Booklovers

On this episode we discuss Trust Exercise by Susan Choi and New Waves by Kevin Nguyen. This pair of seemingly disparate titles—one about a performing arts high school, the other about a tech startup—seem like they have little in common, but beyond having striking covers, they both explore what it means for the reader to be able to trust a narrator in contemporary reading. We also talk about our on...

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...

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 The Orp...

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.

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...

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...