[00:00:00] ANNE BOGEL: Hey readers, I’m Anne Bogel and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that’s dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don’t get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read. Every week we’ll talk all things books and reading and do a little literary matchmaking with one guest.
Before we jump into today’s conversation, I want to tell you about what we have been working on for months behind the scenes at What Should I Read Next? HQ. We have a brand new collection of bookish merchandise for you just in time for fall.
Now, of course, we have the good stuff we had from spring. We have our book camp sweatshirts, which Will Bogel is wearing his right now. We have our What Should I Read Next? and I’d Rather Be Reading t-shirts. We have still discounted bookplates. You can buy all my books. They’ll be signed for you from the shop.
[00:01:10] We have our stickers you love so much in the spring. And we have an exciting new collection of stickers that are so wonderful and fun, perfect for your book journal, your laptop, your water bottle, wherever you like to stick your stickers. These are so beautiful.
And for the first time, well, the first time since 2017, we have a new collection of pin-back buttons. Y’all, we were going to design six, but we ended up with more designs because they’re all so good. I just can’t wait for you to check them out. Go to modernmrsdarcy.com/shop. That’s where you can see all the designs and order yours.
We are also getting excited for our upcoming Fall Book Preview that is happening on September 18th. This year we are trying an experiment for fall. I don’t know if we’ll do it again. We’ll see how it goes.
But we are offering a printed copy in addition to the digital PDF Fall Book Preview booklet that comes with your Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club or Patreon membership because those members enjoy Fall Book Preview as a perk of belonging to that community. Or when you get your a la carte access, you get that digital PDF.
[00:02:19] Now, for the first time, we are offering the option to order a printed guide in addition to that digital PDF that comes as part of our Fall Book Preview experience.
If you would like to add on a printed Fall Book Preview booklet, it’s 12 pages. It’s beautiful. It’s useful. Many of you like to tuck these in your book journal, take it with you to the library. We hear a lot of you are still looking at your Fall Book Previews from 2021, 2022, even just last year, because those books are available at the library a lot sooner than the fall 2024 new hot releases.
Although I will say a big perk of participating in our Fall Book Preview is you hear about the big books of fall that are going to be high in demand, and you hear about them soon. We’re hosting this event on September 18th.
But if you would like our printed booklet in addition, you can go to our shop and order that if you are one of our readers. That’s modernmrsdarcy.com/shop.
[00:03:19] If you are one of our patrons or Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club members, thank you. We are sharing your link to order your printed Fall Book Preview booklet. If you would like one, this is completely optional, and it is in addition to the digital Fall Book Preview PDF booklet that comes with your Fall Book Preview experience. We have shared those links in each community for you to add on a printed booklet.
If you’re not a la carte person, thank you. We make this option available by popular demand because so many of you say you don’t have the time or inclination to join a community, but you do not want to miss out on this experience.
Well, you do not need to miss out on the experience or the booklet either. You can sign up at modernmrsdarcy.com/shop for your Fall Book Preview access, and you can add on an extra Fall Book Preview printed booklet if you so choose.
We are mailing these on Fall Book Preview event day. That is September 18th. They will go in the mail that day.
[00:04:17] We’re really excited to offer this option. This is an experiment. We’re curious to see how it goes. But we always love putting good stuff in your hands in whatever format works best for you.
If you’d like the full lowdown on Fall Book Preview, that is at modernmrsdarcy.com/FBP for Fall Book Preview. Of course, we will include all these links in our show notes, so you don’t have to jot them down while driving or folding laundry or whatever you’re doing while listening to What Should I Read Next?
Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. We’re happy to be reading with you now and on into the fall.
Readers, today’s guest, Hunter, is joining me from Philadelphia, where he recently moved with his husband and their dog.
Hunter’s tastes lean to literary fiction, which manifests in his reading life in all kinds of interesting ways, some of which I knew we were going to talk about today, and I was so looking forward to it, some of which totally surprised me. I love this on every level.
[00:05:16] Today, we discuss Hunter’s years-long project, reading National Book Award longlisted titles, and we get into the personalities of that award and some of the other big book awards as well, plus his frequent habit of rereading books, especially books he doesn’t like on the first pass.
Hunter loves books that are messy and murky and don’t necessarily offer clear answers. At this moment in his reading life, when he’s feeling like he’s in a little bit of a funk, he’s looking for writing that is striking on a sentence level, perhaps a little bit weird, and unlike the majority of what’s coming out right now.
I’ve wanted to host Hunter on the show for ages and found this conversation to be well worth waiting for. I piled up my To Be Read list with titles I’m excited to read next because of how Hunter described them. I know I won’t be the only one. Let’s get to it.
Hunter, welcome to the show.
HUNTER: Thanks so much for having me.
ANNE: Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. Thank you for coming on.
HUNTER: Yeah, it’s fun. We met in person back in… I think it was like late April when you were interviewing Lauren Groff.
[00:06:17] ANNE: Yes, when I was in the great town of Tallahassee. You know, I just finished a book that had a lot happening in Tallahassee, coincidentally. Good timing this week. Tallahassee on the brain.
HUNTER: Perfect.
ANNE: Yeah. Were you getting ready to leave Tallahassee at that point?
HUNTER: I moved a month later, which is so funny because right before I moved, I was like, “I’ve been so excited to get out of Florida.” And then the second I left, I was like, “Wait, what am I doing?”
ANNE: Well, I hope you’re settling in. Tell us where you are now.
HUNTER: Oh, yeah, my husband and I just moved to Philadelphia. Actually, it’s very lovely here and it is hot enough that I still feel like I’m in Florida. So it’s not that far from my feelings of home.
ANNE: Oh, I don’t know that that’s a compliment, though, as we record in late summer. But we have a long history of big Philadelphia residents and fans on the podcast. So I hope that very soon we can count you among them. As a fan, not the resident.
HUNTER: Yes.
[00:07:17] ANNE: Okay, good. I’m glad to hear that. Well, tell us more about yourself. We want to give our listeners a glimpse of who you are.
HUNTER: I was raised in South Georgia. I’ve always referred to it as the buckle of the Bible Belt. It’s so funny. Actually, when I was younger, I was not a very good reader. I didn’t know I wasn’t a good reader until my granny got called in from… My teacher called her in and said, “Hunter can’t read.”
And I was so stunned because I thought I was a great reader. Then I felt like I had to prove something to her and so then I just kind of became this voracious reader of all types of books. Then I guess I was looking for community, and so I started doing Bookstagram @ShelfbyShelf.
I don’t have a life outside of writing and reading, except for I guess… I mean, I eat a lot of fried chicken and cupcakes, and I watch my best friend’s wedding, but there’s not much more to me besides that.
ANNE: How old were you when your granny got that faded call?
[00:08:12] HUNTER: I was seven. It’s so funny, because I’d been reading the Bible with her every morning at 6 a.m. So she was like, “I don’t understand how he’s having such trouble.” But I think I’d memorized the scriptures that she’d read and was just like recounting them verbatim.
