I Know What You Read This Summer

This month our roving reporters Kacie and Matt asked staff and younger patrons "What have you been reading this summer and how did you feel about it?" You will hear their honest answers in this episode. Enjoy... and let us know what you've been reading!

Transcript

Michael Pierry: Hello, and welcome to the Hamden Library Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Pierry, and we have another special episode for you. We asked our staff, as well as a few of our younger patrons, "what have you been reading this summer?" And we got some great answers, as you will hear. Special thanks to Matt and Kacie for doing the interviews, and to Morgan and Kacie for recording ads for our book discussion groups. Now, please enjoy this special short episode.

Matt McGregor: Who are you? What did you read this summer and how did you feel about it? 

Johnea Lomax: I'm Johnea. I am one of the LTAs here at the Hamden Public Library. Oh gosh, I have read a lot so far this summer. I recently finished A Song of Achilles and it was pretty phenomenal. I'm a sucker for a good romance, especially when the story is not solely surrounded by the romance, or it's not the main plot point. So, yeah, I love that book. But I just finished The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell. I love Lisa Jewell, one of my favorite authors.

Matt McGregor: Didn't you recommend me another Lisa Jewell book? That podcast one? 

Johnea Lomax: Yes. None of This is True. 

Matt McGregor: None of This is True.

Johnea Lomax: Yes, that's her most recent published book. 

Matt McGregor: I couldn't finish it. It was so off-putting. 

Johnea Lomax: Really? 

Matt McGregor: Yeah. 

Johnea Lomax: You have to push. 

Matt McGregor: I got like a third of the way through and it was--

Johnea Lomax: You have to push to the end. That's really, like, her books, I find that, like, in the beginning, it's a very slow start. You get to the middle and that's when the mystery really starts to unfold. And then the end - it starts to ramp up and you're waiting to see how the book is going to end. 

Matt McGregor: Yeah, but you're telling me that this feeling that I've been having through the first third of the book is just going to continue getting worse through the rest of the book.

Johnea Lomax: I don't feel that way! [Laughter] I don't feel that way about her books. I feel like her books in the beginning are very slow. And they're meant to make you uneasy. And then as the book starts to progress and the mystery starts to unfold of what actually happened and the events that occurred, because a lot of her books come from different perspectives, then everything starts to meld, and you start to get the whole picture, and that uneasiness dissipates eventually. 

Matt McGregor: I don't believe you. [Laughter]

Johnea Lomax: I will say, the one I just finished, The Night She Disappeared, that one actually, I felt the uneasiness to the very end, and the ending I did not see coming, actually. 

Matt McGregor: Okay. 

Johnea Lomax: Yeah. 

Matt McGregor: All right. 

Johnea Lomax: So. 

Matt McGregor: All right. 

Johnea Lomax: Yeah. One of my favorite authors. 

Matt McGregor: Anything else you want to talk about? 

Johnea Lomax: I enjoy reading kids books, too, and I've recently finished the most recent installment of Cornbread and Poppy. 

Matt McGregor: Oh. 

Johnea Lomax: For the win. 

Thanks again. Thanks. Great. Good. Yeah. Very good book. Okay. Thanks so much for talking to me about your summer reads. Thanks for having me. Okay. 

Rachel Macri: I'm Rachel. I'm a page at the Hamden Library. And yesterday I read How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix. I'm not sure what I felt about it.

It was probably one of the most horrifying books I've ever read. 

Matt McGregor: Is that good for you or bad for you? 

Rachel Macri: That's bad. Normally, I like dragons, magic, anything like that. 

Matt McGregor: Sure.

Rachel Macri: So I think I got this book from Amazon First Reads, so I figured I would read it. It sounded interesting. If you don't like scary dolls, eye injuries, or amputations, this book is not for you.

Matt McGregor: Ooh, so powerful, but maybe not what you wanted.

Rachel Macri: No.

Matt McGregor: Okay. 

Rachel Macri: No, it was Like I said, it was horrifying. 

