WSIRN Episode 193: Rolling the dice on your next read Hosted by Anne Bogel, with guest Keren Form

[00:00:00] KEREN: I spent a long time as a kid thinking the name "Penelope" was "Peena-lope" so, yeah. [BOTH LAUGH]

[CHEERFUL INTRO MUSIC]

ANNE: Hey, readers. I’m Anne Bogel, and this is What Should I Read Next? Episode 193.

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.

Readers, before we get into today’s guest and the books she’s looking for, I have an answer to a question I’ve been hearing a lot in the past year. In fact, one time I heard it was right here on What Should I Read Next in episode 175 with Michelle Wilson. That episode is called “your library called and they want their books back.” But I’ve also heard it in blog comments and even in real life.

Readers are looking for books about women who aren’t in their 20s and 30s. But they don’t want quirky old ladies or magical grandmothers. Michelle and plenty of other readers want older protagonists who are real and relatable, whose fictional lives are similar to their own.

Michelle and I discussed promising titles, of course, but since this topic keeps coming up I also wrote a blog post dedicated to stories that put older female protagonists front and center.

You can find this list on my blog, Modern Mrs Darcy, in a post called 20 Books Featuring Seasoned Female Protagonists. You can find it via Google or simply visit modernmrsdarcy.com/seasoned to read all about it and load up to your TBR.

Today’s guest is Keren Form, self-professed mega nerd who loves everything from Lord of the ​ Rings, and board games, and epic science fiction. We’re having a great discussion today about ​ what it really means to be a nerd, and how her wholehearted enthusiasm has sent her on many life-enriching adventures. Even if you hear “science fiction” or “fantasy” and think “nope, not for me,” I think you’ll find something to love in this episode — my recommendations could just as easily be recommendations of a history lover, or a crime drama fanatic, or a romance-loving YA fan.

Listeners, you should know that there is a brief mention of death by suicide in this episode. If that will be upsetting or triggering for you, please take care of yourself and skip ahead about [3 minutes] in the audio when I begin my 2nd book recommendation for Keren.

Let’s get to it.

Keren, welcome to the show.

[00:02:23] KEREN: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I am super excited.

ANNE: We were so excited to get your submission for our form at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/guest. And our producer, Brenna, was the first one who saw it and she said, Anne, I'm really excited about this one. I think you'd have a great conversation with Keren, but I have no idea how to summarize her reading life succinctly for you. So I thought you'd get a quick out of that.

KEREN: [LAUGHS] It is kinda weird, I guess. But I had a really good nerdy conversation with Brenna on the phone, so that was super fun.

ANNE: Well, tell us a little bit about yourself.

KEREN: I am a hosiery designer, so I design socks and slippers. I live in New York City, in Queens with my husband and my cat. I'm a self-professed nerd of all sorts. I love sci-fi and fantasy. I play board games. I used to run a nerd bar trivia for almost ten years until writing 40 questions a month got to be too much and we had to stop. [ANNE LAUGHS] That's me in a nutshell.

ANNE: Keren, how does one become a hosiery designer? And does this have anything to do with the sock explosion that has happened in all the stores I like to patronize these days?

KEREN: Well, I became a hosiery designer through a really circuitous route. I actually went to school and majored in psychology. And it just so happened that my first job, I got through a relative as an office assistant in a lingerie design company, where I sorta learned the backend of fashion production. And then kinda fudged my way into a design job doing kids' pajamas and men's boxer shorts and learned how to do graphic design on the computer and have just designed multiple categories of apparel for years, and now I'm on hosiery for the past, like, I don't know, since 2004? Not the usual route of going to fashion school. [LAUGHS] And then getting a job.

[00:04:17] ANNE: What would I be surprised to know about your industry?

KEREN: The fashion industry is not glamorous like everybody sorta makes it out to be. It's not a bad job. I actually really love what I do, but you watch all these high fashion things where everybody's all, oh, I want to be a fashion designer and make my own line and do everything I want. But it's a lot of hard work. There's a lot of backend design work. There's working with all the people in the middle, with buyers and your sales people and even just people above you on the chain having their opinions thrown in the mix. And you're making designs for a particular customer; you're not necessarily designing for yourself, so understanding other people and other people's shopping needs and likes and trends patterns is super-duper important. It's not all high-end fun.

ANNE: Are you a fashion designer by day and nerd by night? Or is there more seamlessness ... Oh, how do you like that sewing pun? [KEREN LAUGHS] To what you do?

KEREN: For years actually up until this present job, I was actually mostly a licensed designer, so I would work with licensed products. And I've designed for Marvel and DC and Harry Potter.

ANNE: How did you feel when those projects came through?

KEREN: It's super fun. The only issue that is whenever you're in an office and everybody knows you're the nerd, everybody's like well, go ask Keren if this is okay. No, maybe we should have Keren do it because [ANNE LAUGHS] you know, she really knows Star Wars much better than everybody else. Which is all good and well, but my taste as a fan isn't necessarily the taste of, you know, Joe Smith in the middle of the country. We're two very different people.

ANNE: Now, Keren, you told us there's actually a version of What Should I Read Next that we could play with you, but you would be the expert here, and that is What Board Game Should I Play Next.

KEREN: [LAUGHS] Yeah.

