September Read/Reading/TBR
Join Nora for her first monthly book check-in to see what she loved, what she’s currently reading, and what’s next on her list.
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This episode’s featured books are:
The Valedictorian of Being Dead
Got a book recommendation? Send it our way by emailing us at terriblereadingclub@feelingsand.co.
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The episode transcript can be found here.
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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
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Hello everybody, it's Nora McInerny. Welcome to the Terrible Reading Club. This is the easiest book club that you're ever going to join because chances are we're never gonna meet in real life. I shouldn't say never, because every time I say never, then I come up with another idea. So, honestly, who knows?
This time next year, we could all be meeting in real life. Right now I am formulating an idea for a reading retreat just came into my mind, which means I have to do it. And this time next year, we're all going to be staying together in a compound somewhere. Are we starting a cult? I would never use that word personally.
So it's September. This is when I have that itch to go back to school. Even though going back to school filled me with anxiety, I stayed up all night for many nights. Before we started sixth grade, because in sixth grade at my school, we moved from the grade school over to the middle school. So that was a move of 25 yards and we were given a locker and I had never used a locker outside of the lockers at the Y M C A, which didn't have locks at my Y M C A and which still gave me trouble.
I was so sure I would not know how to use a locker and everyone was gonna laugh at me. I forgot that no one else in my grade had had a locker either. We'd just been shoving our stuff into desks since kindergarten desks and cubby holes, so, If you are a teacher who has already been back to school, I live in Arizona, we've been in school for weeks at this point, or you are going back to school.
One, thank you for your service. It is truly such a service. I am so glad that there are people like you willing to do that job because if the pandemic taught me anything, it's that I am not a teacher. And if you are not a teacher and you also kind of miss that going back to school vibe, I am here to let you know that as adults we can create that for ourselves.
We can. We can go out and get ourselves a new notebook. We can go buy ourselves fresh pens, folders. I really do think we should be using folders more, not in the digital file management sense. Anyone who works with me knows I'm not gonna do that, but I. Love paper. I think we should be exchanging more of it.
Everybody needs a trapper keeper. Start carrying a backpack if you're not already. This is sort of a back to not school episode, so I am not talking to an author in this episode. I'm not talking to anyone. I guess I'm just talking to myself and I'm talking to all of you. And I'm going to talk about a few books that if you are not ready to let go of summer, will kind of give you a way to grip onto that summer feeling, hold onto that summer loving just a little bit longer than I'm gonna talk about some of the books that I am currently reading that I'm not done with yet.
And some of the books that are on my list coming up this month, we no longer have a Pizza Hut book it Personal Pan Pizza to look forward to. So, I'm wondering for all of you, if you would be interested over on our ck which is where we convene, we do weekly book giveaways. We can chat about books, all that stuff.
There's, I think 600 of us over there right now. If I make us a little reading chart that you can print out and put in a folder and give yourself stickers for, and you fill it out then maybe the whole class can earn a pizza party. What's a pizza party when it comes to a podcast? I don't know yet. I don't know, but we can figure that all out.
So go over to the sub stack. You chat about that. It's just called Terrible Reading Club, which is not terribly clever, is it? So this was actually a pretty good reading summer for me this year. I do consider it a part of my job to read, but it's also whenever somebody asks me what my hobbies are, I feel an intense sense of panic immediately because I think, oh, I should really have something good to share.
They want, they wanna hear about how much I love mountain climbing. They wanna hear about extreme sports. They don't want to hear that my hobby is sitting alone in a quiet room with a book. But that is, that is my hobby. And if I'm traveling, I read a book on the plane. My favorite kind of book is the kind that can be read in a plane ride.
And I have a few that fit that bill. The first, I am so tardy to this party that I am embarrassed to admit it. I mention this over on my Instagram too, but lessons in chemistry. Lessons in Chemistry is a flight book. Somebody else told me that they read it when they were delayed in the airport for four hours and it was the perfect book to read when your flight has been delayed for four hours.
I picked it up while traveling and thought, you know, it's a New York Times bestseller. It was one of Reese's book pics. I'd avoided it because of the cover, which is one of those graphics that's very, I can't remember the word for it, but like those graphics where you can tell it's a woman, but there's no real features to it.
