Episode 10: An Autumn of Fear and Family

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

"It is considered a nature classic... It is about hiking, journeying, and camping in the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland and really a lifetime of doing that: of the author going, it's a nonfiction memoir, about her repeatedly going to these mountains and knowing them extremely intimately. And in some ways the mountain becomes like a living, almost sentient being to her with those experiences." -Cheryl

The Waters: A Novel by Bonnie Jo Campbell

"It's fiercely powerful. It's beautiful. I found it really unforgettable. It's a wonderful book."

Catalina: A Novel by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

"Sometimes I'm reading something that really pushes me out. I think that Catalina pushed me out of the zone of what I usually read: definitely a younger author, a really fresh vibrant voice, something that I sometimes bristled at parts of it, and I feel like that's okay... It's very edgy... It's about, in a way, a mental unraveling. It's about somebody who is vibrant, has this incredible voice. It's a stream of conciousness college novel, so you're in her head, and you're watching her kind of get a little messy... But you're also watching her try to deal with fears about violence against women, about cultural appropriation, about being at Harvard and trying to find her place there and having people mansplain to her about Latin American culture... It's a book I'm certainly not going to be able to forget!" -Cheryl

The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir by Kelly Bishop

"It is a celebrity memoir... who plays the incredible character of Emily Gilmore in The Gilmore Girls... This is sort of a dishy story, but at its core it's so impressive what a strong woman she is, and that even in her eighth decade she's still taking on roles, she's still acting, she's still going. It gives you that beautiful insight into an artist." -Cheryl

The Book of Pintxos: Discover the Legendary Small Bites of Basque Country by Marti Buckley

"It's literally stunning. It's a vibrant, bright, gorgeous book." -Cheryl

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

"There's been a lot of coverage of it. You can see a number of different stories about it and interviews with him [the author] about this. It's sobering, but also really interesting and thought-provoking." -Jessica

"It sounds like a really powerful book and you wouldn't expect much less from Coates." -Cheryl

Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune

"It's just this great cast of characters who are just lovely, they're just trying to find their place in the world. They have fathers who want to protect them from everything, but know that they have to kind of let them grow up and know what's going on in the world. And you have government officials that are coming in and causing trouble. But you have a group of people that find out they have more people out there on their side than they think." -Jessica

Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle by Clare Hunter

"It's a history of sewing and embroidery. It's beautifully written. It was a well read audiobook... She spends a lot of time looking at how sewing has been used more radically in terms of the suffragette's banners, or banners for different kinds of resistance in different ways. She talks about how it was used by people in camps, people in jails... It's just so interesting in the different ways it's been used and continues to be used... There's just so much more to it than I thought there would be." -Jessica

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates​​​​​​​

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

"I swear that book got me through 2020. It was a hug. It was wonderfully sweet. It gave me a little bit more faith in humanity." -Jessica

All She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

One Big Open Sky by Lesa Cline-Ransome

"This historical novel is set in 1879. It's kind of on the later side of our Reconstruction Era post Civil War. And the family in Natchez, Mississippi has decided that they are heading West. They're going to Nebraka. They have heard that there's a promise of free land, a way to become real homesteaders and to make their way for a better future for their family... I listened to the book, which I highly recommend because the narrators just give so much life to their characters and you get a good feel for the story." - Mari

"I've been involved with groups that have been trying to document the Black homesteader experience, and there's a wonderful website full of stories that the National Parks website put together... We just wanted to make sure that they're not lost." - Jessica

Black Homesteaders - Stories and history collected by the National Park Service.

Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay

"This is more historical fiction. I'm definitely someone who loves historical fiction... It's the story of four men...These men are all related to each other. The great grandfather is Francisco and he came from the Philippines to work in the harvest fields of California in 1930. And Emil, he's born in California, but has a very distant very fragmented relationship with his father which gets passed onto his own son, Chris, in the 1980's in Denver. And then there's Enzo, who's the teenager, telling his version of the story in 2020 during the pandemic in the Philadelphia area. This was an amazing back and forth of stories of how they came to be, who they were, and why there could be this stress or tension in the relationships between the various father/son situations." -Mari

No More Señora Mimí by Meg Medina

"You think that, you know, that it's the parents that are taking care of the child, and they are but: babysitters, childcare workers, neighbors, preschool teachers, so many take on that role. Grandmothers, grandfathers, older teenagers, so many take on that role of care for young children while parents are away working. I just thought it was a real ode and honor to all these different folks who take care of children." -Mari

The Strangers by Jon Bilbao

"A really, very wild book. That's all I'll say." -Mari

Electrodomésticos: Stories by Moira McCavana

Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay

Small Spaces by Katherine Arden

"It's really kind of creepy... It's always a book that I recommend to children who are kind of ready for that... It's also a great fall book." -Mari

Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White

"It's about a trans teen who's living in a post-apocalyptic world. It's like a religious cult sort of thing that he's trying to escape... There's a lot of body horror that is kind of tied in with trans identity that works really well together. It's really interesting to see that sort of juxaposition of those two things together: someone who is feeling dysphoric about how they look and is living in a post-apocalyptic world where testosterone isn't really a thing that's available and is also having changes to his body that he's not in control of... It's very dark. It's a little grotesque for some people... I think it's great for younger people to sort of see themselves represented in horror... It's very timely." -Rissa

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

"I grew up with that movie. I love that movie... I was like, I've gotta read the book, right? It's so short, so sweet. I didn't believe it when I read the reviews that it was darker than the movie, but it is. It really is." -Rissa

The Shining by Stephen King

Black House by Stephen King

Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Fisherman by John Langan

Ghost Road Blues by Johnathan Mayberry