-hmm.

ANNE: Okay, let's start with a fantasy book set at a little inn that I feel like I've talked about all the time on What Should I Read Next?. So maybe you've read it or maybe you've already decided it's not for you. But I'm thinking of Sangu Mandanna's A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping that came out last summer. Is this a book you know?

KAYLA: Now that you say the title, I think I've heard you mention it, but I don't remember anything about it.

ANNE: This is a fantasy novel that has a strong romance element. It's very grounded fantasy that features a found family. It does have that romance. It has strong platonic relationships, and it just has lots of cozy vibes.

[00:32:57] This book is about a witch named Sarah, who many years ago lost her magic because she cast a forbidden spell. And she has no regrets because she cast the spell to save the life of a cherished family member. She would do it again in a heartbeat, but it still stinks. And something I thought was so fun and charming about this story is it stinks for very practical reasons. Her great aunt that she saved runs this adorable welcoming inn that has serious Three Pines vibes.

KAYLA: Love that.

ANNE: There's a spell cast on the inn, and people who find the inn need the inn. And if you don't need the inn, you will not be able to find your way to it. And that sounds a lot like Louise Penny, which I enjoyed. But they're running this old inn together, and this inn has seen better days.

[00:33:55] And if Sarah could just use her magic to fix the boiler, it would relieve all the money stress they've been feeling. Because you could wallpaper that room, or you could just wave your wand. And it's much easier to wave your wand, but that option is not available to her right now.

So the inn is just super charming because I think in my head like it's just beautifully, charmingly, imperfectly, perfectly decorated. And you just want to cozy up in the corner of every room you're seeing in your mind's eye with a book. But there's also an enchantment that's been placed on it long ago.

Sarah cast a spell before she lost her magic. And the spell is whimsical and mischievous. Like, if there are empty teacups sitting around, then wildflowers are going to be blooming in them. Doors open and close, not in a menacing way, but just like, "Oh, hi, hello," kinda way.

[00:34:46] In one of the guest bedrooms, it rains apple blossom tea for an hour every Sunday, and then it stops, and nothing is a mess. But then several things happen at once. Sarah, for reasons, decides she has to get her magic back. And then also at the same time, the inn's spell draws in this gruff and also extremely good-looking magical historian to the inn, along with his little sister, who happens to be autistic, and she takes to the place immediately and never wants to leave. And the gruff, magical historian who's very, very good-looking is going to feature prominently in the plot.

This little group of strangers becomes extremely tight and they decide, "You know what? Together we can take on the big, bad, mean, magical dudes and cast this impossible spell and get your magic back." I don't know. How's that sounding?

[00:35:44] KAYLA: That sounds delightful, very cozy. I don't have time to learn an entire world, but I can learn an inn. You know what I mean? Like the world-building. So that sounds lovely.

ANNE: That sounds good. Okay, it's not a ghost story, but I'm just thinking about the way that characters' past pains and traumas surface in the plot. And it does have a little bit of a ghostly element, but people have been through hard stuff in this book, and that does definitely surface on the page. Based on what you've said, I think the pervasive tone is "this is hard, but your friends have you. Like, your loved ones have you, and this house has your back." I think that could be really important for you to know as you think about if this is a right book at the right time for you.

KAYLA: Yeah, that's a good note to know.

ANNE: Okay, I'm glad to hear it. Can we talk about a book that I don't know at all is perfect for you, but I still really want you to know about?

KAYLA: Yes.

[00:36:45] ANNE: This is a hotel book that's set on a thinly veiled version of Mackinac Island.

KAYLA: Ooh.

ANNE: And listeners, Kayla was kind enough to give me some Michigan recommendations before we got started, so at least maybe I can give you a Michigan book in exchange.

KAYLA: Yes, I would love that.

ANNE: Okay. This is new. It comes out in July 2026, so not quite yet, but very, very soon, and it's a debut family drama by Ryan Effgen called Make Nice. The tone is light, whimsical, but I'm wondering if this is right for you, because it's a little edgier than I think some readers are going to expect based on what this book sounds like.

[00:37:32] So at its heart, this is a story of three siblings who have been called back to... It's not actually Mackinac Island, but it's so thinly veiled that it was only in going back after I read it and reading the author's description again as I thought about Summer Reading Guide potential coverage. It's not in there, by the way, but I thought really hard about it, that I realized, wait, it's not actually Mackinac Island. It just sounds exactly like everything I've ever heard and read about Mackinac Island. And I'm definitely picturing the Grand Hotel that is one of the iconic images. There's no cars on the island. There's buggies. There's ice cream stands galore, gorgeous seaside, nostalgic parades, that kind of thing.

So in this book, Make Nice, it's about three adult siblings who reconvene at their father's request at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island for one last time. They have come to this place together their entire lives, usually with their mom, but their mom recently died. And Kayla, I do not remember how. That is backstory, not present tense in the plot.

[00:38:40] But each sibling wants to impress the others and show them how they are doing so great, everything is working, they're living their best life, but they do have these old rivalries and sore spots as siblings often do, and they end up upsetting each other and really getting into it, their history and their present together on the island.

The siblings are really fun to read about. There's three of them, two men and one woman. Corey is the family ne'er-do-well who has stolen a five pound block of cocaine that he has brought with him by Greyhound bus to Michigan, and he's thinking, "I'm going to sell this and make a bunch of money and solve my problems."

Then we have daughter Viv, who is dealing with a marital breakdown, but doesn't really want her siblings to know it because she's afraid they'll be like, "Hello, we told you so. We've been telling you for years."

And then we have Pete, who is a super nerdy snail scientist who has never quite fit in in his life. He works at a university. He's obsessed with these snails. But Pete's story made the novel for me, and I still have open tabs on my phone about Carthusian snails and Carrera marble in the Michigan shoreline thanks to his story, which I just loved. He really is living his best life on this Michigan island.

[00:40:10] There's a teenager who belongs to Viv, who's also in the mix and also the patriarch of the family. But this family has a lot of history, and it all comes to the surface in these intervening plots at the Grand Hotel. And I wonder if this is a book that is a little fun for the hijinks, but I wonder if the setting could make this especially interesting to you. I don't know. Are you interested in this at all?

KAYLA: This sounds right up my alley. I love the Michigan piece, but I also love a sibling story. I remember reading The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney kind of about siblings going at it a little bit. Also, as to the snarkiness or dark humor, I really enjoyed The Wedding People at that hotel on the East Coast. So I feel like what you're describing sounds just right.

[00:41:05] ANNE: I think lovable mess applies to so many of these characters. And if you enjoyed The Nest, this one is a little bit gentler. I was worried this might be a little too bristly for you. But if you enjoyed The Nest, I think you're okay. I mean, this really is a book... A sibling story is a plus, but this is location, location, location.

KAYLA: Love that.

ANNE: All right. Well, that is Make Nice by Ryan Effgen. And then if you haven't read any Kevin Kwan, you get a whole bunch of hotels in your 320 pages or whatever it is. Have you read Lies and Weddings?

KAYLA: No. He wrote Crazy Rich Asians, right?

ANNE: He did. Another good hotel story.

KAYLA: Yeah, I read that one, but not Lies and Weddings.

ANNE: Okay. This came out a couple summers ago. It was in the Summer Reading Guide then. And Lies and Weddings is a comedy of manners that is actually, I was surprised to discover, a retelling of Anthony Trollope's Dr. Thorne. But you can forget I told you that. And you don't have to know a thing about Dr. Thorne. I mean, I think some readers will be like, "I miss my English literature seminar days. I'm going to read them both side by side." But you don't need to know a thing about Trollope.

[00:42:14] This is a plot-driven book. It's not so much about character development in that everyone is larger than life in their lifestyle and a little bit in their personality, but the two main characters are not without their struggles and subsequent growth. But this is about a not exactly a single man in want of a wife, but a single man whose mother very much wants him to find a wife.

He is the Viscount St. Ives, who is known internationally as Viscount St. Abs after a photo of him ironing shirtless went viral. And he is not at all concerned with his believed to be obscenely wealthy family's money problems, because he would prefer to happily live out his days surfing in Hawaii. But his mother doesn't want the well to dry up, so she needs him to marry. She needs him to marry up and quickly. And of course, that's not what he wants to do. He doesn't want to marry at all, and well, there are the seeds of an old-fashioned marriage plot in that little setup.

[00:43:22] But what's so fun about this book is you get to follow him and his cronies around the world. And I so enjoy googling all the... I mean, all the locations of these luxury hotels that you can look up on maps and browse through the pictures of the lobby. And Kevin Kwan describes them with all the details, and sets things like wedding receptions and cocktail parties, and just waiting for your pals in the lobby, and it's so much fun. And they do ridiculous and expensive things like go on group hot air balloon rides, and visit these jaw-droppingly beautiful botanical gardens in Morocco. That browser might still be open on my phone from two years ago. I probably shouldn't tell anybody that.

But the food, the clothes, the wines, that you could google and be like, "Oh, that's $600 a bottle, huh?" The specific glitzy intersections where things take place, the cars they collect, the watches, the handbags, the other luxury goods. In that sense, I think Kevin Kwan and Elin Hilderbrand are very similar in that they both add a lot of texture to their stories by letting a lot of the physical settings and material goods do a lot of the lift on characterization for their people.

[00:44:33] This has a vibe not unlike The Guncle Abroad, if we have any Steven Rowley fans listening, Kayla, if you're one of them. But this is just frothy and fizzy and escapist, but not without its substance. And it does have that classical anchor here. How does that sound?

KAYLA: That sounds fun. Yeah, I read The Guncle, but not The Guncle Abroad, so that's kind of a two-for-one. I should read both that and this one. This sounds like a fun escape.

ANNE: All right, I'm glad to hear it. Kayla, for our next book, I wonder how a Vermont inn sounds to you as a setting.

KAYLA: Yes, that sounds nice.

ANNE: Okay. Have you read any Elinor Lipman? I'm thinking about The Inn at Lake Devine.

KAYLA: The name Elinor Lipman is ringing a bell, but I can't think of what I might have read by her.

ANNE: Okay. She's been writing since the '90s, and is prolific, with a book coming out every couple of years.

KAYLA: Wow.

[00:45:23] ANNE: So this one is, oh gosh, late '90s, early 2000s. And this is a love story and a family story that's grounded very much in the real world. This is a first-person tale narrated by a woman named Natalie Marks. And this story talks about hard things, as it's a story about two couples who are of different religious faith backgrounds, whose parents are really unhappy when they get together. But the tone throughout is one of, "We're going to work it out. It is going to be okay." I feel like the reader feels really supported through the whole story.

