The Perks Of Being A Book Lover Podcast

We are all about summer reading this week and Carmichael's Books bookseller extrordinaire Sam Miller gives us all kinds of ideas to make this a great reading season. Books mentioned-- 1- Confessions of Catherine de Medici by C.W. Gortner 2- The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Delila Harris 3- All's Well by Mona Awad 4- Out of the Diaspora --Tragic Magic by Wesley Brown 5- Out of the Diaspora--Praiseson...

Every season one of our favorite episodes is when we get to chat with a book lover who grew up in a country other than the United States. We’ve had guests from Somalia, Ireland and Germany. Today we have Maram Taibah; a fantasy author and screenwriter. We were anxious to talk to her about two things really. She is a bookover who grew up in Saudi Arabia. She now resides in Ontario Canada. She has p...

Our guest this week is Joziah Jason, a 5th grader from Ypsilanti Michigan who has his own bookish podcast, R.E.A.D. Books with Joziah. Each episode he picks a book and dicusses it with guests. He was inspired by the Read with the Barber program in his town. For this program, kids read a book to the barber during their haircut for a haircut and earn $2 as well as confidence in their reading skills....

May is Mental Health Awareness month so this week we decided to interview 2 authors whose new memoirs deal with their mental health issues and the addictions that resulted from those issues. There is hardly a family who hasn’t been touched in some way by mental illness. For so many years, mental illness in all its forms--anxiety, depression, suicide or bipolar disorder--were kept under wraps which...

This week we are getting in the “spirit” of the first Saturday of May; a date that is sacrosanct for many Kentuckians because of the running of the Kentucky Derby. A love of horses and bourbon whiskey are high on the list of things that Kentuckians are proud of and want to export to the rest of the world. Bourbon is big business in our region and has had a surge in popularity over the last decade;...

COVID has been hard for those among us who like to travel, but one of our favorite ways to assuage that desire is to read books set in different locations. Sweeping meadows. Mountains that touch the sky. Exotic locales. These places can whisk us from our humdrum homes. A Strong Sense of Place is both a podcast and a website where readers can find interesting bookish conversations with our guest th...

There is a pop psychology theory about left brain and right brain dominance from the 1980s. Supposedly those with strong right brains are the analyzers and those with dominant left brains are the artists. In this scenario, it is a rare person who is lucky enough to have both sides of their brain work harmoniously; their logical and scientific right brain plays nicely with the creative and imaginat...

Remember in high school or college when you were required to take a certain number of humanities classes? Maybe you groaned or rolled your eyes. But maybe it was the spark that lit an interest in subjects that helped you think critically and creatively. It was in a high school humanities class that Carrie was introduced to and fell in love with E. M. Forster’s novel A Room With a View. For me, an...

Our guest this week, Tori Murden McClure, is a Renaissance woman. She has a law degree, a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard as well as a Master of Fine Arts from Spalding University, the institution where she currently serves as President. She was the first woman and first American to ski 750 miles to the geographic South Pole. She worked as an assistant to Muhammad Ali at the Ali Center, and...

The famous American author Truman Capote once said, ”Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.” Capote’s own life is the subject of the one man play, Tru, written by Jay Presson Allen which appeared on Broadway in 1989. The play is now being performed by local theater company Pandora Productions, a group that focuses on producing plays by and/or about LGBTQ people, as an on-de...

Historically, the voices we’ve heard most in books and literature have been those of white men, and even though there has been a movement to include more varied voices, there are still stories we don’t often hear. The Louisville Story Program, however, is a nonprofit organization focused on helping the stories that don’t often get heard come to light. The first person narrative stories are made in...

When I say the word “zoo” your first thought is probably elephants or giraffes; maybe a great memory of going on a school field trip or of taking your own children there for a special outing. A word you probably don’t associate with a zoo is “Book club”. But our guest today, Katy Morrison, a zoo educator at the Louisville Zoo, wants to broaden your vision a bit. At the beginning of the pandemic, s...

