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Perks of Being a Book Lover is a show about books, people who read, and how reading, at its very best, is a social experience. Whether it be a book club, a poetry slam, or the production of a play; words are meant to be shared. Keep up with us on FB.
Episodes
Tuesday Apr 26, 2022
Tuesday Apr 26, 2022
Our guest this week, Chelsea Hofmann, loves to feel her pulse quicken and gets excited by the idea that anything could happen. She lives her life spontaneously so her love of the thriller genre with its twists, turns, and surprise endings fit her personality just fine.
After finishing college and moving to Southern California with her husband, she wanted to reconnect with her love of reading books that she had as a child but none of the book clubs she tried felt like a good fit. So she started a virtual book club on the Instagram platform called Thrillers By The Bookclub. As that virtual club became became popular with members all over the globe, people started asking her about in-person book clubs. Chelsea nurtured this idea, encouraging book lovers to start their own Thriller By The Book Club chapters. There are now over 27 chapters and more are still forming. We chat with Chelsea in this episode about all the thrilling books she reads.
- You can find Chelsea on instagram at @thrillerbookbabe.
- To find out more about Thrillers By The Book club, to see if they have a chapter in your area or to get more information about starting your own, check out their instagram at @thrillersbythebookclub .
- Local Louisville listeners , there is a chapter in town. @txbc_louisville
Follow us on Facebook at The Perks of Being a Book Lover
Instagram at @perksofbeingabookoverpod
For show notes for any episode, go to our website at www.perksofbeingabooklover.com.
Books Mentioned in this Episode:
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
Today is going to be a little different. Unfortunately we had some scheduling difficulties and therefore don’t have a new episode for you this week.
But, we do have a “New To You” episode because we have been lucky enough to be guests on several other podcasts. So, today we are offering up our appearance on The Modern Life Podcast, hosted by Tabby Pawlitzki. On the Modern Life Podcast, Tabby and guests read a book and then watch the screen adaptation and then pick apart all the things they loved and the things they loved to hate. And which was better? The book or the movie?.
Carrie and I were guests to Tabby’s podcast back in December to discuss The Princess Bride written by William Goldman which was then directed in 1987 by Rob Reiner.
This was our second time being a guest on Tabby’s show and we always adore nerding out with her.
You can find Modern Life podcast on all the major podcast platforms and follow her on Instagram at @Modernlifepod.
Wednesday Apr 13, 2022
Wednesday Apr 13, 2022
April is National Poetry Month and whether you love poetry or not, you’ve likely heard of poet laureates. You may not know what that distinction means, however. There are all kinds of poet laureates—of countries, or states, of cities, and of even smaller areas. A poet laureate is appointed by a head of government for her or his accomplishments and may publish poems for special occasions. It is an honor that comes with a lot of flexibility.
In this week’s episode, we chat with Luisa A. Igloria, a native of the Philippines who came to the US to attend graduate school and is one of only four poet laureates of color for the state of Virginia. She was appointed to the position right as Covid took over our lives in 2020. She talks about the three cornerstone projects she wanted to launch in order to make poetry a larger part of the community.
You can find Luisa on instagram at @poetslizard.
To see the Poetry Postcard Project and Young Poets in the Community, go to her website at www.luisaigloria.com.
Follow us on Facebook at The Perks of Being a Book Lover
Instagram at @perksofbeingabookoverpod
For show notes for any episode, go to our website at www.perksofbeingabooklover.com.
Books and Poetry mentioned--
1- Maps for Migrants and Ghosts by Luisa A. Igloria
2- "Song of Meridians" by Luisa A. Igloria
3- "Blue Bucket" by Naomi Shihab Nye
4- Cartography by Luisa A. Igloria
5- "Vacation" by Wendell Berry
6- Sapiens: A Graphic History Vols 1 and 2 by Yuval Noah Harari, David Vandermeulen, Daniel Casanave
7- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
8- Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
9- Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
10- Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now by Jeff Yang, Phil Yu, and Philip Wang
11- Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr
12- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
13- Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Wednesday Apr 06, 2022
Wednesday Apr 06, 2022
We’ve talked about many books on this podcast with an Appalachian setting. And in the Trump and post-Trump era, talking heads have been trying to understand Appalachia. After the publishing of Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, a book about Appalachia that many people love to hate, a whole slew of books by diverse Appalachian writers came out that showed other versions of this complicated region of the country. Neema Avashia’s new book of essays, Another Appalachia: Growing Up Indian and Queer in a Mountain Place really demonstrates those contradictions and strong sense of place.