ANNE: Tell me a little bit about that interest and how that began, and I have to tell you that what I have in mind is we went to Scotland last winter with friends who love board games, and they had ordered board games just for the trip. Will and I got to play all of these new ones, and I just, you don't know what you don't know, and I didn't know there were board game groups and board game stores and board game nights and board game message boards and tell us a little bit about that world and your place in it.

[00:06:22] KEREN: I enjoyed board games as a kid, but you know, sorta the board games we all played. Monopoly, Scrabble, etc. And then I sorta fell off for years and being a nerd, I knew there was a board game thing happening, but just really wasn't paying attention and then when my husband moved into my apartment before we were married, he brought with him his 20 board games and we just sorta started playing with the two of us and then with other friends and I got super into them because board games are a lot of fun.

We now own around 300 board games, which is-

ANNE: Oh, my gosh.

KEREN: It's ridiculous. And no, I don't have enough time to play all of them. [BOTH LAUGH] When I hear readers on your podcast all the time and I know you do too, oh, you’re like, oh, I travel and I go to a bookstore wherever we're traveling. We do the same thing for board game stores. Especially traveling overseas, we are Euro-gamers, which it's a particular type of game. I believe they originally started in Germany and they tend to be more like, social, less confrontational games with themes like building castles or making dresses or going on a trip in Iriomote, Japan and buying souvenirs. So whenever I actually have to go to Europe for work or when we travel ourselves, we just search for board game stores where sometimes you can play them and sometimes you can buy them and it's fantastic.

ANNE: Are these difficult to find or are they abundant if you are actually looking for them?

KEREN: Nowadays they're more abundant here, even I believe Target carries a lot of the more popular ones like Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride, and it's much easier now with the Internet. I've ordered games from France when they're not available in the US yet. The only thing is some of them aren't the English language, so you have to do some research as to whether the cards or pieces involved are language dependent because you can usually download an English set of rules but if you're looking at cards that has this paragraph worth of description in German, it's not great 'cause I only know very few words in German. [LAUGHS] Like the word for game.

ANNE: [LAUGHS] Did you realize that there would be an issue with the language until you maybe bought your first game in French?

KEREN: No, because we're utter research nerds and there's actually a website, boardgamegeek.com that like has every game in the world listed and it will tell you whether it's language dependent. Wait, I'm really interested. What did you play in Scotland?

ANNE: I mean, all these games I can picture, but I don't know.

[00:08:46] KEREN: Yeah.

ANNE: Okay. So we played a lot of games that our friend red up about, I think on boardgamegeek, and message boards and things like that, that I just didn't know this world existed. [KEREN LAUGHS] But we played Pairs. We played a game called Where Words, almost like Taboo-ish where you're trying to guess a certain word.

KEREN: Okay.

ANNE: We played a game I found very complicated at first. It took me a while to catch on where there were racing camels around the board.

KEREN: Oh, yup!

ANNE: We had to place bets about - What's it called?

KEREN: Camel Up.

ANNE: Yes! Yes we played Camel Up. Also just small, like not board games, but also my friend who was actually on the podcast a long time ago, Mel Joulwan. We had a word game that was made by the people who do Bananagram, but instead of the Scrabble-like Banagram. I don't know, it's almost like Boggle back when I was in third grade--

KEREN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ANNE: Where you roll out the cubes and the letters turn out a certain direction and you're supposed to form like a crossword-y like grid of words, but you're supposed to use all the letters, and whoever does it first wins. I love stuff like that. I thought it was super fun.

KEREN: You know, I love word games but I either have like the worst luck in the world or I'm actually really bad at them. I feel, I don't know. Every time I play Scrabble, I get immediately an entire like tite set of vowels, which is totally useless. [LAUGHS]

ANNE: I'm fascinated by the people who play tournaments and know a hundred words that use a ‘Q’ with no ‘U’, but-

KEREN: Oh, yeah.

ANNE: That is not - that's not me.

KEREN: Absolutely not. [LAUGHS] [00:10:11] ANNE: Though I have actually played Scrabble in this calendar year.

KEREN: I have friends that play cooperative Scrabble, where they together sorta put together words and just try to get the highest combined score they possibly can.

ANNE: Which goes back to the Euro-gamer roots, cooperative, collaborative that I didn't know about. So a favorite of mine that I'm ... Does it count as a board game? There's a board. There are pieces. But it's only two-person, and it's Othello.

KEREN: Oh, yeah, yeah. That totally counts. 100%.

ANNE: I haven't played that in a year, but I do love it. [KEREN LAUGHS] 40 questions a week for ten years, huh?

KEREN: It was actually 44 'cause we had a question which it was the last question in the round, it was like the super, super hard question that if you got it, [ANNE LAUGHS] you not only … You got the point, but we also made all these buttons with characters on it from nerd fandom that you could collect if your team got it right. And by the end of ten years, we had people that were wearing necklaces of them. They had their backpacks covered, so it was kinda funny. The writing question portion I am not sorry to see go, but we ... I mean, we had people that were friends that came, but we made friends with so many people through this game. People would show up because they heard about it, and then they would keep coming back, and now I have a couple new friend groups that I never would have had before hand.

ANNE: Oh, I love how common interests bring people together like that.

