[00:00:00] KRISTINE PARSONS: I have a giant stack of books I bought on spring break and on vacation, and every time I go in the bookstore, I have a lot that I have read recently and that I want to read.

ANNE BOGEL: Well, that sounds amazing. But you're okay with adding to your stack today?

KRISTINE: Of course. I never have any problem doing that.

ANNE: 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, I want to tell you about something we've been working on behind the scenes for a long time around here. We've been working on a certain product for our shop, and I'm so happy to announce that it is finally available for pre-order. Visit our shop to check out our new MMD sorority style sweatshirt, available in a mid-weight Comfort Colors crew in two shades: a soft blue called blue jean and a soft red called crimson. Both feature an MMD applique in deep navy. They are cute and comfortable, and I can't wait to wear mine on cool summer nights and then all year round.

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[00:01:52] Readers, today I'm chatting with a book lover who's seeking a literary doorway into the creative world of art and museums. Kristine Parsons doesn't have an art background. She works as a county road commission manager in Michigan, yet she is fascinated by art and museums, and finds herself drawn to immersive and engaging stories that incorporate one or both elements into the story.

Kristine loves to travel and visit museums in person, but her day-to-day life between work and two active pre-teens means that in this season, these visits are more likely to occur on the page. Today, Kristine and I are exploring stories featuring art and the creative process, and if I have recommendations that are actually set in museums, well, so much the better.

I can't wait to dive in and share ideas for Kristine's armchair cultural adventures. Let's get to it.

Kristine, welcome to the show.

KRISTINE: Hi there. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:02:48] ANNE: Oh, the pleasure's mine. I'm so excited to talk to another Michigander, and also I will confess, I got real excited when I saw the kind of books you were looking for, so thanks for bringing it to the show today.

KRISTINE: Of course, I have looked forward to doing this for a long time, and any opportunity I get to talk about books, sign me up.

ANNE: Should we tell the readers we were just talking about accosting strangers in bookstores we visit, because they need to know what they might enjoy reading next?

KRISTINE: Yes. I consider myself a book pusher, so if I see you in a bookstore browsing, even anywhere near a book that I like or have loved, I will tell you all about why you should read it. I generally walk into the bookstores and recommend whatever it is that strikes my fancy.

ANNE: Mm, that could be a real gift. The right book at the right time. Okay, I imagine many listeners are just smiling with recognition right now.

[00:03:42] Kristine, tell us a little more about yourself. In addition to your book pusher status, would you give us a little glimpse of who and where you are?

KRISTINE: I live in southwest Michigan, not too far away from Lake Michigan, and I have two children, not-quite-teenage children. I have a husband and two dogs, and I work in road construction. So not the actual construction myself. I manage a road department, so we deal with a lot of road-related questions and problems. It's interesting, but stressful, so reading is my escape. It's my main hobby, my passion, the thing that people know me by, I would say, for better or for worse. If you don't want to talk about books, you don't want to come too close to me probably.

[00:04:31] I have always had a fascination with art, I would say, but an amateur fascination. It feels like one of those things that you need a special entrée into that world or an education and an art history degree, and I don't have that. I'm just a person who really appreciates beautiful art and finding beauty in the world.

I love a book that talks about the creative process, and not just in the traditional ways, either, I would say. Like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the development of the video games, I felt like that was really fascinating from a creative standpoint.

So anything that gets me more information about what drives someone to create beauty, whether it be a painting or whether it be writing a book or developing a video game or even just the way the light falls on the grass some days, I think people who can recognize that and translate that into creation or the creative process, and, you know, paintings in particular I find very moving. I would love to know more about that. I would love to have more knowledge about who this artist is or their creative process.

[00:05:41] We have a really wonderful art museum in Michigan, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and I've never been there, and I'm... It's my goal to go and not be intimidated, I guess.

ANNE: Oh, what an amazing goal. And I believe in you. You can do this. But maybe some good novels can help you prepare for your experience when it arrives.

KRISTINE: And that's always the way that I approach any new endeavor is there's gotta be a book about that. So that sounds perfect.

ANNE: Oh, that is so relatable. Kristine, tell us about your reading life.

KRISTINE: Oh gosh, my reading life. I read in every spare minute that I have. I'm very much like if I'm blow-drying my hair in the morning, I'll be listening to a book. I will be reading while I cook dinner. I do a lot of audiobooks. I would say probably 50% of my reading is audiobooks these days just with... I have a long commute. I read my Kindle at night. I'm definitely a multiple Kindle person, but then I also have an abnormal number of book stacks around my house, I'm sure if you asked my husband. So I have a lot of physical books. I find them soothing.

[00:06:50] I have a lot of joy just from having the book in my hand to smell the book, to sit out in my chair in the backyard and read a book, a physical book particularly. There's just a sensation that you cannot pass up on sometimes.

So I read widely, I would say. I have particular genres that I enjoy. I really enjoy historical fiction. I like police procedurals, and I have you to thank for that. I don't think I would've gotten into police procedurals if it hadn't been for your podcast. The Duncan Kincaid particularly I really enjoy.

ANNE: Oh, I'm so glad.

KRISTINE: I love anything set in Ireland with an Irish narrator or an Australian. Jane Harper, Tana French, sign me up. I love them. I like nonfiction a lot and most of all, I should definitely say this, I love romance. I'm in a romance book club at my library I help run, and it's called Between the Pages, and we have a fantastic time reading a lot of different kinds of romance and fantasy.

[00:07:51] I read pretty broadly. I will sometimes read outside of what I'm comfortable with if somebody can give me a really compelling recommendation. I need to have a likable character. If the character's not super likable, I don't know if I'm going to finish it.

For instance, let me give you a really good example here, you recommended on the podcast years ago The Likeness by Tana French, and I had not read any police procedurals. I was not a murder mystery person at that time, and gosh, that book, one of my all-time favorites. I bought a copy, I'm like, "I'm going to reread this." It's stuck with me. I think about it regularly, which is just wild to me because I feel like I don't have enough bandwidth to think about all the things in my regular life. But just the compelling nature of the story, the characters, the mystery, the way she wove it, it's just so nuanced and interesting and well-crafted and- To this day, I still think about that all the time. I wouldn't have picked that up if it weren't for the recommendation, so I will try new things with a compelling recommendation.

[00:09:00] ANNE: I'm glad to hear that. I'm wondering what that's going to mean for today. Kristine, I believe you've been listening for a long time. What brings you to What Should I Read Next? now?

KRISTINE: Oh, gosh, I've been listening since the beginning. I've been working at the road department... Gosh, I feel like that you started this right about the time that I started at the road department because I was pregnant with my daughter at the time, or maybe she was a newborn, and I had a lot of time on my hands then. But I love talking about books. I love having conversations with people about the things they love about books, immersing myself in the literary world.

On Friday last week, I heard Shelby Van Pelt speak about Remarkably Bright Creatures here in Michigan, in advance of her Netflix debut. So it was just really interesting to hear how she crafted the story and her whole process and where she was wandering through the aquarium and thinking about Marcellus and had a newborn daughter.

[00:10:00] I find myself so drawn into conversations where people can tell you what book you should read, but also why. Like, don't just tell me what I should read, tell me why I should read it. That's what I want to know, because anybody can give a book recommendation. Anybody can say, "Have you read this?" Or, you know, sure, sure, I probably have, but tell me why. That's the important part for me is I want to understand why you like it, why I might like it.

ANNE: Okay. Well, today you came to the show with a specific request. Would you fill our listeners in on what that is?

KRISTINE: I really feel like that while I have a passion in my interior, heart, mind, however you'd like to say it, for art, it can feel a little intimidating to walk into an art museum and really not understand what is happening. Like, sure, art on the walls, statues, but what does it mean? Where does it come from? How do you understand it? How can you learn more about it? It can be a little intimidating, I think, for the average person. And I'm the average person.

[00:11:02] So I would like to go into a museum and better understand, you know, what's going on when I look at a certain painting or understand the influences of certain artists or how that ties into how the painting was created or what the statue means. As we talked about, I'm a person who if I want to know something, I go to a book, and I feel like, especially in literature, there's a lot of references to art. There's a lot of stories about art, whether it's a fictional story or a nonfictional story, you know, the art thief or the art spy.

Understanding why certain paintings don't exist anymore or what happened and what drove people to collect art, the whole world of it I find really fascinating. I'm really immersed in those kinds of stories. So I'd like to learn more about it. I'd like to walk into a museum and be like, "Oh, I know that painting," or, you know, "I understand where that statue comes from." I don't need to know everything, but I want to have a working knowledge of certain things, some surface-level knowledge of art and where I can go to read more about it. And not just the nonfiction. I don't just want to, like, you know, a program. I want to understand stories and backgrounds and just really understand more than I do right now.

[00:12:23] ANNE: I want to tell you about an experience I had recently in the Saint Louis Art Museum. I walked into a room, and I was checking out the mid-century paintings and was so delighted to recognize a work by Helen Frankenthaler. I had seen this work before, but it didn't mean anything to me before. But in the interim, I had read a novel, and a huge interlude in the novel takes place at a Helen Frankenthaler special exhibit in London.

And I had walked through that exhibit with the protagonist and one of the ancillary characters, and I had Googled all the works that were mentioned, and I Googled the theory about the art that the artist, who was the protagonist, was describing. And I just felt like when I walked back into that Saint Louis Art Museum that I hadn't been in in several years and noticed that card I hadn't noticed before, even though it was there the last time I visited, it meant something to me, and it was because of the book, that I didn't pick up because of Helen Frankenthaler, but that's where the book led me.

[00:13:22] KRISTINE: I know exactly what book you're talking about. I also read that part and was like, "Let me Google all these paintings. Let me Google Helen Frankenthaler." I wish you could have seen my face. I just jumped when you said the experience they had in the museum in London. I was like, "I know what she's talking about." That's the kind of experience. I want to have that tie in to a book or an experience or a memory, something that makes it more meaningful, something that will make it stick with me a little more.

ANNE: So if we could bring you more of that kind of experience, you would be really happy.

KRISTINE: Oh, I would be over the moon.

ANNE: Okay. Readers, you may want to know that the book we're talking about is Writers & Lovers by Lily King. And we're talking about art, so that's all we're going to say about it.

What do you think about this, Kristine? What about if you tell me the three books you love, one book you don't, and what you've been reading lately, and I'll be filtering this through your interest in art and your desire to have more of those kinds of experiences. And then we will talk about what you may enjoy reading next, and we'll see what other clues and nuggets we pick up along the way.

[00:14:29] KRISTINE: Okay, perfect. The first book that I loved was The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, and this is probably the one I've let longest to go, so I'm not as clear on the details as I was when I read it. But I remember the impressions that stuck with me. Just the history of the AIDS crisis and the way that that was portrayed.

And as a child of the '90s, I grew up and knew about it, but I don't know that I was as aware of it as this story takes you. The way that they wove art into that story, that he worked in a museum, but he was... Or an art gallery, that's what it was. But he was more about donations and getting paintings, so it was a little more mercenary than perhaps... you know, he wasn't just a starving artist, but he was around a lot of artists.

And the dual timelines of that story... I really preferred the historical timeline more than the present-day timeline. But understanding what it's like to create art when also this major historical event is happening, which maybe they didn't realize at the time was this major historical event, but that will completely impact the way that the art is created and looked at and translated into the decades in the future, and what it means when you don't know what's going on.

[00:15:55] I think a lot of us can relate to that with the pandemic. But what it means to have that experience, that traumatic experience, and also be trying to live your life and survive what's happening. I really appreciated the way that she put a human face on the historical events, and also dived really deeply into the characters' lives and into some of the less serious things too, the trips to visit the art donor, and the conversations that he had with her, and how there are still practical concerns. You know, "How much am I going to make off of this if I give you all of my art?"