Matt McGregor: Someone's gonna like it. 

Rachel Macri: Yes. 

Matt McGregor: Okay.

Rachel Macri: I have no doubt I mean, it was a good book. It was just I don't. Eye injuries and amputations scare me. But it was a good book, I will give them that. 

Matt McGregor: Yeah, yeah. I I can see what you're where you're coming from. I read, um, uh, Beneath the Trees Where No One Sees, which is a graphic novel about a serial killer bear, and it was really gory and off putting, but it was good. I, I read it, and I don't finish everything I read, and it sounds like you finished this. 

Rachel Macri: I did. It was, like I said, it was a good book. It was just those two things I don't care to hear about.

Okay. Thanks so much for telling me about your summer read. You're welcome. 

Dave Scanlon: My name is Dave Scanlon. Recently, during my summer reading, I read 3:10 to Yuma by Elmore Leonard, and it was a wild ride. Wonderful.

Matt McGregor: I know nothing about it. I know they made it into a movie. 

Dave Scanlon: Short story, and it was, it's a Western, and leans into every Western cliche.

It's essentially a few pages of just, "how do you build a story entirely out of cliches?"

An example that doesn't necessarily happen in the story. But if I was going to pretend to be writing a story, it'd be something like this. 

Matt McGregor: Dave's 3:10 to Yuma, 3:11. 

Dave Scanlon: And be like, "why do you do it, Sharon?" "Well, it beats working beef, kid."

Dialogue like that. Plus gunfights, you get on a train, boom, done. 

Matt McGregor: How long is this book? 

Dave Scanlon: I, we'd have to check. Somewhere between 7 and 10 pages. 

Matt McGregor: Oh, so it's a short story. 

Dave Scanlon: Very short. You could knock it out in minutes. 

Matt McGregor: This is, must be incredibly dense, or just packed, packed with stuff. 

Dave Scanlon: I mean, the amount of ammunition in 10 pages is wild.

Matt McGregor: Uh, so if you want a summer read that really moves, uh, check out 3:10 to Yuma. Thanks for telling us about your summer read. 

Dave Scanlon: Absolutely. 

Frank Jonietz: I've read, in succession, four books on the same theme. First one is The River of Light by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. This is a book about, well, ostensibly about Jewish mysticism, but it goes deeper than that into other forms of mysticism.

The second book I read was Spinning Straw into Gold by author, late Joan Gould. She wrote for a number of the big magazines in New York. And this is about stories about women's lives and how the myth plays into them. And she went into, you know, ancient stories like Red Riding Hood and Snow White and how you see those in

women's stories, contemplate, she took Eleanor Roosevelt's life and compared that to these stories that, um, were mythic stories and showed how her life played out along this mythic theme. And the next one was Karen Armstrong and, uh, it's called Sacred Earth. It's, it's very complex, but the simple thing is, is she was pointing out that our relationship with the earth is not going to be repaired by our technology. 

It's not good. Technology is not going to save us. That's the message. Is that we need to reconnect with the earth in ways that, you know, ancient peoples had connected with, and we'd lost that connection, particularly during the enlightenment, when there was this split between logos and mythos.

And that led me to her next book, which is in a collection. It's called A Short History of Myth, which is a very slim book. And, um, she's looking at myths generally and how myth evolved from early hunter gatherer societies and how myths have changed with the changes in the way we live, but they're still going back to something, uh, ancient.

And one of the things that she pointed out, for example, I did not realize, for example, Islam is a much more cyclical religion than Christianity. I mean, Christianity is fairly linear, you know, beginning and the end times. Whereas other religions, you know, like Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, they all are cyclical.

It's like, like death is not the end, but it is a re beginning. 

Matt McGregor: Thanks for, uh, thanks for talking to me about what you've been reading this summer. 

Frank Jonietz: Hey, you know, I love to hear the sound of my own voice. 

Matt McGregor: Well, I hope the listeners like to hear you too. 

Joanna Pfaff: My name is Joanna. I'm a branch librarian at the Hamden Library here.