But Natalie's family was in Massachusetts, and every year they summered, the verb, either by the lake or by the beach. And one summer they sought out this place called The Inn at Lake Devine in Vermont, and got a letter back from the proprietor that said, "We don't take people like you because our guests are all Gentiles." And this happened to Natalie's mom, not our narrator, Natalie. But when Natalie was young and she watched this happen, she was angry, but she was also very curious, and she had a contrarian streak in her, and she grew up thinking, "Well, wouldn't it be fun to infiltrate this place?"

[00:46:53] So in her teens, she figured out a way to spend a summer at the inn. And then when she grew up and trained to be a chef, she gets invited along to a wedding at the inn, to a society kind of wedding. So Natalie goes, and she cooks, and when she falls in love with someone there at the inn, neither of the parents are happy.

But this is a comic novel, and they are going to work it out. And I wonder if you may not enjoy just the story of people working through differences in a way that hopefully feels authentic but also safe. But also just the details that we see from all sides of life at the inn. But we get to see the perspective of her being a teenager, and then an adult, and then a special guest, as she's in a wedding party, and then she's a chef at the inn as well. And I wonder if all those perspectives will be a nice, well-rounded hotel story, and some for you.

[00:48:00] KAYLA: Yeah, I love the through-the-lifetime approach. That reminds me of The Ice Cream Queen that we talked about, and Same As It Ever Was. So, yeah, that sounds really fun.

ANNE: I'm glad to hear it. And I kind of want to give you a sad one that might be too sad, but it might also be really good. So are you comfortable with wielding the power of making the call, but hearing about a sad book?

KAYLA: Yeah, I can always tuck it away for later, too.

ANNE: Okay. Have you read any Mary Lawson?

KAYLA: No.

ANNE: Okay. She is a Canadian author who was shortlisted for the Booker for, let's see, maybe in the past five years. It's called A Town Called Solace. Her debut was Crow Lake, that Will Bogel has talked about a lot in these parts. And I know we've talked about Solace and Crow Lake on the podcast.

[00:48:52] Road Ends is coming to mind because it's a recent one I read, and I did not expect it to be a hotel book, but I loved that storyline so much. For readers who know Lawson or Crow Lake, this book is set in that same story world, and there's a slight overlap of characters, but you do not need to read one with the other.

So, like all of Lawson's novels, this is set in northern Ontario, and there's a little town called Struan that is far north and remote. And this story starts in that small community in the 1960s. This is a novel about a large family in a hard place. And we mostly hear from the two eldest children, who are like 21 and 23 when the novel begins. But to zoom out a little, their parents are married unhappily. They never meant to get married. At least the father never meant to marry the mother, but because of World War II, that's what happened.

[00:49:54] The mother keeps having babies because she loves and dotes on her infants. But once they exit infanthood... Is that a word, Kayla, infanthood?

KAYLA: Infancy.

ANNE: Once they exit infancy and move on, once they can walk and talk, she is uninterested. It's like they don't exist. She is mentally unwell, but none of the family members can quite put a name to it. And the firstborn daughter, secondborn child, Megan, has been keeping the wheels on the wagon for a long time. She has been parentified since about the age of six. She has been running the household.

And when the story opens, she is about done. And exacerbating her sense of doneness is that her elder brother, Tom, who could ostensibly help her, is dealing with his own crisis because his best friend died under circumstances that are still haunting him not that long before. And Tom had this promising career in naval aviation. He was going to go to Seattle and work for Boeing, but he is stuck, and he's okay with that for right now.

[00:50:59] And the family is at this crisis point. Like, somebody has to step in and do something, because the mother's having another baby, and they cannot keep this going the way things are. Oh, and the father's just absent. He's just denial and avoidance. But that's not the tone of the whole book. But that is the situation.

At the beginning of the story, Megan gets an opportunity to leave for London to visit a friend, and she's like I don't have to tell my parents how half-baked this plan really is. I just gotta get out of here. And she leaves, and what we see in the rest of the story is split narratives of Megan trying to make her way in London, and gosh, it is terrifying at first, because she does not have a plan when she leaves. And it's the '60s. It's not like she can call up her friend on the cell and be like, "Hey, where are you? Help me. Let me in out of the rain so I can start my British life." And then we're back in this small town, Ontario, where this family is struggling.

[00:51:57] And I think the things that are hardest in this story is they aren't just struggling emotionally, they are struggling physically, and there's a four-year-old child whose mother has forgotten about him because he's not a baby anymore. He can walk and talk, but he's being neglected, Like basic things. Like he's wetting the bed and nobody's cleaning it up. He doesn't have any clothes. He hasn't had a bath in weeks, like that kind of stuff. And it's hard.

But what I didn't expect about this story, because people having a hard time and Mary Lawson was not surprising to me. She often puts her characters through it, and I've read enough of her books now to trust she will bring me back to a place that feels redemptive, where maybe it's not great, but it is okay, and I can see it's getting better.

But Megan ends up through... Well, through a little bit of stick-to-it-iveness, but a lot of sheer luck. She ends up falling in with a couple who are passionate about renovating old homes into hotels, and they have taste and style and vision, and she throws herself into the work with them.

[00:53:05] And I wonder if that perspective of building a boutique British hotel from... Not building it, I mean, the building is there, but creating it out of shambles into a classy place with a swanky bar and lots of cachet and travelers from all over the world. I wonder if that would be an interesting and appealing angle to you.

More happens in this book, but the combo of family drama, serious character development over time and across vast spaces, and also that really interesting and unexpected hotel angle will add up to something special for you. How does that sound?

KAYLA: I'm liking the hotel angle, and I normally love a messy family story. The neglect piece is sort of hitting me a little wrong right now, but I'll definitely tuck this title away for maybe when I'm in a better place.

ANNE: That sounds like a good place to put it. All right, Kayla, we're going to stop there. How is all this sounding to you? How are you feeling about looking forward in your reading life?

[00:54:19] KAYLA: This is exciting. I knew you could do it, but I was afraid you would throw out hotel titles I'd already heard of, so I'm excited that there's so many out there, and I also feel you've helped me scratch at or broaden my net for finding these hotel-adjacent stories.

ANNE: Oh. Okay, I'm thrilled to hear it. Now, of the ones we talked about today, I'm so curious to hear what you may read next. We've got A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna, Make Nice by Ryan Effgen, not out yet, but very, very soon, Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan, The Inn at Lake Divine by Elinor Lipman, and that last one, Road Ends by Mary Lawson. Kayla, what do you think?

KAYLA: I feel most drawn to Make Nice, but since that won't come out till July, I think I'll start with, is it The Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping? Did I get the title right?

ANNE: Yes, you did.

KAYLA: That sounds cozy. I'm excited.

[00:55:21] ANNE: All right. I'm glad to hear it. Kayla, this has been a pleasure. Thanks so much for talking books with me.

KAYLA: Thank you.

ANNE: Hey, readers. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kayla, and I'd love to hear what you think she should read next. Find Kayla on Substack. We have all her links, as well as the full list of titles we talked about today at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

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[00:56:16] Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by executive producer Will Bogel, Media production specialist Holly Wielkoszewski, social media manager and editor Leigh Kramer, community coordinator Brigid Misselhorn, community manager Shannan Malone, and our whole team at What Should I Read Next? and Modern Mrs. Darcy HQ. Plus the audio whizzes at Studio D Podcast Production.

Readers, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading." Happy reading, everyone.

[00:00:00] KRISTINA FOREST: What I love particularly about romance, you'll find a book that you really, really like, and you'll be like, "This was amazing." And you'll look up the author, and they've written like 50 other books, and you're like, "Perfect. I'm getting them all."

ANNE BOGEL: Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogel, and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read.

[00:00:46] Readers, today I'm excited to dive into the world of summer reading with Kristina Forest, contemporary romance writer and author of the 2026 MMD Summer Reading Guide title, The Summer Girlfriend, which appeared in our Seaside Stories category and is available on bookstore shelves now as it was just released on June 9th.

I described it in the guide as a sweet summer romance bursting with bookishness and baked goods. The plot hinges on a fake relationship that blossoms out of a bookstore meet-cute. The beach setting was inspired by a handful of real places, some of which surprised me, and Kristina's deep and abiding love for the Jersey Shore.

The family's warm and inviting beach home is a character in its own right, and a Black-owned family business that makes delectable baked goods features prominently in the story. And of course, romance and chemistry feature prominently in these pages.

We are going to get into all of it today, along with some of Kristina's very favorite titles for beach reading season, whether you need a paperback to toss in your beach bag, or you won't be going anywhere near the beach anytime soon and would welcome a vicarious vacation. I can't wait to share this conversation with you. Let's get to it. Kristina, welcome to the show.

[00:01:56] KRISTINA: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

ANNE: Oh, the pleasure's mine. Congrats on your new release.

KRISTINA: Thank you so much. I'm really excited for it.

ANNE: We're talking before the day, but The Summer Girlfriend enters the world on June 9th, so it'll be ready and waiting whenever readers are listening.

KRISTINA: Yes, just in time for summer.

ANNE: Exactly. All right. Well, I'm so excited to talk today. I really enjoyed your book, but I've been reading you for years, and I know many of our listeners as well. And you're probably new to some of our listeners, so I hope you all enjoy listening in and meeting a new-to-you author.

But Kristina, could we start by just giving the readers a glimpse of who you are? Would you tell us a little bit about yourself?

KRISTINA: Yes, sure. So I'm Kristina Forest. I am a romance novelist, contemporary romance particularly, but I started my career writing YA romance in 2019. I am a born and raised Jersey girl. I'm very proud of that, even though I spent about a decade of my life living in New York City, which I also sort of feel like a New York City person still.

[00:02:59] I worked in publishing, children's books publishing, for many years. I love reading romance novels, which is probably not a surprise to a lot of people. My favorite subgenre is historical romance. That is definitely my happy place of reading, of reading, period, is historical romance. But that's what got me into reading romance novels.

I was reading Tessa Dare, and Beverly Jenkins, and Lisa Kleypas, and from there I started reading contemporary. And it was really The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang that made me a bigger contemporary romance reader. I believe that novel published in 2018, I think is when that came out. From there I went to Jasmine Guillory, Nisha Sharma, and Alisha Rai. I was discovering so many contemporary romance authors.

But The Kiss Quotient was the book that I read, and I thought, "Oh, maybe I could do this too." Because at the time I had been writing YA, but I wanted to try and write adult romance. And so romance novels is like what I live and breathe.

[00:04:10] ANNE: I am so curious about the leap from YA to adult. It never occurred to me that... I mean, what do I know, Kristina? But it never occurred to me that reading one specific work would be the impetus. I'd love to hear more.

KRISTINA: Yes, sure. After I graduated from undergrad, I went to undergrad in New Jersey, I took several creative writing classes. And at the time, because I was younger, I was reading a lot of YA, particularly YA romance. I was a huge, and still am, but I was a huge fan of Sarah Dessen when I was in high school.