I mean, all of those things were interesting and relatable, but I think the thing that really moved me the most was what it felt like for those characters to face death and disease and the unknown, and not... You know, it wasn't as well understood then as it is now, or even understood at all, and then also have to keep living their lives, and how that influences the art they create. I think that was a really beautiful story. Really tragic, but also really beautiful.

[00:17:02] ANNE: I believe I remember reading that tragic but beautiful is something not uncommon to your superlative reading experiences.

KRISTINE: Yes. I like a book to both move me and make me feel hopeful, and sometimes also break my heart. Like, the emotional experience of being invested, and you're hoping that it ends well, and that the resolution that you're really yearning for happens, but if it doesn't, that you're so invested, you're like, "Whoa, I need a minute to recover from that." You know, I like a nice, tidy ending, but also I can handle something less than happy if I feel like that I really got emotionally invested.

ANNE: That's helpful. That is The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. Kristine, what's the second book you love?

[00:17:56] KRISTINE: The second book is The Unseen World by Liz Moore. I read Long Bright River, oh gosh, five or six years ago, and it just blew me away, and I loved it so much, I'm like, "I'm going to read everything she's written." And I picked up The Unseen World, and I was like, "Whoa, this is totally different." Which I read The God of the Woods last year, two years ago, and I feel like maybe that's the theme of her books, is they're all completely different from each other, and that's a real skill, I think, to be able to pick a subject and characters and have them be so different from each other, but yet the emotional heft of the story is still there. Like, you can still feel her mastery of the story happening as she writes it and learning about the characters. And really she makes it easy to get emotionally invested, and for me, I want emotional investment. I think that's a thing that art does well, too, so then maybe that's how that ties in here, is art allows for, it creates emotional investment if it's done well. And I guess that's a subjective thing.

[00:18:59] But I really loved the story of Ada and her father and her unconventional upbringing and how she was very precocious and surrounded by all of this emerging technology. She knew so much. At the same time, she also knew so little. A moment her life changes from the known to the unknown, or the unseen, I guess. And you really go with her on this journey as she discovers what her life is going to look like, what her life means, where she comes from. And you're discovering it with her as she's understanding things about her family that she was unaware of or trying to understand her father better because he was also, even though she was the closest person that he had in the world, he was also a mystery to her, to some degree. So it was a really compelling, intimately told story, and I just really appreciated what the author was able to do.

ANNE: Okay, that was The Unseen World by Liz Moore. I mean, speaking of bittersweet.

[00:20:04] KRISTINE: Oh, that's true. Yeah. And I feel like I've read a couple of books lately that reminded me of that. I can't think... what's the one where the father's a doomsday prepper?

ANNE: Oh, wait, hang on, I got real excited because I thought you were talking about What Kind of Mother.

KRISTINE: I am. I am talking about What Kind of Mother. That is it.

ANNE: Okay.

KRISTINE: You're so good at this game.

ANNE: Well, I recommended that book to my 16-year-old, and then felt really proud of myself when I found out later that it had won an Alex Award, which does highlight adult books that would be especially of interest to teenagers. But I kept thinking as he was reading it if The Unseen World would be a good next pick, so I think those books were already linked in my brain.

KRISTINE: Yes. They reminded me a lot of each other. That's where I was going, is I think that they have very similar premises, but they're done differently enough that I think you could still appreciate them. I don't know if I'd read them back-to-back, but they reminded me a lot of each other. There's an Irish novel, Confessions, that reminded me a lot of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and I'm like, see-

ANNE: Oh, I haven't read that one.

[00:21:06] KRISTINE: Oh, it's interesting. It's not as good as Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, but it is still very similar. Like, similar premise. And you can have stories that are similar and also be completely different and have different emotional experiences. I guess that's what I love about books. You can read one book one day and a different book the next day, and they remind you a lot of each other, and the emotional experience could be totally different or it could be exactly what you were looking for when you're saying, "I want another book like this." I think what a lot of people mean is, "I want to feel the same way when I read it," you know?

ANNE: Yes, which is why the algorithms often don't cut it.

KRISTINE: Yeah, 100%. It's an emotional experience.

ANNE: I'm with you. I'm with you. Kristine, what's the third book you love?

KRISTINE: The third book is my favorite.

ANNE: That's bold. I love it.

[00:21:54] KRISTINE: I love it so much. I was in the car on the way back from a conference when I read this book, and it's seared into my memory, just the experience of reading it in the backseat of the car. People were talking to me, and I was like, "I cannot talk to you right now. I want to read this book." It's Heart the Lover. I don't think I said that.

Heart the Lover by Lily King, oh, it just broke me in the best possible way. I loved Jordan. I think the thing I loved so much was not necessarily her experiences reminded me of me, but her emotional depth as a character, her growth, the maturity that you see happening in the book, her flaws, her wounds. It reminded me of myself. And maybe it's just of a particular era, the sort of pre-cellphone college experience or early cellphone college experience. I was in college in the late '90s, early 2000s, and it had a very particular flavor that reminded me of my own experiences and being away from home and exposing yourself to different types of people that can be really intimidating.

[00:22:58] She talks about in the beginning of the book how she felt really intimidated by Yash and by Sam because they just seem so knowledgeable. I remember having that same experience. Like, you can go from being a very small world in high school, and you go to college and it just completely expands your horizons. I loved her as a character. I identified with her deeply.

I like books set in academia. It gave me a little bit of The Secret History vibes, not so much for the plot, just the feel, the sort of very academic, literary feel. I always enjoy learning new things. So she talks a lot about art and history and culture and experiences. I felt like I learned a lot, you know, was exposed to a lot of different things, authors and concepts in that book, even though it's just a short little book.

[00:23:48] And then also it was very emotionally packed. It was very wistful, and it was heartbreaking. It just leaves you wrung out in the best possible way. That young love feeling, the way that you experience that first relationship that you're never going to be able to do again because you only have a first love the one time, and the trials and errors that you go through in relationships. Ugh, it moved me so deeply, and I'm fairly certain after I read it, I called everyone I knew, and I was like, "You need to read this book. You need to read this book right now." I bought copies for people. It was just something that I felt like it just changed my life, and it needed to do the same thing for everybody else. But, you know, art is an individual experience, so who knows? But I just was blown away.

ANNE: I love that for you. And I'm making notes. We may be connecting some of those ideas to recommendations shortly. Kristine, now would you tell me about a book that was not right for you? And I'd love to hear where the disconnect was.

[00:24:53] KRISTINE: I'm sure that it's right for other people. It got a lot of publicity and people seemed to really enjoy it. It was A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst. The first little bit with the whale, I was like, "Man, oof, exciting. What's happening here?" I love a good, compelling nonfiction story. And then the whole rest of it seemed like it was unlikable characters. And it's real people, so it's their real story and not incredibly sympathetic. It felt a little mundane.

I guess I felt like the story was going to be more about the survival aspect and the adventure of the story and less about the logistics of the trip. There were parts of it in there, the survival parts, but it just felt like that was smaller than I had expected. I wasn't as captivated as I was hoping to be. But it wasn't terrible. I didn't hate it. There are books that I hate, I'm sure. There's books that I'll, you know, for the rest of my life remember how much I disliked it. This one just wasn't for me. It didn't keep my attention long enough. I wasn't as interested as I had hoped. I was looking for more of the emotional experience of survival, and I was really hoping the whale falls on the ship and these people have to survive, and it was not Castle of Water. To be fair, it is nonfiction, but... I was going for a little bit more Castle of Water vibes, but nonfictional.

[00:26:28] ANNE: Oh, I haven't thought about Castle of Water. Well, actually, I think about Castle of Water, readers were talking about the Dane Huckelbridge novel, every time I think about taking out my contacts and not having a new pair.

KRISTINE: I was just thinking about that part.

ANNE: It's about a plane crash on an island, and two people make a life thereafter. But she doesn't have her glasses, contacts. Oh, I'm really grateful for my contacts. Okay, but we are talking about your books, and A Marriage at Sea was not for you.

I distinctly remember reading that, well, I listened to the audio, which was short, it was five-something hours, while I was doing yard work last summer, and I thought it was very interesting. And also that book was another that made me realize how much I appreciate emotional resonance in the fiction and nonfiction stories I'm reading. Like, that's something that really makes a particularly good reading experience for me, and I miss it when it's not there. And so many readers have loved this book. That's worth saying.

[00:27:38] What I hear you saying, Kristine, I think, is that a nonfiction, this happened, this happened, and this happened, is not answering that question you said was so important to you, in a different context, but the question of why. Like, what's the meaning there? What am I to make of this?

KRISTINE: No, I would agree with you. I think that that is part of what the problem was.

ANNE: Okay. Kristine, what have you been reading lately?

KRISTINE: I just finished Yesteryear with, I think, half the rest of the world, and I'm still thinking about it. I feel like that book really is made for contemplation and thinking about, and book clubs. And if you want to talk about it, that's one that you can pick up and talk about. There's a lot of different aspects to it. I've really enjoyed the experience.

[00:28:25] I picked up American Fantasy this week, so I'm super excited about that to see where that's going to go, because I really love Emma Straub, and have not had a bad experience with one of her books yet. I haven't read them all, but I think that this one sounds promising.

I'm also reading Daughter of Egypt by Marie Benedict, and I really love that. I love Egyptology. I reread The Egypt Game last year because it was one of my, I think, historical favorites from my adolescence, and just, ugh, just revived that childhood interest in all things, like, ancient Egypt and pharaohs. It's super interesting. I'm really enjoying it.

I have a giant stack of books I bought on spring break and on vacation, and every time I go in the bookstore that I'm really looking forward to. I'm really looking forward to the new Maggie O'Farrell, so I don't know. I have a lot that I have read recently and that I want to read.

ANNE: Well, that sounds amazing. But you're okay with adding to your stack today?

[00:29:26] KRISTINE: Of course. I never have any problem doing that. When people are always like, "I have to cut my TBR back," I'm like, "I don't even..." If I was to look at Goodreads, I guarantee you there's probably 7,000 books on there. I don't care how many books are on there. I care about what I want to read in the moment, having choices and selection. The more new books, the better. I will never have enough time to read all the books, but half the joy of being a reader is surrounding yourself with the choices of all the books that you crack open and fall into, and they become your whole personality for two or three days. And then, you know, everybody around you is like, "Stop talking about that book, about the tradwife." I'm like, "But wait, I haven't told you about the best part."

ANNE: So more books is more possibility, and you like possibility in your reading life.

KRISTINE: I love possibility. I think that's what makes it exciting is you don't know what you're going to encounter.

[00:30:19] ANNE: Okay. So today we're looking for bookish possibility, including stories set in museums and about art. We've talked a little bit about those characteristics that you really enjoy and the genres that you tend to go to. Is there anything else I should know about what you're looking for, or that you want right now, if that's a different question to you?

KRISTINE: No, I am really open to anything. I trust your judgment. You're the expert. And also, I really enjoy someone's perspective other than my own. I have a really good dialed in sense of what I like, but I think part of the bookish serendipity that appeals to me so much is someone presenting something to me that I might not have considered for myself.

ANNE: Okay, let's go. Kristine, this is going to be fun. Thank you for bringing this request to the show. The first book I have for you is brand new, just out May 5th. It was in the Summer Reading Guide, so I want to focus on a little bit of a different thing than I did at unboxing or in the guide. It's by Alexandra Andrews. It's called The Fine Art of Lying. Do you know it?

KRISTINE: I do not.

[00:31:31] ANNE: Okay. She wrote Who Is Maud Dixon? that came out maybe 2021, give or take a year, which was a suspenseful thriller with no likable character. And I'm really asking myself, I've been asking myself while you've been talking, like, "Are these characters likable?"