You know, like a messy bun with a pencil in it. Some cat ish sunglasses or glasses frames. The, the title of the book in a really bold font on a hot pink. I judge the book by the cover is what I'm saying, and I don't dislike the cover, but I assumed that it was a rom-com and I have to be in a very specific mood for a rom-com.
But instead, this is the story of a sort of strange woman in the 1960s, a fish out of water in the sense that she is ahead of her time, she is beyond her time. She is a chemist in an era where that was not a viable career for women. And she finds herself in Unwitting Julia Child slash Martha Stewart character with her own TV show.
She is, in my estimation, probably neurodivergent this book is what I love in a novel, which is, A quirky lady doing things that people don't understand, who doesn't really understand why other people don't understand it. A very neat and tidy storyline where everything ties together. In the end, there were a few clues that other people didn't see coming.
I usually never see something coming, any twist in a book. I'm liable to break my neck, but I saw the slight twist in this one. I was like, Ooh, look at me putting together these context clues and it all works out in the end, which is not a spoiler. I think that's how most books do end, and that's what I want in a novel most of the time or in a novel that looks like this.
I found the writing really peppy. A few people said it didn't seem realistic internal dialogue. I. For a woman of that era, but I'm not a woman of that era, so I simply could not make that judgment at all. There was just enough quirk and just enough grief, which I was not expecting at all from this cover.
So lessons and chemistry was exactly what I needed it to be at exactly the right time. Another book I picked up while I was traveling and read while I was traveling. This makes me this saying all this makes it sound like I'm traveling all the time. These were like brief work trips most of the time.
This summer, I happened to be traveling for work. I always try to pop into a local bookstore. I popped into diesel books in Brentwood, California. First, when I was walking into the bookstore, I saw Jane Fonda. That's really maybe why I liked this book so much, I think, 'cause I wasn't expecting it. I was like, who's that lady?
And at first I thought it was my mom because my mom and Jane Fonda do share very similar features, a similar way of walking. And honestly, they dress alike. It was not my mom, it was Jane Fonda, who I think is 10 years older than my mom. But Hollywood 80 something is probably commensurate with a Midwest 70 something.
I think the exchange rate tracks, as far as I know the book is called Friends Like These by Meg Soff. I might be saying her name wrong. It's R O S O F F.
It's technically, I think it might be considered ya, but it doesn't feel like it. It takes place in New York City in 1983. So it is a summer book. 'cause it takes place in summer. It is sweltering hot. And there is a girl who doesn't quite fit in, who finds herself pushed into a New York City world that she wants to be a part of, but is also frightened by and intimidated by.
And she finds herself clinging to this kind of odd girl who is a born and bred New Yorker. And they're both interns at the same newspaper. They kind of form an alliance against that. You guys that also have the internship. And it was, so this is like a friend romance to me where I love a book where the relationship between two women, specifically young women, is the most important part of this story because.
Being this age where you're trying to figure yourself out, you're trying to figure the world out, your friendships can be just as if not more intense than any flirtation or romantic relationship. And while I was an infant in the year 1983, in the year 2006, seven, I lived in New York City, I lived with I felt so out of place.
I felt so out of place. I did not belong at all. And my friendships with the girls, and I say, I mean, I know we should say women at that age, but no. Like we were girls. We were girls. And those relationships were so intense. They got me through. And in many ways, like they almost did me in, and this is. A novel that centers that relationship.
A very intense friendship between two young girls, and it's called Friends Like These by Meg Soff. Apparently she has other books and I am going to read the heck out of those.
Never come here for breaking book news. I will typically be either the only person to have read a book or the very last person to have read a book. I will never be a person who's like spotting a book trend.
But everybody told me to read Emma Klein's, the guest. And by everybody, I mean everybody on TikTok was talking about Emma Klein's the guest. Emma Klein also wrote The Girls, which was, I mean, essentially I would categorize it as not Ted Bundy, fanfic, who's the other guy.
Emma Klein, the girls. Is about Manson family. Okay, so the girls' Manson family Fanfic I is, is how I read it, and I really struggled to get into that book.