KEREN: It's wonderful. And actually, the weirdest nerd trivia story. My husband and I were on vacation in Cinque Terre in Italy, we were on a tour. Which by the way, I would not have known about it-

ANNE: Wait, hold on. Hold on. This is one of those words that ... I have never been to Italy. I would love to go. I've only read about this in novels, Keren. Yeah. You pronounce it how?

KEREN: I think it's Cinque Terre. I called "Sank Terre" forever because-

ANNE: Yeah, me too! Okay.

KEREN: I just assumed it was French, yeah. Mm-hmm. [LAUGHS]

ANNE: I never had to say it out loud!

KEREN: No. [00:11:50] ANNE: It's one of those bookworm problems, is that suddenly you need to say a word that you've only previously read in books and you realize, wait, I actually have no idea.

KEREN: I spent a long time as a kid thinking the name Penelope was "Peena-lope" so, yeah. [BOTH LAUGH]

ANNE: I just read a book with a Peena-lope [KEREN LAUGHS] except when I read this in my head, I pronounced it Penelope.

KEREN: Yeah. [LAUGHS]

ANNE: Okay, so the book was set, I'm just going to say Italy.

KEREN: Yeah, well we went to Cinque Terre because I played a board game about it. So we're like oh, let's go travel there. It seems nice. We were on a tour and we had like taken this two hour bus ride and then they gave us food, and we were outside the restaurant about to do the rest of the tour, and I'm tying my shoe and these people walk up behind us and are like, are you Jim and Keren from Turner Trivia? And we're like, what? What? [ANNE LAUGHS] And there were two people from one of the teams that came, that were on our tour in Italy.

ANNE: Oh, that's amazing. Board games bringing people together since-

KEREN: Yeah. Across the world.

ANNE: Fascinating. Oh, that's so much fun. [KEREN LAUGHS] Keren, I love how you made your interests not just something you do by yourself, but something you do collectively. Will we see that in your reading life as well?

KEREN: I mean, I definitely share books, you know, past stuff around that I like. I have certain friends that obviously have the same nerdy interests as me and the same reading interests because they're not necessarily the same thing. We do book discussions and not really like a book club kinda person, but just more sorta individual discussions and what not. I don't know. I definitely brought it to trivia when I was doing it.

ANNE: [LAUGHS] Now I feel like there's something we have to explicitly unpack and that is you have referred to yourself as a nerd a lot. And I'm sure you know that in the What Should I Read Next universe, that is a term said always with great affection.

KEREN: Oh, yes.

ANNE: But when you describe yourself as a nerd, what does that mean to you?

[00:13:33] KEREN: Ahh. It's such a weird question because nerd, I feel-

ANNE: Because we can all be nerdy in our own way.

KEREN: Exactly.

ANNE: Because ... I would definitely describe myself as nerdy, but I couldn't list you the Star Wars movies in order to save my life right now.

KEREN: Yeah, I think nerd might actually mean anybody that's really excited about one subject or you know, a particular interest. So you can be a book nerd. You can be a sci-fi nerd. You can be a Star Wars nerd. You can be, you know, a board game nerd, or a bunch of those together. I don't think nerdism should be exclusionary. You know, as long as you got like a huge interest, like really love boring people to death about it, then I think you're nerdy. [BOTH LAUGH]

ANNE: Were you to bore people to death about a specific aspect about your reading life, where might you run into trouble of getting perhaps a little long winded if your audience didn't share your interests?

KEREN: Definitely bore people to death about Terry Pratchett's Discworld, especially in trivia. ​ ​

ANNE: I hear that you have a physical marker of your love for Pratchett.

KEREN: I do. I have a tattoo that I got the year that Terry Pratchett died.

ANNE: Ohh.

KEREN: Yeah. That was my first tattoo. I was like, uhh, okay. I actually know that I want this permanently on my body, and I'm not going to regret it.

ANNE: Is it in a place where people can ask you about it?

KEREN: It is. So it's on my left, on the inside of my left wrist, which it actually, I don't know, it's part of the description of the tattoo, which oh when I'm asked casually by like a doctor or someone random that's like oh, what's that mean? Way too long to go into the description [BOTH LAUGH] and I'm usually just-

ANNE: So what do you say?

KEREN: I say it's in memoriam of my favorite author. Then they're usually like okay, 'cause it's small talk and they really didn't want to know more. But actually it's the sign and we're going to get super nerdy here, it's a Dwarvian mine sign from The Discworld mythology. It's the ​ ​ summoning dark and in the book Thud!, it ends up on the inside left wrist, which is where mine ​ ​ is, of my favorite character, Sam Vimes, and basically dwarves will draw this sign to summon a demon essentially to take revenge on people that have wrong them. And it ends up in Samuel Vimes, who is a policeman, and what the demon does is sorta puts a champion, plays with their mind, and tries to get them to take revenge in, on or whatever has happened. And the interesting part about it is watching it play out in a character who has seen the worst of mankind and has overcome so many of his own demons that he sorta understands that push of urge and why it's wrong. It's, I don't know, it's always resonated with me because it's very easy for everybody to just be cruel. You know, something bad happens to you, to blame others, see people as other in times of like stress and wrongness but the good in humankind is to overcome that urge. I've always loved that and Terry Pratchett understands human nature like no one else I've ever read. Like both the good and the bad of it.