Neema is a middle school teacher who lives in Boston, but she grew up in a small West Virginia town that was built up around the chemical industry that used the state’s coal to power its plants. Her parents migrated from India and Neema had what she felt was a magical childhood. But as much as she loved her hometown and home state, as she became an adult she had to to come to terms with what home means when you are Indian-American, Hindu, vegetarian, and queer growing up in a place that is overwhelming white, meat and potatoes, and Christian. Her essays ask interesting questions about what it means to love a place that doesn’t always love you back.
You can find Neema on instagram at @avashia and at her author website www.neemaavashia.com.
Follow us on Facebook at The Perks of Being a Book Lover
Instagram at @perksofbeingabookoverpod
For show notes for any episode, go to our website at www.perksofbeingabooklover.com.
Books Discussed in this Episode:
1- Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia
2- The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa
3- Drowned Town by Jayne Moore Waldrop
4- Death in the Air: The Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City by Kate Winkler Dawson
5- Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
Articles mentioned--
What Does the Image of the Cat Signify in Japanese Literature? by Dee Das
bookriot.com/cats-in-japanese-fiction/
Wednesday Mar 30, 2022
Wednesday Mar 30, 2022
Our guest this week is author and podcaster, Maggie Smith. Maggie’s second act in her professional life is as a novelist. She spent over 25 years running a business but when it began to feel boring and she needed to use her creativity, she attended a writer’s workshop where the instructor asked everyone to write down something they could never write about; Maggie wrote about mother daughter relationships. This idea transformed itself into a novel about where mothers/ daughters/ and mentors intersect titled Truth and Other Lies.
One of the thematic ideas of the book is how important heroes are—they inspire us and make us feel a sense of empowerment. But sometimes we move into hero worship, where we fail to see that our heroes sometimes have big glaring unbelievably unethical behaviors that we could see if we opened our eyes. Of course, the blindness that keeps us from seeing the truth about our heroes is similar to the blindness that keeps us from seeing our mothers, or parents in general, in a favorable light. The novel covers a lot of ground in a fast-paced story.
You can find Maggie on instagram at @maggiesmithwrites and at her author website www.maggiesmithwriter.com. Her podcast Hear Us Roar for the Women’s Fiction Writing Association can be found on your podcast player of choie.
Follow us on Facebook at The Perks of Being a Book Lover
Instagram at @perksofbeingabookoverpod
For show notes for any episode, go to our website at www.perksofbeingabooklover.com.
Books Mentioned in this Episode:
1- Truth and Other Lies by Maggie Smith
2- The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
3- The Beatryce Prophecy by Kate DiCamillo (audiobook)
4- Woman on Fire by Lisa Barr
5- Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson (audiobook and text)
6- The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont
7- The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict
Podcasts Mentioned--
1- Hear Us Roar, hosted by Maggie Smith
2- Books Are My People, hosted by Jennifer Caloyeras
Movies mentioned--
1- Chinatown (1974)
Wednesday Mar 23, 2022
Wednesday Mar 23, 2022
This week’s episode is for true crime enthusiasts. Every city has had murders that make the news, and Louisville is no different. Our guest this week, David Domine', adopted Louisville as his hometown and has a following here as an author, tour guide, and storyteller in the city. He has written a new book called A DARK ROOM IN GLITTER BALL CITY about a sensational murder that was discovered after a domestic disturbance in Old Louisville in 2010. The story includes drugs, drag queens, and maybe even the CIA.
His book is true crime, but it also veers into memoir and history. And it introduces readers to quirky characters whose eccentricities are why we have a saying here to “Keep Louisville Weird.”
His book is getting some attention. Publisher's Weekly gave it a starred review and Amazon named it as one of the top true crime reads of the season.