ANNE: You fooled your granny, but not your teacher.
HUNTER: No. She was like, “You were struggling with Dr. Seuss. So we need to get on it.”
ANNE: Yeah. Well, I would love to hear more, like in practical terms, what’s your reading life like? So you’re a big reader, a big Bookstagrammer, but how do you implement that in your day-to-day, these days?
HUNTER: Basically, every morning I wake up and before I go to the gym, I read a chapter or two, typically like 20-30 pages of a book. And then I listen to an audiobook while I’m in the car or when I’m walking somewhere, or I’ll have an eBook on my phone.
I’m just constantly reading all throughout the day. I used to work for the Board of Veterinary Medicine in Florida, and I would just read in between everything I was… all my paperwork. And then I read for like an hour or two before bed every night. I typically juggle three to four books. I would typically read a novel, a short story collection, an essay collection, and a memoir.
[00:09:25] ANNE: Ooh. In the mix at any given time?
HUNTER: Yeah. I try not to read two novels at once or two memoirs at once, because I don’t want to like… In my mind, it’s easier to kind of keep things separate if I just read one of each at each time.
ANNE: Something else we noticed from your submission is that you are a devoted re-reader. And that stood out to us at What Should I Read Next? HQ, because we don’t hear that a lot. We hear from a lot of people who wish they were re-readers or want to make a plan to revisit books that they’ve read in the past, but not very often from readers who actually do. Would you say more?
HUNTER: Whenever I re-read a book, it feels very much like entering into a time machine, because I always know where I was mentally and emotionally, especially at the time I first read a book. I’ve re-read White Oleander by Janet Fitch probably 20 times now.
ANNE: I’ve never read that.
HUNTER: I don’t know if it’s great, or if it just resonated so much with me when I first read it that it’s just kind of imprinted itself onto me at this point.
[00:10:30] Also, you know, I write a lot. And because of that… It’s so funny. I write a lot and so I re-read a lot to kind of study what people are doing. But then I always end up getting sucked back into the same books I love.
I’ve re-read Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff I think 12 or 13 times. And each time I’m studying it, I’m like, “Oh, yes, I see what she’s doing.” And then 30 pages later, I completely forgot to observe anything because I’m just invested again in that beautiful language.
ANNE: That’s such a compliment to a book though, when you go for research to look something up, and next thing you know you’re like 19 chapters later on.
HUNTER: Yeah.
ANNE: Why that one?
HUNTER: I don’t know why, but I have an obsession with marriage. And I think it’s because almost everyone in my family is a serial marrier. They’ve all had like four or five, six spouses in their lives.
I’ve been married for almost 8 years with my husband. We started dating almost 12 years ago, and we have the record for the longest-lasting first marriage in my family. So I think that I just have this weird obsession with what marriage looks like, what it is.
[00:11:33] I think that’s also why I love Middlemarch, because Middlemarch also has an obsession with marriage. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I do. I re-read a lot of books about marriage.
I also re-read a lot of books about coming of age with absent mothers, which is like… it probably is so revealing. But like The Goldfinch, Swamplandia!, a lot of Pulitzer Prize winners are books with absent mothers. The Nix by Nathan Hill, I think. Those are things that I’ve noticed re-occurring patterns of.
ANNE: How did you notice those patterns? Like, did you see it yourself or did someone point it out to you? I just think it’s so hard to get a read on our own reading lives, because we’re so close to what’s happening and we have so many data points.
HUNTER: Honestly, it’s so funny. I think that it’s doing Instagram and giving book recommendations, I began to notice the patterns just based on what books I was recommending, because I realized that at one point I was recommending books like White Oleander by Janet Fitch, and Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, or Marlena by Julie Buntin, or History of Wolves. I can’t remember who wrote that.
[00:12:44] But I noticed a lot of books that had similarities to them as far as books about young girls being raised in these really different environments, and it really kind of captured the landscape. So I would notice these re-occurring things that I was drawn to.
Once I saw what books I was most drawn to, then I started to kind of reflect and ask myself, why am I drawn to those things? And I realized that I’m really obsessed with myself, and I want to figure myself out. So that’s why I’m constantly reading these books.
ANNE: And fiction is a great way to do that.
HUNTER: Mm-hmm.
ANNE: Okay, that’s so interesting. So, Hunter, we’ve been talking about you coming on the show for a while now. And I was thinking, based on what you read, which I’m not in your head, I don’t see your bookshelves, but I perceive you reading mostly literary fiction. Like you’re reading the serious stuff.
And we thought that early fall would be a great time to kind of tone shift into… I mean, September and October is when lots of people are thinking about the big literary titles of the year, because that’s when they’re published, and it’s back to school season, and everybody has their campus novel lists.
[00:13:52] And sure, some of those can be fun and fluffy. But a lot of times that’s serious literature. So you’re saying, Mm-hmm, tell me more about what you enjoy reading.
HUNTER: So when I was 18, I had this idea that I was going to read all of the important books so I could be cultured because all of my friends went off to college, and I did not go. And I was like, “Well, I’ll just be cultured.” So I read a bunch of Pulitzer Prize winners, and then I read a bunch of National Book Award winners.
Then a couple years ago I set off on this project of reading like every single National Book Award fiction longlister from 1950 to now. I’m almost done with the project, but it’s been quite an undertaking. But I guess I love mess. I love how murky the… there’s no real clear answers in a lot of literary fiction. Yeah, they challenge you not just on a subject level a lot of the time, but they’re also challenging you structurally. I think you find some of the most beautiful sentences in those kind of books.
[00:14:55] ANNE: Not everyone is as interested in beautiful sentences as I imagine you are. Can you say more? I mean, I love a beautiful sentence.
HUNTER: I think I first realized I… So back in 2013, I think, I first read the short story Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx. And there is this beautiful sentence that starts with the two men kissing and there’s a quick shift in this little dependent clause in the middle of the sentence where it describes one of the wives noted like looking in and catching them in the moment, but it turns right back to this passion that these two men have. And it’s so quick that you almost miss it, but it’s so startling.
And I thought the fact that you could create almost an entire novel’s worth of feeling and meaning into one sentence was just so powerful to me. And I just loved that. So I think that things like that and having like a perfect last line for a book that really just…
[00:15:57] I think about Middlemarch’s last line all the time. I think that a great line, I don’t know, it just imprints itself into your mind and it makes you… There’s something about someone articulating a feeling or thought that you’ve had but could never quite express and doing it better than you ever thought you could ever do. That’s really powerful to me.
ANNE: Now I feel like we need to share Middlemarch’s last line. It’s Dorothea, it’s like the effect she has on those around her. Yeah?
HUNTER: Yes. I’m pretty sure that the last line is, “but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rested in unvisited tombs.”