But I think the protagonist of this book has a lot that you will like about her. So this is about a woman named Claire. She's a Manhattan stay-at-home mom. She lives a pretty tame life. She is almost done with her art history PhD, and she says that she's been languishing as an ABD, that is All But Dissertation, for years.

And I'm going to skip to her revelation that she has at the end of the book for her. She finally decides, like, "I, I love art. I grew up in this tiny town upstate, and I went to a museum and fell in love with this one particular painting, and it set me on a path that made me think, 'I want to know more about this.'"

[00:32:41] And she thought, Well, obviously, the thing to do is pursue art history. And if you're going to pursue it all the way, that ends up with pursuing a PhD. And her focus is this fictional artist who's this... she describes him as a successful but enigmatic mid-century painter who's supposed to be the subject of her dissertation, except she's not writing it.

But she comes to this realization that really you reminded me of with your words about art. She just reflects on how she loves art. She doesn't know why. She loves the mystery of it. And she reflects on how no one in the thousands of years that art has existed, has been made by humans, has ever given a satisfactory explanation of what it actually does and why it affects us and how it affects us and what it all means, and why do certain works of art affect some people and not others?

[00:33:32] And she says all these people have written millions upon millions of words about art, and she's read so many of them, but she says not a single sentence has come close to capturing that visceral response she had when she looks at a painting that, for whatever reason, she loves. And she says, "It's not logical. It makes no sense, but it's real, and that is why I love art." And that kinda reminded me of what you said. Like, we can't understand it. I mean, we can't understand why we're drawn to it, but we can learn more about the things we're drawn to.

And in this book, which is a murder mystery, and it begins in this, like, dramatic fashion, then you go back and learn about the bad choices she made that led to her being at the scene of a crime when an art gallerist is murdered, oh, and an $18 million painting is missing.

But she knows all these things about art, but it's not just the knowledge, it's like what they mean to her. And my favorite parts of the book were when she gets pulled into conversations with people who know the art world, and she just really quippily like says what she thinks and why she likes some things but thinks others are overrated, and she's like, "Oh, those multimillion-dollar rainbow dots, like they just look good with people's sofas. That's the only reason that that's popular. You want to see some good dots, how about check out this artist or this artist or this artist?"

[00:34:53] And Kristine, I think maybe the highest recommendation I can give to you for this one after I think you may really feel a kinship with the protagonist, is my search history was so delightfully full of Richard Diebenkorn and Ed Ruscha and James Turrell and Carsten Höller, and artists I hadn't heard of before, like Kusama and Baldessari and Howardena Pindell, and I enjoyed going down that road.

Also, for books set in museums, there's a fictional museum that's crucial to this book. It's called the Museum of Contemporary Art. It's in New York City. And how the museum functions, how the funds are raised, how the museum decides what to acquire, and then the complex process it must go through if it wants to deaccession a work, I'd never thought about any of that.

When I was reading it, I thought, "Oh, of course museums have to make decisions like this, and of course they have to account for the finances and the decisions about the art and everything else," but I'd never thought about it. And I really enjoyed how this book drew me to think about it. How does this sound to you?

[00:35:56] KRISTINE: Oh my gosh, that sounds incredible. I'm just sitting here, I'm like, "How fast can I get this book?" Feels like it perfectly encapsulates what I'm looking for in my reading life right now. And my fascination, if I had to tell you, there's certain things I consider in my reading wheelhouse, museums, art, nuns, code breaking. I'm sure it's a very eclectic list, but it sounds like you have taken the words that I have spoken and breathed them into existence in the form of this book, and I'm just so thrilled to get my hands on it.

ANNE: Well, I'm delighted to hear it. Kristine and I are recording before the Summer Reading Guide, but I will have said more about it by the time this episode is airing, and you can have your hands on it. Past Kristine can be reading it by the time this episode is playing for everyone.

KRISTINE: I can't wait.

ANNE: Okay, I'm glad that sounds like a good fit. Next, I'm thinking about Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel. And this one has been out for a little longer. Have you read this?

[00:36:57] KRISTINE: I have not read this. I have it on hold in the library because-

ANNE: Do you?

KRISTINE: You know, I've always wanted to read The Ensemble, and I read the first few pages and I was like, "Eh, I don't know if I like this." And maybe it was just more not the right book at the right time, because they seemed a little unlikable. Because I don't know if I gave it a fair shot. But I have this one on hold, and I haven't read it. Please tell me more about it.

ANNE: Well, this one has a strong hook for you just with the content, so it could be a great place to start with Aja Gable, and then you can decide. It is very different from The Ensemble. I think this one came out in fall 2024. But I was one of many readers who had just been eagerly awaiting her next one for six years. And she's a screenwriter, so she was writing in the meantime, just not writing books that we could hold in our hands. But this new novel is very different from her first.

[00:37:49] In this one, a quantum physicist is approached by a rich, egotistical billionaire to work on a secret project involving a dangerous kind of time travel. At first, our scientist, Noah, and his wife, Maya, believe that Noah's been singled out because he's brilliant. And he's definitely brilliant, but he's also been targeted because of a tragedy in his past that's really being exploited here. And the billionaire also has secret, sinister motives, but you know, he's keeping those under wraps for the time being.

So Noah and Maya decide he's going to take the job, they can't turn it down, and they move together to Marfa, Texas, because that's where the billionaire's lab is. I've never been to Marfa, Texas, but I have really enjoyed the books I have read that include stops in Marfa, Texas. I think this might be the first one I've read that's set entirely in Marfa, Texas. But art is big in Marfa, Texas. It is a real destination.

[00:38:46] So while Noah is off trying to figure out this dangerous kind of time travel thing, bad things are happening to Noah, and his work, and his marriage. But the stakes are even higher than that, and that sci-fi kind of story will be deeply compelling to some readers.

But let's talk about the setting and the art for you. Much of the action takes place in Marfa, Texas, which is such a cool place that many of us have only been to, and perhaps will only go to on the page. Maya is an artist from Japan, and her career and interests feature prominently in this book, how she's thinking about her work and her field, and her friends who are artists, her friends who have left.

There is so much art in these pages. I did so much Googling. My search history just makes me smile when I think about it. I looked up so much Donald Judd and Kusama's infinity mirror rooms. Now on... You want to go to the Detroit Museum. I want to see an infinity mirror room in person now, and it's because of this book.

[00:39:50] The Marfa ghost lights. The protagonist describes her visceral reactions to some works she sees, like a Donald Judd installation that she saw and took in and just started crying. And she walks you through why. But also there's some more cerebral breakdowns of how she responds or doesn't to certain pieces.

The Marfa ghost lights are not artistic exactly, but was also a really fun textural detail. But the art is not limited to Marfa. We also go to LA, and New York City, and Japan. There's so much fun, nerdy, creative, intellectual stuff in these pages because her husband's a scientist, she's an artist, and the book really examines that whole interplay between science and art, and the human desire to understand it, and the things we do understand, and also a question it poses is how much is beyond our understanding at all.

And that may sound really deep, but piece by piece with characters having conversations and thinking about the works in front of them, the right reader could really fly through this. How's this sounding to you?

[00:40:56] KRISTINE: Oh, gosh, that sounds really fascinating. And science fiction is not a thing that I would normally gravitate to, but I feel like that it's one of those genres where with the right recommendation such as this one, you can find those hidden gems that are really going to speak to you and be the book that you're like, "Wow, maybe I do need to look into this genre a little more. Maybe there are some stories that I haven't considered."

I don't like to be a person who refuses to pick something up based on genre. Like, you cannot lump them all into one genre and say, "Well, this is not for me." Like, I would generally say horror, not for me, but I know that there are some books that I've read that would be considered horror books that I did appreciate and enjoy if was not a little icked out in certain spots of the book. But the compelling storyline, time travel and space, those are also things I'm super interested in.

[00:41:47] I finished Detour a couple of days ago on audio, and had no idea what it was about besides space, and I am very fascinated by the idea of time travel and wormholes and multiverses. You have to forgive me, I'm not quite up on my science as much as I'd like to be. But it's so fascinating to think about how one choice that you make creates a spinoff universe in which you make the alternate choice, and how that domino effect or butterfly effect, whatever you'd like to say, affects everything else around you. So I'm super excited about this one and feel like I will definitely be picking it up immediately.

ANNE: I'm glad to hear it. Okay, this next one is a little more of a stretch, but I think some of the literary story elements that aren't specifically about art have a lot in common with some of your favorites, including especially Heart the Lover.

[00:42:44] In Heart the Lover, what we have is the protagonist, Jordan, looking back at a distance of many years and reflecting on what happened in her college years, and how these relationships changed her life, and also how she feels differently about them in her, I think she's in her 40s, than she ever knew to think of them when she was in her early 20s. But the book I'm thinking of is Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein. It came out mid-April. Is this one you're familiar with?

KRISTINE: I almost picked it up at the bookstore yesterday.

ANNE: Did you really? The cover is really distinctive. Were you drawn in by the cover, or did you put it down because of the cover? Some readers love this, and some readers are like, "What the heck? I don't think this could be for me."

KRISTINE: No, I was drawn in. And the title. It was at the library, and I saw it, and I was like, "Ooh." I almost grabbed it, but there's like a 10 new book checkout limit, and they waived it already for me, so I was like, "I can't do that too. I can't check out another one and have like 15 new books out and be monopolizing them." Our library's amazing, but on the smaller side. So I was like, "I shall save that for somebody else." I saw it yesterday. It's funny that you mention it because I was like, "Ooh, I really want to read that."

[00:43:57] ANNE: Oh, okay. It's kind of you to look out for your fellow readers. I'm not sure what you gathered from the jacket, but I'll start from scratch. Well, Holland Saltsman of The Novel Neighbor gave me a galley of this a million years ago and said, "Read it. I want to know what you think." And I was like, "What is happening with this cover?" But I did, and the premise is so audacious. I thought, "This is a big swing." It's a little bit Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but also not at all that.

So, in this book, we have this woman in her, I think, early 40s, looking back on what her life could have been, reflecting on how she was so in love with the art, and also she thought so in love with this man who she felt really took advantage of her innocence, and love and appreciation for beauty and beautiful things, and never fully understanding how it wrecked her or why, and finding guidance in what seems like both a highly unlikely but ultimately perfect place that feels like it's able to explore themes that are really perfect for right now. Lots of descriptions of art. Also, if you're into that, really terrific descriptions of France and food. How's this sounding to you?

[00:45:19] KRISTINE: There were several things that you said that really just struck a nerve, and... oh gosh, like this is going to be amazing. I'm kind of at a loss for words. I feel like I'm anticipating the experience before I've even had it, and I'm so excited just to be able to do that. But talking about the timeline of the story, you know, my college experiences are about that same timeframe, and I feel like that I can really relate to that, that if you could've developed a comparison to Heart the Lover, like, come up with it yourself, I don't think you could've done it any better than this.

This sounds like exactly the type of story that is not the same story, but same emotional experience, and I'm incredibly excited about it because it's both relevant to things that I'm aware of, but also there's so much in there to unpack and to learn about. I love learning new things about medieval art. I don't really know anything about medieval art. I have a loose knowledge of, you know, medieval times.

[00:46:15] It reminds me a little bit from what you're saying about The Rachel Incident, and I adore that book, just the relationships in there, really getting into those and understanding, like, how you feel in that moment emotionally versus perhaps looking at it later with perspective and understanding that the power dynamics were not what they should've been, and it... seeing it through a different set of lenses, perhaps. The whole book sounds incredible, and I cannot wait to pick it up. Gosh, you are so good at this.

ANNE: I'm so glad that sounds like a good fit. And The Rachel Incident is such a good comp. I love that book, and I'm always looking for more of that flavor, and it hadn't occurred to me that Dear Monica Lewinsky actually fits that description.