When it came out, it took me two or three tries of starting it at night on my, you know, tablet and then falling asleep and finally just giving up. So I was not a person who thought, oh, I've gotta read the guest. I do love the cover of this book. And honestly, that is what we do, is we judge it by the cover.
It's this beautiful green with this gorgeous, gorgeous blue, and it's just, oh, there's a hand reaching out and it conveys longing. And I love longing. I love anything that is unrequited. After I also just told you I love something with a neat and Heidi ending. We contain multitudes. Ourselves in the books that we read.
So the guest takes place over a week. We meet this girl, the protagonist. She is swimming. She is about to drown. She doesn't, or this would've been an incredibly short book, but we learned that she is a sex worker, that she is sort of somebody's girlfriend, but the relationship is obviously imbalanced. He's older, he's rich.
She is a thing of beauty. She is an object, and when he tells her to leave his house, it is apparent just how little this girl has to tether her to this world. We follow her for a week while she buys her time thinking by Labor Day, he'll have forgiven me. I can show up and all will be well. The writing is so spare.
There is not a word wasted, and this protagonist is not the most likable of girls. Although I felt this tenderness, this protectiveness, this sort of wanting to wrap my arms around her and make her make different decisions. She makes horrible decisions. She makes horrible decisions. You can tell that even if she made all the right decisions, her situation would be difficult to say the least, and would probably still feel impossible.
And there's something about the juxtaposition of this girl who has nothing but her own beauty being cast out into a world of wealth where all the doors are essentially locked to her. Watching her try to survive in this environment that is so compelling. My friend, actually, my, you know, second cousin, Claire McInerney part of our, part of our organization, part of our team here said it is the most compelling book about nothing I've ever read because nothing really happens and yet everything happens and it's about nothing.
And it's also about class, which I love. I love books that explore class and power and who has it and who doesn't. And I really like this is the kind of book that is staying on my bookshelf I know exactly where I'm going to shelve it, which is novels I would read again and it takes place in that last. Gasp of summer, right before Labor Day, unless you live in, I guess, pretty much all of America right now where we are having record high temperatures. And I live in the Sonoran Desert here in Phoenix, Arizona, and it has been over a hundred degrees for most of the days this summer.
Let's not get into that. Let's not get into that. I don't want to fall down an anxiety spiral right now. That's not what I want to do.
I also read a book that I would've never picked up except that I. I was supposed to join a book, a book club, not as a, not as a member, but as a guest.
This book club had read Bad Vibes, only my most recent book, and I said, yeah, I'll join you. And then through a series of mishaps, technological, and just myself related, I didn't make it, and they said, don't worry, we're meeting again next month. Here's the book. It's not my book. It's a book called Wayward by Amelia Hart.
I bought it to make it up to them, and I really did not want to open it because it is magical realism and I never read the book flaps or the back of books before I buy them. I either want to read it. Or I don't, I think sometimes the exception is obviously nonfiction books. I will, but if it's a novel, I do like to be surprised.
But it was shelved in, in magical realism. I bought it, there's a giant crow on the cover and I was like, oh God, what's this gonna be about? then the background is really busy and there's like florals and insects and I just thought, oh God, okay, here we go. It's gonna be about like, I don't know, witches or something.
Bingo. Yes, it is. It is a braided narrative that takes place in the 16 hundreds, in the 1940s and in present day. And yes, it is witchcraft. Yes it is in, in inheritance and yes, class and magic and feminism and. I tore through that one. I actually gave it to my daughter to read first because she loves that stuff.
We were out in the Utah Desert on a family trip and what better time to read than when you're just surrounded by nature's beauty and also by a ton of screaming kids your own and other people's. She wrote, she read that book in a day. She handed it to me. I finished it also pretty quickly. It was a page turner.
I could keep up sometimes a braided narrative. I'm like, I don't know where I am. Wait, it's a 16 hundreds now. Wait, who's this person? Wait, how does this all fit together? It fits together. It is. If you are into this kind of thing, you will love it if you are not. I think it could be a great book to get from the library.
It could be, honestly, it's probably a really good audio book as well. But it was also a nice surprise to know that, you know, I really can enjoy something and find a lot of value in something, even if it isn't my normal fare. I've yeah, I actually just loaned that one out to, to a friend slash neighbor, so it's one that's a book that I really enjoyed.