[00:16:19] ANNE: Now when Terry Pratchett died and you thought, I'm going to get a Terry Pratchett tattoo, was there any competition or did you immediately know it was this image from Thud!? ​ ​

KEREN: No, I 100% knew this. The moment from that book regarding this sorta struggle has just always had sorta deep emotional resonance for me.

ANNE: Oh, that's really touching.

KEREN: Thanks.

ANNE: Keren, you said that was your first tattoo. Do you have other literary inspired tattoos?

KEREN: I've got one more, and oh man, if you like want to go even nerdier [LAUGHS] because it's a Tolkien inspired tattoo in the way that everybody knows Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. ​ ​ ​ Mine is inspired by The Silmarillion, which is the book [ANNE LAUGHS] Yeah. Mmhmm, Lord of ​ ​ ​ the Rings nerds think is too nerdy to read. ​

ANNE: I'm laughing because the first time I heard of that book, 'cause I didn't read these growing up and I didn't know, I was in my early 20s and I remember one of my husband's coworkers was reading it. And he was really apologetic about it.

KEREN: Yeah!

ANNE: Which I was like, oh, I love Lord of the Rings, should I read this? And his nerdy ​ ​ coworkers was like uhh, no, this is definitely too nerdy for you. [LAUGHS]

KEREN: You know, my husband listened to it on audio and found it much more digestible that way because you have somebody with a nice soothing British accent essentially telling you a history story, so it's easier maybe to digest that way. You feel like you're in class. [LAUGHS] If you enjoy class.

[00:17:36] ANNE: [LAUGHS] It clearly means something to you.

KEREN: Yeah. I love it. It's in the beginning, sorta a creation story and then goes into like, oh, 20,000 years of Elvish straith and history, but it's just really awesome worldbuilding and there's a lot of striving through bad times that I just sorta resonate with. But yeah, on my arm, it's two stylized trees with some words between it. And the trees are the two trees of Valinor, which you know the Lord of the Rings movies when the elves are always like, oh, we're sailing into the ​ ​ west. That’s Valinor, which is essentially their paradise. And these trees used to be what was the sun and the moon in ancient times until they were destroyed by Morgoff, who is the ultimate evil of the day. The elves have pretty much never gotten over that. Like one of the worst things to ever happen in their history.

In the middle of that is a quote in Elvish that says “Aure Entuluva” which means day will come again. That is from a latter period in the history which is something shouted by Húrin, who was hero of men who shouted this while fighting off like a bajillion orcs, so the rest of the company could get away. It was a hopeless fight. It's a reminder to me that, I don't know, especially nowadays when everything in the world seems kinda hopeless and everyone's really sorta disenchanted and upset that even if things are kinda garbage, you can't stop fighting for what's right or to help people because you always need to try to make a better world regardless of what's going on. I know it sounds super corny and it's doubly corny on top of talking about tattoos, but it's a message that I always liked, and reading in any sort of media is people struggling to do the right sort of thing and hopefully preserving.

ANNE: Did you design your tattoos yourself, Keren?

KEREN: Terry Pratchett one is an exact copy of what's on the inside flap of the book. The tree one, I ... You know, I found some reference online. I didn't draw it myself, but I found something that was stylized like Tolkien and found the words and I actually have a friend who's a tattoo artist who kinda helped me lay it out.

ANNE: So you enjoy reading about people struggling to do the right thing. Is that a theme that we're going to see reflected in your favorites?

KEREN: I think so.

ANNE: Well, Keren, after hearing just a little about your love for Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, I'm so excited to hear more about your reading life. Are you ready to dive into your favorites?

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ANNE: Well, you know how this works. You are going to tell me three books you love, one book you don't, and what you're reading now, and we will discuss what you should read next. Was it hard to choose these favorites?

[00:22:41] KEREN: Oh, God, yes. [ANNE LAUGHS] Yeah. Everybody that comes on your show I think says "oh, I had a hard time. It's impossible." And it is. I've been reading for 40+ years. I'm a huge rereader, so a couple of these choices, I was like okay, these are the ones I've reread the most. Discounting Discworld, so we'll put them on the top.

ANNE: Okay. What did you choose for your first favorite?

KEREN: The Doomsday Books by Connie Willis. I guess it's speculative fiction. Set not too far ​ ​ into the future, I think it was set in ... I wanna say around 2050 or so when time travel has been discovered, but it's really only used by historians to go back into time and study without really interfering with anything. And it's centers around an Oxford University student. She is the first one being allowed to travel back to the middle ages because it had previously been rated way too dangerous for obvious reasons. Not a really healthy time period. She gets sent back in time, but unfortunately, as soon as she arrives, she's come down with a virus and is so delirious she's not sure. You're supposed to establish where you are spatially, when you are time wise, etc. and she was completely delirious and is unable to ascertain her surroundings, but is luckily taken in by a medieval family who cares for her and she comes to spend time with. At the same time back in Oxford, the tech in charge of sending her there has also come down with a virus and is unable to ascertain where or when she is.

So you have on either end of the spectrum, people trying to solve this mystery of what's happening while in the present, people are falling sometimes deathly ill with this virus. You're sorta putting clues together, trying to figure out when and where she is, which is great. And i really love it not only because there is a link in the actual plot narrative that's going on, but Willis draws really good parallels between characters on both end, showing that humans are kinda humans no matter what end of the time spectrum you're on. There's always selfish people. There's always people, you know, willing to help other people out. There's always people willing to go above and beyond, and there's also just kids living their fun, happy life on both ends no matter what's happening.