KRISTINE: I love that book. I listened to it, I think, and I don't know what about it. I think I initially was like, "I'm not sure this is for me," and then I'm pretty sure that was one of those... I have several in my pocket of, like, go-to recommendations, and that's one of them. That, and the Likeness, and Beartown.

[00:47:22] I'm trying not to recommend the same books all the time. I really try to think about what somebody might like because I don't want to just tell you, "Read this book." Like I said, I want to recommend a book for a particular person based on their taste because that's so much more meaningful. But there's some that are universally appealing.

ANNE: Do you want to hear the why?

KRISTINE: Yes. Yes, I do.

ANNE: All right. Well, good news, I hear your library has it.

KRISTINE: My library. I hope it's still on the shelf.

ANNE: Well, if not, I also hear you have plenty to read, but you know, you want to know what's going to strike your mood right now. Okay, speaking of, so we talked about... we talked about a lot of books, but the three we're left with are The Fine Art of Flying by Alexandra Andrews, Lightbreakers by Aja Gable, and Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein. Kristine, what do you think? What do you intend to pick up next?

[00:48:11] KRISTINE: Oh, gosh, Dear Monica Lewinsky, just recency bias. You talked about that one last and it just... All of them sound incredible. I cannot wait to go out and get them as soon as possible, pick them up today on my way home from work if I can. But I just am so excited about that one. That one sounds unique and different, and I don't know... not that I wouldn't have picked it up because clearly I saw it at the library yesterday, and I might have, but I love a unique reading experience, something that I didn't expect to have that now I get to, and then I can share with everybody else. So thank you so much for doing this. This has been absolutely incredible.

ANNE: Oh, well, the pleasure's mine. Thank you for sharing your life and your reading life with us, and I'm so excited you're excited about what you can read next.

[00:48:59] Hey, readers. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kristine, and I'd love to hear what you think she should read next. Find Kristine on Instagram and Goodreads. We have those links and the full list of titles we talked about today at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

Make sure you're following us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, wherever you get your podcasts. That way you'll find each week's new episode automatically in your downloads. You'll find us on Instagram at @whatshouldireadnext. That's where we feature each new episode along with other happenings, like our recent Patreon bonus episodes, news about events, photos of our new merch, and other assorted updates from What Should I Read Next HQ.

Join our email list at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/newsletter, and you'll hear from us each week with a peek at the latest episode and other news to know.

[00:49:49] Thank you 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] 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.

This week, I’m sharing an excerpt from our 2026 Summer Reading Guide live unboxing. Our 15th guide and its corresponding unboxing are out in the world and available now to readers everywhere. If you don't have yours yet, visit modernmrsdarcy.com/srg, that's for Summer Reading Guide, to get in on our summer reading action.

[00:01:00] To mark this, our 15th guide, today I'm inviting you to listen in as I tell you all about the minimalist picks from this year's guide. We've been talking about Summer Reading Guide unboxing around here since 2018, when we held our first one. During unboxing, I go through every book in the Summer Reading Guide and tell you why, out of the hundreds of books I considered including in the guide that year, these are the ones I landed on. What makes them interesting? What is each story like? What kinds of readers might they appeal to? Those are the questions I'm answering. And during unboxing, I talk about all the books in the guide, and I do that in order, category by category.

In today's excerpt, our partners at Studio D have grabbed what I have to say about the six titles in this year's minimalist guide so you can listen in. This year, those books are The One Day You Were My Husband by Rosie Walsh, Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan, Sisters of a Halved Heart by Nayantara Roy, Land by Maggie O'Farrell, The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders, and Whistler by Ann Patchett.

[00:02:04] If you've already received your guide as a member of one of our communities or as an a la carte purchaser, I hope you're enjoying it and are enjoying curating your summer reading list. If you've not yet gotten your guide, you can do that now or any time with instant digital delivery. Your à la carte purchase or membership also grants you access to that video unboxing of the entire guide, not just the six titles we're previewing today.

Our Summer Reading Guide isn't about persuading you what you should read this season. That is not what we're about here. It's not what we do. I am not here to tell you how you should spend your precious reading time. I am here to help you, as I am able, determine how you might spend that precious reading time in a way that you feel really good about.

And this year, our reading retreat theme was born of the desire to come alongside you as you discover potentially good books for you that let you escape into new worlds, and enrich your life in meaningful ways, and find satisfying and joyful reading experiences all summer long.

[00:03:05] This year's guide includes 35 new for 2026 releases publishing between April and August that I have read every word of. They've been organized ... Uh, why the passive voice? I have organized them into offbeat and a little bit whimsical categories to help you think differently about what books may be right for you this summer.

I've included our popular For Fans Of backlist recommendations for every title, Awesome on Audio picks, Reading Retreat best practices from our whole team, and a splashy anniversary feature looking back on 15 years of our Summer Reading Guide. I hope today's episode gives you an exciting preview of our 15th guide. To get the whole thing, go to modernmrsdarcy.com/srg for Summer Reading Guide. That's modernmrsdarcy.com/srg.

As we did last year, we are also offering the guide professionally printed, delivered straight to your mailbox in the US. These are shipping out now. If you want one, visit our shop at modernmrsdarcy.com/shop and order yours.

[00:04:09] We took pre-orders on this. If you pre-ordered, you're getting one, but Will Bogel ordered several hundred extra printed guides. If you're lucky, we will still have one in stock for you, but if you want one, please don't wait. Go order that now at modernmrsdarcy.com/shop.

We also have retreat-worthy merch in that shop, like our cozy new sorority-style sweatshirt that I've been dreaming of offering you all for years, a brand-new hat that I hope brings a smile to your face, it sure did to mine and to others when I wear it, restocked book darts, stickers, totes, and more at modernmrsdarcy.com/shop.

All right. Without further ado, let's get to the books.

[00:04:51] Next, we have The One Day You Were My Husband by Rosie Walsh from Pamela Dorman on May 19th. Walsh writes these distinctive kinds of relationship-driven thrillers like Laura Dave and Gillian McAllister, if you know those writers. And this one is part mystery, part love story.

And like several books in this summer's guide, as you'll hear, it asks, "Can we ever really know the ones we love?" This is also about the power of first love, and asks this related question: "What if you move on after the love of your life disappears, but then that person comes back when you didn't think they would?"

So here's what happens. In 2010, Carrie marries Johan on a Thailand beach. Even though she hasn't known him long, she's sure he's the love of her life. But before the wedding night is even over, authorities raid their wedding and arrest him for a drug crime. It is seriously giving Brokedown Palace, if you ever were traumatized by that movie like 20 years ago.

[00:05:47] So, eventually Johan, who thinks he's going to be in prison basically for forever, begs her to leave him there, she should move back to the UK and get on with her life because she's a kickass surgeon-in-training, she has a promising future. He wants a good life for her, even if it's one without him.

So flash-forward, 12 years later, it's 2022, she's married with six-year-old twins, and she's looking up rentals for a work trip coming up, and on Airbnb, there's Johan as an Airbnb host in Sweden. And she's never once looked him up. She didn't want to torture herself, and she knew if/when he got out, he would contact her, but he didn't. He's alive and well. He's living in his native Sweden. He never breathes a word. She wants answers. Like, what happened? And she's going to get them. And I inhaled this so fast because I wanted to know what happened.

[00:06:41] GINGER HORTON: I can't wait for this next category, though, because... now you're speaking my summer language.

ANNE: Well, I'm glad to hear it. Here's what I did with the categories this year. I really wanted to do something a little more fun. In some of our older guides, we just had categories that were a little more bonkers, but for that to work, I felt like we needed a lot of categories that were very niche and bonkers.

And so, as is always the case, many of these books could have been sorted into multiple categories. In Seaside Stories, we have romance, family saga, romance, mm, literary fiction, but we put them here in Seaside Stories instead.

We're going to start with Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan, out from Putnam on May 26th. Sometimes, I don't know if this happens to you, but sometimes I think, "You know what I really want right now? An Annabel Monaghan novel." And I picked this up when I was in that kind of mood, and it did not disappoint.

[00:07:39] When I'm feeling that way, I want to see big-hearted, likable characters living in worlds I want to spend time in who are going to deal with their big stuff, or at least most of it, before the story's over. And I loved Dolly. Annabel Monaghan says in her notes, "Thank you to the woman named Dolly who came through the signing line at one of my events, and I went, 'Dolly, what a nice name!'"

Dolly here is 39, pessimistic about romantic love, but bursting with love for her family and friends. She has understandable abandonment issues. One thing she learned early is love is fickle, but debts stick around. Her dad tried to, last-ditch effort to make her mom stay was to invest in this expensive business venture her mom believed in. They're still paying off the loan. Her mom's long gone.

Dolly is not thrilled to be back in Whitfield, Rhode Island, her hometown, for the summer, but her family needs her. They are already struggling in all the ways when the house catches on fire, and suddenly they need 50 grand for a new roof right now.

[00:08:43] So enter Stuart Whitfield. He is handsome, local, most eligible bachelor who is publicly humiliated when Page Six shares photos of his cheating fiancée. What's worse, she's cheating with a Yankee, and everybody in Whitfield is Red Sox fans. So right after the bad news breaks, Dolly rescues him by stumbling upon him in his hour of need and changes his tire. The paparazzi snap a photo. They say that he's rescuing her, but the press is fantastic.

So as things go in such books, he wants to know, can Dolly help him out for the whole summer? Because he has a PR problem that she could be amazing for. She says, "Sure, pay for my roof," and they make a deal, and then Dolly catches feelings.

I loved the scenery, the relationship they build just tiny exchange by tiny exchange, the family fish business, and also Dolly is baking as love for others and also therapy for herself throughout the book. And I just found it so fun and soothing to read about.

[00:09:45] We're going to start with a book club book. We're reading this in July, Sisters of a Halved Heart by Tara Roy, out from Algonquin on June 2nd. My reading journal says, "Gah, I love this." When the story opens, Mira is just arrived back in Brooklyn from London. She fled there several years ago to get away from her half-sister, Joy, who betrayed her in dramatic fashion.

Something I think Roy does really well here is make the situation believable. Because it sounds big in headlines, like how could that end up happening? And I feel like she sells it. Joy just wants things to be okay again, whatever that means, and Mira is like, "Nope, there is no..." Like, "Are you... No, there is no way. Don't you know what you did to me?" That's where each sister is. We slowly learn what happened and where things stand now. Their elderly father, whose health is not great, is a big factor in their dynamic.

[00:10:40] This story has a really strong sense of place. It's so atmospheric. Many, many real locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan are name-checked, and I Googled probably every single one. I cued up the numerous referenced songs and mapped all the real locations. And also this one has minor characters that feel more fully developed than you see in many novels. I really enjoyed that as well. There are platonic and romantic love stories, not just the love triangle at its core, which is what we get with those sisters.

It's set in the literary world, as Mira works for a literary magazine, like a really, like, niche, fresh literary magazine with a lot of cachet right now. And there's a really believable exploration of how the sisters seek to move forward after the betrayal.

There's a literary mystery threaded through the pages. Mira works at that magazine, and a debut novel that is stunning ends up on her desk. The author's anonymous. She feels like it was sent to her as a message, like a very personal message. And figuring out who wrote it and why is a big part of the story.

[00:11:47] Oh, Ginger, you know I have mixed feelings about epilogues, and I can't wait to talk about this one with you. I know many of you despise epilogues. Some of you really love them. I was just like, "Ugh, dang. I can't wait to talk about it." So discussable. That's a big reason it's our July Book Club selection.

GINGER: Can't wait.

ANNE: Let's talk about Maggie O'Farrell. Land is out from Knopf on June 2nd. This is inspired by O'Farrell's great-great-grandfather, who worked as a laborer for Ireland's Ordnance Survey not long after the Great Hunger in the mid-19th century.