ANNE: Oooh. Okay, that’s a great line and also a very impressive party trick.
[00:16:55] HUNTER: Yeah. Whenever I met Lauren Groff for the first time, I basically quoted half of Fates and Furies to her and I think she was both impressed and afraid.
ANNE: Okay. You know what that makes me think of? I never put these two things together before, but I love Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. It’s a book I’ve read many times and it took me forever to figure out the meaning of the title.
And it comes from a Robert Frost poem that begins: I could give all to Time except – except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with?
They’re saying the same thing. Like here are unhistorical acts saved on the page if nowhere else, but then you know like millions of people went on to read this novel. So not so unhistorical after all.
HUNTER: Right. Which is so funny. That’s the thing is I think that like… I always think about there… I don’t know if you ever read The Fault in Our Stars, but-
[00:17:55] ANNE: Yeah, a long time ago.
HUNTER: Yeah. I think it’s been like 12 years since I read it. But I remember the thing I loved the most about that book was that the girl, Hazel, the main character, she didn’t really want to be remembered and she had no feel. She didn’t find it that important.
And I always feel like the people who kind of step back and who don’t really want to be seen as much, I think tend to end up having the most impact because they’re like the great observers and they’re the ones who kind of tend to want to understand other people better and they reserve judgment more, I’ve noticed.
So there’s little things like that that I think about. And I think a lot of great writers are people who actually don’t really care about being noticed or remembered, but they are because they just kind of have that spirit about them.
ANNE: The paradox. And I can see how that really appeals to you because you want to understand. Like you want the observations.
HUNTER: Mm-hm.
ANNE: Okay. All right. I’m so curious to see how that comes up in your picks. I imagine we could talk about this for hours, but would you give me just a few nuggets from your National Book Award project? Hunter, I’m sure you’ve noticed some things, you’ve observed some things, you’ve learned some things.
[00:19:09] HUNTER: So I have this theory that in order for a book to sustain itself, it either has to be so beautifully written, so well written, and so near perfect that writers return to the book time and time again for their own inspiration, or that it deals with such a hot button topic in a non-offensive way that it becomes something that is taught in classrooms year after year. It’s typically one of the two things.
Because a lot of the books that people considered great in the 1950s are out of print now. And a lot of the books from the 60s are also out of print. And I think that the only ones that really have withstood the test of time are the war novels, which there was a lot of war novels in the 50s from people who’d served in World War II.
And that’s the thing. It’s so funny. There’s so many books now that remind me of books from that period that were out of print that I read. I think what I most noticed was that a book can be great, but it can still be forgotten if it’s not doing one of these two things.
[00:20:15] Like To Kill a Mockingbird was a finalist the year that this book called The Waters of Kronos won. Also in that same long list, there was A Separate Peace, and The Violent Bear It Away. Everyone remembers A Separate Peace, The Violent Bear It Away, and To Kill a Mockingbird, but no one remembers The Waters of Kronos.
And I think it’s just because The Waters of Kronos doesn’t really tackle any of the subject matter that those other books do. It wouldn’t really be taught in a children’s class or a high school classroom. Also, it’s beautifully written, but it’s not one of the all-time great books that stand out among all these others. So I think that that’s a big thing I noticed.
Also, that the National Book Award was much more about going against the establishment, whereas the Pulitzer was much more about honoring these revered writers over some lesser, oftentimes lesser known, or more innovative writers, I think, at times.
[00:21:12] I think that people have more respect for the Pulitzer Prize, but I think that the National Book Award was trying to really highlight these people who were doing really interesting new things. Kind of like what the Booker does now, the Booker Prize.
But now I feel like the past couple of years, the National Book Award has kind of leaned more towards… I don’t think they always want to highlight the big authors anymore, which is kind of a shame to me, because I think that they want to showcase new voices, but there are other prizes that are meant for that. But I have a lot of opinions about book awards. But those are the biggest things I’ve noticed.
ANNE: What is the prize of your readerly heart these days? Like what’s the one that you find most in sync with your taste, or most likely for you to make new discoveries that you’re really glad to have found?
HUNTER: Here’s the thing. I spent almost a decade dedicated to the National Book Award. And so I love so much about the National Book Award. I think it is a very great prize. But it is also solely focused on highlighting books by American writers. The Booker Prize has a much wider scope.
[00:22:12] And I found that as my taste has shifted over the past few years, that it tends to end up being the Booker books that I am more drawn to. However, Lauren Groff was a three-time National Book Award finalist, and she’s my favorite writer. So I don’t know if I would have read her if… that’s not true. I bought Fates and Furies before it was on the National Book Award list. But I don’t know if I would have prioritized it if it hadn’t dropped on the long list the same week I bought it.
ANNE: Interesting. Well, and what I’m also hearing from you is that we definitely think of these literary prizes… some of you are like, I don’t think about literary prizes at all. And that is totally fine. But these prizes have their own personalities. And also for a variety of reasons, those evolve and sometimes shift pretty dramatically.
HUNTER: Yeah. Oh, that is one thing that is kind of insane to me is that… well, and here’s the thing, too, is people forget, you know, it’s not the same judges. You know, they change every year. And also the people who are running these things change every year.
[00:23:10] And while I think that maybe more established prizes like the Pulitzer, the Pulitzer Prize, the thing that’s looking for the most is the… it used to be the Great American Novel, but they’ve changed it to the best-written work that potentially is written about American life. Whereas the National Book Award is meant to be just the best-written book by an American writer.
I think that when you have a slight shift in focus, if you have a slight shift in focus to say, like, we’re looking for a book that captures this specific thing, it’s a little bit easier to kind of maintain more consistency with what you’re looking for.
Whereas the Booker and the National Book Award and a couple of these other prizes, they’re not quite so specific. So it really does change each year. And not only do what the books talk about change each year, the styles change each year. So it doesn’t really feel as consistent as far as what the books look like, I guess.
Also, the Booker Prize, I will say they are more consistent because they often choose more structurally innovative books. But there are other times too where I feel like they’ve neglected really great books in favor of highlighting, I guess, lesser-known voices.
[00:24:15] ANNE: That’s so interesting. I really appreciate your thoughts there. I admire projects like that. Also, I imagine that was the bulk of your reading for a long time. Or at least a really big chunk of that. When you say real estate, where is that coming from?
HUNTER: Listen, it’s so funny too, because my friend and fellow Bookstagrammer, Bernie Lombardi, he was listening to me and like… I wrote a newsletter, a Substack newsletter about this project for a couple of years. I would send my newsletters to him to kind of read because he’s an academic. So I was like, well, he’ll be able to tell me if it’s good or bad.
Something that he actually pointed out was that I had a very American lens and that when I was discussing books, I was only discussing them through an American lens. And that if I wanted to discuss them in a deeper way, I needed to kind of break free of that.