I can't wait to join that book club to talk with them. And also that is the kind of book where I'll read it and I'll pass it on and it's okay if it doesn't come back. Does that make sense? Nothing against the author. We simply cannot keep every book we've ever read. We can't. Okay. Alright, we're gonna take a little break and then we'll be back with what I'm in progress reading and my TBR pile.
MIDROLL 1
So I have an erratic list of books that I am in the middle of right now. The first is No Bad Parts by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz.
So if you've heard people talking about Internal Family Systems, this is kind of, I mean, this is the book from the guy who invented Internal Family Systems. It is the kind of therapy that I am working on right now, and I thought, yes, I need extra credit in therapy, so I better read this.
So I'm gonna actually read you an excerpt of it because this is the, I think this is a good summary of what the book is about to me. I don't think anybody wants you to paraphrase a nonfiction book for them that's about mental health. I could be wrong. Please let me know if I am, but if you are a.
Person who has struggled even to like find a kind of therapy that works with you or you know, has really struggled to like, feel good about yourself. One, give internal family systems a Google, see if there's a qualified therapist by you who can work with you on it. And also give this book a read because this book has also given me things to talk about in therapy.
But what I really loved was like right from the jump. He is talking about our culture as a whole. One reason why I hate self-help books so much which I could do an entire episode of in just absolutely bonkers self-help books, I kind of, I collect self-help books that I find at thrift stores, self-help books from a hundred years ago, which read the same as the books that have been bestsellers for.
The past 10 years, or the past five years, they're all the same thing, which is that it's all on you. And there's no kind of recognition of the broader forces at play that might have helped us develop some of these, you know, what they would would, a self-help author would call like a deficiency or, you know, a character defect, which is really just a kind of a survival mechanism.
So I'm gonna read you a couple things that I flagged and highlighted. This is literally on the first page. Okay. He's talking about his goal and he says basically,
Okay. So he's talking about the goal of Internal family systems and helping his clients keep the striving, materialistic, competitive parts of them that had dominated their lives from regaining dominance so they can explore what else is inside them. In doing so, I can help them access what I call the self, in essence of calm, clarity, compassion, and connectedness.
And from that place, begin to listen to the parts of them that have been exiled by more dominant ones. Those clients and the rest of us didn't come to be dominated by those striving, materialistic and competitive parts by accident. Those are the same parts that dominate most of the countries on our planet, and particularly my country, the United States, when my clients earn the grip of those particular parts, They have little regard for the damage they're doing to their health and relationships.
Similarly, countries obsessed with unlimited growth have little regard for their impact on the majority of their people or the health of the climate and the earth. Such mindless striving of people or of countries usually leads to a crash of some sort.
I'd never heard of the Mono Mind belief system, which is something that he calls like our prevailing belief system, right? Where you would say, I am this kind of person, full stop. I'm this kind of person, I am this. And. If you were raised in a family or a culture or a belief system where people were either good or bad, things were either good or bad, and black and white thinking was the norm.
Internal family systems. And this book is really going to do a number on you. There's a lot about shame, there's a lot about self-esteem. There's a lot about hiding flaws and perfectionism and how those things are all connected and they're so deeply unhealthy. So So when we think about ourselves as all good or all bad, when we think of each other as all good or bad, that's where, I mean, that's why the self-help industry exists, right?
Because everything is all on you, and so you should be able to fix it. And he says right in the first chapter, he comes for that. He says, the emphasis on willpower and self-control permeates American culture. We think we should be able to discipline our primitive, impulsive, sinful minds through willpower.
The idea of taking responsibility for oneself and not making excuses is as American as apple pie.
Sadly, our worship of willpower has been used by politicians and pundits to justify increasing levels of income disparity. We're taught that people are poor because they lack self-control, and that rich people are wealthy because they have it, despite research to the contrary. Studies show for example, that lower income people become empowered and productive once they're given enough money to cover their basic survival needs.
Like, no duh, of course we know that. But to see that be the basis of, to see that be the basis of a book, to have that be established as a ground rule before getting into examining your own self was really, really different than a lot of, you know, books of this nature that I have seen, collected, read, dissected.