In Land, her ancestor becomes Tomás, a skilled mapmaker who works with the Ordnance Survey. It's 1865. He's brought his son Liam along. The goal is to map the whole of Ireland. And they're working for British colonialists. They are brutal masters, the Brits.

[00:12:41] But as their work nears completion, Tomás stumbles upon an enchanted spring in a magical little copse, and when he comes out, he is changed, and the impact touches every character and rolls down through the entire book.

If you love O'Farrell, you'll see a lot of her hallmarks here. She excels at giving a bird's-eye view of her characters' lives and their relationships. Here we have the main characters' perspectives, that of all the family members, but also those of an unborn baby, a talking fish, the family dog, a skylark, a house. She also has this gift for portraying these moments where you can see how the characters are orbiting each other. You can see the near misses, and you can see how they could connect, if only, but the characters themselves do not see it.

[00:13:34] The writing is lush and gorgeous. And there is so much here that is deeply life-affirming, but it's also consistently devastating. There is so much sorrow and sadness. This is also a diaspora story. I really enjoyed it. Talking about it makes me want to read it again.

Next, we have The Great Wherever, a book club pick by Shannon Sanders out from Henry Holt on July 7th. This is a debut and a ghost story, but not in the way you might think. Our main character is Aubrey. She's 32. She's broke. She's fresh off a breakup. It actually happens in the early pages. Oh, you do not feel for the guy. What a jerk. She's grieving her dad's death, and then she is stunned to find out that when her dad died, he left her his share of the family farm in Tennessee. What she doesn't know is that the instant she gained an interest in the farm, she became extremely interesting to four meddlesome, judgmental ghosts who are deeply invested in that property and now track her every move.

[00:14:37] Much of the story is told from the perspective of the ghosts who are... I mean, they're so funny. I love the ghosts. And they provide welcome levity to what at times is a dark story. But the reason the ghosts track her every move is... well, they explain it to you. The moment a relative is designated a farm inheritor, the rooms of their minds belong to the ghosts. Like the ghosts can enter them. They say it's like a key turning in the lock. The ghosts also describe this as watching the best reality TV, seeing what Aubrey and her ilk are up to.

So Aubrey travels to Tennessee to connect with these family members she's never really known. She sees the farm. She considers an offer from a big, bad corporation. The family is aghast she would consider selling, but she thinks it could be the answer to her money troubles. And while that story is unfolding in the present tense, the ghosts are unspooling the history of the land and how they came to haunt it. This is so discussable, which is why it is our August Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club selection.

[00:15:33] Next, we have Whistler from Ann Patchett. This story begins with a chance encounter at the Met that reunites 53-year-old Daphne with a man she hasn't seen since she was nine years old. That's her former stepfather, Eddie.

Eddie vanished from her life after the two were in a terrible car wreck together, and much of the book is finding out what happened minute by minute during that car wreck. It sent them both to the hospital, they landed on different floors, and by the time they checked out, Daphne's mother had filed for divorce from Eddie, and Daphne would not see this man again for 40-something years. And she's never understood why. Her mother would never talk about what happened. But after bumping into Eddie, the two are overjoyed to be in each other's lives again, and there's this real joyful sense of making up for lost time, and Daphne learns what really happened.

[00:16:27] There's lots of art and books in these pages. Daphne is an English teacher to high school girls. She loves her job, the books, and the girls. Eddie is an editor for a big five publisher, and Daphne's mother used to be a publicist who long ago married one of her authors who's terrible and so much fun to read about.

This story is so finely textured. Like, when we were walking Daisy, I found myself telling Will in detail about a collection of rabbit paintings appearing in these pages. I also Googled lots and lots of Hockney.

Now, the horse on the cover is only in the novel for a couple of pages. It's not a horse book. The horse is a horse and also a symbol. And because it's a symbol, I had this terrible moment. I know many of you have big feelings, whatever kind of feelings, but big feelings about Ann Patchett novel endings. And at first, I thought she was doing her ending out of left field thing. I was really worried. But I was very happy with the way this book ended.

[00:17:24] And I have been itching to read this again since about a week after I finished it, which might have been about the Christmas holiday. I think that's high praise. Maybe it's not the book for you, maybe it is, but for me, I think it's going to be best of the year material. Not the single best, but like top 12, I think.

Hey readers, I hope you enjoyed that snippet from our 2026 Summer Reading Guide unboxing. To get your digital copy of the guide right now and enjoy the full recording of our unboxing, visit us at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

And if you'd like to order your copy of the professionally printed magazine version of the guide and check out all our new merch, visit modernmrsdarcy.com/shop.

Follow our show on Instagram at @whatshouldireadnext and tag us in your summer reading posts and stories. We want to see what you're reading.

[00:18:19] That said, we do like to honor those who have made the investment in our team and our work by purchasing the guide or joining one of our membership communities. Please remember that the 2026 Summer Reading Guide is exclusively for our members and a la carte purchasers, and please avoid spoilers when sharing about the Summer Reading Guide on social media or elsewhere online. Thank you for supporting the work we do.

Join our email list at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/newsletter to keep up with our latest news, events, and episodes.

Follow or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Casts, whatever your favorite podcast player may be. Subscribing makes a big difference to us in the quickly changing landscape of podcast production. Thank you so much for taking a moment to check your settings.

[00:19:04] Thank you to all 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, Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club community manager Ginger Horton who unboxed these books with me for today's episode, 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] GINGER HORTON: I was telling Anne before we started this call that I had gone through as I proofread and noted the 15 books that I want to read for the summer based on my own reading intentions.

ANNE BOGEL: 15 for 15.

GINGER: 15 for 15. I did not do that on purpose, but you know I love when that happens.

ANNE: 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.

[00:00:44] This week we're giving you the information you need to find out about a whole lot of reads. We are sharing the excitement of our upcoming Summer Reading Guide — that will be our 15th edition — releasing this Thursday, May 14th. I am joined today by the absolutely perfect guest for this episode, if I do say so myself. That is our Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club community manager, Ginger Horton, and we can't wait to tell you more.

If you are already a member of our Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club or our What Should I Read Next? Patreon communities or you purchased your à la carte ticket, you are all set to get the guide on Thursday and attend Thursday's unboxing events at either 1:00 PM or 8:00 PM if you'd like to join us live. Those times are Eastern, New York City time.

[00:01:29] We are holding two book parties, and we call them book parties not because they're parties in the traditional sense. They're, you know, informative literary events, but we call them parties because they are so much fun. But there are two events happening live, so you can choose the one that suits you best, or some readers join us for both. And if neither time works for you, never fear. We have the recording for you available beginning very late in the day on May 14th, but any time thereafter, you have instant access.

Summer Reading Guide veterans make a big deal of unboxing for good reason. You'll hear Ginger and I talk more about that today. Readers do things like take the day off work, gather with friends, or plan whole weekend getaways to different cities because of unboxing and the Summer Reading Guide.

[00:02:19] With this year's theme of reading retreat, you could even create your own special day to watch the event, peruse your guide, and plan your to-be-read list. If you've never been to one of our unboxings before, here's what to expect.

I go through all the titles in the guide one by one, sharing more about why I chose each title, what the reading experience is like, and what kind of reader may most enjoy each book. I get to share more than I can say in print and answer your questions about tone, theme, content, comps, and more.

There's still time to purchase your à la carte ticket, and we do recommend not waiting until the last minute, although you could, but less stress is good for your reading life. Ticket holders get a copy of the beautiful digital guide in PDF form and are invited, if they so choose, to attend our live unboxings. Find out all the details you need to know at modernmrsdarcy.com/srg, that's for Summer Reading Guide. Modernmrsdarcy.com/srg.

[00:03:18] Readers, today I am delighted to welcome our book club community manager, Ginger Horton, to the show to talk about our Summer Reading Guide. If Ginger's name sounds familiar, well, lucky you. You may recognize her from our recent episode where she helped to recommend titles to Cheryl Drury, or because you're an MMD book clubber, a listener in our Patreon community, or just like to hang out in these parts.

Ginger's been on the podcast a time or, I don't know, six since you first made your debut a few years back, Ginger, and we couldn't believe you hadn't been on till then. But today, Ginger's here, and we're going to dive into all things summer reading.

And I love having you on the show today, Ginger, because I feel like you're the perfect bridge between what I'm holding in my brain for the 2026 Summer Reading Guide that has been, in one sense, in the works for many years. When like authors I know and love first mention, like, "Oh, in a few years I'm going to have a book come out about X," and I've thought, "Oh, I'm going to put that in a spreadsheet somewhere to remind me in four years that book is coming, because I want to read it, and maybe it's going to be great for the Summer Reading Guide."

[00:04:26] So I've been thinking like way long-term and have put this thing together piece by piece. But you have been collaborating on the guide for many years now, and were an integral part about deciding not just what our specific vision for 2026 would be with the reading retreat theme, but also really helping me think through how to present those ideas.

And we're going to get into that in detail. But Ginger, in one sense, you're a creator, but in another sense, you're a co-discoverer with readers because it's just been like hours since you saw the first draft of this year's Summer Reading Guide. So thank you for being the perfect guest and coming to What Should I Read Next? today. Welcome.

GINGER: I love this time of year. Anne, I'm so glad to be back in this space because I do... I have a complicated relationship with summer reading. But I love summer. We might get into that. I love summer.

ANNE: No, we're going to get into it right now. So, for those who don't know, tell us more.

[00:05:21] GINGER: Okay. Well, sometimes, not the last couple of years, but sometimes I have had a real dip in my reading life in the summer, and I have theories about why that happens. But the Summer Reading Guide is a resource that I start using in May, but sometimes it takes a long time for me to enjoy all of it because I make my way piece by piece through the year sometimes.

And so, yeah, I love holding out as long as I can. And as our team has grown, that has been available to me. I hold out as long as I can and kind of look at the guide as late as possible in the process, partly because my eyes are fresher to catch any typos or whatever, but partly because I love the delight and the discovery of to see what you have read, what ends up on the guide, hearing you, like you mentioned, four years coming, one year coming, this book is finally coming out, we have a release date, and now hearing why I might want to read it.

[00:06:13] ANNE: Well, I'm glad to hear it. There are 35 books in this year's guide once again, and they are broken down in two categories. We have things like historical happenings, literary and contemporary fiction that this year we've done something fun with. It's on a spectrum from serious and earnest all the way over to playful and quirky.

We have books that are about messy, messy relationships. And yes, that word is repeated, and I do mean messy in the best sense when it comes to fiction. We have a category for magical and strange. We have seaside stories, if I didn't already say that, mystery and suspense, memoir and nonfiction. There is good stuff in this year's guide.

So we want to create a guide that is compact and has lots of options, but not so many, not the thousands of titles coming out this summer or hundreds that are on my, like, I could consider this for the guide reading list, but really whittle it down to some likely to bring you reading joy this summer all in one little package. And we have fun features as well. We'll talk about that more in today's episode.

[00:07:17] But my friend, Nikki, shout-out Nikki, gave me the gift of describing back to me what the guide was to so many readers. She said, reading time is precious. Like, we all have... I mean, some of you tell us about how much you're enjoying the switch between retiring from a full-time job and becoming a retiree and having so much more reading time that it still feels abundant to you if that transition is new. But the vast majority of us feel like so many books, so little time is a serious dilemma, and the thing that really stands between us and the reading life we wish we could have.

And my friend was telling me how the guide every year is just such a gateway to reliable reading joy because if you're going to take your precious reading time and spend it metaphorically on only a handful of books, you want to make sure those books bring you a memorable experience.

[00:08:10] And having someone hold your hand as you make those choices can feel really, really good. And that's what we've done every year in the guide for... this will be our 15th edition. If you told me back in 2012, "This is the first of 15 and counting," I mean, I think it would've exploded my little readerly head. But here we are.

