The Avid Reader Show

From one of today’s leading experts on the emerging science of the microbiome comes a ground-breaking book that offers, for the first time, evidence that the gut-microbiome plays a pivotal role in the health crises of the twenty-first century. In his acclaimed book, The Mind-Gut Connection, physician, UCLA professor, and researcher Dr. Emeran Mayer offered groundbreaking evidence of the critical r...

Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. The Great Man can’t concentrate; he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. With their daughter, Sarah, away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own to care for him. One day, feeling especially isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. Meanwhile, Spence’s estranged son from his first marriage has com...

The Fehler sisters wanted to be more than bug girls but growing up in a fourth- generation family pest control business in rural Missouri, their path was fixed. The family talked about Fehler Family Exterminating at every meal, even when their mom said to separate the business from the family, an impossible task. They tried to escape work with trips to their trailer camp on the Mississippi River,...

Your brain is a collection of maps: detailed representations, scrawled across your brain’s surfaces, of the sights, sounds, and actions that hold the key to your survival. Although scientists began discovering these maps over a century ago, we are only now beginning to unlock their secrets—and comprehend their profound impact on our lives. Brain maps distort and shape our experience of the world,...

In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart, a young American neurosurgeon had an even more ambitiou...

Hailed by George Saunders as “a true original—a wise and wildly talented writer,” Lee Durkee takes readers on a high-stakes cab ride through an unforgettable shift. Meet Lou—a lapsed novelist, struggling Buddhist, and UFO fan—who drives for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a north Mississippi college town. With Uber moving into town and his way of life vanishing, his gir...

A is for aronia, berry member of the apple family, clothes-stainer, superfruit with reputed healing power. D is for durian, endowed with a dramatic rind and a shifting odor—peaches, old garlic. M is for medlar, name-checked by Shakespeare for its crude shape, beloved by gardeners for its flowers. Q is for quince, which, when fresh, gives off the scent of “roses and citrus and rich women’s perfume,...

For millennia, the first four books of the New Testament have not only supported the central tenets of Christianity but have also proved to be formative texts for the modern Western world. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ—but they are perhaps best understood as four separate versions of the same story, showing complex origins, intricate int...

Soon to be a movie! Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find hims...

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of mile...

wise, bighearted, boundlessly joyful novel of love, disaster, and unconventional family Jane falls in love with Duncan easily. He is charming, good-natured, and handsome but unfortunately, he has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne City, Michigan. Jane sees Duncan’s old girlfriends everywhere–at restaurants, at the grocery store, even three towns away. While Jane may be able to come to ter...

Wherever we go, we carry with us our own souls, morals and seeds of creation or destruction. This book, especially in our time, gives the meaning of choice as we head down either of these roads. Amid the Crowd of Stars is a grand scale science fiction novel examining the ethical implications of interstellar travel, a topic rarely addressed in science fiction novels. What responsibilities do we hav...

One of our greatest scientists reveals ten profound insights that remind and explain to each of us how we experience this physical universe we find ourselves in. In Fundamentals, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek provides a window into the very nature of reality, or at least the reality we accept on a quotidian basis. With pleasing and articulate explanations of the deep science beyond the essential co...

When a deadly Fly Flu sweeps the globe, it leaves a shell of the world that once was. Among the survivors are eighteen-year-old Nico and her dog, on a voyage devised by Nico's father to find a mythical portal; a young artist named Kit, raised in an old abandoned cinema; and the enigmatic Deliverer, who lives Life after Life in an attempt to put the world back together. As swarms of infected Flies...

Zero day: a software bug that allows a hacker to break into your devices and move around undetected. One of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, a zero day has the power to silently spy on your iPhone, dismantle the safety controls at a chemical plant, alter an election, and shut down the electric grid (just ask Ukraine). For decades, under cover of classification levels and non-disclosure a...

The renowned biographer’s definitive portrait of a literary titan. Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth’s personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the postwar literar...

Discovered as three notebooks in an antique store in Rome at the turn of the millennium, The Reincarnationist Papers offers a tantalizing glimpse into the Cognomina, a secret society of people who possess total recall of their past lives. Evan Michaels struggles with being different, with having the complete memories of two other people who lived sequentially before him. He fights loneliness and b...

When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discove...

Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to this music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet music is an overlooked part of our origin story. The Musical Human takes us on an exhilarating journey across the ages – from Bach to BTS and back – to explore the vibrant relationship between music and the human species. Wi...

Eleanor Zarrin has been estranged from her wild family for years. When she flees boarding school after a horrifying incident, she goes to the only place she thinks is safe: the home she left behind. But when she gets there, she struggles to fit in with her monstrous relatives, who prowl the woods around the family estate and read fortunes in the guts of birds. Eleanor finds herself desperately try...

Sam asks Rose about when they first discovered T.S. Eliot in this episode of 1Q1A. If you enjoy this bit then be sure to listen to the full episode where Sam and Rose discuss their book "What Big Teeth".

Today our guest is Steven Hall, author of The Raw Sharks Texts a seminal and amazing book that was released almost 14 years ago and published in pretty much every language in the world. It won the Somerset Maugham Award and should be a movie soon. Steven has written for Granta and Lonely Planet and build tons of video games. But today we will be talking about Maxwell’s Demon, Steven’s new book whi...

Sam asks Steven if he still reads the back of cereal boxes. Listen to what Steven has to say. Check out Sam's full interview with Steven on his latest novel, Maxwell's Demon.

He walks the stars embedded in the virtual dome of night and, when he tires of a world, throws a small black stone over his shoulder - and entire societies blink out of existence. The work is necessary, or so he insists. But the Planetbreaker's son has his own ideas. Meanwhile, in 'The Strange Case Of,' Mamatas gleefully blinks sentimental, shopworn ideas out of easy acceptance. 'The Twin Dragons...

He walks the stars embedded in the virtual dome of night and, when he tires of a world, throws a small black stone over his shoulder - and entire societies blink out of existence. The work is necessary, or so he insists. But the Planetbreaker's son has his own ideas. Meanwhile, in 'The Strange Case Of,' Mamatas gleefully blinks sentimental, shopworn ideas out of easy acceptance. 'The Twin Dragons...