So I am not done with this. I'm not done with this. I am on page 54. Okay. I'm on page 54 and there's a hundred and I think 90 pages. And so, you know, I can't do that math, but I'm in progress with that one. And. I love it and I can see myself hopefully maybe even interviewing him someday. But I'm at least talking with my therapist about it.
I used to be a person who could only read one book at a time, just one book at a time. No more than that. I thought like my brain just needs to focus on one book. I actually think that my A D H D brain prefers to have a couple books going at once. Sometimes I will just dive in and finish one, but if I can't do that, then being able to dip in and out of a few kinds of books helps me.
I don't think I could have two novels in progress, but that's a nonfiction book. And this is a novel that is coming out in January, 2024. It's by Emily Austin, and it's called Interesting Facts About Space. And Emily Austin wrote one of my favorite books of either last year or the year before. Can't remember when I read it.
Can't remember when it came out. She wrote the book. Everyone in this room will someday be dead. And that book is funny and strange and lovely and wonderful, and this book is the same and different.
It's such a peculiar little story. I don't really know where it's going. I just know that there is a woman with irrational fear of bald men who knows a lot of interesting facts about space. Right near the beginning of the book, she gets a frantic phone call from a woman asking if she's sleeping with her wife, and it turns out she is.
And so what we know about this woman so far, she is a depressed lesbian who loves space and is afraid of bald men, and some strange things are happening in her apartment, and I just love the way that Emily Austen writes. Okay. I love, I love, love, love the way that Emily Austin writes, okay, this is a little bit from it.
My mom taught me to watch the oven. When she cooks, she stays beside the food. She has a stool she sits on in her kitchen. It is important, she says, to keep an eye on a hot oven. She also says, for her, it's like watching a show. She likes to witness cook. She likes to witness cookies rise, butter, melt, and the edges of vegetables.
Blacken, she turns the oven light on, looks through the window in the door and watches the food turn brown and hiss. I keep abandoning my baking to ensure my door is locked and to look out my peephole. I put both hands on either side of the hole before peeking out. There are red cake battered hand prints on my door.
Each time I spot them, they startle me, I think. Are those my bloodied hand prints? Am I a ghost? Did my neighbor kill me earlier? Am I trapped in here? Reliving my attempted escape for eternity? Then I remember that I'm baking a cake and rush back to the oven to watch it rise. I don't know where this book is going.
I'll keep you updated. I know it's on pre-order right now. I know that I would read Emily Austin is one of those authors. She only has one other book out. She only has one other book out. Everyone in this room will someday be dead, about a depressed lesbian who takes a job working the office at a Catholic church and starts a correspondence with the friend of the dead woman who had the job before her.
I just love, I love how interior these books are and how clear the protagonist's voice is. I don't know, I just, I just know this is, I know this is gonna be one I love, even though I'm very early on in it.
all right, so let's move on. oh, actually no, I have one more thing. I have one more thing that is in progress, which is also a,
whew. This also nonfiction book. This is a big one. This is connected to some of the episodes one of the episodes this month on Terrible. Thanks. One of the episodes on Terrible, thanks for asking This month, September, 2023 is called Claire Has a Secret. It's about a young girl who was secretly struggling with suicidal ideation, with depression, with anxiety. She was, A kid, a middle schooler, when she made a plan to end her life, wrote a note and thankfully never used it.
And that is a different kind of suicide story than the ones that we have told a terrible thanks for asking. In the past, typically we have talked to people in the wake of surviving the suicide of somebody they love. So it's a very different kind of episode. But as a person who spends a lot of time personally and professionally, thinking about and talking about depression I have not always wanted to read about it.
I've not always wanted to read about it, but I have been hacking my way through the Noonday Demon in Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon. This is a big, juicy, hefty book. Okay. This is, the font is so small. The index and bibliography and notes are almost a hundred pages. Yeah, hold on. 4 45 to 565.
So there's, there's quite a lot of pages of notes and bibliography and all of that, but it is an exploration of. Historical and present day depression. Andrew Solomon is just kind of one of those big famous writers that I'd always heard of. But I'd not read any of his work. I don't know if this is the right one to start with, but I have, it is very informative.