I actually think it really helped me become a better reader. It’s also helped me appreciate books that are by writers outside of the US because it helped me understand that my measurement, my metric for what was good or bad was based on a very American style of… like what we’ve cultivated is the American styles of writing, I think.
[00:25:29] ANNE: Interesting. Okay, where do translated works fit into your reading landscape these days? And I definitely have a need to know reason here as I think about what you may enjoy.
HUNTER: I actually read a lot of translated lit now because my friend Bernie, he reads the International Booker International Prize and I’ve slowly become more interested in the translated literature section of the National Book Award. So I’ve just been picking up a lot of those.
But also, I just read Hurricane Season recently, which is translated and [Elena? 00:26:04] knows and I’ve been trying to read… I cannot say her… Olga Tokarczuk.
ANNE: Yeah, which one did you read?
HUNTER: I started Flight. I haven’t finished it yet. But I am enjoying it. But I own three of her books and I’m constantly… It’s so funny. I own like 300 or 400 unread books, which is really… I should not admit to that. But I’m constantly collecting.
ANNE: It is what it is, Hunter.
HUNTER: Yeah.
[00:26:29] ANNE: Yeah. All right. We’re here for those confessions. Somebody feels seen. Thank you for your service. On the show, we ask you to choose three books you love. That’s a tall order. How did you choose them? I mean, aside from Lauren Groff, your favorite writer, favorite living writer, which did you say?
HUNTER: I do think at this point she is my favorite writer, which it’s so funny, because sometimes I’ll recommend her to people and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know.” But I tell people all the time, I’m like, “If you like more commercially leaning books, like you know, if you read Monsters of Templeton, that’s much more accessible.
But if you like the really challenging things, I think The Vaster Wilds is very… each of her books is so different that I feel like you can be a different reader for each one. So I guess that she is my favorite writer.
ANNE: So, Hunter, I’m guessing that you chose a Lauren Groff title as one of your favorites.
HUNTER: Yes.
ANNE: Okay, let’s start there. Which one did you pick?
HUNTER: I picked Fates and Furies, which I now think it may be tied as her best novel alongside The Vaster Wilds, even though they’re very different.
[00:27:30] But Fates and Furies is a much more literary, less suspenseful Gone Girl in a way.
ANNE: You know, that is a description I’ve never heard before. I’m here for it.
HUNTER: No, it’s so funny. I’ve written about those books together a lot and people get very annoyed whenever I do. But they’re both books about marriage and they’re both books about the ways that you kind of like keep certain things. Like you’re a person in your marriage, and then you’re a person to yourself. And those are two different things. And they both explore that in very different ways that I find really exciting.
But I think that with Fates and Furies, she’s just doing so… and she’s also writing about privilege. And she’s writing about female rage and all these different things that I find so intriguing. And she’s doing it with such beautiful language. It’s one of those books that also I think rewards rereading because you just… every sentence is a jewel and each time you discover a different one that resonates.
ANNE: I think you mentioned that you read it 12 or 13 times. I would hope you would feel that way.
HUNTER: Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:28] ANNE: And that is one of those books where the conceit of it is such that you would read the first half very differently than the second. Well, do you want to do the honors? Actually, let’s tell the listeners how it’s constructed if they don’t know.
HUNTER: Yeah. So the first half is titled Fates, and it’s focusing on the husband Lotto. It’s kind of this coming-of-age story about this guy who’s kind of been like anointed, just like this light shines from above on him. And he just assumes that everything just kind of goes his way because that’s the way the world works.
And you spend this whole first half understanding their relationship kind of from his point of view. It’s third person, but it is kind of from his viewpoint. And then the second half Furies picks up. And it’s the wife Matilda’s side.
And it’s not that you feel deceived in any way, but it is just a very different perspective. It’s really just kind of showing how two people can be in the same relationship and have very different takeaways, I guess. And also how you find all these things out about Matilda, about how she struggled when she was younger, she had a really hard life and so her come up was not nearly as easy as his.
[00:29:40] And so you’re kind of seeing how their upbringings and their struggles and where they were kind of placed in society really colored how they viewed their lives together.
ANNE: Yeah. And something else that I have been really struck by about that book is so many readers have said that they finished it and felt one way about it and then actually talked to other readers about the experience of reading and have had their minds changed by like book club discussions with a frequency that doesn’t happen with a ton of fiction.
HUNTER: Oh, yeah. Let me tell you. There are a lot of people who only read the first half of that book and hated it. And I always tell people, if you hate the first half, you will love the second half. If you love the first half, you may feel some kind of way about the second half. So it really just depends.
ANNE: Yeah. Because they’re two very disparate parts of a whole. When I read it the first time, I did not have the idea that the husband was a narcissist on the brain. But then when I heard Lauren Groff discuss in Florida, like a lot of her inspiration for the book, it made me think, “I’ve only read that book once.”
[00:30:43] And that’s the kind of book that would benefit from a rereading. And I’m curious what I think now going in knowing so much more than… I mean, I think I read an advanced copy a million years ago. Went in knowing nothing, hadn’t talked to anyone who had read it. It’s a very different experience to go in after having a good conversation about it and just knowing a lot more hearing from the author’s perspective.
HUNTER: I would love to know your thoughts on a reread.
ANNE: Yeah. I’m curious. But I will let you know if/when that happens. Hunter, what’s the second book you love?
HUNTER: The second book I chose was Edinburgh by Alexander Chee, which it’s about this boy named Fee who suffers from sexual abuse at the hands of the chorus director of this boys’ chorus group that he’s part of when he’s younger.
The first part of the book is about him and these other boys who are all kind of suffering from the same thing. And then the second half is about his adulthood.
[00:31:40] Actually, Hanya Yanagihara almost bought this book for Riverhead, whenever the book was first being shopped around. And the reason why I find that interesting is because Hanya’s book A Little Life deals with some very similar subject matter.
But Edinburgh is such a beautiful, tender, open-hearted story about… I think it’s so interesting to read a book where a person has suffered such tremendous abuse, but also the book writes with an understanding of where abuse comes from and what it… It never forgives the abuser, but you realize this abuser had a family and it’s kind of like exploring some of what the family kind of went through after I think a little bit. Just a little bit.
But I think that the book also writes so much about queer experience in a way that felt very honest. I hadn’t really seen it written like that before. I also think it is also a perfect book, I’m convinced. I think that it is as great as Fates and Furies, which I do think of as high praise in my mind. It’s beautifully written.
[00:32:43] Once again, there’s this one line where he talks about there’s a character who dies and because the boy, as a singer, he often thinks in sound. And there’s a point where it describes how he’ll miss this boy and how like… so sound waves never disappear, but they just expand. And for him to hear this boy’s voice again, he’d have to have an ear the size of Jupiter or something like that.
But it’s much more beautiful than that whenever he writes it. But I was so moved whenever I read that line. But it’s a beautiful book. Just resonated in a lot of ways for me.