I really love this because as I said, I reread things like a million times. Every time I reread this and the more I go through life learning about different periods of history, the more clues I understand that she has put in this book to help; you figure out things along the way.

ANNE: So it sounds like this is a fast moving story with really big themes.

[00:25:05] KEREN: Definitely.

ANNE: How did you find your way to this book?

KEREN: I actually had a coworker recommend it to me back in what I want to say around 2000, 2001 or so. She was also a sci-fi reader and she was like, I think you're really going to like this book. And I did really like this book. [BOTH LAUGH] And I've also really liked her ... They’re not sequels necessarily but she has a few others written in the same universe that are also great.

ANNE :And this the stand out for you?

KEREN: Yeah because it was the first and this one is like a mystery drama. The one after this, To Say Nothing of the Dog, I also really enjoy, but that one's of a lighter fare. It's set in Victorian ​ and it's more of like a farce slash mystery, so it's fun.

ANNE: I didn't know anything about Connie Willis as an author, but that is not what I expected based on the title.

KEREN: It's really good, and that one makes a lot of references to Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, a lot of the mystery type books that I grew up loving.

ANNE: Keren, what's another book that you reread? I almost said constantly, but is that even fair? You're a huge rereader, but how often might you pick up a book that you come back to again and again?

KEREN: So, most books that I really love, I tend to get to every year or every other year. They're my book hangover cure when I'm like uhh, I'm never going to read something as good as this again. It's like oh, let me just pick this up. I know I love this. We can like, breeze through it pretty quickly and then I'll get in a better book mood.

ANNE: That is a proven method for many readers.

KEREN: And it's funny you should ask about that 'cause my next one is Carry On by Rainbow ​ ​ Rowell, which I only read for the first time I wanna say two years ago, and I've reread it like six times [LAUGHS] which is sorta embarrassing. It's a YA novel.

ANNE: Wow.

KEREN: Yeah, I love it.

ANNE: I'm not familiar with Doomsday Book, but I have read Rainbow Rowell. And Carry On ​ ​ ​ specifically. [00:26:39] KEREN: Oh, fantastic.

ANNE: Wait, doesn't she have another one coming out in this same universe?

KEREN: Yes. In September. I'm so excited.

ANNE: [LAUGHS] Okay. So six times in two years is intense. What is it about Carry On? ​ ​

KEREN: It's sorta a Harry Potter analog and it's linked to her book Fangirl. Did you read that one ​ ​ ​ ​ too?

ANNE: I did.

KEREN: So, yeah, it's about the two girls who write fanfiction, so this sorta the fanfiction that came out of this book. It is set in what would be technically be a series of books but this one is called Simon Snow and The Dot Dot Dot. It's sorta a classic chosen one story, you know, chosen one who's supposed to fight X, evil, the prophecy, blah blah blah. But it completely turns the whole chosen one concept on its head, which I really love because as a sci-fi and fantasy reader, there's so many of those.

Basically Simon Snow, his friend group, in his chosen group, his best friend Penny Bunce, which by the way, one of the only and best representations of a platonic male, female friendship which I love. It's so rare that you ever actually get that. They've been going through trying to save the world the whole time and fighting against Simon's roommate slash nemesis, Baz Pitch. [ANNE LAUGHS] I don't know. There's a whole interesting twist to all those dynamics which I don't want to ruin it for anybody.

The book is itself shows really fun relationships, takes what you're expecting and turns it on its head. What I really, really like is that it shows, I mean, I'm 45-years-old, but I think it shows teens closer to what they really are. I feel that when adults write teens a lot of times, and this happens on TV and in books, they're either all super smart, like way smart, and always making quips, and just really super self-assured or they're all making really obvious mistakes just to sorta move the plot along, which drives me up a tree. I can't stand it.

ANNE: [LAUGHS] It's not just you.

KEREN: Yeah. Rainbow Rowell in this book, and in other books, I think she remembers that teens are like simultaneously smarter and dumber than we remember being. They make mistakes because they're teenagers and they don't have the life experience, and that's 100% expected, but they're also often more intelligent than adults in certain areas. And it's funny, my husband actually pointed out that he really liked that she remembered how gross teenage boys are. That like people are drinking out of milk cartons [ANNE LAUGHS] and because that's what happens. [LAUGHS]

It's also got a nice love story in it in a really good deserved way. And I also really like the magic system that she's created, which all of the often used phrase have really high magical powers. So like clean as a whistle will get something cleaned up off the floor, etc. I feel the characters are super well rounded, whether they're good characters or evil characters. Nobody is just that. They're all well rounded. You can understand bad guys' motivations, you can understand good guys' motivations and bad people do good things sometimes and good people do bad things sometimes.

[00:29:32] ANNE: Okay. And you like that complexity.

KEREN: Yes. Absolutely.

ANNE: What did you choose to round out your favorites?

KEREN: My final one is Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It's a speculative fiction book. It's ​ ​ pretty much historical fiction with just some slight elements of technologically advanced things, though it was 1999 when this book came out. [LAUGHS] So some of these slightly advanced things have come to fruition since then, which is pretty funny.