And every year since the second year, I have read every book in the guide cover to cover, and the reason that is, is the first year, I remember highlighting some new releases that I was really excited about, that I was really looking forward to spending my reading time on. And about half of them, I not only was disappointed, but was kinda angry that my precious reading time had been spent in that way, and I resolved then, like, I... In this context for the Summer Reading Guide, you know, guidance implied, I'm only going to talk about the books that I have read and can vouch for.

[00:09:09] And just because I've read a book does not mean you will love it as well. But in the guide, in that unboxing I try to be real specific about what my reading experience was like, not to tell you what yours will be like or that you should want that experience, but to help you wrap your head around, is this... I mean, is this a train I want to get on this summer? If I only have so much reading time at my disposal, how do I want to use it, and do I want this book to be in the mix?

And if you have questions, like, people will say things like, "Well, you know, I'm not feeling really sweary this summer. Can you guide me in that direction?" Or, "I need a book that's going to leave me in a hopeful space, and I'm thinking about X title. Is it a good fit?" I can answer those questions because I've read them all. Ginger, what would you add to that?

[00:09:54] GINGER: I think that we are all in a place that we could not have collectively seen 15 years ago, and that is, I feel this, that the marketing dollars are working harder than ever. I know that there is, I guess, lore in the publishing world that they don't quite know what's happening and what to do. But I can tell you, I feel the impacts of it because I see the same books, I see the big book list, everything that's getting published, and that does not mean that those books are right for me.

I love the publishing industry. I'm so glad they're marketing books. I am cheering any books that anybody wants to put in front of me. But that doesn't mean that's a book I want to read just because it's in front of me. And so, yeah, I think that having a trusted, guided source is so important.

When I walk into my independent bookstore, I know which of the staff members write those little cards that I am going to seek out, and I know which ones, God bless them, they're doing great work there, but I do not want to read the books that they suggest.

ANNE: Not your book twin?

[00:10:48] GINGER: They're not my book twin. That's such a helpful thing to know, actually. And like you said, sometimes that's even specific to the year. It doesn't mean that that's forever a no for me, but that can be tailored to my reading summer. Summer reading is precious time, like you said.

ANNE: We hear that. Also something that's unique about our guide is since 2019, shout out to Katie who designed our first one, we've done a beautiful user-friendly magazine style that you can print the whole thing if you want. You can mark it up. But it's just a really fun way to engage with something that a lot of people really enjoy and look forward to every year. And that is their summer reading... oh, what's a word that I can use that's not curriculum? Because that sounds a little too much like school.

[00:11:34] To some of us, anything that hints of school, like you want homework. You wish we'd make worksheets for your summer reading. But for others of you, you want nothing that smacks of that. But as you're imagining what literary joys could await you this summer, the magazine style can be a really fun way to dip in.

And since 2020... I mean, we've had loose themes for a while. Boot camp in 2024 was the first year where we leaned hard into a theme. Last year's was road trip. This year's is reading retreat. And we thought that would be such a lovely theme for right now. Ginger, you want to say more?

GINGER: It does. It feels like a sigh of relief. I love just the exhale that a reading retreat is, whether that is a literal one, as Anne mentioned. Some people build the start of their summer around the Summer Reading Guide, taking days off, booking an Airbnb, traveling to a location. But I think even if it's just figurative. I remember two summers ago, we had a specific Genius Moves class that was all about summer Genius Moves, and one reader said that she has this hour of the day that she opens up the front door, she has a screen on it, and she pretends she's reading on like a screened-in porch because, "No bugs, all books," was what she said.

ANNE: No bugs, all books.

[00:12:55] GINGER: Give me 20 minutes. That somehow you are creating this space for your reading life. And we keep hearing that recently from readers that, again, the publishing landscape is overwhelming in the best possible way. We love that big book party, but what we also want is just space to slow down, to savor.

Man, I think about all those summers when you were a kid, speaking of homework, where you would prop your feet up, you'd turn on the ceiling fan, maybe just me, I lived in the American South, and you just like had this long, expansive time to read. And that is the vibe I'm going for this summer.

ANNE: Oh, and you know, you may hear us say words like peace and calm, but I want you to know that is adamantly not code for boring. We are talking about a really energetic kind of entry into a space that you couldn't be happier to be in. But that is anti-frantic, not frenetic in any way, no FOMO allowed. What we're looking for is to cultivate vibes that feel really warm and supportive and enthusiastic and abundant.

[00:14:05] Our desire with our reading retreat Summer Reading Guide magazine is to come alongside you and help you discover good books that let you escape into... peaceful, new world? No. But that you would seep into interesting new worlds that you want to be in, and also enrich your life in meaningful ways. We are a bit nerds. You are going to go places and learn things with the books in this year's Summer Reading Guide, but on your terms. And you can choose how nerdy or escapist you wish to be.

And it's Modern Mrs Darcy, What Should I Read Next?. We believe in nerdy escapism, but we just really want to help you craft a season full of abundance, ease, and joy, whatever it is that you want in your summer, and also one that puts a heaping helping of potential four and five-star books on your readerly horizons. That's been a goal for years now.

[00:14:57] We just recently did a survey in these parts, and I wasn't really expecting the biggest shot of readerly joy for readers to be to read a book that I would give four or five stars to. The other thing most likely to give readers a big shot of readerly joy was finding out an author they love has a new book coming out. I'm certain some of those are in the guide among these 35 books.

Some of them you may already know. Like, "Oh, I've been looking forward to that author's new books." But I think some of them will be surprises, just because it's hard to know about everything happening in publishing world.

And also, we have a feature like we have in several years past that's books from authors you know and love that includes titles coming out between May and August from authors that you may already have read previous books in their series, or that you may have already read previous books by them, and we want you to know they're coming even if they're not specifically featured as one of the 35 titles in the guide.

[00:15:55] GINGER: Like Anne mentioned, anti-boring is absolutely what we're after. But there is nothing boring about sinking into that comfortable reading chair or comfortable reading spot, and then your heart beating out your chest because you cannot stop turning the page. So, absolutely, comfort can mean multiple things, but there is no more comfortable place for me to be.

I was telling Anne before we started this call that I had gone through as I proofread and noted the 15 books that I want to read for the summer based on my own reading intentions.

ANNE: 15 for 15.

GINGER: 15 for 15. I did not do that on purpose, but you know I love when that happens. And a good many of those, though, are the heart-pounding ones, or what I expect, yeah, kind of the page-turner ones. There might be some juicy, funny... A lot of these titles are really not at all like boring, pastoral vibes. They are absolutely, I'm going to power through those in two days straight.

[00:16:51] ANNE: Mm-hmm. There's definitely a purposeful mix of the heavy and the light, the long and the short. Lots of different vibes and settings this year, which we always try to do, but I don't know, life is hard. Good books help. I want to be sure I'm putting books for a wide variety of readerly experiences on your readerly horizons.

And for the reading retreat, I really wanted to communicate a vibe that was easy, but also really, really inviting, and that could help you imagine yourself taking place in a retreat that was either solo or communal. And bringing that to life with imagery was really fun.

I mean, I talked in a recent newsletter about how I really enjoy going to Trader Joe's and buying all the snacks. You should've seen our family group chat. Everyone was so enthusiastic about the leftovers they were hopefully going to get to eat, which they did, and it was great.

[00:17:51] And I hired a local photographer, shout out Laura, who was amazing. Ginger, I love collaborating with our team on so much. I love that. I mean, it was so life-giving to work with someone. Laura got it. Thank you, Laura.

GINGER: I love that.

ANNE: We were just arranging our snacks and our journals and our books and our blankets and our snacks and more snacks and our drinks and everything. And I had a few fellow readers on hands to help conjure the communal scenes. It was so fun to think about what would be inspiring and idea giving for you all this summer. I'm really happy with the results.

[00:18:28] GINGER: We had a Pinterest board at one point, and I think it's pretty hard to top a Pinterest board. But I think the way the guide looks, man, I gotta tell you, I think it might be better than a Pinterest board.

ANNE: I will pass that on to Laura. That's high praise.

GINGER: Shout out to Laura.

ANNE: So we want you to know if you're like, "I'm not doing a reading retreat this summer," that's cool. Like, we did one in the pages. So you could have the fun of flipping through that experience without thinking... Like, no actual retreat required to find good books in the guide this summer.

But this is a milestone for us. I mean, we've said that it's... Ginger chose 15 books for 15 years. This is our 15th Summer Reading Guide, and this is our year of celebrations around here. You've heard us say that this year we're celebrating 10 years of Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club. We hit 10 years of the podcast in January. Let's see. This is 15 years of the blog as well.

[00:19:23] GINGER: I love an anniversary. That's so much fun to talk about. You can absolutely celebrate, you know, four years into something. Why not? But there's just really something nice about those 10 and 15-year numbers.

ANNE: Yeah. And we had fun with 15. There's an anniversary feature in this year's guide where I walked down memory lane and really did the hard work of finding the original Summer Reading Guides, which are purposely not just something you can click on Modern Mrs Darcy and access. But there's a feature that walks you through, many of the covers from past years, going back to the first edition. And I recommend backlist books through the years because we love a juicy new release. But we also love a book that you can get your hands on immediately at your public library because there's not a bonkers wait list for it.

[00:20:14] And because we know you'll like backlist picks so much, I mean, as do you and I, Ginger.

GINGER: Oh, yeah.

ANNE: Like, we get this. Every title in the guide has a handful of "for fans of" picks is what... They're FFO picks in my reading journal, that are titles that would be really nice flight picks that just play really nicely with the new title I'm recommending in the Summer Reading Guide.

Sometimes it's because of setting, like all the books take place on the Camino de Santiago, for example. Sometimes it's because of the genre, but it's a book that has a similar tone or emotional feel to the book I'm recommending. So that you can both get a sense in this like really shorthand fashion of what the new book is like, but also, you can do a "Hmm, if I enjoyed reading this one. What should I read next?" kind of thing with all these books. It's just another way to help you discover older titles you may enjoy.

[00:21:14] GINGER: I love those bonuses because they do feel like a sneaky way to get a couple more books. You could build a personal curriculum out from there. And also, it's such a great way to see, "Oh, I liked both of those books. This one's going on my TBR list."

ANNE: That's what it's designed for. Ginger, would you like to do the honors of telling everyone about our team feature for this year?

GINGER: Yes. I absolutely love this. I might have already let Genius Moves tumble off of my tongue, because this is the time of year where I think it really occurs to me to think in a very specific way about my reading life. I hope to be intentional throughout the year, but that way is to get some wins. And Genius Moves are those short little pithy ways that we win in our reading lives.

[00:22:01] This started actually back at an in-person reading retreat for book club a while back, and we asked all the attendees to bring one quick win, one genius move for their reading life. They were so varied, so much fun, and so helpful that we've kind of used that as shorthand for the rest of book club. So we'll have a class every so often with just these collection of genius moves.

And so we asked the team to contribute their best genius move. Those are so much fun to read, to get tips, to see those little tiny tweaks. You're not going to overhaul your reading life with a genius move, but you might make one tweak that allows you to get, oh, let's say 30 more minutes of reading time on your family vacation. Hint, hint, that's mine. A sneaky way that I do it. I love to see the variety and the creativity of readers especially, man, our team members really came through. So that's going to be such a fun feature.

[00:22:57] ANNE: I really enjoyed that tip personally. Personally. Because 30 more minutes of reading time, especially... I mean, I'm an introvert.

GINGER: Same.

ANNE: So the way you worked that idea into your genius move, I really appreciated it.

GINGER: Well, you'll have to open your guide. I wish I knew the page number. It would fall off my tongue, but open your guide to the page with genius moves and find out what that would be.

ANNE: Well, it's in the beautiful table of contents. Because this year's guide is so li- It's just so pretty. It continues our same aesthetic, but the design is a little bit different this year. It's us, but it's different. I think you'll really enjoy it, whether this is your first guide or your 15th.