ANNE: Okay, almost a perfect novel with a sentence so gorgeous that you’re still thinking about just that one little package of words all these years later. I said all these years, when did you read this?
HUNTER: I first read it in 2018.
ANNE: Okay, you said that you can remember where you were and what you were doing when you read a book. And I love how you produce that instantly. Hunter, what’s the final book you chose as a favorite?
HUNTER: I chose Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, which there’s a blurb about Karen Russell from her… It’s on the paperback of her book, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, her short story collection that describes her sentences as backflipping off the page.
[00:33:55] I think that is so accurate, because whereas Fates and Furies in Edinburgh are very serious, I think that Swamplandia! is… Every book has some humor in it. But Karen Russell writes the funniest things.
Swamplandia! is about a family, the Bigtree tribe who live in the Florida Everglades, and they run this swamp theme park. The mother was an alligator wrestler, but she dies of cancer before the book start. It’s about this 13-year-old girl, Ava Bigtree, kind of coming of age while her family’s life is kind of falling apart.
The theme park is kind of on its last leg and the father, Chief Bigtree, is trying to find ways to keep it going. And there’s like a sister Hilola, who is trying to get… She’s trying to elope with a ghost and the brother Kiwi is working for the competing world of darkness is the competing theme park and he’s trying to get money from them to keep the theirs running.
[00:34:55] It’s beautiful sentences, but very funny. But also… I think it’s so funny. I said this before, but I love books about absent mothers. I think that Karen Russell does something so great, which is that she never sacrifices the language. Even though she writes from a child’s perspective, she never sacrifices the language.
But what she does is she just makes it where they don’t have the kind of inside, I guess… Everything’s very short-sighted. Everything’s very short-sighted in the way that a child’s mind can be at times. And that’s how she maintains the believability that these are children, even though the language is so elevated. And I think that’s just brilliant.
ANNE: I’ve never read any Karen Russell.
HUNTER: Oh, she’s so good. I think there’s a story that she has called The New Veterans that is one of my all-time favorite stories in the Vampires in the Lemon Grove. If you read that one, I think you might enjoy her other stuff.
ANNE: I am on the hunt for short stories right now. I appreciate that.
HUNTER: Well, that’s perfect. So yeah.
[00:35:51] ANNE: If we had longer, I’d want to hear more about your love of short stories, because I noticed you called that out specifically. Hunter, tell me about a book that was not right for you.
HUNTER: So a book that I read recently that just didn’t really work for me was Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I should also clarify, if a book doesn’t work for me, I do read it again and again in the hopes that it will work.
And I’ve read Malibu Rising three times and I just think that it was not what I… maybe it just wasn’t what I expected. I don’t think I’m a book snob. But I just think that I had different expectations for what it was going to be and do. I don’t know.
ANNE: Based on everything you’ve said, I’m surprised you picked it up. I mean, I loved it. I thought it was a really fun time. Like it’s, you know, big splashy story set in the 80s. People were like big hair, thick belts, cans of tab, house on fire. But I read those kinds of books sometimes and I don’t see evidence of that in anything we’ve talked about today. What did you think it was going to be? What did you want it to be?
[00:36:57] HUNTER: Okay, so let me tell you. I read Daisy Jones & The Six first. And I like that one.
ANNE: Okay, that’s a good foundation for thinking, Let’s try some more.
HUNTER: I like that one. Then somebody had said, “You’ve got to read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” And they said to me, “It’s the best-written book since Anna Karenina. And I thought, “Wow, that’s really high praise.” I read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and I reread it a couple years after the first reading, and I liked it a lot.
But if you go into that book, thinking it’s going to be like a modern classic, I don’t know if that’s the best mindset to be in.
And then somebody said, “Oh, well, read Malibu Rising.” Whenever it came out, they’re like, “Read Malibu Rising. If you’ve liked Daisy Jones, but you weren’t really sure about Seven Husbands, check that one out. It’s really good.”
I think people pitch her books to me as more literary than they are. And there’s nothing wrong with what… I love books like… I don’t know if you consider… I think Emma Straub is kind of like a literary beach read. I look for books to kind of straddle that line sometimes. And I think that I often assume, based on how people sell Taylor Jenkins Reid to me that she’s going to be a little bit more literary than she is. And I think that’s what kind of trips me up sometimes.
[00:38:13] ANNE: I hear what you’re saying. And it’s so interesting to note how everything is relative. As a very specific example, we’re putting together a list of quiet novels that we’re going to share on Modern Mrs. Darcy in a blog post this fall.
I was just reading through the comments from a podcast conversation actually that happened on What Should I Read Next? with Susan Meissner, where we talked all about quiet novels back in winter of 2024 and it’s very clear that a lot of terms are subjective. Quiet is one of them. Literary is another. And people have very different ideas and expectations of what the words mean.
HUNTER: Yeah. It’s so funny, right? I think that people sometimes have this misunderstanding that like, Oh, you’re a reader, so you will like any book. And that’s not true.
ANNE: Or, or… and I love that this is how literature works on an emotional level, and also awareness is extremely helpful when you want to choose a book that you’re actually going to enjoy.
[00:39:13] When we have an emotional experience with a book, and when we love it, our expectation is often that that means that is what the reading experience of that book is like, not that’s what our experience with that book was like.
HUNTER: I’ve gotten really good at being able to know like, Okay, I love this book, because it speaks to my experience, speaks to my feelings, it speaks to my heart so much. So I try to include that whenever I do tell somebody about it, because I’m like, “This is not gonna resonate for you for these same reasons that may not have the same emotional impact.” But yeah.
ANNE: Yeah. So this one was not for you?
HUNTER: No.
ANNE: Okay. So when we’re reading the cards here going, this is a portrait of what Hunter enjoys, that’s not on the table, and that’s fine. You have 300 or 400 books at home that you haven’t read yet. It’s okay to eliminate a couple kinds of books from consideration.
Hunter, what have you been reading lately?
HUNTER: Oh, gosh, I recently read Hombrecito, I think, which just came out. It’s like a novel in stories about the queer experience and also immigrating all these different things. It was really beautiful.
[00:40:22] I’m trying to think about what else. I’ve honestly been reading too much lately. I actually just read Wolf Hall, which I liked it, but it was also a lot. I also just read Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson. The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan, Colored Television by Danzy Senna, which I really liked. But those are kind of the things I’ve been reading lately.
ANNE: Okay, thank you for those. Hunter, before we jump into recommendations, you mentioned in your submission that you were, and I’m putting words in your mouth a little bit here, but that you have some thoughts about autofiction. That’s something that you’ve been contemplating. Like how we engage with it, how we perceive stories that we know, like you pretty close sometimes to the author’s real life. But also, that doesn’t mean we should be making assumptions that the author is always drawing on their life to write these fictional tales. I’m passing the baton to you. Would you say more about this?