And, um, for the past couple of years I've been doing Sort of an online book group for my summer reading, which uses six books to read over the course of the summer, so it becomes about a book every two weeks. Which sometimes is more successful than others. But so far, I've actually read three books with this group already.

Matt McGregor: Okay, okay. 

Joanna Pfaff: And so the first book we read was James, which is a retelling of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the Slave Jim's perspective by Percival Everett. And this is only the second book of his I've read. But I've never actually read the whole book of Huckleberry Finn either, so it was an interesting experience.

Let's see, the second book we read was Wandering Stars, which I didn't realize was like a direct companion to the author Tommy Orange's first book, There, There. 

Matt McGregor: Yes. 

Joanna Pfaff: So, the, um, like I said, since this is an online group that we're doing it, we've had discussions about it. And we consist. The consensus seems to be that you get more out of Wandering Stars if you've read There, There first, because like I said, it's almost a direct continuation.

But even so, I thought, I thought it was interesting, but I think it was interesting because it was split into two distinct parts, where it's like the first half was sort of like the history of this family going back to like the 1800s, and then the second half was like. The family from the first book and like what happened in the direct aftermath of the first book.

Matt McGregor: Right.

Joanna Pfaff: And it didn't really come together in that sense because you know, because it was the history going back to the 1800s You just got like a broad stroke of each individual person that the author highlighted.

Matt McGregor: Right.

Joanna Pfaff: And then you got a very focused Look at the family. 

Matt McGregor: You've got an epilogue for a book you've never read.

Joanna Pfaff: Pretty much, yeah. But I mean, even, even, even if I had read the book, I feel like the two parts wouldn't necessarily fit together as well. Just because they were so different in format. 

Matt McGregor: Right, I could see that. Maybe, maybe There, There would give you enough context to tie it all together. 

Joanna Pfaff: Maybe, maybe. Yeah, after the summer I might go back and, and go back and do that, but right now I've got to keep reading the books.

Matt McGregor: And what's the third book? 

Joanna Pfaff: The third book that we just finished, uh, we just had our last discussion for it yesterday was Martyr. 

Matt McGregor: Yes. 

Joanna Pfaff: By Kaveh Akbar. 

Matt McGregor: Mm hmm. 

Joanna Pfaff: And that was, it was sort of similar in, in structure to, um, Wandering Stars in that it jumped around in time. So, but, sorry, I, I say similar in structure as in

having different time periods and such, but--

Matt McGregor: right. 

Joanna Pfaff: There's one main character, but we also get like chapters from the perspective of the main character's father and his mother and even his best friend at some point. 

Matt McGregor: Sure, 

Joanna Pfaff: but it's kind of scattered throughout. 

Matt McGregor: Yes.

Joanna Pfaff: Whereas, whereas with wandering stars, it was, here's all the history and here's the present day. 

Matt McGregor: Okay, so a little bit more like um 

Joanna Pfaff: A little more scattershot. 

Matt McGregor: Cloud Atlas. 

Joanna Pfaff: Not exactly like that, because Cloud Atlas is like, you know, nesting dolls. 

Matt McGregor: The other one, where you just had two dolls. Oh, I guess not, because you go in and then back out. Nesting dolls is a really great way, That's much more elegant than how I thought of it, which was an onion.

Joanna Pfaff: Well, I guess it's kind of like an Onion too, if you think about it that way. But no, I think the idea is like nesting dolls, and then you come Cause like, you have the two parts of it. 

Matt McGregor: Yes, yes, yes, yes. 

Joanna Pfaff: But yeah, no, no, with Martyr, like I said, you've got the main character, and then every other chapter or so will be either from someone else's perspective, Or it'll be like, he has dreams where characters, like real characters, and, I mean not like real, characters from his life will talk to like fictional characters or like celebrities or some such and have some sort of philosophical conversation.

Matt McGregor: Interesting. 