Let's talk a little more about the books.

GINGER: Yes.

[00:23:43] ANNE: There are 35 this year in those categories we talked about, and I want you to know there will be a Minimalist Summer Reading Guide this year. It'll go on the blog on May 14th, and then our first Tuesday What Should I Read Next? episode after the Summer Reading Guide releases, that's on Tuesday, May 19th. That will be me unboxing the Minimalist Guide.

And when it occurred to me to do this little preview episode in this way, I thought, "Why on earth have we not done it this way before?" It makes so much sense. But Unboxing means I'll give you a little more color and flavor, and you'll be able to hear the tone of my voice, a little more nuance, a little extra information, versus the short little blurb that will be on the blog.

But we're going to tell you what three of those books are right now. We don't do it this way every summer, but this summer we happen to be reading three new 2026 releases that are all in the Summer Reading Guide in Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club, and we announced those to our book clubbers a few weeks back in the middle of April, and we're going to tell you about all of them today. Da da-da-da.

[00:24:46] GINGER: I am so excited about these three titles. First of all, I think each one of them could totally stand on its own. But also, I think it's pretty representative of the breadth of the guide. I love that we are reading something that I think would be immediately hospitable to almost any reader. Just like that beach read, that airport read. You could pull this off the shelf, take it down, and it's going to just go down easy. But there's also a lot to talk about.

There is a more juicy, literary, family drama that's very discussable and a little nerdier, kind of midsummer. And then we sort of end our summer on a really avant-garde pick. There's ghosts, there's some more drama. I think this is so representative of what we do. A lot of fun, a lot of discussability, a lot of discoverability. And so Anne, would you like to do the honors and tell us which three books I've been obscurely describing?

[00:25:43] ANNE: I'd be delighted. In June, we're reading a romance author that I believe is no stranger to the vast majority of you. I am quoting Wallace Stegner all the time in Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club. He has a fictional novelist in Crossing to Safety say, "Hard writing makes for easy reading." And ooh, this book goes down easy in the best sense.

Our author is Annabel Monaghan, joining us for a chat to talk about her new May release, Dolly All The Time, in late June. It's a seaside story with a big-hearted, fiercely loyal protagonist that so many of you are going to want to root for, who we're going to cheer on to see her get her happy ending. And that is all I'm going to say about that until unboxing. You can look it up, but that's all I'm going to say until unboxing. So that's June, Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan.

[00:26:37] In July, we're reading another book that I inhaled. My initial two-sentence review was, "What a juicy, delicious, lavish, atmospheric, messy-in-the-best-way love triangle of a book. My first from this author, but won't be my last." We are reading Sisters of a Halved Heart by Nayantara Roy. I just had very different expectations from Dolly All The Time. The tone and setting are totally different, but oh, I sucked this down so fast.

It's messy in the best way. It's in the messy, messy relationships category. Really interesting family drama that also has a wonderful supporting cast. I love the relationship between the female protagonist and her female best friend. There's a kid in the book who's perfect, brings out things in the other characters without feeling overdone or annoying.

[00:27:32] There's a literary mystery woven throughout, because the protagonist works at a literary magazine that has cachet, and there's a manuscript that is like knock-your-socks-off fantastic that appears unsolicited on our protagonist's desk because of her role at the magazine, and the question of who wrote it and why'd they send it to her permeates the whole book. And it does get resolved, and it's very satisfying.

Plus, Ginger, I told you, we both have mixed feelings about epilogues, but ooh-

GINGER: Oh, yeah.

ANNE: ...we're going to have a whole forum in book club about the epilogue for this book. I mean, I think I really liked it. I don't ever feel that way about epilogues, but I think I really liked it.

GINGER: I'm so nervous. But it's going to make for great discussion.

[00:28:21] ANNE: I'll tell you more about the specifics of this story at unboxing, but that's Sisters of a Halved Heart by Nayantara Roy, out in July.

And then August is our debut novel with those ghosts that Ginger was just talking about. This is The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders. It is a powerful, multi-generational family saga about inheritance, a family farm, and the meddlesome, gossipy, nose-in-your-business, opinionated, judgmental family ghosts that reside on the farm and have strong, strong opinions on the family members' lives as they're still buzzing around the property. It's hard to not keep going, because I just want to talk about all these books. But that's August, The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders. It's her first novel.

GINGER: I can't wait to talk about that one, too. I spent six years of my life in Memphis, and so I am so always happy to see Memphis on the page as well.

ANNE: Well, this fictional family farm is right down the road.

[00:29:26] GINGER: Love it. And like Anne said, this is the beginning of a bookish conversation, and so not only will we be talking more about those books in book club, but there will be bonus episodes in the Patreon space all summer long. And yeah, this is just the beginning of the chatter about the 35 books and more. You know, we'll continue to talk about books all summer long.

ANNE: Yes, we will. Ginger, you said you just went through the guide and marked down 15 titles you were especially interested in reading. I'm curious on just getting some commentary that's not spoilery, but was there anything in there you've already read, anything you previously knew about that you were really anticipating, anything you previously knew nothing about that especially piqued your interest? Readers want to know things.

GINGER: Yes. Yes. Okay, so the books that I am leaning towards seem to have like two or three themes going on. Number one, I have been in grad school this year, and I want to do two things for my reading life. I want to read those gentle, pastoral, soothing, but something you could put on a child's bookshelf in the Lake District in the pastoral times. I want to read gentle stuff, and I also want to read-

ANNE: That's very specific.

[00:30:36] GINGER: Well, it's so specific because there's a forum about personal curriculum in the book club, and people have been helping me put together my exact reading list. It involves Winnie-the-Pooh and The Secret Garden and things like that.

But I also want to read the buzziest of the buzziest. You said that people aren't feeling very sweary this year. Oh, I want controversy. I want drama. Bring on all of the sweary, art theft, juicy... That is exactly what I want. And several of the authors that are on the Summer Reading Guide I think are going to come through on that for me.

There are destinations that are places I want to go. There are authors that are always auto-buy authors for me. There is at least one author that I am a complete... No, two authors that I am a completist for, and one that I would love to be a completist for. So I want to go places, I want buzzy, I want controversy. And then, you know, I'll just top that off in the evenings with a gentle breeze and James Herriot kind of calling over the plains to me. So I think we can contain multitudes, but that is what I am hoping for for my summer reading life.

[00:31:44] ANNE: Ooh, I like your very specific vibes. Well, for years now, I've done a remix of the books in the back of the guide. I just want to put them in front of you in a different way than they're originally categorized so that if a book that was set in a category that's heavy on historical fiction didn't catch your eye, maybe if I describe it as a book that had music galore that would inspire you to make a playlist, maybe that would get your attention and reconsider a book that you had glossed over the first time. Because there is a lot of that this summer. There are quite a few specific books I read to vet for the guide, but four that made it into the guide, that there are so many artists and even specific tracks name-checked that I was like, "Well, okay. I just put down my book, but now I'm making dinner. I have to listen to these songs they've been talking about." So I really enjoyed that.

[00:32:37] There were a weird number of mentions and epigraphs from Rainer Maria Rilke, the patron saint of What Should I Read Next?, because we quote him at the end of every episode, "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading." There are five debut novels in this year's guide. The longest book is 592 pages. The shortest is under 100. There are… how many works in translation? There are four.

I'm going to tell you at Unboxing about the book that my 16-year-old saw sitting on the counter, one of those works in translation, and was like, "That looks cool. Would I like that? Can I take this to school?" So, you know, that made my heart sing.

We have books that are on the shorter side, like 224 or less. We have books on the longer side, 450 and up. Lots of books to take you around the world. I told you about the immersive books I gulp down in two days or sometimes... I was going to say closer to two hours. That's an exaggeration, but more like 24 hours. Yes, absolutely. Lots of thorny relationship dramas, a nice amount of magical realism. There's just lots of good stuff in this year's guide.

[00:33:41] GINGER: And aside from the books, both of our communities have so much fun stuff planned. We mentioned bonus episodes. Book club really comes alive in the summer. We have got our readers weekend, we have got Austin in August, and we have a really fun class planned for June that will involve a lot of team members, and a lot of tips for doing just what we hear that you all want to do, which is slow down and savor at certain points in your reading life. And so we're going to share a lot of strategies and tips for that.

So, we have got places in the community. If you want to not just read the books, but you want to talk about them, you want to talk about them with fellow readers, you want to celebrate your reading life and celebrate your reading wins, we would love to have you in either of those communities. They are both such warm and welcoming places. And especially in the summer, we know that we get people that kind of come in and out depending on their reading lives. Hello, so many teachers. We love you.

ANNE: I was just thinking that.

[00:34:39] GINGER: But if this sounds like a place that you would want to be in the summer, or any time of the year, this is a great time to jump in.

ANNE: And we really want to be at your service as you make your reading life work for you. And the Summer Reading Guide can absolutely be your beginning and your end of summer discovery, but it can also be the leaping-off point for summer of lots more discovery and enjoyment. So if you're interested in exploring more, I know many of you are… in our Patreon community, I just released a bonus episode a couple weeks back that was featuring April 2026 releases that I thought were 100% worth talking about, but were not in the pages of the Summer Reading Guide.

So I know many of you often read the guide thinking, "Is she going to include the whatever?" So preemptively, I'm telling you, here's some like early Summer Reading Guide-ish picks, and also if you're wondering where the new book by whoever is, it's not in. I can tell you now, it's right here. And if you want new releases that are already out, they are all out as of now.

[00:35:44] We also do a bonus Patreon episode that we also make available to all our book clubbers. This is always, for several years now, the first bonus after the guide releases, where I go really in-depth and answer so many Summer Reading Guide questions from unboxing and from our community comments in the wake of unboxing. And then our first Patreon mini matchmaking episode after the guide release will be specifically for Summer Reading Guide books, when you're saying, "Okay, Anne, this is what I've enjoyed lately. This is what I haven't. This is what I'm looking for." Readers will often tell me, "These are the Summer Reading Guide books I'm considering. What do you think?" And I'll tell you.

GINGER: It's one of the really nice things about this guide. And I have yet to discover in all the bookish worlds that I inhabit anyone who reads every book that they promote on the guide. And I just want to give you more props. I know you mentioned it, but it is so much work that you put in to reading, and not just vetting and making sure that they are right for the guide, but also the availability to answer questions for these communities to, you know, yeah, clock in, "No, that one probably wouldn't be right for you," or, "Yes, this one sounds right up your alley based on what you've told me." That is a huge part of the work that you put into this, and man, do we as readers get to benefit from that.

[00:37:00] ANNE: Well, one of our core values is trust. Sometimes you readers, our team members, hear me all the time refer back to the values that guide us as a team and me as a creator. And when it comes to trust, I feel like you need to know that I'm not just making stuff up or regurgitating marketing copy. Now, sometimes in our previews I'll say, "This is how the publisher is pitching it," and that is true, and I'll be very clear that I do not have the personal experience there. But in the guide, yeah, I have read every word, and I want you to know what you are getting from us. That's really important.

Maybe I should've started by saying thank you, Ginger. We work hard to make this really good, and I just really hope you all continue to find it a really useful tool, and, like my friend Nikki said, a gateway to reliable reading joy.

And I hadn't planned to talk about our philosophy, not just philosophy, but guidelines, laws about artificial intelligence that we have for our team, but it really just plays right into our team core value of trust. We want to be honest and forthright and dependable in our content, in its delivery.