I took a creative writing class in high school, and my teacher brought in her father, who was an author. His name is David Lubar, and he wrote middle grade and YA. He gave a presentation on his books, and he essentially made a comment that was... he said something to the effect of, "Oh, my books helped put your teacher through college." And it just was like a light bulb in my head because I really loved to read, but it had never occurred to me that it was a career, if that makes any sense.

[00:05:19] You know, I was 17 at the time. I was like, "I really like reading books," but I didn't think of the career of being an author the same way that I thought about being a teacher or being a lawyer or something like that. I was like, "Wow, this is a career where he makes a livable wage, to the extent that he can help put his daughter through college?"

And I thought, again, about Sarah Dessen, I was obsessed with her books, and I was like, "I really want to do that, but I want to write those kinds of stories featuring people who look like me, with Black characters." From there, it was literally that moment at my senior year of high school when I took that creative writing class that I decided that I wanted to be a writing major in college, and thankfully, my parents didn't ask a lot of questions. They did not ask me really... I don't think my dad said anything. He was like, "Okay." My mom was just like, "Okay, fine," you know? I was very lucky that they just-

ANNE: They thought you'd come to your senses on your own.

[00:06:19] KRISTINA: No. It was more just like I was a very determined kid. I was like the kid who would come home from school on Fridays and do my homework right away. That's just a perfect way to sum up the way that I was when I was younger. I think definitely still like that as an adult but I think that my parents just knew that I... I think they just trusted that I knew what I was doing to the extent that a 17-year-old can know what they're doing. But yeah, they didn't ask me any questions.

And so I was a writing arts major, which I think is a major that's particular to my college, which was Rowan University. And so I had to take several creative writing classes while I was there. I had a few professors who read some of my short stories, which were primarily middle grade and YA. They encouraged me to apply to get my Master of Fine Arts, which was great because I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation.

[00:07:13] These few professors encouraged me to apply to grad school, and so I applied to The New School in New York City and I was accepted into the Writing for Children program, so then I moved. While I was studying, I had a few internships because I thought it would be important to learn the inside of the publishing industry if I wanted to be an author. Essentially, I wanted to know how the sausage was made.

My first internship was at Macmillan in their children's publishing department. And I wanted to stay in New York. You know, like a lot of people, I moved there and fell completely in love. It's still my favorite city. And it's very expensive, so I needed a job.

So while I was in grad school, I was interning in publishing, and one of the internships turned into a job. This was at Simon & Schuster. A quick way to sum that up is while I was working at S&S, I graduated from grad school, and my graduate degree, as you can imagine, was not cheap in New York City. And I was like, "I need to make all the loans that I took out to get this degree worth it," and so I became very determined to get an agent and to get a book deal.

[00:08:29] And so what I was working on was my first novel, which was titled I Want to Be Where You Are. This was a YA rom-com about a ballerina who goes on a road trip with the boy next door to a dance audition. At the time, I really was inspired, again, by Sarah Dessen, but also authors like Jenny Han, Stephanie Perkins. I thought that I would spend my career writing YA.

I wrote three YA novels, and I loved the experience. I think that there's something very fulfilling about writing for youth. And I loved meeting librarians and younger readers out at the festivals because they loved the books, and they wanted to see more books like that, particularly young Black readers who are looking for books like that. Because when I was in high school, there weren't a lot of contemporary YA romances featuring young Black girls. And so I really took a lot of pride in being able to write those stories for young girls who were like me, how I was when I was in high school, who were looking for those books.

[00:09:41] Then I turned 30. I was turning 30, and I just sort of felt like I had said all I wanted to say in the teen space. Also because I was working in children's books publishing, a lot of what I read was children's literature, of course. And so I'm reading picture books and chapter books and middle grade and YA all day.

I started reading adult fiction for pleasure because it was a way to separate what I was doing for work from my personal life. A friend of mine worked at St. Martin's Press, and she was a publicist who worked on a historical romance, and we used to send books back and forth to each other. And one day she sent me a box of mass market historical romance novels, and when I tell you, I think I read that entire box in like two weeks. I was like, "Oh my God, this is amazing."

ANNE: Oh, that sounds like a peak. I mean, we're talking in June, so it sounds like peak summer experience. Wow. It brings back so many childhood memories, too, of trading books with my neighbor. I mean, boxes of books. What a delight.

[00:10:46] KRISTINA: I know. We would just send each other packages. That's another plus of working in publishing is just the amount of leftover or free books that you find around the office. That feeling that I had of discovering these historical romance novels reminded me of like you're saying of when you're younger and you find a book that you really love.

What I love particularly about romance, but because I'm talking about historical, I'll stay there, is you'll find a book that you really, really like, and you'll be like, "This was amazing." And you'll look up the author and they've written like 50 other books. And you're like, "Perfect. I'm getting them all." And you can just immerse yourself in the author's entire backlist.

[00:11:32] I think this might be the first year that I haven't done it, but I usually pick one author and I just read their entire backlist for a couple months at a time. And it's the most enjoyable experience because a lot of the times it's series which then break off into other interconnected series and you're just immersed in this world of this family or these friends. Nothing captures my attention the way that a romance novel does.

ANNE: That sounds incredible. Who are some of the authors you've done this with?

KRISTINA: Oh, gosh, Lisa Kleypas, Beverly Jenkins, Tessa Dare, Laura Kinsale, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, who writes... she is actually the romance author who invented the sports romance genre.

ANNE: What?

KRISTINA: In my opinion. And I think a lot of people would agree with me.

ANNE: We like a hot take.

[00:12:29] KRISTINA: Yeah. Because her Chicago Star series is about a team of football players. The Chicago Stars are a fictional football team, and the different women who fall in love with either these players or these coaches. But maybe didn't invent it, but she popularized it, as she made it very popular in the '90s and early 2000s.

So I did that with her, and that was a great time. Last year it was Laura Kinsale. I read a bunch of her backlist. And she's a historical romance author. But I haven't had time to do it this year. This has been a busy... It's probably the busiest writing year that I've had, this year has been. So I'm way behind on anything, any reading.

ANNE: I trust you'll catch up in the fall.

KRISTINA: Yeah, that's fingers crossed that I will be able to catch up on my TBR.

ANNE: Do you read solely romance, Kristina?

[00:13:24] KRISTINA: I would say about 95% of what I read is romance. I read different subgenres of romance. I will sometimes read sci-fi. I will read historical, like I said I'll read contemporary. And then I'll read rom-com. I think there's a difference between a contemporary romance and a romantic comedy. But then occasionally, I do... I also read historical fiction.

There are a few authors who I really love. I love Sadeqa Johnson, Yellow Wife and House of Eve. Those are two of my favorite books. And then I also do read literary fiction. I love Brit Bennett. Her book, The Mothers, is one of my favorite books of all time. I'm looking forward to reading Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray, Kin by Tayari Jones. These are books that I bought when they came out, and I'm just waiting for the chance to be able to read them when I meet all of my deadlines. So, yeah, majority of what I read is romance, though.

ANNE: Well, you said nothing holds your attention like a romance.

KRISTINA: Yeah, yeah.

[00:14:23] ANNE: Which may speak to what your personal reading does for you. I'd love to hear more about what reading means to you or what role it fills in your life, whatever direction you want to take that.

KRISTINA: A question that I feel like I get asked a lot or that authors get asked a lot is like, "What are your favorite hobbies?" And the only one I can ever really say is reading. And it always, I'm like, "Oh, does that sound boring because I'm an author? Of course, I'm going to say reading." But it really is my number one hobby.

When I am not reading a good book, I feel off, and I don't know if you feel this way, too, because I know that you read a lot, or if the people listening feel that way. But if too many weeks have gone by where I haven't read a book, and this sometimes happens when I'm on deadline, I'm just so locked in that I can't immerse myself in the works of someone else, I start to feel really like something isn't right.

[00:15:22] I love reading good books. I love being immersed in other people's art, and reading brings me joy, and it feels like a safe space. And I feel happiest when, of course, things are going well in my personal life, but also when I'm reading a really good book. It makes me excited. It makes me excited about literature. I love seeing how people respond to a book that I've read and really liked too, you know, in the reader community.

I think that reading creates a sense of connection also because I think we tend to be... readers tend to be introverted people. I know. I describe myself as an extroverted introvert. I'm naturally introverted, but I can be extroverted if I need to be. But I think that what brings us all together is that we love to be immersed in the pages of a fictional story or nonfiction if people prefer to read nonfiction. But it really is my favorite hobby. It's what I really love to do in my spare time.

[00:16:31] ANNE: Well, I relate to that. I feel restless when I'm not in the middle of a good book or when I don't have one on deck that I just can't wait to get into. I like to know there's a book, a specific book and story experience waiting for me when I'm ready for it, at all times really. I'm realizing as I listen to you talk about this.

KRISTINA: Yes, yes. I agree with that.

ANNE: Kristina, with your past books being published in February, The Summer Girlfriend coming out in June is a change, I'm thinking that's maybe not a coincidence.

KRISTINA: Yeah, no, very, very strategic to have this book come out at the beginning of summer.

ANNE: Well, I'd love to hear more about writing a beach read in all the senses.

KRISTINA: Yes. I really was just thinking about all of my memories and old current of spending summers at the beach in New Jersey, particularly Wildwood Beach, which is where we went every summer. It's also where we went after prom. I think that might be a New Jersey-specific thing. I don't know if other states have this, especially if you don't have a beach.

[00:17:47] But in high school after prom, we would spend the weekend at Wildwood. Like everybody would go. You would get hotel rooms, or some people had like beach houses or whatever, but we would spend the weekend at Wildwood. That felt quintessential to my youth.

My parents used to drive us to Wildwood Beach. You know, we would sometimes go for the day, sometimes go for a few days. Wildwood has this huge boardwalk and along the boardwalk, there's places where you can get funnel cake and fried Oreo. Literally, you can get anything imaginable fried in dough and covered in powdered sugar. It's there at these places. And these huge slices of pizza, these huge cartons of lemonade, and it's so sugary and sweet, salt water taffy, and the different sections of the boardwalk that has games and rides. It's just so much going on.

[00:18:43] And the beach itself is really long. The point of when you get off the boardwalk to walk to the actual shore, oh my gosh, that always feels like the longest walk in the world, especially if the sand is hot, and you're just trying to run and get to the wet sand as fast as you can because your feet are burning.

These were just like very clear memories in my mind, and I wanted to put that onto the page so that when people read The Summer Girlfriend, they would feel like, "Ah, this is what it means to be at the beach in New Jersey for the summer."

And the smell. The smell of the saltwater is just everywhere, and the seagulls calling to each other and also bothering you. Like the minute they smell food, they are right in front of you. So I was just trying to capture all of those memories when I was drafting.