It reads really quickly. It reads like a very, it reads like a, a magazine piece, like a Vanity Fair piece where you're like, I just need to see where this is going. And it's been very, very informative Also. Darkness visible. William Styron this is his very, very, very, very short book about his spiral into depression.
It was first published in 1990. He experienced depression for the first time in 1985. It's called a Memoir of Madness. William Styron is the author of Lie Down in Darkness. What else did he read? What else did he write? What else did he write? Oh my God. Oh my God. Doy William Styron brought us Sophie's Choice and lie down in Darkness.
And it's, it's really interesting to me to hear him write that he had not experienced depression till he was 60. Some of that writing, I think, Are you sure buddy? Are you sure? Did you just not have words for it or did you just have a functional level of depression? Not to say that you must have depression to write depressing things.
I think you can possibly, it's, it's probably possible for some people to do both. I've only ever lived in my own brain, unfortunately. But this will take you maybe 15 minutes to read and you can find it at most used bookstores 'cause it's, again, it's pretty old. But this was a part that I underlined the depression.
The depression that engulfed me was not of the manic type, the one accompanied by euphoric highs, which would've probably presented itself earlier in my life. I was 60 when the illness struck for the first time in the unipolar form, which leads straight down. I shall never learn what caused my depression as no one will ever learn about their own.
To be able to do so will likely forever prove to be an impossibility. So complex are the intermingled factors of abnormal chemistry, behavior, and genetics. Plainly, multiple components are involved perhaps three or four, most probably more in fathomless permutations. This is why the greatest fallacy about suicide lies in the belief that there is a single, immediate answer or perhaps combined answers as to why the deeded was done.
The inevitable question, why did he or she do it usually leads to odd speculations for the most part, fallacies themselves. Then you describe okay, so these, the people that he's talking about, nexstar people he knew who had died by suicide. Reasons were quickly advanced. For Abby Hoffman's death, his reaction to an auto accident, he had suffered the failure of his most recent book, his Mother's Serious Illness with Randall Gerald.
It was a declining career, cruelly, epitomized by a vicious book review and his consequent anguish, prima Levi. It was rumored, had been burdened by caring for his paralytic mother, which was more onerous to his spirit than even his experience at Auschwitz. Any one of these factors may have lodged like a thorn in the sides of the three men and been a torment.
Such aggravations may be crucial and cannot be ignored, but most people quietly endure the equivalent of injuries declining careers, nasty book reviews, family illnesses. A vast majority of the survivors of Auschwitz have borne up fairly well, have borne up fairly well. A vast majority of the survivors of Auschwitz have borne up fairly well, bloody and bowed by the outages of life.
Most human beings still stagger on down the road unscathed by real depression. Damn. The man can write. There's, you know, of course there's outdated language, but it, it's, it's, if you felt any of these things to read about them could be, might be helpful. I don't know. I can't pretend to know you. Okay. Oh my god.
I probably only have time for like two. You know what, we can make this whatever we want. We can talk as long as we want. 'cause I am talking to myself checks. Watch. I got nothing going on. We're fine. Let's keep going. Okay. Another book that follows this same vein that connects back to the topic over on terrible thanks for asking, which you may or may not listen to, but I really am very proud of that episode as well, is this memoir by the late Heather B.
Armstrong. It's called The Valedictorian of Being Dead. The two, the True Story of Dying 10 Times to Live. Heather Armstrong was one of the. OG bloggers to make a life and a career out of that. She is right up there with Jenny Lawson and I can't name another one. Women Who, yes, were Mothers. Motherhood was a part of their story, but it wasn't the central story.
Women who established themselves on the internet by talking about themselves. Heather's blog and her Instagram handle were called Deuce, D O O C E. I discovered it in my twenties before I knew how to categorize the very intense feelings of despair that I, I feel like I've been having my entire life. And I read her blog posts.
Religiously. I would spend hours of paid work time at my many internships. Apologies, apologies, apologies. That was the literally the world's worst intern. My own time at college, just sitting in my dorm using a desktop computer, hardwired into the ethernet, reading her writing, which was so funny and witty and like, you know, rude and just, she was just such a force.
She truly, in many ways paved the way for people to be able to make a living on the internet by being quote unquote, you know, like by being themselves and her. She was always very open about her mental health or lack of it. She died by suicide this year, 2023 after a lot of really strange, you know, problematic things happening on the internet.