Joanna Pfaff: It was, it was interesting. I'm not 100 percent sure. How those tied into the overall narrative, but it was an interesting diversion, you know, it kept, it kept the book from getting, you know, stale, not, stale's not the right word, but. 

Matt McGregor: But you finished all of them. 

Joanna Pfaff: I did, yeah. You finished all three. I finished all of them so far. 

Matt McGregor: You finished Wandering Star and you finished Martyr and you finished, um. 

Joanna Pfaff: James. 

Matt McGregor: James. Uh, I mean, that's more than, I put down most books, uh, not even halfway through. 

Joanna Pfaff: Well, I think again, Like I said, this is the third year I've done it, and last year I did actually not finish one of the books just because I was like, reading the same words over and over and just not getting it.

Matt McGregor: No, we've all been there. 

Joanna Pfaff: Yeah, but like I said, but most of the time, the books, they choose books that are, you know, easy to do in the two weeks. Although I think they're straining it a little bit with the book that we've just started, which is The Book of Love by Kelly Link, which is over 600 pages. 

Matt McGregor: I remembered being 

Joanna Pfaff: reading this in two weeks.

That's asking a bit much, but I'm going to try. I'm doing my best. 

Matt McGregor: I hope it moves. 

Joanna Pfaff: Well, I've read a few chapters already. It's weird, but it lets you know it's weird up front. 

Matt McGregor: Okay. 

Joanna Pfaff: So I feel like I can roll with it. But I'm curious how they're going to spin this whole story out into 600 pages. 

Matt McGregor: Okay. 

Joanna Pfaff: We'll see.

Matt McGregor: Thanks for talking to me about your summer read. 

Joanna Pfaff: Ah, no, it's been interesting. 

Matt McGregor: It sounds great. And have a lovely day. 

Joanna Pfaff: Thanks, you too. 

Hi, this is Lauren. Um, the first book I read this summer was We Were the Lucky Ones, and I really enjoyed it. I enjoy books that do, um, have World War II as a setting, and it was, um, It really made you just appreciate the freedom that you have.

And it's just amazing how resilient, um, survivors were of, um, World War II. Um, if you haven't read the book, it takes place in Poland, um, post, um, 1939, after the Nazis had invaded Poland. And it was just incredible how this family, um, they were separated during the, um, Um, during the takeover and how they all survived and how at the end, um, each of their stories, everything is, is tied together.

So it was, it was amazing and it is based on a true story. So I certainly recommend it. 

Morgan Gagne: The August book discussion pick is Anne Napolitano's 2023 novel and Oprah book club pick Hello Beautiful. An homage to Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women, Hello Beautiful is an immersive and deeply moving family saga Come talk about Hello Beautiful with us on Monday, August 26th at 6:30, either in person or online.

You can learn more about Hello Beautiful and the book discussion group by visiting Miller Library's information desk or our website at www. hamdenlibrary. org. 

Kacie Meixell: This episode's kids book reviews are brought to you by The Page Turners, Hamden Library's super cool book club just for kids. Find out more about The Page Turners on our website, hamdenlibrary.

org. 

Page Turners: Hi, my name is Rithanya, and the best thing I've read this summer was, actually, I can't decide because there's a lot of books that I read, but one of my favorites was Daughter of the Deep because it was a long book and I liked all the ups and downs of the book. And the second one was The Penderwicks. I really liked it because it was funny, fun, and really nice.

Hi, I'm Desi, and my favorite book in the season was The Lost Hero. And my favorite part is when Leo finds Hephaestus.

Hi, my name is Devera, and my favorite book I've read this summer is the Percy Jackson series, Trials of Apollo. It's about the Greek god Apollo comes down to Earth as a human and has to complete a bunch of tasks to become a god again.

My name is Brady and my favorite book this summer was Green Glass House. And my favorite part was when they made up a game and I don't remember what it was called. But it was really, it sounded really fun. I, and I think everyone should read that book.

Michael Pierry: That's all we have for you this month. Don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It really helps. If you're listening on our website, you can also send us a text message from your phone. Just tap more info and then send a text message. We would love to hear from you.