[00:19:41] ANNE: Oh, I'm so jealous. You were singing the praises of New Jersey beaches before we hit record on this conversation. I love where I live, except I'm incredibly jealous that I'm like 600 miles from the ocean. And no citizen of New Jersey is that far away.

KRISTINA: Yeah, no. Yeah, we're lucky.

ANNE: I would love to hear more about the specific story setting of The Summer Girlfriend, but first could we zoom out for a moment?

KRISTINA: Yeah.

ANNE: Kristina, could you just give our readers a sense of what the book is about?

KRISTINA: So, The Summer Girlfriend is about a woman named Noelle who is saving up to go back to college. She had to drop out when she was originally in college when she was a teenager, and she wants to get her master's degree and become a librarian. But she's just been let go of her main job as a bookseller. She also has a side hustle as a bridesmaid for hire.

And she happens to meet a young man named Jeremiah who is wealthy. He's the heir to a baked goods company, and he is in need of a fake girlfriend for the summer at his family's beach house in the town called Heart Beach. And so they decide to fake date for the summer. He'll pay her to be his pretend girlfriend, and then she'll get the money for college. But not actually falling in love while pretending to be in a relationship is a lot easier said than done.

[00:20:57] ANNE: I enjoyed all the details so much. Okay, but I'm not going to get distracted right now. Let's go back to the story world. In the book's prologue, I think it's set in 1974 and we hear a little bit of the history of Heart Beach and this one specific house that comes into the protagonist's family. I mean, this was a whole new world to me.

The tone is so wistful, and you know as a reader this is the origin story for this house and this place that is going to come to mean so much to this family that we're reading about it in the present-day storyline 50 years later. But also, the way you describe Heart Beach is so fascinating. I loved hearing the details and history, and is... I was wondering if it's based on a real place. Perhaps you just hinted at that.

[00:21:44] KRISTINA: Yeah. There are actually a few inspirations for Heart Beach other than beaches like Wildwood and Ocean City, which is where I went growing up. Heart Beach was founded by a Black couple. And that was inspired by the history of Bruce's Beach in California, which is a part of Manhattan Beach.

Bruce's Beach was founded in the early 1900s. It sounds so weird to say the early 1900s, but it was founded in the early 1900s by this Bruce couple. They'd moved to California during the Great Migration, and they purchased a plot of land and turned it into a seaside resort that was welcoming to Black beachgoers because not all beaches were welcoming to Black people at the time. And it became a very popular attraction for Black people.

But the people in the predominantly White surrounding area were not happy with this. And because there was so much pushback from the people in the surrounding area, the Manhattan Beach Council voted to condemn Bruce's Beach. Then the land was unlawfully seized and the resort was demolished.

[00:22:52] It was a few years ago that the land was finally returned to the descendants, but they ended up selling it back to the county for about $20 million, and they decided to use that money to finally build some generational wealth within their family.

But I kept thinking, "What if that hadn't happened to this family? What if they were able to keep this land and to continue to be allowed to have this be a beautiful resort where Black people were buying homes and where they came to vacation?" And there's also Chicken Bone Beach in New Jersey, which was a Black beach in New Jersey during segregation.

So the history of those different beaches went into Heart Beach as well. I hint on that a little bit in the prologue when they're talking about the history of how the town started but also the particular house. I was intentional with starting the prologue by describing the house because I feel like Heart Beach is a character in itself in the novel. It's the place where everyone always comes back to.

[00:23:58] The heart of the story, of course, is the relationship between Noelle and Jeremiah, but then the broader heart of the story is this house in Heart Beach and how hard Jeremiah's grandparents worked to be able to buy this house and what that meant to them to be able to have a beach house that they could vacation at in the 1970s and how they've continued to keep this house in their family and how multiple generations have walked through the front doors.

It's especially because I think generational wealth is such a hard thing for Black people to be able to get and then attain in this country. And so I really wanted to write about that and to write about this family who they really love each other, but that the house is a reflection of that love and how the house has been expanded over the years in the same way that the family has expanded over the years.

[00:24:55] But it's where everyone comes back to every summer. They are here in Heart Beach, which is why it's a point of contention for Jeremiah, because he's been avoiding the house in Heart Beach after he had an argument with his grandfather before his grandfather passed away. He feels a lot of guilt over that argument, and so he's been avoiding this house, which also means so much to him. And so it kind of is eating him up inside that he feels as though he can't go back because of the bad memory that he has there.

ANNE: I love how you describe the house as being a character in its own right. And it does feel so warm and welcoming. I mean, some books are, in part, enjoyable to read because you want to spend time in the world they're set in, and I wanted to be at that house.

KRISTINA: Oh, good. I'm really glad to hear that.

[00:25:44] ANNE: I love how we see the legacy of the home and the generational wealth in this Black family. And also the recipes were passed down through the generations as well. This story is... I mean, I really enjoyed reading about the family business, but also it's a family business that makes baked goods. And something I've learned about myself is I like to read about things that taste good. I'd love to hear anything you have to say about legacy or sweets.

KRISTINA: That was inspired by my grandmother. We were very close. She passed away two years ago. So the relationship between Jeremiah and Pop, who's his grandfather, was sort of inspired by how close I was with my grandmother. She was like a second mom to me. And she made the most amazing pound cake. It's a secret. I know the recipe, my mom knows the recipe, but that's it. And we don't tell anyone because we're like, "If we're ever in dire straits, we can make that pound cake and sell it."

[00:26:48] It's literally what we keep in our back pocket. Like, if we ever need to figure out a way to make money, we will start selling that pound cake. And it's the cake that my friends... whenever someone's having a baby or they're moving or some kind of exciting life thing is happening, my friends text me like, "Does this mean I can get a pound cake?" At holidays they're like, "Are you making the pound cake this year?"

And it's just like everyone loves this pound cake. And because it was my grandmother's recipe, and I was thinking a lot about how I was... I remember being so young and standing next to her at the kitchen counter while she whipped the batter. And she would only let me eat a little tiny spoonful because she said I couldn't eat the raw eggs. And I was always so disappointed by that because the batter of this pound cake is... it's honestly my favorite part of making a pound cake is when I can eat the batter.

[00:27:45] I just have these memories of helping her to whip the cake. And she was a little woman, and I remember watching her with her little tiny arm whip all this thick batter and being so fascinated by how she did it so perfectly, that she would make drop cookies and pies and everything from scratch.

My grandmother, she really was kind of grandmother from a storybook. We would come home from school, and she would have cookies, and my friends would always want to come over and be like, "Did your grandmom bake?" You know? She would make lemonade fresh. She was an amazing woman.

The three of us, me, my mom, and my grandmother had this joke that we would one day start selling those poundcakes. So when I was thinking about what the Smith family would be known for, what their legacy would be, I thought, "Oh, poundcakes." It starts with his grandfather making a poundcake for his wife, and then from there he's like, "Well, what else can I bake?" That was inspired by my own relationship with my mom and my grandmom, and how much we all love to bake, and all the secret recipes that we have.

[00:29:00] ANNE: Oh, that sounds amazing. My mom always talked about her grandmother's baking as well. That it was incredibly delicious, but the ugliest baked good you had ever seen. I'm not sure they were Smith's Sweets material.

Now, many readers will not be sad to discover the book that they're reading features a library or a bookstore. We kind of get a twofer with The Summer Girlfriend. Would you say more about that? I especially loved your bookstore's name in the book.

KRISTINA: Oh, thank you. Noelle, at the beginning of the novel, she works at a place called Hidden Gems Books. Particularly it's a used bookstore, hence the name Hidden Gems. And her boss, Harold, is lovingly curmudgeonly, but he's very strict on we only sell used books. And I believe that's what he says is, "People need to read about what came before before they read new things."

[00:29:53] And even though Noelle's like, "We need to sell new books in order to keep people wanting to come to the store," and just because a lot of the time the big best sellers are the ones that are driving the revenue. But he's very, very solid in the fact that he only wants to sell older used books at the store. So that's where that name came from. Then also Heart Beach Books is the bookstore in Heart Beach. That name is just... you know, there's only one bookstore in Heart Beach, so it's called Heart Beach Books.

But yes, Noelle is a book lover, and she discovered a love for reading after she had to drop out of college and her mom was going through some health struggles. She found reading, and she found reading to be a safe space. I think the way that many of us come to reading or the “what” we love about reading is that it provides an escape.

[00:30:45] And she just became a very avid reader, and she had a very wonderful interaction with a librarian who took her around the library and just gave her a bunch of recommendations. And she realized that she wanted to be able to be that person for someone else who was going through a hard time and was shown kindness and patience and was provided with a bunch of really good books to read to help her get through a tough time in her life. So that becomes her goal. She loves to read, but she also wants to share the love of reading with other people.

ANNE: I love that. Kristina, you were saying that Noelle was largely inspired by your student loans. Do I have that right?

KRISTINA: Yes. I just have a lot of student loans, because I went to grad school in New York City. And I remember thinking... and this was early on of when I was in the preliminary stages of thinking of the idea of The Summer Girlfriend, of fleshing it out. And I thought, "Ugh, I wish somebody would just come along and give me a bunch of money." You know? "I wish someone would just come along and pay off those loans for me."

[00:31:56] And then I thought about Jeremiah. Like, wouldn't it be lovely if you knew some guy who was handsome and kind, and... you know, of course, he's not perfect. He's got his own emotional wounds going on. But if he came up to you and was like, "You don't have to do anything. I'll just pay off your loans for you."

So that's sort of what ends up happening to Noelle. He's like, "I will pay your remaining tuition if you come to my family's beach house with me and pretend to be my girlfriend for the summer." And she's like, "Oh, gosh, so hard. You're so hot. Of course I'll do it," you know? It's not hard money to make. But that was the inspiration is just thinking about the student loans that I currently owe.

ANNE: Well, I enjoyed reading about that and her summer at Heart Beach. Kristina, for those heading to the beach themselves this summer, or for those who are not heading to the beach and really wish they were, I'd love to hear about some of your favorite beach reads.

[00:32:57] KRISTINA: Yes, of course. So my first recommendation is going to be a novel called Only for the Week, and this is by Natasha Bishop.

ANNE: Oh, I don't know this.

KRISTINA: This is a romance novel, and is a true beach read because it takes place in Tulum, Mexico. A woman named Janelle is in Mexico for her sister's wedding. She's the maid of honor. But the twist is that her sister is actually getting married to her ex-boyfriend who she broke up with years ago. She doesn't care about him anymore, but there's tension there, of course, that her sister ended up dating her ex.

But she ends up getting in a very flirtatious situation with the best man, who is, of course, the groom's best friend. So it's a lot of messy drama between those four people. But they decide that they are only going to be in a very short fling for the week that they're in Mexico. But of course, when you decide that, you know, we're only going to be together for this limited period of time, things don't always end up like that.