The story is switching point of views between World War II and current day. In World War II, you have one character who is a cryptanalyst who is working on breaking the ... Germany's enigma code. Also back in World War II, there is a U.S. Marine who while they're breaking all these German codes, they have to make sure that the Germans don't realize they've broken their codes so there's this marine who's part of a detachment that goes out and sorta fakes up things so that the Germans don't realize what is happening. Pretends they've spotted a convoy or leaves clues to think oh, no, the code hasn't been broken, you know, someone actually saw that happening, etc. And on the other end, you have the modern day grandson of the code breaker who has discovered lengths to Nazi gold and sorta an unbroken code from his grandfather's days.

Really super interesting. It's Neal Stephenson, so it's highly intricate and has a lot of math stuff in the middle of it. And I recommend this to a lot of people and there's certain things in there that if the first time through the parts where he's diagramming math things, you can skim through it. It's cool. It won't like ruin your experience of the book.

ANNE: So if you wanted to nerd out about that, you totally can, but it's not essential to get the story.

KEREN: It really isn't.

[00:31:13] ANNE: Okay. That's going to be really empowering to a lot of readers.

KEREN: I gave it to my mom to read because to expose even more nerdiness in my family, my parents are World War II and Civil War reenactors. [LAUGHS] So I was like, Mom, you have to read this, it's World War II. She was like, well, it's got these ... I was like no, no. Just breeze through that. Read the rest of it, and she loved it. Like she thought it was really great.

I know people always describe writing as, you know, oh, it's got beautiful prose to it, which is not usually my jam, but he does something similar which I don't know, in my brain, I think of it as textural prose. You know when you eat a dessert in a restaurant and like it's really creamy, but they've added some crunchy bits to it because it sorta will bring out the creaminess and the juxtaposition of those two-

ANNE: I love the crunchy bits.

KEREN: Yeah. I feel his writing is like that. There'll be like super intricate weird math stuff, but then he'll go off on a tangent about eating captain crunch cereal in the perfect temperature milk or gets too mushy. [ANNE LAUGHS] And it's-

ANNE: So true.

KEREN: Yeah, right? [LAUGHS]

ANNE: I mean, I haven't eaten that since I was seven years old and I still know it's so true.

KEREN: 100%. He actually goes off on a whole thing in Cryptonomicon describing the main ​ ​ modern day character through a Tolkien lens, saying oh, Randy is a Tolkien dwarf. He's hardworking and does this and that, and he talks about him being stuck at a dinner party with his girlfriend and her like pompous academia friends and says that, oh, Randy is a dwarf and he's stuck at a table with a bunch of hobbits complaining about stuff, which just immediately solidified exactly who these people were in my mind.

ANNE: I love the way you describe it, and I also love that it sounds like readers who wouldn't naturally pick this up like your mother also really enjoy the story. That's telling.

KEREN: It's actually a decent gateway book. I also have a friend at work who was like, I don't really like sci-fi, and I was like well, there's lots of different kinds of sci-fi. I know you like this kind of story, so try this, and she also liked it.

ANNE: I'm glad that she had a reader like you in her life who could help her see that it's not all what maybe the stereotypes have lead her to believe.

[00:33:12] KEREN: Mm-hmm.

ANNE: Keren, you had a difficult time choosing your favorites. Was it as challenging to identify the book that was not right for you?

KEREN: Oh, no. No, no, no. [BOTH LAUGH]

ANNE: Tell me about it.

KEREN: [SIGHS] And I'll probably make some nerds mad about this. But-

ANNE: Which wouldn't it just be fun if we all agreed?

KEREN: That's why there's so many things. We all have our own opinions and likes and stuffs. I really, really disliked The Name of the Wind and also Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss ​ ​ ​ ​ because so many people told me that it was good. I read the second book, hoping it would get better. [ANNE LAUGHS] Yeah. [SIGHS] These books made me-

ANNE: It's been a favorite on this podcast.

KEREN: Yeah. And I, you know what, have friends that love it and honestly I will never knock anybody for liking something I don't enjoy because what, we're not the same person.

ANNE: No. No, no.

KEREN: My biggest gripe with this is the main character is a Mary Sue and that kinda character drives me up a tree. I don't know if you know what a Mary Sue is. Basically a character that can do nothing wrong. Like they are perfect at every single thing.

ANNE: No, I didn't know that, but I love that now.

KEREN: Yeah. I think it started with fanfiction maybe but I'm not sure. He is the best at every single thing he does. He's like oh, I play the lute better than everybody. Oh, I'm going to magic school? I am immediately better than any of my teachers and I am like 14 years old but I speak with the eloquence of a 45 year old Duke, and I am outsmarting every single person around me. There's no like tempering of what's happening. I mean first of all, the bagginess of it is really obvious. [ANNE LAUGHS] Also just people aren't like that. There's nobody that's' perfect. There's nobody that's all good or all evil. Doesn't make any sense. Also I found these books so sexist. Every female character seems to be there for him to have sex with or to mansplain how to do something better and the main quote unquote romance seems so emotionally abusive and is touted to be romantic and that's just something that drives me up a tree.

I read them so a few years ago, so I don't remember all the ins and outs, but that sorta overshadowed any of the worldbuilding. 'Cause I seem to remember there's some interesting things in there, but it would ... I would just read some stuff and then be like argghhh! Just kinda ruined it.

[00:35:18] ANNE: Keren, what are you reading right now?