You can find David Domine’ on instagram, @bluegrasspeasant, on FB David Domine’, The Bluegrass Peasant and at his website www.daviddomine.com. You can find information about David’s historical tours of Old Louisville at www.louisvillehistorictours.com
Books Mentioned in this Episode:
1- A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City by David Dominé
2- The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
3- When Stars Rain Down by Angela Jackson Browne
4- The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
5- Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
6- Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
7- The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
8- The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
9- You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe
Shows Mentioned:
1- Unsolved Mysteries (2020) Netflix
2- Only Murders in the Building - Hulu
You can find us at:
www.perksofbeingabooklover.com
Insta - @perksofbeingabookloverpod
FB - The Perks of Being a Book Lover
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
This week’s guest, Angela Jackson-Brown, is an award-winning novelist, poet, and playwright. She is also a professor at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana who completed her MFA at Spalding University in Louisville where she is also a member of the creative writing graduate faculty.
Her most recent novel, When Stars Rain Down, was published in 2021 and is a historical fiction story set in 1930s Georgia, and has been nominated for several awards. Angela also has a new novel coming out in July called The Light Always Breaks set in post WW 2 Washington DC that features political and romantic intrigue between a high powered interacial couple. These are stand alone novels but what is cool is that these books’ characters are in the same fictional universe so readers get a chance to reconnect with characters they may have met before.
Angela talks to us about how she uses fiction to write about experiences in her life she wished she’d had, why she started writing plays, and the first book she read as a child that made a big impression on her (and this will surprise you).
You can find Angela on Instagram at @angelajacksonbrownauthor and at her author website angelajacksonbrown.com
Follow us on Facebook at The Perks of Being a Book Lover
Instagram - @perksofbeingabookoverpod
Website at www.perksofbeingabooklover.com.
Books Mentioned in this Episode:
1- When Stars Rain Down by Angela Jackson-Brown
2- The Light Always Breaks by Angela Jackson-Brown
3- The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl
4- Drinking From a Bitter Cup by Angela Jackson-Brown
5- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
6- Roots by Alex Haley
7- The Color Purple by Alice Walter
8- The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.
9- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
10- The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Mysterious Howling by Maryrose Wood
11- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
12- We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza
13- Girl at War by Sara Nović
14- True Biz by Sara Nović
Movies mentioned
1- Child's Play (1988)
2- The Conjuring (2013)
Tuesday Mar 08, 2022
Tuesday Mar 08, 2022
Our guest this week, Mazey Eddings, started out as a massive romance reader. In fact during her most stressful times of life, she would read upwards of a book a day, drawn to that guaranteed happy ending that all romance novels require. But, as someone who has an anxiety disorder, ADHD, and is on the autism spectrum, she felt like she didn’t see the issues that she deals with on a day to day basis portrayed in the books she was reading. So in the middle of dental school she started writing scenes that later became her debut novel.
Mazey’s first book A BRUSH WITH LOVE hit bookstores at the beginning of March and features two dental students as they fall in love and deal with very adult struggles like extreme anxiety and familial guilt. Mazey also has 4 additional books in the pipeline over the next 3 years that feature other neurodivergent characters.
We talk about why romance is the perfect genre to explore happy endings for underrepresented groups, the amount of misogyny still found in historically male dominated fields, and about the trend of women in STEM within the romance genre that appears to be here to stay.
You can find Mazey Eddings on instagram at @mazeyeddings and at her author website, mazeyeddings.com
Follow us on Facebook at The Perks of Being a Book Lover
Instagram at @perksofbeingabookoverpod
For show notes for any episode, go to our website at www.perksofbeingabooklover.com.
Books, Series, and Movies Mentioned in this Episode:
Books mentioned
1- A Brush with Love by Mazey Eddings
2- The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
3- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
4- The Name Of The Rose by Umberto Eco
5- A Room With A View by E.M. Forester
5- Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas
6- The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
7- Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert
8- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
9- Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake by Mazey Eddings
10- Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham
11- A Perfect Equation by Elizabeth Everett
12- The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
13- Yearbook by Seth Rogen (audiobook)
TV series mentioned:
1- Medici - (2016 - 2019) Netflix
Movies mentioned
1- The Lost Daughter (2021) Netflix
2- Nightmare Alley (2021) HBO Max
Wednesday Mar 02, 2022
Wednesday Mar 02, 2022
For me some of the most satisfying episodes we do are when we talk to book lovers from other countries. What is it like to be a book lover from far-reaching places around the world? In the past we have talked to readers and writers from Ireland, Somalia, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. This week, we are headed to Croatia to speak with Ivana Murk who gives us a window into her life as a child growing up, learning to read both the Cyrillic alphabet which Slavic languages are based on and the Latin alphabet. She learned English in school starting in 3rd grade and now she now reads books in both Croatian and English. We talk with her about Croatian authors who you might want to find translations for if possible, why the skill of a book translator is so important, and what authors you have probably heard of who are particularly popular in her country.