[00:33:59] My other recommendation is a novel called Curvy Girl Summer by an author named Danielle Allen. This is a novel about a woman named Aaliyah who is determined to find a boyfriend by the end of the summer where she's having her big 30th birthday party. So she goes on a series of dates, trying to find different guys who could be the potential boyfriend to bring to this party.

And she goes on all of her dates at the same bar. And she ends up striking up a very interesting friendship with a very cute bartender, and it turns out that the person who might be the best boyfriend for her could have been in front of her the whole time.

So those are two that I off the bat recommend because they take place during summer and have very summery feeling, perfect for the beach. This is a book that published earlier this year. It's called One and Only by Maurene Goo.

[00:34:56] Maurene is another author who started out writing YA and who is now writing... I would say One and Only toes that line between women's fiction and romance. But this is a story about a woman who... she's Korean American, and in her family they have the secret magical gift of being able to read into people's past lives and discovering who their soulmates are. So that's how they make their living. No one knows how it's done, but people pay a lot of money for them to figure out who their soulmates are.

And she is nearing her 40th birthday and she knows her soulmate's name, but she still has not met him. And she ends up falling for someone who's a little bit younger than her. But then it turns out that the person whose name is on the note for her soulmate is this guy's boss. So she ends up in this very interesting love triangle between the younger guy that she likes and then his boss, who she also really likes.

[00:36:00] This was the first novel that I've read in a long time that had a love triangle, but really I genuinely did not know how it was going to end. And I thought that was really refreshing. I really love Maurene's books. So those are three novels that I highly recommend people take to the beach this summer.

ANNE: Ooh, thank you. What's the best book you've read this year?

KRISTINA: I loved every book that I read this year. Oh, One and Only. I would say One and Only probably. That was probably my favorite book. Another book that I really loved this year was Keeper of Lost Children by Sadeqa Johnson. I had mentioned her before. She writes historical fiction.

This novel talks about a little-known history of mixed-race children in Germany post-World War II and how there was a woman who was a wife to a soldier who was stationed in Germany, and how she discovered this orphanage filled with mixed-race children, and this is usually from Black men who were stationed in Germany but then weren't allowed to marry the German women that they met or for various different reasons the children were given up. And she worked to get these children adopted by couples in the United States. A very interesting, you know, multiple perspectives. That was also a really good novel.

[00:37:23] ANNE: Yeah, I really enjoyed that myself.

KRISTINA: Oh, you read it, too?

ANNE: Yeah, yeah.

KRISTINA: Okay, perfect.

ANNE: I really like her. And Kristina, what's one book that you're really excited about reading this summer, high on your priority list?

KRISTINA: Oh, gosh. I would definitely say Score by Kennedy Ryan. This is book two in her... oh, gosh, I'm blanking on the name of the series. But the first book is called Real, and that's one of my favorite romance novels. Essentially, the series is about a group of creatives who are coming together to make a biopic about a woman named Dessie Blue who was a Harlem Renaissance figure.

The first book is about the director who falls in love with the lead actress, and Score is about the screenwriter and the man who's making the score for the novel. I know that there's an actual title for that job, but I'm just blanking right now. I'm thinking score creator. I know that's not right. But it's a romance between the two of them. It's a second-chance romance, because they had dated previously in college, and now they're working on this film together.

[00:38:27] KRISTINA: I loved Reel and so Score is definitely high up on my list to read once I hand in this next book.

ANNE: That's good motivation. Kristina, thank you so much for talking books with me today. Is there anything else you want to tell our listeners?

KRISTINA: Thank you so much for having me. I guess what else I would like to say is that I hope that if you read The Summer Girlfriend, that it feels like a wonderful beachy read, even if you're not at the beach, and you're just reading on your lunch break at work. I hope it transports you to a beachy, summery environment.

ANNE: I mean, I love to take a good book to the beach, but also a good book can take you anywhere.

KRISTINA: Yes, I agree.

ANNE: Amazing. Well, we wish you well as you go out into the world to talk with readers in person so often about the book, and hope you have your best reading summer.

KRISTINA: Thank you so much.

[00:39:25] ANNE: Hey, readers. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kristina, and I'd love to hear what you think she should read next. Find Kristina at her website, Kristinaforest.com, as well as on Instagram. And we have all those links and the full list of titles we talked about today at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

Follow our show on Instagram @WhatShouldIReadNext, and share your favorite summer episodes with a friend who might enjoy listening too. That would help us a lot, so thank you in advance.

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[00:40:12] Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by executive producer Will Bogel, Media production specialist Holly Wielkoszewski, social media manager and editor Leigh Kramer, community coordinator Brigid Misselhorn, community manager Shannan Malone, and our whole team at What Should I Read Next? and Modern Mrs. Darcy HQ. Plus the audio whizzes at Studio D Podcast Production.

Readers, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading." Happy reading, everyone.

[00:00:00] EMILY HENDERSON: In preparation for this, I reread some of the short stories and essays with the pen in hand, and I was like, "Oh, now I really know this story. I like short stories so much that I don't read them, I guess."

ANNE BOGEL: Well, it sounds like perhaps you really want to do justice to them.

Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogel, and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read. Every week we'll talk all things books and reading and do a little literary matchmaking with one guest.

[00:00:50] Readers, our 2026 MMD Summer Reading Guide, the 15th edition, is available now. For instant gratification, you want the digital experience. Go to modernmrsdarcy.com/shop and get your Summer Reading Guide. You'll get the 38-page Summer Reading Guide PDF immediately, and you'll get access to the unboxing experience, where I walk you through the guide book by book so that you can decide how your reading time is best spent this summer.

Now, if you want a beautiful, delivered by snail mail, hold it in your hand, professionally printed 38-page guide, well, this is the second year that has been available. I have already told you these were going, going, gone so fast, and we sold out of that batch. They sold so quickly, in fact, that Will Bogel says we have to order more. So more are on the way.

If you want yours, you still have a chance. Go to, again, modernmrsdarcy.com/shop. What you want to order is the Summer Reading Guide print magazine. It will say very clearly this is the one that's coming in the mail. Go order yours, and it will be in your mailbox, US only, I'm afraid, very, very soon.

[00:02:06] Now, while you're at modernmrsdarcy.com/shop, you can check out our ever-popular Well-Read hat, our awesome tote bags — we're very picky about tote bags, us book people — our book darts, our pencils, our postcards, our new sorority sweatshirts. Lots of good stuff there. All that and more, modernmrsdarcy.com/shop.

Readers, I love a summer reading project, as I'm sure you know, of any style. But when I read the submission from today's guest and her quest for what she is calling a short summer of reading, well, I had to know more, and I wanted to talk about it on the show.

So today, Emily Henderson joins me. She is a mom of four, writer, and runner with a passion for home design, and she loves a project. While Emily came to reading later in life, she's found through trial and error what really works for her, and these days, for reasons we talk about, that's often books in an audio format.

[00:03:05] This summer, though, Emily would love to prioritize daily reading on the page so she can build that stamina back up again. And to do so, she's looking for short reading experiences that will not only get her reading print, but also serve as a satisfying substitute for social media that she wants to spend less time on. Emily is looking for short stories, essay collections, memoirs and essays, and micro histories that deliver the quick bite-sized reading experience she is hoping to log every day of summer break, her short summer.

She'd especially appreciate stories that leave her breathless or make her think about them long after she finishes. I have ideas, and I can't wait to dive in. Readers, let's get to it.

Emily, welcome to the show.

EMILY: Hello, Anne. Thank you for having me.

ANNE: Oh, the pleasure's mine. Thank you for bringing yourself and your reading life and your summer project to me and to our listeners.

EMILY: Yes, I'm excited.

[00:04:00] ANNE: Me too. Emily, let's start by just giving our readers a glimpse of who you are. Can you tell us a little about yourself?

EMILY: Yes. So, 40-something, mom of four, and I live with my family in Santa Barbara, California.

ANNE: Lovely. Emily, you are here today to talk about books, but we'd love to hear what's your life like. Like, what are you up to when you're not talking about books and reading on a Tuesday?

EMILY: I would describe myself as I'm a stay-at-home mom, I'm a runner, and I'm a reader, basically in that order. And so most of my days start at dawn, and I typically go for a run. My oldest is 15, my middle is 13, and the little baby is 3. So I'm kind of in, I guess I would say, two seasons of life in that I have the older teenagers who keep me busy with their emotions and after-school activities and academics and all of that, and then I have the very physical nature of having a preschooler.

[00:05:10] Between juggling that and trying to find time to carve out space for myself and my personal life and meet with friends, that's pretty much what keeps me busy.

ANNE: Emily, thank you for sending in the submission to our form at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/guest. Just sharing that in case any listeners are like, "What is she talking about?" But I gathered from your submission that you are a project person, and not just in your reading life. Is that actually the case?

EMILY: Oh, yes, absolutely. I love a good project. One of the things I said in my submission was that during the pandemic, my husband works in a hospital, and with all the stress of having kids at home for school, I needed to find a way to get out of the house.

I had heard about some people running every street in their city, and so I said, "Okay, that's what I'm going to do with my weekends." And I called into our local bookstore, Chaucer's Books in Santa Barbara, and I ordered a... I was like, "Hey, here are some books that I want, but also, can I get a map?" An actual physical street map of Santa Barbara.

[00:06:28] I literally opened it up and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to go run this neighborhood." And I decided I was going to run every street in our city. It took me about 16 months, and it ended up being 500 miles or something like that. But it was just a wonderful way to see my city and to kinda just see it from the street level and really feel like I got to know kind of the whole area, because I literally have been on every single street in the city. So yeah, I'm definitely a project person.

And then a couple years ago, my husband and I bought our house in, let's see, 2011, and in 2023 we decided we were going to take it all the way down to the foundation and remodel it from essentially the ground up. And that was just another project we embarked on, so that was a lot of internet searching. Pinterest and I were like best friends for the entire time.

[00:07:37] We just made every decision. We literally decided where all the light switches were going, what color were the windows, and how big were our hallways were going to be. I have a friend who's about 10 years older than I am, and she always said, "You know, the great test of a marriage is to hang wallpaper together. And if you can make it through that, then you're good." And I said, "Well, we made it through remodeling our whole house, so we must be doing okay."

ANNE: Oh, yikes. I have some wallpaper I'd like to be hung. I don't think I want to do it with my husband. Okay. That's really interesting context since we're talking to you about a reading project today, or I don't know, maybe we'll find out what it is and how committed you are to it after our conversation. But I hope you leave more excited, not less.

Emily, tell us about your reading life.