HUNTER: It’s funny. You know, I mentioned Edinburgh by Alexander Chee earlier. He has an essay collection called How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, which the title is kind of a joke, because when he set out to write Edinburgh, he’d already been working on another book and people weren’t really as interested, I guess. So he thought, “Okay, well, all of my friends are writing these terrible autobiographical novels. So I guess I’ll just write one too.”
[00:41:41] It was really interesting because then he talked basically how he set out to initially just write about all of his traumas, and that ended up not… that’s not what made a good book. So he kind of had to see where a narrative was in his experiences, and then create a fictional version of that.
But I read that collection and Edinburgh back in 2018, at the same time that I just read The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, which kind of has some autofiction qualities to it. I had also just read Florida by Lauren Groff. And she kind of made these jokes about how there’s… you know, it’s not her, but it’s not not her in the collection.
I think that she was really wanting to play with readers’ expectations of, because people had made so many assumptions based on Fates and Furies, which had come out right before. And I guess I’ve just been thinking a lot about, honestly, if you look at any book, any book, no matter how far from or close to a writer’s experience, is going to say a lot about who they are.
[00:42:47] Because Alexander Chee’s book, The Queen of the Night, is a very personal book to him. It’s about a female opera singer in the 1800s in France. So it’s obviously not anywhere close to his experience personally, but he’s such a lover of music. And so he’s really showing you so much of who he is and his love of music through this.
Also, when writers are writing about questions and ideas they have, I think they’re really revealing a lot about themselves, because they’re showing you what they’re struggling to kind of contemplate. And I guess, you know, there’s been a lot of conversation over the past couple of years about how more marginalized writers tend to get thrown this kind of shade of like, Oh, it’s just thinly veiled memoir.
But almost every writer is pulling from their personal experience in some way. It’s not to say that it’s just thinly veiled memoir, but every writer is like writing from something really personal. That’s why they’re drawn to that. And so I just think that’s really just an interesting idea to consider.
[00:43:46] ANNE: Zadie Smith blew my mind. I wish I could give the source for this when she talked about how so much of what she writes is autofiction. But wish fulfillment for her is autofiction. Also, like, what are my fears? What keeps me awake at night? Like, if I start from my experiences and then write how it all goes incredibly horribly wrong, she’s still writing out of her personal experience.
Oh, and Ann Patchett talked about how she was inspired by Zadie Smith in The Dutch House, which you would not read and be like, Oh, clearly this is Ann Patchett’s thinly veiled life. But she’s a stepmother. And she said that the idea of how could the things that keep me awake at three o’clock in the morning, you know, thinking that I’ve become the wicked stepmother, what could that look like in a story that interests me? And I just never thought about it in either way.
HUNTER: I’ve been thinking a lot about, sadly, of after [Allison Rowe? 00:44:40] died, we had all these revelations about this reality that was going on with her and her daughter and her husband. And I was thinking a lot about how people said it colored the way that they viewed her stories. And I think that’s true.
[00:44:55] But I’ve been thinking a lot about writers who we have these complicated relationships with, like Junot Díaz, or like Flannery O’Connor. But you know, I think that if you look at these writers, every writer is telling you who they are in some way, and they’re telling you what they’re struggling with.
Flannery O’Connor, who we later, you know, eventually, in all these letters of hers, we discovered that she was actively racist, but her stories are often really trying to reckon with what racism looks like. And they tend to be more open-hearted than she seems to be in her letters to people. When you look at the stories of Junot Díaz, a lot of his stuff are trying to reckon with misogyny in a way.
And I think that really, every writer, whether they’re good or bad people, they’re all reckoning with their own personal demons in some way or with just something that has… even if it’s not their own demons, I guess, they’re reckoning with what the reality of their world is. And so you really begin to understand, yeah, like what keeps them up at night. And I just think that’s really interesting.
[00:45:54] ANNE: Yeah. I mean, we don’t bat an eye when nonfiction writers say, I’m just writing to figure things out.
HUNTER: Right.
ANNE: But I think that’s happening a lot in fiction as well.
HUNTER: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
ANNE: Just going back to what you said earlier, that you love mess and murkiness.
HUNTER: I do.
ANNE: There are no clear answers. A writer trying to figure some stuff out is going to give you that.
HUNTER: Yeah. I was rereading Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz. Those short stories… they’re so messy but in ways that… I think they do make people uncomfortable.
Or even Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, these are really complicated lives, and there are no answers. But I think that I get really excited by the idea of… I think it’s also this, you have this feeling of, oh, yes, I’m not the only person who is dealing with this feeling of just almost gloom and doom sometimes about what you’re doing with your life and the people around you. I don’t know.
[00:46:59] ANNE: That’s so interesting. Okay, our Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club community manager, Ginger, was telling me — I think she might have been quoting Deesha Philyaw recently — how she writes short stories because it’s not about the resolution like a novelist, or isn’t sometimes, but that’s reader’s expectations. But a short story is about an individual revelation. And I was like, Ooh, that’s good.
HUNTER: Yeah. No, that’s the thing. That’s another reason why I think I love short stories, is that sometimes it seems like such a minor thing whenever these revelations come, especially there’s some short stories… I think Lauren Groff is great at having these quiet revelations kind of happen. And it’s almost like the camera just shifts a little to the left, and that’s all it takes, but it feels life-changing.
ANNE: Yeah, that’s so good. Okay, you loved Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, Edinburgh by Alexander Chee, and Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.
Not for you was Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid. And you’ve been reading some interesting stuff lately, including Hombrecito and Colored Television.
HUNTER: Yes.
[00:48:10] ANNE: Let’s talk about what you may enjoy reading next. I would love to start with an autofiction recommendation since we’ve just been discussing that, and that is Small Rain by Garth Greenwell.
HUNTER: I have been wanting to read this so bad. I loved his first two books.
ANNE: I have not read those, but this is the one where I decided I was going to give it a try. It felt like the right book for right now. And I should say that we have not communicated in many years, but I used to walk to school with Garth a long time ago.
And this is autofiction, so that was really interesting for me because he’s writing about a lot of things and people and places that I remember and I know. And it was wild to me how factually real so much of this was. And it’s a novel.
So this is a quiet novel, and it’s one in which both very little happens and also someone’s literal existence is hanging at the balance. And it was inspired by a real medical event that Garth experienced. It can’t have been that long ago.
[00:49:09] We’re about the same age. This happened in his early 40s. He was suddenly very, very sick. It’s discussed medically in the book a little bit, but he experienced a tear in the wall of one of the chambers of his heart, and he almost died.
Well, first, he talks about the searing pain that he experienced at the beginning. Anyone who has suffered such pain or who has witnessed someone in great pain, I think you’ll feel really seen and understood. He’s capturing something that you wished perhaps that you would have had the words for. Garth puts it on the page. And I always appreciate when an author can do that.
But very quickly, well, he talks about not wanting to inconvenience his partner, who he refers to as L throughout, and that is the first initial of his actual real-life partner.
