Spartanburg County Public Libraries

BookLovers: A Podcast from Spartanburg County Public Libraries

Arts EN ↓ 55 episodes

We’re pop culture obsessives, animal lovers and professional food fans. Our opinions and interests are wide and deep, so the podcast reflects that. We dissect old titles that need a fresh take, brand new stuff that everyone’s talking about, and off-the-beaten-path works that deserve some love. We release episodes every month. The current iteration of Booklovers is focused on sharing our reads with listeners, doing a deep dive on a specific book or topic, and then talking about readalikes in our Reader’s Advisory Corner. We also keep a running list of all of the titles we discuss, from books

Be sure to visit the podcast's website and support the creator: www.spartanburglibraries.org

Author

Spartanburg County Public Libraries

Episodes

Ted Chiang & N.K. Jemisin 16.08.2020 1:35:39

On this episode, Carmanita officially joins Booklovers as a cohost! To celebrate, we discuss two short story collections by award-winning master speculative fiction authors N.K. Jemisin and Ted Chiang. We open with an attempt at defining speculative fiction and then shift to discuss both collections in a general way before finding threads of commonality and contrast across pairs of stories. We clo...

The Orphan Master’s Son 31.07.2020 1:24:13

In this episode, Jess & Joseph tackle The Orphan Master’s Son , Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2012 novel about humanity and survival in North Korea. As with many stories about North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son is grim, violent, and disturbing, but as with many works of fiction, it is also funny, hopeful, and sprinkled with small scenes of joy. We consider the role of a novel like Th...

Lot & Sports is Hell 16.07.2020 1:16:33

On this episode, Jess and Joseph are joined by Carmanita Turner, the media selector for Spartanburg County Public Libraries, to discuss two recent titles that focus on Black life in urban settings: Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington, which takes place in Houston, and Sports Is Hell by Ben Passmore, which takes place in Philadelphia.

LGBTQ+ Graphic Novels Beyond Fun Home 02.07.2020 1:20:28

To cap off Pride Month virtual programming at SCPL, Jess and Joseph review seven recent LGBTQ+ graphic novels, which range from romance and noir to urban fantasy and philosophical nonfiction. Along the way, we talk about the varying styles of the different titles and suggested similar books for interested readers. Time travel, necromancy, smartphone apps that grow mushrooms from your phone, and gr...

My Sister, the Serial Killer & Gone Girl 19.06.2020 1:17:12

In this episode, Jess and Joseph discuss unreliable narration in psychological thrillers by focusing on two big titles from the last decade: Gone Girl , the smash bestseller by Gillian Flynn, which details the disappearance of a woman on her fifth anniversary, and My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, which is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about. Although these novels were...