KEREN: I recently finished The Broken Earth trilogy which I got from your recommendation on a ​ ​ recent episode. I think the post apocalyptic one. I read all three books in a week.

ANNE: Oh, wow! They're not short.

KEREN: No, they're no. I just couldn't stop reading them. It's my favorite I think epic style sci-fi since Dune, which is actually very similar. The planet in both of those is a character, which is ​ ​ just great. It was such a good story. I think when you described it what I really liked was you were talking about how there's all this history, like history upon history upon history of the world and that you needed a glossary, which actually was like a high point for me. I was like ooh, I definitely have to get this. [BOTH LAUGH]

But I liked that you're sorta thrown into this world and are slowly piecing together both what's happened in recent history, and then 25000 years ago. Oh, it's got a wonderful main character. Very representational of all types of people, and I just don't know, can't say enough good things about that book. And I actually just saw N.K. Jemison a week or two after I read it at BookCon. I saw her speak.

ANNE: What?

KEREN: Yeah.

ANNE: What amazing timing.

KEREN: Right?

ANNE: I mean, jealous first of all, but what amazing timing.

KEREN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, I didn't get to meet her, but she was on panel and they were talking about how they came up with ideas for their books and she said she had had a dream about a angry young woman floating a mountain behind her. And she had to know what that was all about.

ANNE: Oh, that is fascinating. Is that one you'll be rereading?

[00:36:41] KEREN: 100%.

ANNE: I love the zero hesitation.

KEREN: And I also recently read Strange Weather in Tokyo because it was recommended so ​ ​ many times and I was actually in Tokyo [LAUGHS] on a train between Tokyo and Kyoto and needed a quick book to read. I was like oh, well, now's the time. That was kinda perfect for that time and that place.

ANNE: Well that's very different from the other books we've talked about today.

KEREN: Yeah. And I don't know if I could have read that in a different time and place, but I liked being immersed in the place I was reading something set in the place I was because I'll get inspiration from reading books anyway for travelling. Which oh, I forgot to mention because of Cryptonomicon I actually travelled to Bletchley Park in England and got to see where Alan ​ Turing's desk was and where they broke all the codes. And the same thing with like Cinque Terre, from going there from playing a board game. I do the same thing with books. I get excited about something and I want to read, see, and do everything involving that. It was fun to read about someone snacking on Japanese food and Japanese restaurants while having done it myself.

ANNE: Oh, I'm sure. When you said you liked your books to be immersive, you mean it.

KEREN: Absolutely.

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ANNE: Well I'm really excited to talk about what you may enjoy reading next.

[00:39:18] KEREN: Ooh, me too!

ANNE: Because we definitely have consistent themes here and I noticed you haven't talked about the writing style much at all. Like you want it serve the story, and you like it when it's good, but you do not want the writer to call attention. Look at how pretty my writing is. Or isn't this especially poetic? Like just stay in your lane, dude. That's what I hear you saying.

KEREN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, pretty much exactly.

ANNE: So while you do especially love sci-fi, there's lots of different ways that's expressed like we have a YA novel. We have some books that are really plot drive. We have some that are more character driven. They move at different paces. They're different lengths, but they all go into great depth to really sink you into the world and really share you the characters.

KEREN: Absolutely. And I am not ... I'll read anything. If you hook me with the characters, I don't care if it's horror or sci-fi or just literary fiction, I'm all in.

ANNE: All right, Keren. The first book I'm thinking of is one that really does interesting things with the chosen one trope, and that is the City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty. Is this a book you ​ ​ know?

KEREN: No.

ANNE: I really do not want to give too much away. But I will say that the author who I think writes this from a perspective that I think you would really appreciate. What was important for her to know, what she wanted the reader to take away, and how she wanted it to feel timeless, and I'll explain that more in a second. I think these are all promising things for you.

[00:40:45] KEREN: It sounds good.

ANNE: She sets you up to believe that something is happening. And you're not wrong exactly but thinks so, and I don't think you'll feel tricked because I hate feeling tricked as a reader, and I know that I am not alone in that. At all. She's doing something perhaps more interesting and less obvious in common than the reader may at first think. This is a new book. It's just come out in the past couple of years. It's lengthy enough. It'll give you the kind of hefty story that Strange Weather in Tokyo aside, that you seem to gravitate toward reading. It's a little over 500 pages.

This is actually the first book of a promised trilogy. So if you do love it, you will have more stories to look forward to.

KEREN: I like it.

ANNE: This is fantasy. It's got really excellent worldbuilding. You've said that word a couple times, and I know you care about that. And it features a 18-year-old. Her name is Nahri. She makes her living as a con artist and she's saving up for something important to her, so I think you'll appreciate the themes here like what you said about some of the books you really enjoy is characters are complex and you see good people doing bads and good people doing bad things. And that is certainly true of Nahri. So she has no family. She has to make her own living and she does it as a con artist. But one job goes horribly awry and she accidently conjures a mischief and also handsome djinn that completely wrecks her life and ends up transporting her to the magical city of Brass. It's a city from Middle Eastern folklore, the brass walls are impervious. They mean a lot to the city, and a lot to the plot itself.

What happens next is fun and fascinating and she's such a great, strong female protagonist. She's independent. She's feisty. She's on a hunt to figure out what is going on and what her role in it is, and again, I really like what this book does with the chosen one theme.