[00:08:34] EMILY: It's interesting that I became an adult who is literally never without a book, because when I was a kid, I was very late to learning how to read. And the fact that I would kind of hide that I did not know how to read. I got very good at figuring out context clues and all of these things. And it probably wasn't until fifth grade that I really felt like, "Oh, wait, I just read that book and I understood it."

It was still a struggle through elementary and high school, but I was able to kind of work through and then I just really discovered a love for literature when I was in college. I was an English major of all things. And when you're an English major in college, it's a different kind of reading in that it's like Milton and ancient British literature and The Iliad and The Odyssey and Heart of Darkness and all these classics.

[00:09:37] But I also got to take a really fun class called Detective Fiction, where we read Sherlock Holmes, of course, but then Carl Hiaasen, who I still laugh out loud when I read his books. And then after college, it was kind of like, "Okay, now what?"

But I graduated in 2002, and you would have thought like, Oh, I'll be done with reading. But that was the explosion of Jennifer Weiner's books, and In Her Shoes, and all of those books, and they were just like... I don't know if easy breezy is the best way to describe them, but they were just great books to be reading when you don't want to read hard stuff, but they're still well-written, go down easy. I think one of the things you say is like, "Easy reading means hard writing." And I can imagine that that's exactly how those books come to be.

[00:10:35] Now, as an adult, I'm just never without a book. The one thing that has changed in probably the last eight or 10 years is that I'm almost exclusively reading through the audio format. So I just kinda miss reading on the page. I miss that deep work of underlining and highlighting and going to Google and looking up things. I really just miss that deep reading.

So while I listen to 75-ish books a year, I'm kind of wondering if maybe what I'm needing is less actual titles, but deeper reading on the page.

[00:11:23] ANNE: I saw that in a past submission you'd sent in that you said you read X number of books the previous year, and that was too many.

EMILY: Yes.

ANNE: Would you say more about that?

EMILY: There's just so many great stories and I want to consume them all. But that is absolutely unavailable to anyone. I think I find myself not necessarily FOMO, but just like, "Oh, that looks so great. Okay, I've gotta get through it fast." It's almost like this race to read all of the great literature that there ever was.

Then I think there was a year where I was like 75-ish, and I was like, "This was too much," because I felt like I looked back over that list, and I didn't even remember. Like, "Oh, I did read that? I guess I did. I remember that cover, but I have no idea what happened in that book."

[00:12:17] But also, like what I was saying about how being an English major, I still remember the gist of scenes that I remember reading back in college, which was a long time ago. And so I feel like if I slowed down, still read audio because I love that format, but that I replaced some of those books with books on the page, it will help me slow down a little bit and kind of consume the story versus, I don't know, I guess get a deeper understanding.

ANNE: That is really useful to keep in mind. Emily, this is really interesting and great context as we explore what you want in your reading life in the months to come and how I can help. I know you've brought a specific project that I've now referenced several times to the podcast today. Would now be a good time to tell us all about it before we go forward?

EMILY: Yeah, I think that's perfect.

[00:13:16] ANNE: Okay. What do you have in mind? And I'm wondering if it's a natural extension of what you've been describing just now.

EMILY: During the summer, I want to read a short story or an essay every day for the summer, and what I've been loosely calling this is called Short Summer. And the idea being that the idea of reading a whole novel day after day on the page kind of feels overwhelming right now. But if I sit down, and I'm like, "Oh, I just have like 20-ish pages, 20 to 40 pages to read," I can find that time throughout the day, or even if I just have a good chunk of time while the kids are off at school to sit down.

And then it feels like not only can I get the beginning, middle, and end of a story or a thought or idea from an essay, but it feels like I'm more experiencing it than running through it like I might if I were listening to an audiobook while doing other things like dishes or laundry. I feel like it will force me to sit down, pen in hand, and really absorb the idea of what an author is trying to say.

[00:14:37] The thing I like about short stories is that they're so compact, and so much is expected out of... you know, every word seems to be important, whereas a novel just has kind of like forever to talk. Maybe not forever, but you get what I'm saying.

ANNE: Yes. Emily, some readers would notice that they want to do more deep reading, and they might choose a book and do some deep reading. Would you tell me how the project nature specifically appeals? I'm endlessly fascinated by how readers seek to make their reading lives fun and enticing and make their plans work for them and their personalities. I'm wondering if I'm projecting or making assumptions or if marrying the project with the wider aims is really critical here.

[00:15:30] EMILY: It makes a lot of sense because, like my running project, it was very simple. All I had to do was I needed a map and a Sharpie and a GPS app, which I used Strava, and I just picked a neighborhood and I went. Whereas this project with short stories and essays, it's essentially like I've got this collection of short stories, all I need is this book and a pen, and then I'm off. So it's very simple. And if I just map out one chunk of time, maybe it's like 45 minutes or an hour, to me, a project, if I'm going to complete it, I very much could make things more complicated, but if I want to complete the project, it's gotta be simple.

ANNE: I was instantly captivated by Short Summer. Obviously, the length is a factor here. Tell me about your relationship with short stories and essays.

[00:16:30] EMILY: Well, as an English major, you read a lot of anthologies, and so I wouldn't say that I have a whole lot of current connection with short stories themselves since college, really. I didn't really pick up a whole lot of short stories until one of my selections is a collection of short stories that you mentioned, I think, in one of your Quick Lit things, and I was like, "Oh, that looks cool." And I listened to it on audio, and I was blown away.

Again, it's that economy of language that's required in a short story that's just so wonderful that always draws me to them. But I kind of forget that I like them because they're not that popular. Like, short story collections are not that popular now.

[00:17:21] ANNE: I was just reading something in Publishing News, industry take, where the premise was there has never been a market for anthologies. Period. The end. Readers love short stories, writers love short stories, and also this is not profitable, or it almost feels even viable format, and yet they keep coming out and readers keep coming to them.

EMILY: Yeah. Well, because... Actually, I take that back. Lily King came out with a short story collection a few years ago, and I remember loving every single story that was in it.

ANNE: I still have a bookmark in that from several years ago. Thank you for... This episode has actually made me think, "What are the collections that I've begun?"

EMILY: But again, I listened to them on audio. I just remember loving all of them, but I don't really remember the gist of all of them. In preparation for this, I reread some of the short stories and essays with a pen in hand, and I was like, "Oh, now I really know this story. I like short stories so much that I don't read them, I guess."

[00:18:25] ANNE: Well, it sounds like perhaps you really want to do justice to them.

EMILY: Yes, yes.

ANNE: Which ironically might make you less likely to pick them up because it has to be like the right time. You need the space, you need the pen, you need the chair.

EMILY: Yes.

ANNE: Where an audiobook, you can listen in the car.

EMILY: All the time, yeah.

ANNE: Or whatever it is you're doing.

EMILY: Yeah, yeah. And so I feel like if I have the project connected to it, then I'll make the time. I'll be able to fit that in.

ANNE: Emily, it sounds like you know so much about your reading life. You've read short story collections in the past that you've really enjoyed. I know several of your favorites are going to be essay collections. What brings you to the podcast with this project? I'd love to know what I can add that you feel like you're still missing.

[00:19:06] EMILY: I guess maybe direction on what am I missing in the literary world that's either classic or contemporary published that maybe I wouldn't know about in terms of short stories or essay collections. I think there are more nonfiction essays out there. Those are a little bit more readily available. But I guess it's more direction, like, "Hey, here's something that maybe you hadn't thought about." Or if you're hearing something in my responses that's like, "I think you might want to try this author."

ANNE: Okay. So do I get to be the outside POV who looks at what would enhance this project? What might you want to read that you haven't even considered yet?

EMILY: Yeah. I think that would be really... Especially when it comes to nonfiction.

ANNE: And I hope that talking about it helps it feel even more immediate and makes you even more excited to get started.

EMILY: Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:20:00] ANNE: Okay. So we know where you're going in the future. We're going to flesh that out a little bit with identifying some more potential titles. But first we're going to look back at what you've enjoyed and haven't enjoyed in the past.

Emily, you know how this works. You're going to tell me three books you love, one you don't, and what you've been reading lately before we come back to Short Summer and your options there. How did you choose these books today?

EMILY: Well, I had to narrow it down to it being short stories and essays, so that made it easier because I haven't read too many of them. I was introduced to a short story collection by you called The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck. This is a collection of interlinking short stories, mostly set in New England.

The way it's structured is in what's called a hook and chain, which is actually what poems or songs are done, where the first and last line rhymes, and then the middle lines are all couplets. So that's how he structured these short stories, where the first story is kind of a standalone in the beginning, and then there's what you'd call couplets of short stories in the middle, and then the last short story is connected to the first short story.

[00:21:24] And I thought it was just a really interesting way to organize a collection. But the theme of all of them kind of being set in a similar area, discussing first love and all of that does kind of make them feel... Like, it doesn't feel like they're all willy-nilly short stories. They're just all kind of together, even though they're different stories, but they follow similar themes.

The title story is about two musicians, Lionel and David, both very talented, and they fall in love traveling through New England recording American folk songs. And this is set back in 1916. They do it on these wax phonographic cylinders, which when he was describing it, I was having a hard time thinking of it until I read the second story where she described them as looking like toilet paper rolls. Which was a really... I was like, "Oh yeah, now I have a good image."

[00:22:25] What I liked about these two interlinking stories is that the last story almost answers the questions of, like, how do you really know someone you love, and kind of the intensity of a first love. And there's one really great line that Lionel is kind of telling this story of his youth when he's in his 80s, I think, and he says, "You know, I look back on that time, and it's not with sadness or grief," but that he looks at his life like it could've been an inch longer. And I thought that was just such a beautiful way to... I guess you're looking back and being like, "Oh, that could have been different." And just a beautiful line that kind of encompasses everything.

It's also beautifully written. These stories are great. Again, I think those short lines talk about how compact a short story has to be, but also kind of open. Even though it's one line, it opens up a whole world that maybe you didn't know was there.

[00:23:31] And to me, I love the ending of a short story that kind of leaves you breathless and leaves you with a little bit of an ellipsis that is still satisfying. Like you don't feel like, "Oh, I want to know more." You're like, "Oh, but there's this whole other story." Like the story kinda keeps going without you, I guess that's what I think. You're lingering or thinking or wondering, and that's what I love about that one.

ANNE: Okay. Well, I'm really glad that worked for you. Emily, what's the second book you love?

EMILY: This is a collection of essays. It's called The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green. This came out in 2021. I felt like I couldn't escape the cover. I felt like it was everywhere. Maybe that's just because we were all home during the pandemic.

[00:24:25] Honestly, it's a joyful book. It's like 40-ish very short, two to three pages of essays of... I guess, would you call them essays? They're reviews of things like the internet and Diet Dr Pepper and Halley's Comet.