[00:38:09] We are known, and we've worked hard to be known for our taste, whether or not you think it's good taste, I think you know it's my taste, and for our reliability in, you know, bringing news and opinions and ideas from the book world to you. We really want to celebrate the written word and the people who create the books we love to read. And we want you to know all these books are human-selected. We don't use generative AI. No ChatGPT, no Claude, no Gemini. No algorithms are picking these books. No any computers. No... I mean, I'm using my MacBook, okay? But machines are not writing our blurbs. We don't use digital tools to choose books for our guests or for our blog in any way. And not for the Summer Reading Guide either. All our work is our own.

[00:38:59] And this is the time-consuming, old-fashioned way, and y'all, it kills me to then see our stuff turned around and copied verbatim, and then... This is one of the reasons I'm not on Instagram anymore. It just makes me sad. But we do work hard to create good stuff that you enjoy reading or listening to. We take our reading lives and your reading lives... I hope at the same time, both we don't take ourselves seriously, but we take this stuff really seriously. Life is hard, and good books can be such a source of joy and connection and respite, that really energetic peace and rejuvenating calm, and we want that for you and think you deserve our best effort. And now I'm just going... I repeat myself for emphasis. I just repeat. I really mean it. You can tell because I keep saying it.

GINGER: It is fun work, but it is hard work. I was going to insert a joke here that you can not only trust that these are books that are picked by someone with taste, but you can also just trust that they are actually books that exist. Unlike one certain AI-generated book list that was traveling around the internet last summer. These all do exist.

[00:40:12] ANNE: Which was so funny and also so sad at the same time.

GINGER: Oh, such a moment. Such a moment in time, exactly. These all do exist. You can go to the bookstore and buy them or put them on your library holds list. We promise. That is our solemn vow.

ANNE: And that reminds me, just thinking about the generative AI, we do work really hard. It's expensive and costly in many ways, both financially, in time and energy and labor, to create good stuff for you. And we really ask that you respect the work that went into it. There's a page in the guide that shows all the covers, all the little thumbnail images. It's so pretty. Please don't put that on your Instagram. We would really like to keep that for the people who've gotten the guide.

And we hope you can understand that it hurts when our work is copied or misused, whether that's by the obvious plagiarism that has become more and more of an issue over the years, but also by feeding it for free to those large language models, like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. Please don't copy-paste our stuff in there. We don't want it to be used for training. We don't want it to be remixed, and we would be really grateful if you would refrain from any action that would result in our work being used for that kind of thing. We have a little note in the guide, but it's worth saying again.

[00:41:22] GINGER: This is the one time that imitation is not a sincere form of flattery. Well, I guess we've said a million trillion words about the guide, and so now if you're wondering where you can get that, Anne, you want to tell us?

ANNE: Oh, that does seem important.

GINGER: Yes. Tell us how one would get their hands on a copy digitally or a print guide, and an invite to that Unboxing. Hello, the big book party. I will start off by saying that it is a perk for Patreon members and book club members. If you are already in those spaces, you absolutely know that you are in the right spot. That will hit your inbox as it always has. It will be on all the pages, you know, all the spaces that you know to go look for events and resources.

[00:42:09] But we also offer an à la carte version, and so if you have chosen that those are not the communities that you are willing to commit to right now, totally understand, and we want to make sure that you have the availability to get yourself the guide and also an invite to the unboxing.

ANNE: Please visit modernmrsdarcy.com/srg, for Summer Reading Guide, to get your à la carte copy of the guide. We really would love you to join one of our communities if you are so inclined. That does financially, and really from a morale perspective, support the work we do day in and day out here for What Should I Read Next? And it's, I think, where we put our best stuff.

And you'll hear from more of our team in our communities, What Should I Read Next? Patreon for our bonus episodes and fun events, and Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club for community, classes, and conversation. This is where we host almost monthly author chats, regular classes, member meetups, and all kinds of stuff to help you get more out of your reading life by learning to read better together with your fellow book clubbers.

[00:43:11] GINGER: Can I put in a little plug? Because they are both valid ways to get the guide, à la carte or a member community. But if you are the kind of person who is excited about reading 35 potential blurbs of four books you might want to put on your TBR, and you want to talk about summer reading, and you want to nerd out about what books are going on your list, you might want some more bookish friends. So if that feels right to you, it might just be the place that you find your people, you find your book people, and you find a community. And I would just say, yeah, give it a try. Summer is a great time to find those bookish friends. And if you are the kind of person who nerds out about summer reading, you might find your people there.

ANNE: Indeed, it's a great place to be. And if you were fuzzy on what Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club was at the beginning of this episode, Ginger is our community manager for this space. And so Ginger, I feel like you're always singing the book club song.

[00:44:06] GINGER: I know. It doesn't feel like I have to sell it to anybody because I absolutely believe in this community. It has made me a better reader. I cannot even picture what my reading life would be like, what my reading list would look like without this community. I found out about so many books this way, and I have found so many true friends this way. So I just cannot even imagine my reading life without it. Can you hear me saying, "Come be my friend"?

ANNE: Well, I'm so glad to be your friend and to be a part of it. And if you don't have the time or inclination to join a community, we got you. It's at modernmrsdarcy.com/srg. Okay, I want to acknowledge the next part can be a little bit confusing, but you can also get a hard copy printed guide, Summer Reading Guide, that shows up as a magazine in your inbox via snail mail. You can get that independently, which will not include unboxing or the digital PDF, or you can buy it as an add-on. But that is an option.

[00:45:07] We did it for the first time last year, and the only thing I dislike about it is... I mean, it takes over my house for a couple days, but worth it. The only thing I dislike about it is the terminology. Like, I don't want anyone to be confused. I want you to know what you're getting and get what you expect. But if you are so inclined, or you like the sound of having a print copy, I really encourage you to go this direction.

I did a lot of printing the guide myself here locally in the years between 2012 and 2025, and it is really expensive, and the results are very hit and miss. But Will Bogel has worked just hand-in-hand with our local printers these past couple years. We printed a lot of things to ramp up to doing the guide for the first time last year to make sure we get a gorgeous edition at the lowest cost we can, and order as many as we can. So please order your guide. It makes it more affordable for everybody.

[00:46:05] But we get that nice bulk printing discount. We know we're getting top-notch quality, and we can pass that bulk printing discount along to you. So ordering from us will be cheaper, your result will be better. You'll have to wait for the USPS to bring it to your door, because we don't wrap this thing in March so that we know you'll have it ready and in your hands on May 14th, because I want to read as much as I can to get you as many books. But we do expect to have these in hand, I hope, before May 14th, so it'll be arriving then or shortly thereafter, but we'll definitely be mailing them by May 14th. And if you want one to pop up in your mailbox, we would be delighted to send one your way.

GINGER: It's worth the extra communication because they are really pretty. So it is worth a little extra moment acknowledging that you can get a hard copy because if you are so inclined. Oh, they're so pretty. I miss old school magazines coming to my mailbox, and this is one way to recapture that.

[00:46:57] ANNE: Oh, I still love a magazine. I love a magazine. I mean, the kids say print's coming back.

GINGER: Hear, hear.

ANNE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

GINGER: Love it.

ANNE: My 16-year-old is buying cassette tapes, and I'm here for the hard media resurgence.

GINGER: Oh, man. All right. I'll listen to a 16-year-old, right? Surely they know what's cool.

ANNE: I am so sorry to say that right now we are only shipping to the United States. That has not always been the case, and I hope it will not always be the case. But we're a small business. We cannot keep up with what's happening in the global landscape, and that is the case right now. So if you're in the US or have a US mailing address and want a copy, we would be delighted to send that to you. And we'll have links for everything we talked about in the show notes for today's episode. Oh, too many details? I do love a detail. Look, we want you to know what you need to know.

All right, Ginger, final question, because we gotta end on a more fun note than shipping. Something you're most looking forward to in your summer reading, or something you're most excited for readers to experience with their summer reading?

[00:48:00] GINGER: Ooh, that's a great question. Okay, there could be many answers to this, but I have got to say one thing that we have not talked about is in the guide that I am so excited for people to see, and that is that somehow in the archives, the team that put this together, probably mostly you, Anne, went through and found like 15 standout moments, one from every year. And some of them...

ANNE: That was me.

GINGER: Oh my gosh, I remembered many of those, but there were some that I had completely forgotten about. Delight upon delight upon delight. And so I thought, now, if you've been around here a long time, that is going to be the most blast from the past, look down memory lane. But also, we have had this year of celebration, and I keep thinking, if you are new around here, and you've discovered this warm, bookish community, and you are wondering, "I've got 10 years to catch back up on. I've got 15 years to catch back up on," this is kind of one of those things that's like a little shortcut to "here's the best of the best". And so start here. Check this out. It's not so overwhelming. Here are 10 or 15 things that we loved and that are great memories. I just love that part. It was so fun, and I giggled multiple times. And, I mean, again- it just looks really beautiful, so shout-out to the team who put that together.

[00:49:09] ANNE: It does look really beautiful. So thank you for the compliment for my editorial eye. But also, this year our guide was designed by a What Should I Read Next? alum.

GINGER: That's right.

ANNE: In fact, we first connected when Julie Van Huizen was on the podcast back on March 12th, 2024. She's episode 421, fittingly called Go Ahead, Judge That Book by Its Cover, because she is a designer, and she has an eye for that kind of thing. And so in this year's guide, she brought her eye to our summer reading explorations, and the final result is just, like... I mean, we gushed. We gushed about it.

GINGER: Yeah. Good job, Julie. It's real pretty, as they say. And yeah, what a full-circle moment here on What Should I Read Next?

[00:49:58] ANNE: Full circle. Okay, what I'm looking forward to for our readers this summer, I wish everyone the pleasure of reading and deeply, deeply enjoying a book from a favorite author that caught their eye that they thought, "Oh, that book's for me." And I want them to read it and love it and go, "Yes, that was so worth waiting for." And also, I imagine with joy, and I do wish for them the experience of finding a book that makes them go, "I'm intrigued. I don't even know why. This isn't what I was looking for. I'm going to take a chance on this unfamiliar thing that feels a little bit outside my lane," and read it and go, "Ugh, I had no idea I wanted a book like that, but I'm so glad I read it."

GINGER: Yes. May we all have all of those experiences this summer.

ANNE: All the books, all the things, all the feelings. Oh, Ginger, thank you for joining us as collaborator and co-discoverer and creator.

[00:51:04] GINGER: Thank you for having me, and I am always here to talk about summer reading. I hope to hear from many of you, whether that's in the comments here on the post, in both of our community spaces. I just can't wait to talk more summer reading. Anne, this was a delight to talk with you, and here we go. This begins the most nerdiest time of the year.

ANNE: Ah, the pleasure is mine, and I hope all of yours, and that it's just a really wonderful reading summer.

Readers, I hope you enjoyed our conversation today. I'd love to hear your Summer Reading Guide questions or whether there are any titles you're expecting or hoping to see featured in this year's guide, although mum’s going to be the word, so that thing is out on May 14th. You will find the list of titles that Ginger and I discussed today and all the Summer Reading Guide links and details you need to know at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com. If you want to go in and grab your à la carte access, that's at modernmrsdarcy.com/srg for Summer Reading Guide.

[00:52:06] Follow our show on Instagram at @WhatShouldIReadNext, where our capable, competent, delightful social media manager, Leigh Kramer, will be sharing some behind-the-scenes peeks. And if you do join us for Thursday celebrations, we'd love to ask that you wait to share your excitement about those actual selections so that we don't spoil any surprises for those getting the guide later.

The 2026 Summer Reading Guide is exclusively for our members and à la carte purchasers, so please do avoid spoilers when sharing about the Summer Reading Guide on social media. And thank you so much for supporting the work we do and looking out for your fellow readers.

Please join our email list. This is our favorite way to share all our news and events and happenings for stuff like our Summer Reading Guide, plus our weekly episodes and other bookish happenings. Sign up at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/newsletter.

[00:52:58] Thank you to Ginger Horton for joining me today and to all the people who make the 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.