I had, I had checked out from her at, at some point in, in time. And so I know that, you know, her name has been her name does not hold that same I don't even know what I'm trying to say. I know a lot of people feel very, very strongly about this person, the good and the bad. And like I said, after, you know reading part of Internal Family Systems and working on things like that with my therapist, I think most of us are Partially have good parts and have, well, apparently no bad parts.
No bad parts. We all, we all do do bad things and we do good things, and we are all complex human beings. And I don't know this person personally, but I did not read this book about her attempting to treat her persistent depression and suicidal ideation by essentially signing herself up for this treatment where, you know, she would basically, I mean, I don't, I can't, under, I I, it's very hard for me to understand anything that's medical, but, you know, have her have her brain off go brain dead for 15 minutes and then be brought back to life in, it was a, it was a clinical trial.
It was an experimental treatment. All in an effort to kind of cure her of this. Horrible disease, this horrible feeling. And obviously it didn't work. It didn't work. She's dead. That I'm not meaning that to on flip, I don't mean that in a flippant way at all. She's a parent and I read this book after she had died.
I'd known it was out there. I had thought about reading it. I think I'd even put it on hold at my library. And I bought this in the wake of her death thinking. I really just I don't know. I don't know. It's really, it's very, very hard to read about a person who really tried to stay alive and had children that she loved very deeply and cared very deeply about.
And, you know, she was really it, it, she was very, very, very much struggling with a lot of things and whatever she put on the internet was not the full story. And obviously neither is this book, but the valedictorian of being dead, I think it is still in print. I got a used copy. So I read that too.
Okay. Now we are going on to T B R. Now we're going on to T B R. Can you keep up, can you keep up all.
Where I'm literally looking around me at piles of books to be like, what are the things that I was gonna read? Okay. I've got a couple things on my T B R. These were books that were sent to me from publishers. A benefit of being a writer, having a podcast is that people tend to send you their books and ask you to read them.
And you know, I, I can't read all the books, but if something really strikes my interest, I'll say, send it to me. I'll say, send it to me. Will I always read it? I sure will try to. So glossy. Where's this book? Okay. I don't, I don't know where I put it, but,
the book is Glossy by Marissa Meltzer. It is the story of a Glossier a iconic millennial brand. Can we have iconic millennial brands? I think so. I am excited to read this book because Marissa's a very talented writer.
Marissa's a very talented writer. Glossier is a fascinating story, and I'm also a little afraid to read this book because I'm just hoping that it is not a take down, you know? I think we tend to have really, really harsh takes about women, especially in the professional space, especially women who are like reaching for.
That glass ceiling in a capitalistic society that they did not invent, but certainly are a part of and are perpetuating and are benefiting from. And we tend to look at them a little bit more critically than, you know, men who have done frankly much worse. Every, you know, mo guess, have you heard of the, heard of the Koch Brothers?
Like where's their juicy memoir? Although I think that they are generally dull men, I'm willing to bet I've never met either Koch brother. If you know them to be a, you know, sexy dynamic dinner partners, please let me know and I'll issue an apology. But the subtitle of this book is Ambition Beauty and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss's Glossier.
Emily Weiss was one of many. Female CEOs who had big, big brands in, you know, the 2010s and seemed to girl boss a little close to the sun. So that is one that just arrived at my PO box, and I'm going to sit down and read that at some point. Where's the other book that I'm reading? Okay. Okay, here's another one.
George. George has been on my list for forever. This one was sent to me. We actually have a few copies to give out to listeners. We do all of our book giveaways over on our Sub George is a memoir by Frida Hughes, who is the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. It is a memoir of her. Raising a baby mag pie that she found after a storm.
I'm honestly just, frankly nosy. I'm just nosy. I'm, I'm just nosy to know more about the daughter of Sylvia Plath and what that would mean to grow up as a girl whose mother was and is a symbol, a hero to sad girls everywhere. I don't know if anyone else in their depressed teenage state kind of worshiped Sylvia Pleth, but I think that's a very common.
Teen girl experience. And I also know that Frida is her own person. We are not our parents. I, I guarantee you, the most interesting thing about her is not who her parents are. So I am really interested in this one. And and we have copies of that one, if anyone else's. And finally, this has been on my list for forever.