Green writes with such a joyful melancholy about him. He's just so aware of the bittersweetness of life. One of the lines I loved was, "We all know how loving ends, but I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I'm here." And I just think that's just such a wonderful sentiment to be like, "Look at this world that we're in."

And there is a little bit of COVID talk in there, so if people aren't ready for that, they might not want to go there. But I really liked it, because I'm kind of in a space where I want to look back at COVID and be like, "Wow, that was a really big thing that happened in our world. Let's think about it."

[00:25:32] ANNE: Yeah. Okay, so that's an example of an essay collection you loved. The John Green collection is really varied. He talks about Diet Dr Pepper and Wintry Mix and the Indy 500. Some of the things he discusses are on the surface fun, I almost want to say frivolous, but I don't know that joy feels frivolous right now, because he loves Diet Dr Pepper. But some from the jump are deep and moving. What is it about that reading experience that you really loved as a reader?

EMILY: I think it's just the bittersweetness. I think some people look at bittersweet as like there's some negativity around that. I've always looked at it as like that is the juice of life, where you can encompass something so light and Anne, like you said, frivolous along with deep and heart-centered. And that is what life is. And I think that's why I'm so attracted to that kind of writing in nonfiction, that it's like you can talk to me about something that's hard, but it's also beautiful at the same time. That something that is good doesn't always have to only be joyful.

ANNE: So you liked the bite-sized complexity?

[00:27:03] EMILY: Yes. Yeah. And I also just like John Green as a person, too. He seems very relatable to me. And so maybe that's why it's like I kind of felt like I was reading the inside thoughts of a person I just enjoy knowing, his public persona obviously, but I think I just like that part of it, too.

ANNE: Okay. That's good to hear. What did you choose for your third favorite?

EMILY: This is kind of more of a collection of nonfiction essays that's like, I would call memoir, like a memoir in essays. And it's This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett. They're all previously published, or they are addresses or speeches that she gave. So previously published in like The Washington Post or Vogue and other outlets.

[00:27:58] I'll just touch on two of the essays. One of them is The Getaway Car. This one is like part writing advice and part really... Like if you're somebody who likes to know about wonderful authors like Ann Patchett, you get a lot of juicy tidbits of what her life was like before she was Ann Patchett, capital Ann Patchett.

And the way she describes the whole idea of like you have this wonderful idea for a novel in your head, and it's just so perfect, and it's the greatest work of literature, and then getting it on paper is like impossible. And so I love that. And David Sedaris, if you can take a compliment from David Sedaris, says that this was the best essay he's ever read about writing, which I thought was pretty high praise coming from him.

ANNE: Whoa.

[00:28:55] EMILY: Yes, it was wonderful. And then the title essay, which is called This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, it actually begins by telling a lot about divorce and how her parents' divorce and her first marriage kind of falling apart. And it's done in a way that is respectful. It's not like a big rant. It's very interesting to follow along the story.

And then she basically ends with she was in kind of like a long-term boyfriend situation who also had gone through a divorce, and then they were there together for 11 years, and they end up getting married based on the fact that he had some kind of medical emergency, and she had to go fly and see him, and it was a whiteout snowstorm, and it was very cinematic and romantic. And then you're like, "You know, this is how this happy marriage kind of began."

[00:29:54] Then also throughout the essay collection, she touches on this relationship with her current husband, Karl, and you kind of... You don't get just the beginning of the marriage. You also get how you get there in the other essays that are in the collection.

I just found them really well written, but they also kind of flow together even though they were written totally separately for different magazines. I think also people who liked Ruth Reichl's Save Me the Plums, and the reason is because it reminds you of the time when magazines were king. These gorgeous magazines. There's an essay in there of her writing for Gourmet. And I love magazines. I wish magazines would come back in a big way, but we might be past that. But if you are somebody who liked Save Me the Plums, I think you'll definitely like this one as well.

[00:30:53] ANNE: Okay. Well, that's an interesting comparison, and now I want to reread both books. Emily, would you now tell me about a book that was not a good fit for you? And I'd love to hear what it was that didn't work.

EMILY: Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert. This is a collection of essays on... It's kind of like looking back at the '90s and 2000s, and feminism of that era, and kind of looking back essentially like, "Hey, maybe we weren't so good to women back then," is kind of the gist.

It's a wonderful book for nostalgia, especially the way she talks about the comedies of the early 2000s, and the way she kind of talks about women and feminism and the way they were treated. If you like culture discussions, those parts are done really well. But I didn't feel like this author had... I don't know. I struggled with knowing, "Okay, what did she come here to say? And what does that mean about our current situation?"

[00:32:08] I think the essays that I like both touch on a theme that's interesting, but they also bring it forward to like, okay, well, why now? Why are you writing this now? I think that's important when I'm reading a good essay, especially when it's about an idea that's not a personal essay. It's an essay about big ideas. I want to know, well, how does that reflect on my life and how I think about things? So I think that it was kind of missing a thesis, I guess.

ANNE: Okay. Do you happen to know if you like that in your short stories as well?

EMILY: Like the author came here to say something?

ANNE: Yeah.

EMILY: I think so, yeah.

ANNE: Okay.

EMILY: I like to try to figure out, like, okay, what is this author trying to do?

ANNE: Ooh.

[00:33:02] EMILY: And I guess that could encompass what are they trying to say about the larger world, or even just about these characters. Like, what are we trying to represent here?

ANNE: That's helpful. Emily, what have you been reading lately?

EMILY: Lately I read a great collection called Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. This is kind of another look back at the pandemic, and it's like part cultural criticism, part memoir, where Naomi Klein was confused with another famous Naomi, and that may have caused some consternation in her life.

I really liked the author. She describes the mirror world. I found it useful to think of that idea as developing empathy for whatever I'm railing against right now. There's somebody on the other side of that mirror who is railing against the same thing, but from the other direction. And I feel like reading these essays that were really well-written and also interesting and definitely a topic for our time, it helped me kind of develop that empathy for the other side of the mirror.

[00:34:16] ANNE: Okay, that's very interesting. So, Emily, you loved The History of Sound, the short story collection by Ben Shattuck, The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, and This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett. Not for you was Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert, and lately you've been reading Doppelganger by Naomi Klein.

Emily, we are finding options, short stories, and essay collections for your Short Summer project, a short story or essay every day over summer break, and you want to discover great stuff but also prioritize daily reading on the page. You mentioned in your submission, too, that you are hoping these short bursts of reading will be a much more satisfying substitute for social media. I imagine you're not the only one thinking along those lines right now.

[00:35:05] EMILY: Yes, I would like to go back to the days where I spent my time reading with books on the page, because that's actually something that probably, I would say, when I got into social media more is probably when I stopped reading on the page more. Now that I think about it, I'm realizing this in real time, if you can tell.

ANNE: Okay. Well, that sounds like an important observation. I mean, there's so much that you could possibly read, and we both know you are well aware of that. But something I really have in mind is what you said in your submissions, that you like short stories that leave you breathless. In your submission you said, like, the ending of Passing by Nella Larsen, or Joyce Carol Oates' Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? And also essays that make you think about them long after you finish them, like These Precious Days by Ann Patchett.

So I think I have an idea of what kind of reading experience you're going for there, but do you want to say more about that? I mean, how am I capturing it, like mirroring it back to you? Am I getting it right?

[00:36:13] EMILY: Absolutely. I think that the most satisfying part about reading a short story that does leave you in that "oh my gosh" moment is just that it... like I said before, it's like the story just keeps going on even though it's done, and I can still experience it even after I'm done reading.

ANNE: And also maybe that it still matters?

EMILY: Perfect. It still matters, yes. And at the end of a good essay, it still matters. Yes.

ANNE: We are not going to load up your TBR with 30 different titles today, but we always invite readers, request, beg readers to send in ideas for further books that you or readers who really resonate with what you're saying that you will enjoy, may enjoy reading next, and to go to whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com and comment in show notes, or sometimes people tell us on Instagram.

[00:37:10] So with that in mind, I'm going to share that you said in your submission that you love essays that take a specific thing that happened to the author and manage to make it universal. You love commentary on culture or investigative journalism, pop culture, literary criticism, true crime, politics, and many more fields.

And you love obscure micro histories of something like... you tossed out bananas in your submission. So readers, I'm just going to get us started today, but I'm sure you have so many more ideas. Bring 'em. We want to hear 'em. Can we jump in?

EMILY: Yes, let's go for it.

ANNE: First, I want to give you two resources. The first is Episode 452 of What Should I Read Next? with our guest, Jessica Crockett. It's called Get a Little Taste of a Lot of Good Stuff, and it aired in fall of 2024, but you could listen right now. It's evergreen. She wanted to talk about short stories and exploring more short stories, and we talked about all kinds of collections and standalones that she may enjoy reading next.

[00:38:11] So I recommend listening to the episode, but also you can go straight to the show notes and you can see the full list of titles we talked about. So even without listening, that's a good resource for those interested in exploring more. Now, that is short story specific, not essays.

We also did a Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club. We called it our own curated short story collection in 2024, and we listed a bunch of short stories for our readers. I'll share that link in... I'll share it with you, Emily, and I'll share it in show notes for those who are members. But I'll just toss off a few. We shared a George Saunders story, a Jhumpa Lahiri story, Weike Wang, Joanne Harris, Deesha Philyaw, and we shared The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury. I think he could be such a good classic author for you to explore, but we can say more about that in a moment.

[00:39:04] Emily, I'm definitely keeping in mind the idea that you want a story that leaves you breathless. I'm imagining that something that could look like is there being a change in perspective or understanding at the very end that makes you go, "What? What just happened?" Like maybe sends you back to the beginning, or something that makes you think, "Oh, I was sure it was going this one place, and I realized I didn't understand anything at all."

EMILY: Yes, exactly. I love a story that does that.

ANNE: Okay. In that case, I'd like to surface a crime collection, or how about a short story collection by a crime fiction author, Laura Lippman, for you called Seasonal Work. Is this one you know?

EMILY: No, not at all.

ANNE: Okay. Well, it came out maybe peak pandemic. It came out a few years back. But she is a well-known Baltimore area crime writer who is prolific. She has published a book a year as long as I've been paying attention to her work for 10 or 15 years now.

[00:40:05] And some of these stories have been previously published. Some were written specifically for the collection. So, as she was pulling these together with her editor, she said that really the stories fell into three different buckets. There's a section about Baltimore, and also, if you're a longtime reader of Laura Lippman, she has written a Baltimore PI protagonist named Tess Monaghan in multiple books.

So there's a section about Baltimore and Tess. There's a bunch of stories about girls and a bunch of stories about infidelity, which she calls the old crime staple. And she especially liked that the stories about infidelity addressed every point on the triangle: the unknowing other woman, the betrayed spouse, and also the cheating spouse, and there were some fun dynamics there.