But very quickly, he ends up in the hospital in Iowa where he teaches in the Writers’ Workshop, and he talks about how bewildering it is to be in the early pandemic, in the hospital, with this illness that makes him extremely popular among all the doctors because they all want to see him because his case is interesting, which is you never want to be interesting in a hospital.
[00:50:23] What he’s experiencing isn’t exceedingly rare, but his age is noteworthy for a young, healthy guy to experience this particular problem is unusual. And people want to get up in his case. And he talks about just what it’s like for his whole life to be taken over by this.
And he’s in a hospital bed for much of it, and going in and out of sleep, dealing with some nurses who are wonderful, who you just want to like, “Oh, what a wonderful human. I hope I get care like that. I hope my loved one gets care with that if I ever find myself in this horrible situation.”
He talks about the experience he has with some of the staff where he feels less than human. He talks about how… I mean, I don’t have words to say like how frightened he is watching one of his monitors deliver numbers that are scary, that he thinks he needs help and nobody is coming. And he talks about this feeling of being helpless and trapped.
[00:51:18] But he’s walking the reader through this intense medical situation. Also, he’s alone on the bed. It’s COVID. He can only have visitors two hours a day. He’s in the ICU. And he has a lot of time alone with his thoughts. So he’s reflecting on some of his childhood, some of his growing up years, on the origins of his relationship with his partner.
Like the nurse says, “Oh, how did you all meet?” And you hear him in the story say, “Well, this is the story that I typically tell. I love to tell this story. These are the parts I leave out of this story. This is what you need to know. This is what I actually tell her.”
It’s such a close, kind, thoughtful, introspective, fascinating narrative. And there is so much real in this story that it reads like memoir. And yet, he’s very clear that it is not memoir. It is autofiction. And I don’t know what to say, except I think this is exactly a book for you that has things you love in it. What do you think?
[00:52:18] HUNTER: This sounds honestly perfect. This sounds like the book that I have wanted all year long.
ANNE: The day this episode releases, September 3rd, it’s ready and waiting for you. I hope you love it.
HUNTER: Cannot wait.
ANNE: Now, I want you to talk about a book with me that I know that you have already read, because you told me. But I had to see, because if you had not yet read it, you needed to read it, because it’s right up your alley, and that is State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg.
This came out this summer. It reminded me so much of… Oh, gosh. Laura, I apologize. I’m sure you’ve heard this, but I have not read The Bell Jar until this summer, and I happen to read these books completely coincidentally, almost back-to-back. And when autofiction is discussed, Sylvia Plath is often not far behind.
But I read this book not knowing much about Laura van den Berg. You probably read her much-lauded short story collection. I hadn’t read that. But I read the book, and then I read a few interviews she gave about how this started more like a journal of what she was experiencing moving back to Florida from Texas early in the pandemic, because that’s where her family was.
[00:53:28] And then it started as autofiction. And the way she discusses how she chose to introduce a speculative fiction element was so fascinating. Should I keep going, or do you want to take over?
HUNTER: Well, it’s so funny. I was not at all surprised by her leaning speculative, because Jeff VanderMeer and Lauren Groff, Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer especially, I think, are people who really kind of lean into more speculative elements or just more fantastical elements in some way. And I think that’s a very Florida thing to do.
ANNE: Because it did feel so much like Lauren Groff’s Florida as well.
HUNTER: Yes. That’s the thing, too. Whenever I first started State of Paradise, the first line in the book is about her husband going for these runs. And the first short story in Florida by Lauren Groff is Ghosts and Empties, and it’s about this woman who takes to going for a walk at in the evenings. That immediately made it feel to me.
[00:54:33] ANNE: Wait a second. You asked a question about that.
HUNTER: I did. Yeah.
ANNE: Lauren Groff conversation I moderated.
HUNTER: Yes.
ANNE: But I hadn’t read Laura van den Berg at that point. Oh, worlds collide. Thank you for that, Hunter.
HUNTER: Yeah. So I was very excited by that. I think that immediately kind of tied these two books together for me in a lot of ways. And I do think that both of the books explore Florida in really interesting and different ways. And I should clarify for anyone who’s read Florida and isn’t sure about State of Paradise, State of Paradise is written in a much more clean language, I think. It’s less musical and just more straightforward, I guess.
ANNE: It’s more concise.
HUNTER: Yes.
ANNE: It’s like more direct storytelling. How’s that?
HUNTER: Yes. Thank you. State of Paradise I thought that the speculative element made a lot of sense to me. Also, I think that when you’re writing so intimately about yourself, it’s almost like you get so close to the bone that you almost have to have another element as a safeguard, almost, I think.
[00:55:33] So I think that introducing that… I think that happens a lot, too. I think that Karen Russell always talks about how, you know, you can play fast and loose with your Oz, but you have to still have the grounded Kansas details.
ANNE: I love that.
HUNTER: I think that’s so true. I think that’s one of the things that I think makes State of Paradise work is that she is writing so intimately about things and feelings that are personal to her, that are her experiences. I almost think that the speculative elements, in a way, feel even more revealing, because they’re showing, I think, some of the things that she maybe… it’s like what you said this earlier about… I think you said it with Ann Patchett, like the greatest fear kind of thing, element. And I think that happened a little bit with Laura Laura van den Berg’s book.
ANNE: Yeah. And I thought it was so interesting what she said in interviews, how she felt like what she experienced was so surreal, and so emotionally head-spinning, and so disorienting, that she felt like she couldn’t tell it straight, because you would get the facts, but you would not understand the emotional experience she was trying to convey.
HUNTER: Yeah.
[00:56:45] ANNE: Like, the limits of the autofiction were the truth. She couldn’t tell you what it felt like and stick to the facts. There’s a point in the book where the narrator says, I’ve told many versions of this story, just searching for the one that felt like what it was like to actually live it. And I thought it was so interesting that she felt like she needed to include elements of the impossible in order to get it emotionally right.
HUNTER: I mean, I think it goes back to that thing that Mary Karr, when she wrote her third memoir Lit, she threw out 2,000 finished pages, because she realized that even though all of it was actually what happened in her life at the times that she was writing about, none of it actually captured the emotional, mental interiority that she was experiencing at the time. So it’s constantly seeking what’s going to best represent that.
ANNE: My home bookshelves are a mess. I was reorganizing this weekend, put my hands on that Mary Karr book, and thought, “Wow, I haven’t thought about Lit in a long time.” That makes me want to reread it immediately.
[00:57:51] HUNTER: You should. It’s really good on audio, too. I recently decided to…
ANNE: Oh, I’ve never listened to her.
HUNTER: Oh, listen, listening to her is even better, honestly, than reading it, because her Texas accent is just such joy.
ANNE: And that’s exactly the kind of thing where if she wasn’t the one who’d read it, I’d go, I know what Mary Karr sounds like, and this isn’t it.
HUNTER: Yeah.