I, I, I've had it, it's been sitting right here. I see it every day and every day I think I'm going to crack open creep. I've heard nothing about this author. Ooh, I've heard nothing about this author, but now I want to, okay. She wrote the True Crime memoir mean, which now I'm going to go look up and.
So the subtitle of this book is Accusations and Confession. So she's talking about being a creep. She's talking about creeps of history. I'll report back on this one perhaps in October or over on the CK I'll let you know what I thought of this, but that is also on my T B R for September.
We are not necessarily going back to school, but we are going to create our own little back to school moment. Our back to school feeling. Put books on your book list. Go over into the sub stack. Let's do a little sharing library. If you have something you wanna send to somebody, send it to them. We do giveaways once a week over there.
If there is And honestly there are books of mine and not books of mine. Not like once. You don't have to like get, oh, geez Louise. You don't have to like get the books that I wrote or anything. But when I have books that I love but don't necessarily need to keep, that's where you can go and and, and I will give them to you.
I will mail them to you. I have to do a slight disclaimer, which is like, right now I can only mail books to the US. At first I said the US and Canada, and you have to know that shipping is so bananas right now. I support the US Postal Service. I'm a passionate U S P S user. When I go to the post office and people try to complain about the post office to me, I shut it down.
I say, I'm not the girl for you. I'm not here to disparage the, the, the fine people of the United States Parcel Service at all, or postal service, whatever that p stands for. However, shipping to Canada, I shipped a book. A week ago it was $30. Like, guys, I can't, I just can't. I'm just, I can't do that. I can't do that.
I can send books to the US and I'm sorry if that's not fair. And I know that there's always like one listener in Australia who's like, I, why can't I say Australia? There's always one listener who is in Australia who's like, what about me? And I'm like, no, I can't. I can't, I can't do an Australian accent or a New Zealand accent.
And they are different. They're music to my ears. And anytime I'm around an Australian person or a person from New Zealand, I shut up because I know that my body and my brain are going to start like trying to make their accent happen. And it's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen. The best I can do is to try to like tame my Midwestern accent.
Down a little bit, but like my vowels wanna, eh, they wanna go through my nasal cavity more than anywhere else. Anyways, this is terrible reading club. The next time you hear from us, we will be talking to an author again. We are doing these episodes twice a month. They come out on Sundays. They come out on Sundays now because I just thought there's really not that much to look forward to on Sundays.
So, so what if we just did these on Sundays? Let's just do these on Sundays. So we do these on Sundays. Let me know over on the CK if there is anything else that you want. Don't want. We had Kate Kennedy on a recent episode and she was the hit of the century. If any of you want to join me to talk about what's on your T B R, I am open to that.
I am open to all of that. I really do want this to feel like. A fun little get together every time you hear from us. So, and it's hard to feel that way when it's just me sitting in a pair of overalls in my office, sweating my face off because it's always hot in Arizona and I turn my air conditioning off so that you don't have to hear, like, and you'll only hear that when the motorcycles go by, which is every 30 seconds.
So thank you for being here. Terrible Reading Club is a production of Feelings and Co. We are a company making independent podcasts. And I have to say, I have to say, it's different guys. It is different. It is different when you're making stuff on your own. I would not want it any other way. I would not want it any other way.
But when you are listening to an independent podcast, you are truly supporting like a small business and the people who make this stuff because. They love it. So thank you. Thank you for listening and for sharing this with people that you love or people you hate. Thank you for being here and for the ratings and the reviews and all of it.
A reminder that all of these books and all of the books that we've ever talked about on this podcast are available in our show description. Well, The books we talked about today or in the show description. And so it was a link to our bookshop on bookshop.org, which has all the books we've ever talked about. Ever. Of all time. And shopping through those links helps support this little show. So thank you.
I love doing this job and I love doing it with all of you. So tell next time, keep reading and stay terrible and let me know if that catchphrase is catching on or if it's just a phrase. 'cause sometimes it's hard to tell. Oh, our team on Terrible Reading Club is myself, Claire McInerney, Megan Palmer, Marcel Malekebu, and Kara Nesvig.
Yay. Yay!