We feel it would be helpful to give you just a brief little summary of Croatian history in the last 50 years that is most relevant to this episode. Croatia was a part of the former Yugoslavia, which also included Serbia, Bosnia, Hercegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. In 1991, Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. This did not happen peacefully. This was followed by the Bosnia War from 1992-1995 which pitted Croatians, Bosnians, and Serbians against each other and has been called the bloodiest event in Europe since World War II. Geographically, Croatia is very close to Italy to the West by way of the Adriatric Sea, Austria and Hungary to the north, and Bosnia to the West.
You can find Ivana on instagram at @books.with.tutus_and_sons and at her blogsite books.with.tutusandsons.com
- Follow us on Facebook at The Perks of Being a Book Lover
- Instagram at @perksofbeingabookloverpod
- For show notes for any episode, go to our website at www.perksofbeingabooklover.com.
Books Mentioned in this Episode:
1- Girl at War by Sara Nović
2- Chasing a Croatian Girl by Cody McClain Brown
3- The Famous Five by Enid Blyton
4- The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
5- Grimm's Fairy Tales
6- Croatian Tales of Long Ago by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić
7- Various poetry by Dobriša Cesarić
8- Various poetry by Vesna Parun
9- Gordana by Marija Jurić (pen name: Zagorka) and other series
10- Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
11- Various works by Elif Shafak
12- Beartown by Fredrik Backman
13- Anxious People Fredrik Backman
14- Various works by Colleen Hoover
15- Dark Mother Earth by Kristian Novak
16- The Gypsy, But The Most Beautiful by Kristian Novak
17- Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore
18- This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel
19- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
20- A Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon
21- Shantaram by Gregory Davis Roberts
22- Odin's Child by Siri Pettersen
23- Love Stories by Trent Dalton
24- The Guncle by Steven Rowley
25- Every Bone a Prayer by Ashley Blooms
26- Where I Can't Follow by Ashley Blooms
Tuesday Feb 22, 2022
Tuesday Feb 22, 2022
This week we chat with Brittany Thurman, a native of Kentucky, who has recently published her first children’s picture book titled Fly illustrated by Anna Cunha. She worked as a children's specialist at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh which is where the idea to write her own book occurred, and she even took inspiration from one of the children who would come to her storytimes. Fly is the story of a young girl who wants to enter a double dutch jump rope competition but doesn’t know how to double dutch. She asks her friends for tips and while they don't know how either, they each give her a piece of knowledge that helps her be more confident in her dreams.
In this episode, she tells about the creation of this book as well as other books that she has in the pipeline, including one about the first public library built for and staffed by African Americans in the United States, which is the Western branch of the Louisville Free Public Library system. Brittany is a very busy new author.
You can find Brittany on instagram at @britjanee and at her website at www.brittanythurman.com.
Follow us on Facebook at The Perks of Being a Book Lover or on Instagram at @perksofbeingabookoverpod to see what we're up to. For show notes for any episode, go to our website at www.perksofbeingabooklover.com.
Books Mentioned in this Episode:
1- Fly by Brittany Thurman and Illustrated by Anna Cunha
2- Fearless: Boulevard of Dreams by Mandy Gonzalez with Brittany Thurman
3- Forever and Always by Brittany Thurman
4- Addie Walker--American Girl series
5- Goosebumps series by R.L.Stine
6- Replica series by Marilyn Kaye
7- Mary Kate & Ashley series
8- A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa by Tony Bartelme
9- Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
10- Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
11- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
12- Stunt Boy, in the Meantime by Jason Reynolds
13- A Comb of Wishes by Lisa Stringfellow
14- Red, White and Whole by Rajani LaRocca