Sometimes it only takes a spark to start a fire. For writer and activist Farrah Alexander, the small flicker of an idea that eventually became her first book was her January 2017 participation in the historic Women's March in Washington DC. She encountered so many women who were emboldened to make change but weren’t sure how to channel their energies. Farrah wrote her book titled Raising the Resis...

February is Black History month and while we believe Black authors should be read any and all times of the year, this month can sometimes be the impetus readers need to help them discover new-to-them Black writers. Not only can you experience Black art through literature, you can see it in the theater where a play is brought to life and someone else’s reality is laid bare before the audience. Our...

This week we travel to Eastern Kentucky to the town of Morehead in our quest to explore cool independent bookstores in our region. Morehead is home to a little over 7,000 residents and Morehead State University. The university as well as the regional medical center in town give the community a diverse makeup. And it’s location inside Daniel Boone National Forest and the head of the Sheltowee Trace...

This coming Sunday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, and we couldn’t pass up an opportunity to talk about the genre of romance. If you are of a certain age, you may most associate romance novels with Fabio, the long-haired king of Romance novel covers. But romance is a very wide umbrella. There are historical romances like the books that inspired the Netflix series Bridgerton, classical romances (...

If you are listening to this podcast, you probably appreciate a good book. You can pick up a paperback or read a digital copy on your e-reader whenever you have spare time. But imagine if you didn’t have the ability to see the words on the page? Blindness doesn’t make a person any less of a book lover but it sure does make reading them more complicated. We assumed that technology would make things...

If you are a book lover, you are probably also a library lover. Those two things just go together, like peanut butter and jelly or Sherlock and Watson. Some book lovers not only visit their local libraries all the time, but they also visit libraries when they travel. Carrie, for example, checked out Maison de la litterature in Quebec City when she visited several years ago. It is cool to see what...

Our guest this week, Danica Novgorodoff, is a writer, graphic novelist, and illustrator who has written 3 of her own graphic novels but her work has received some extra special attention recently.  She is the illustrator of the new graphic novel edition of Jason Reynolds’ award winning young adult novel Long Way Down.  She believes she was chosen for the book partly because of her special use of w...

***Listeners, this week we have our last replay episode before we start back with Season 4 next week with an all new group of fascinating bookish guests. We’ve been recording over the hiatus, and we are excited to introduce you to more book lovers in just a few more days. Our rebroadcast this week is from Season 3, episode 58 with Clare Wallace, the executive director of South Louisville Community...

This week we wanted to revisit an interview we did with Cassie Chambers. Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of J. D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close has sparked quite a debate bordering on controversy in America this fall about Vance’s assertion as to the motivations and plight of Appalachian people. Many authors from this region have wanted to push back on that a bit...

2020 has been one for the books, hasn’t it. See my pun there? A worldwide pandemic, a truly historic election, racial unrest, murder hornets, shortages of toilet paper, and massive fires in California are just a few weird things that happened this year; we all took solace where we could. For book lovers like us, it usually meant a book but could also include new hobbies like puzzles and baking for...

There is a saying, “If you want a happy ending, read a cookbook”. Our guest, Laura Lucchese, is in a book club that always ends well because her group reads and then produces a group meal from cookbooks. James Beard, the great culinary expert said, food is our common ground, a universal experience. In our mind, to bring books and food together is a match made in heaven. Laura tells us how many coo...

If you are a book lover of a certain age, you may have spent a lot of time reading authors like Judy Blume, Paula Danziger, Gary Paulsen, or Christopher Pike when you were a teenager. Although books began to be categorized as ‘young adult” as early as the 1960s, when we were teens we didn’t know that, and we certainly didn’t care what the boring grownups were calling the books we gravitated to. Wh...

Our guest this week, Tori Murden McClure, is a Renaissance woman. She has a law degree, a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard as well as a Master of Fine Arts from Spalding University, the institution where she currently serves as President. She was the first woman and first American to ski 750 miles to the geographic South Pole. She worked as an assistant to Muhammad Ali at the Ali Center, and...