[00:40:53] Something else I like about her is that she's very conscious of something that I heard you hint at, that novels may be easier, but short stories feel like a high-wire act, and you really have to deliver in less than 20,000 words, or for some of her stories, less than 5,000.

But she is so good at portraying what seems like an ordinary domestic kind of tale and turning it into something, to satisfied readers, deliciously dark and pleasantly off-kilter just in the course of a couple of sentences. These are tightly written on an individual level. They are all very varied, but hang together really nicely as a collection.

The beginning story, "Seasonal Work," is based on something she saw as a journalist when she was new in the field, and she said it was never proven that what she thought she was seeing was actually what she was seeing, but she believes it to this day.

[00:41:49] But it's about a family on the take posing as holiday helpers. It starts with this heartwarming scene that becomes something else, all narrated by one of the kids who's involved. How is this collection sounding to you?

EMILY: It's perfect. I love crime fiction anyway, and this would be a new author to me even, and it sounds great.

ANNE: Okay. I am glad to hear it. Now, I don't know if this is good news, bad news, or just news, but this collection is really great on audio. It has a full cast of narrators, but they have definitely chosen who will narrate each story with care. And if you want to mix it up, or... You know what? You can make the call, but it's been found to be really satisfying on audio for many readers.

EMILY: It's good to know, because my new favorite thing is to listen on audio while I'm reading on the page.

[00:42:48] ANNE: So you can have the experience of the audio, but also gain those benefits — I mean, this does sound like school, but I guess you were an English major — of doing the deep work of reading and writing and marking up?

EMILY: Yes.

ANNE: Okay. I love that for you. More stories with a little bit of a twist. I love So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan for you. Have you read anything by Claire Keegan?

EMILY: No.

ANNE: Okay. She's an Irish writer working now who really, I think, blew up on this side of the Atlantic with Small Things Like These, and her short story collection, Foster, that was packaged as a short little novella with an intro.

So both are so worth your time. Foster is a short story. Small Things Like These is a novella. But she's widely admired for being just one of the best writers working today. I loved Foster personally. I mean, I love all her work. I love her work. So I read Small Things Like These, and then I read Foster, and then I came to So Late in the Day and was expecting bittersweet, heartfelt, moving... Somehow her stories are bracing and gentle at the same time.

EMILY: Mm.

[00:44:01] ANNE: But then I read this collection, So Late in the Day, which is different. It's more like, "Gasp, what just happened? Oh, my." I didn't know Claire Keegan got dark, but this story collection gets dark.

The subtitle of this book is something like Stories of Men and Women. It might actually be, importantly, Women and Men. And there are three stories in this collection. One was published 25 years ago. The others are much more recent, and they've been curated and expanded with the way that they were chosen to be together in this collection and talk to each other.

But these characters are very flawed. I feel like everyone starts out a little bit domestically, but you see... I don't know. I thought I was seeing ordinary people in ordinary moments, but they don't work out that way. And what we end up with is women in extraordinary situations, sometimes perilous situations. I feel Claire Keegan kind of giggling as she's writing these and winking at the reader as they're going along.

Emily, is this sounding good at all?

EMILY: It sounds so good.

[00:45:15] ANNE: Okay. Then I won't overthink it too much.

EMILY: You've chosen all of my favorite things: winking at the reader, an author who maybe laughs at her own jokes while she's writing them. That's what I was imagining. Bracing and gentle. All of the adjectives were right up my alley.

ANNE: Okay. I am glad to hear it. Also, you need some essay collections. And you said that you love to read something kind of peculiar and unexpected, like a detailed history of the banana?

EMILY: Mm-hmm.

ANNE: I understand that wasn't specifically about bananas, but it did make me think of a book by Aimee Nezhukumatathil called World of Wonders. The subtitle will help you know what to expect. It's In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments.

She narrates her own audiobook, and it's fabulous. I should have told you, if there is an audiobook of So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan, I would listen to that in a heartbeat because she's Irish, and I want that accent in my ear, but I have zero personal experience with that. But I have listened to Aimee Nezhukumatathil before, and I love her voice.

[00:46:23] She's a poet writing nonfiction, as she's done with a couple of collections. And what I love about poets writing prose is I just feel like their gift is choosing the exact right words that fall in the exact right order, even when they're writing normal sentences with normal punctuation.

But this is a little bit personal storytelling, memoir-ish, and a whole lot of what she's learned from and observed in the natural world. She's really reveling and viewing the world with wonder and curiosity as she calls you to look at insects that you have or maybe haven't heard of, probably haven't if you're me, and plants, and her own experience just growing up as a kid and now a woman who loved nature and who saw a lot of varied nature as her family moved many times from Kansas to Arizona and then east to New York and Ohio.

[00:47:25] It's great on audio, but if you read the book with your eyes, there are illustrations that are just really lovely and gorgeous and may add to your, I don't know, your like, "Oh," experience of what you're reading. So I think this would be really fascinating, interesting, and also inspiring and calming and grounding. How is this sounding to you?

EMILY: It sounds wonderful. You know, the poets do have a way with words. It's like when a poet writes a novel, you know? You're just like, "Where did you come up with this?" So that definitely appeals to me.

ANNE: Well, I love that, and I'm glad to hear it. Let's go to West Virginia. The book I'm thinking of is actually in this year's Summer Reading Guide. It's Small Town Girls: A Writer's Memoir by Jayne Anne Phillips. Do you know her? She won the Pulitzer in 2024 with Night Watch, but this new release is a memoir in essays that all... I mean, they hang together, but they totally stand alone. I don't believe you would need to read them in order.

[00:48:35] But in it, she's exploring how her West Virginia upbringing, and specifically the small, specific West Virginia hometown she grew up in, shaped her way of seeing the world, her career, her friendships, her entire life. Do you know her?

EMILY: I don't.

ANNE: Well, I like this one for you because it is very extremely uniquely specific, and she goes in... I mean, I imagine she knows. Some people know West Virginia really well. Some people reading this are probably from her hometown, but many of us just don't have a clue. And she knows that she is sharing a unique, otherwise inaccessible experience with... I mean, even I'm practically next door in Kentucky, and I don't know anything about West Virginia.

But when you said that you like books that make the highly specific feel universal, she's amazing at saying, "Look close. Let me tell you what it's like," and then describing an emotional experience that feels so universally human. Or she describes things in such a way where something that I otherwise would've known nothing about, I can look closely and compassionately at.

[00:49:52] So maybe she's describing the legendary Hatfield and McCoy feud, where many people, I think, just know that it's a thing, but she really gets into the details in a way that humanizes the players, and also makes you see how it's relevant a long time ago and relevant today, and why it's a big deal, and what it means. And you're reading about the Hatfields and McCoys, but you know some of those emotions, and you can see them playing out in many places, not just West Virginia.

But she leaves West Virginia, too. She describes writers that she loves that have influenced her greatly, but she also describes things like being sent to a western Kentucky funeral in 1997 because her New York editor was like, "You're from Middle America. It's all the same, right? West Virginia, western Kentucky. Go sit at this girl's funeral," who was murdered in a school shooting that happened in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997. And she's writing about one specific thing. But what she's writing about is about the broader human experience.

[00:50:52] And these essays are on a theme. And while they're all very friendly with each other and feel like they belong in this collection, they're not strongly linked. So it would be easy to read this book slowly, one essay at a time. You could jump around. You could turn to what interests you most first. She reads her own audio. It's good in that format, if that is useful information. How's this sounding?

EMILY: It sounds wonderful. The last story you talked about, I also listen to Pantsuit Politics, and I know that Sarah Stewart Holland, I think that might have been the shooting she was part of at her high school or... So this is a definite yes.

ANNE: Yes. That's the one. Well, I'm glad to hear you might find that interesting. I feel like I've said Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw so many times on this podcast, but it remains a really interesting pick that is so good on audio, and one that I have recommended fervently, and it feels like nonstop for going on six years now.

[00:51:55] Love Jhumpa Lahiri, especially Interpreter of Maladies. I think Ray Bradbury writes a lot of stories where you have no idea what's happening. You think you know what's happening, you're pretty sure you know what's happening, and then at the very end, he's like, "Oh, this is going to be fun when they read my closing paragraphs." I think you may really enjoy his style if you've not read him.

Toni Morrison has only written one short story, but I think you may enjoy it. That's called Recitatif. And then Hanif Abdurraqib wrote a really interesting, engaging, fantastic on audio, he reads it himself, collection called They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, where he writes about specific songs or musical experiences, but then takes that one specific thing and turns it into the universally human. I think you may enjoy seeing that done with music. Flannery O'Connor is another classic where you get to the end and go, "Wait, what?" Anything jumping out at you here? Is this the kind of variety you're looking for?

[00:52:56] EMILY: Absolutely. I already have The Secret Lives of Church Ladies on my TBR, so that one will definitely get read this summer for sure. I've kind of danced around Ray Bradbury, but never picked any of them up, and so I think that will definitely be on my list, too.

ANNE: He'd be great to take just a little taste of. I mean, it'd be easy to Google Ray Bradbury stories I can read right now, so you can hold it in your hand. You could print off a short story that's available on the internet, and then you could get yourself a collection that you can highlight the bits, if you enjoy what you read a sampling of.

EMILY: Yes, definitely.

ANNE: All right. Emily, I really enjoyed our explorations today. How are you feeling about your project?

EMILY: Oh, I'm feeling very excited, like I have a direction to go in, definitely some new authors that I hadn't considered before. This is great.

[00:53:50] ANNE: All right. Well, I am delighted to hear it. Now, we talked about a lot of potentials, but the ones we really honed in on were Seasonal Work by Laura Lippman, So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan, World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and we ended with Small Town Girls by Jayne Anne Phillips. Of those books, what's really jumping out at you? What do you think you might read next in your project?

EMILY: I think I'm going to go for the crime fiction with Seasonal Work. That one sounds like a good place to start.

ANNE: All right. I'm happy to hear it. I hope it's a fit, but regardless, I hope you learn something really interesting about yourself and your reading life with it.

EMILY: Thank you so much.

ANNE: Hey, readers. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Emily, and I'd love to hear what you think she should read next for her short summer. Find Emily on Substack and find the full list of titles we talked about today. We have all those links at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

[00:54:45] Follow our show on Instagram at @WhatShouldIReadNext to keep up with summer reading updates and what's new at What Should I Read Next HQ.

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Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by executive producer Will Bogel, Media production specialist Holly Wielkoszewski, social media manager and editor Leigh Kramer, community coordinator Brigid Misselhorn, community manager Shannan Malone, and our whole team at What Should I Read Next? and Modern Mrs. Darcy HQ. Plus the audio whizzes at Studio D Podcast Production.

Readers, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading." Happy reading, everyone.