ANNE: Yeah. Okay. Well, I love that. Thank you for talking about State of Paradise with me. I felt like it belonged in this conversation about autofiction.
HUNTER: It did.
ANNE: Yeah. Okay, what you should read next, perhaps. Perhaps. I am wondering about Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. And I have to tell you, if I really wanted to sell this to you, I would lean into the fact that Lauren Groff says everyone should read this book. And I think she means especially you, Hunter.
HUNTER: Okay. Do you know, I literally bought… I haven’t read it, but I bought it from The Lynx, Lauren Groff’s bookstore in Gainesville, because I knew that she’d said you should read… So yes. Actually, this is like double confirmation now. This is so funny.
[00:58:55] ANNE: Well, I love that it’s an older work. It’s 1998. I didn’t want to only talk about new books, because I know that you’re looking for those. But gosh, I wish I knew how to describe this book to you. Lauren Groff could probably do a better job and probably already has. But it’s deadly serious and also super funny.
The conceit itself is really interesting. So she is retelling, in a sense, the story of a figure from Greek mythology, and that is Geryon. He’s a monster slain by Herakles as part of one of his labors that he’s famous for doing, and they made a Disney movie about.
So this is a novel in verse. It’s about abuse in his childhood. It’s about the making of art. It’s about desire. Anne Carson takes this character from history, and she invents this tragic backstory that sounds very modern.
[00:59:57] He’s an abused child who grows up and becomes an artist and also a lover who has been done wrong by the one he loved. I don’t know what to say except that it is weird and funny and moving. On a sentence level, I think it has moments where you go, “Whoa.” I’m just gonna stop and get a [read here?].”
HUNTER: I knew so little about this book until just now, and now I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this sounds so good.” Also, I just have to say, as an aside, listening to you talk about books is just very moving in itself, because you speak with such passion. And I think you speak so beautifully about every book. Just hearing you talk about it alone has sold me.
ANNE: That is very kind. Listeners, you should probably know that I probably started trying to describe it three different times, and we cut that out. So thank you, Hunter. I’m glad you liked the finished version.
[01:00:58] Okay, I want to close with something weird. And I’m hoping that you haven’t read one of these novels in translation. Well, they don’t have to be weird, exactly. Now, I know it’s been a long time since your friend told you you’ve got an American lens, like, let’s branch out a little bit. And you wanted to do that. You have. And also, have you read Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias?
HUNTER: No.
ANNE: Okay. This rec came to me via my friend Michelle Wilson, who I believe is the one that you got to go to Annie’s Reader Retreat at The Bookshelf with. She’s the one who apparently sold everyone there on Open Throat by Henry Hoke. Okay, so Michelle’s got cred. Hi, Michelle.
So I read this because of her. It was either going to be this or another novel in translation that brings her French character to the United States. She has a French lens on America. Maybe we’ll talk about that later.
But you have no idea where this story’s going to go. I think it’s a good kind of unsettling that feels true to the story.
[01:02:01] So this is kind of wild because this novel describes a pandemic. And it just came out not that long ago in the United States. It might actually have been this year. But based on when it was published in Spain, this was written pre-pandemic. And thinking about that is just wild.
There’s a great review, and I think the Scotsman, where the reviewer says, “Look, to call this a dystopian novel is selling it short. This is a full-on technicolor apocalypse.”
Our unnamed female narrator lives in this coastal city where the waters are always red and swirling from toxic algae and it creates this red wind that’s constantly blowing into the coast. Sometimes it gets very foggy, but mostly there’s this red wind that is dangerous. People are getting sick.
I listened to the audio of this, and I hit fast-forward a couple times because of the descriptions of how they were getting sick. I didn’t need those 15 seconds of description in my ears. And they are living there on the coast because they can’t afford to leave.
[01:02:59] All the wealthy have fled inland to their cities where they are feeling relatively safe, but they really don’t want the poor masses to leave and come invade them with their disturbing illnesses. Have you read C. Pam Song’s The Land and Milk and Honey?
HUNTER: Yes.
ANNE: There were many elements here that felt very similar. Very different stories in how it’s enacted. But the unsettling landscape and the environmental and ecological situation felt similar. Similar to Laura van den Berg and a lot of books that I feel like I’ve been reading lately.
The narrator is a copywriter and she has mostly given up her job, but she has accumulated this to the reader, it feels like a treasure trove of just really weird factoids that she drops into the text occasionally. But we are watching her navigate the impending doom perhaps of all humanity.
[01:03:55] But I have to tell you, the pink slime doesn’t have to do with the red and toxic algae. It’s not a natural disaster. It is this ultra-processed substance called meat traits that people are eating because that is how they are going to survive. They don’t have the mung bean flour that they had in The Land and Milk and Honey. They have meat traits, and that is what they’re eating.
So this is a different kind of story for an American reader. It’s weird and interesting and unpredictable, but not in a way that feels forced or canned. Also, she has these moments where she steps back and kind of muses. And those sentences are so smart and sometimes so provocative and so thoughtful. I think it’s really going to stand out to you for that. Towards the end, she says, “Writing is useless. I should dream it, smash the pieces of the broken urn so that no one, not even me, can put it back together.”
[01:04:52] Or she talks about how a story needs to start at the beginning, or at least a story needs a starting point. But she was never any good with the beginning because the beginning is never the beginning. We mistake things for beginning. It’s just the moment we realize that something has changed. But that’s us. That’s not the story.
I think those kind of meta flourishes that are written so well will have a lot of appeal to you. How does that sound?
HUNTER: Honestly, that sounds so good. You have no idea how obsessed I am over this already. I hadn’t heard of this book. I am very, very excited. I’m probably going to order it as soon as we’re done because this sounds very much like what I want right now.
ANNE: Amazing. I’m not sad about that. Okay, I’m going to ask you to pick. Of the books we talked about, Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, and Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías. What do you think you’ll read next?
HUNTER: I’m pretty sure it’s going to be Pink Slime.
[01:05:52] ANNE: I’m excited to hear it. And I will report back on my theoretical rereads, TBD.
HUNTER: Perfect.
ANNE: Hunter, this has been a delight. Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking books with me today.
HUNTER: Yes, thank you so much for having me.
ANNE: Hey, readers, I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Hunter, and I’d love to hear what you think he should read next. Find Hunter on Instagram @ShelfbyShelf, and you can check out his Substack newsletter of the same name, Shelf by Shelf, on that platform.
We’ve linked both of those in the show notes and included, as we always do, the full list of titles we talked about today. Check that out at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.
Connect with us on Instagram. We’re there @WhatShouldIReadNext? I’m on Instagram @AnnBogel.
Be sure to sign up for our email updates so your What Should I Read Next? news is not algorithm dependent. Do that at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/newsletter.
[01:06:54] Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by Will Bogel, Holly Wielkoszewski, and Studio D Podcast Production. Readers, that’s it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, “Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.” Happy reading, everyone.