Chakraborty is Muslim, and it was really important to her that she use symbols from Islam and she do it faithfully. And the way she does that in this book, it's not a coincidence that she sets it in the early 18th century, and I highly recommend looking for her interviews and reading her author notes that explain these things. Something that works really well in this book because of the way she's definitely situated it in history and symbolism that has existed for centuries if not millennia, is that you can read it and feel like it's representing certain eras that you are familiar with. It's like you can ... She said that she's had readers read it and say, oh, this sounds exactly like Israel and Palestine. Or oh, it sounds like the Persians and Arabs a thousand years ago. Or oh, is this about Iraq and the United States? And I think the way readers react to that speaks to the way she portrays universal human themes and struggles that have been constant over time.

I think seeing that portrayed in this high fantasy setting could be really satisfying for you as reader.

[00:43:50] KEREN: This sounds ah-may-zing. I really like what you said about again the chosen one story being subverted, but not being tricked because I love when something is not what you thought it was and suddenly like the world shifts and pieces become clear, and you're like, whoa. But not that like M. Night Shyamalan thing at the end, like oh no, it was really this the whole time. Where it's not paid off at the end.

ANNE: I do like to have my mind blown sometimes.

KEREN: Yes. Every once in awhile.

ANNE: I mean, it has to make sense. You know?

KEREN: Yes.

ANNE: To have the feeling be oh, of course, and not how dare you, author.

KEREN: Exactly. Exactly. I also love the idea of her being a con artist because I love a good heist. So [BOTH LAUGH] that also works really well along with the high fantasy and sci-fi.

ANNE: Stephenson's no stranger to a good conspiracy, so you know, we can see that in your history.

KEREN: Yeah. [LAUGHS]

ANNE: Keren, how do you feel about a left turn towards a really popular contemporary sci-fi thriller?

KEREN: Sure.

ANNE: I feel like maybe you'll be seeing this everywhere and you don't need me to point it out to you, but I can't not mention the new time travel novel Recursion by Blake Crouch. Do you know ​ ​ it?

KEREN: No, I don't. I'm so excited though. I love time travel.

ANNE: We can see that in The Doomsday Book and I'm glad that's not a coincidence. I like this ​ ​ because it's time travel and the time travel isn't gratuitous or hey, maybe people would buy a time travel novel but it's essential to the story and also something you see in this time travel novel is ... You talked about Terry Pratchett and how you see in some of his work a call to be your better self and something we have in this book is people struggling to be their best selves and also to make sacrifices of what they really want for the sake of humanity.

This was a brain bender. I had to read some pages like three times like is what I think happening is happening because as the characters travel back in time, they keep rewriting history and it changes things. In the opening pages, there's a NYPD detective, and he's been summoned to a top floor of a Manhattan high rise because there's a woman on the ledge who's threatening to jump, and she says don't come near me, you can't save me, I have false memory syndrome. Life is not worth living. I am going down. You do not need to come with me, and I don't want you to catch it because it is believed that false memory syndrome is contagious.

And she tells him that the reason she can't go on is because she woke up one day, I think the week before, and all of the sudden, she has all these memories. They're not normal memories though. It's like she's seeing them in black and white. She calls them shadow memories, but she remembers this whole past life she had. Her husband and they had a wonderful marriage and she was in a different profession than she is now, and she had a son. And it's the images of the son that really kill her, and she thinks that could have been my life, but here's what I'm stuck doing now. And it is not okay. And she tells the detective specifically this is the man I was married to. This is the situation. So after she jumps, not a spoiler, it happens on page six. [KEREN LAUGHS] He looks him up in the phone book and goes to visit him out on his house in Long Island and the guy is protesting at first, I don't know what you're talking about. That is ridiculous. How on earth can somebody have ... Like false memories? You've got to be kidding. Leave now.

But he has second thoughts and says okay, detective, false memory syndrome is not what you think. And gives him an address for a shady hotel where Detective Barry gets strapped into this chair, a gutsy female scientist who's been working on in an ocean in the middle of nowhere for a philanthropist slash scientist who might have questionable motives and starts to find out what is going on. How it was originally intended for good, but how it's much more likely that it'll destroy humanity.

Wrapping my head around what was happening when you start messing with space and time in this novel, it was a doozy, but it was lots of fun. So this is a high stakes novel. You've got a procedural because you've got a detective on the case. You've got a save the world thriller. You have a love story, which really took me by surprise, but lots of readers have really enjoyed not least because it's so unexpected. Time travel thriller. How does that sound?

[00:48:02] KEREN: This sounds so, so good. Ah, the minute you said that you had to keep going back and forth to a page, being like wait, what? That got me. [ANNE LAUGHS] I always feel like it's a good novel if I'm like, wait a second, did I read that right? I love procedurals as well. And New York. Three wins. [00:48:17] ANNE: Check, check, check. Okay. Because I've seen that you really enjoy books that are creative and inventive with their plots and that also put a twist on something you feel like you know and show it to you in a whole new way. The book I'm thinking of was first introduced to me by a reader who said, you know, this isn't the kind of book I usually pick up. Read it. I know you'll love it, And that is a YA fantasy, fairytale retelling, which those have some built in strengths and also have some kind of weaknesses, it's Bridget Kemmerer's A Curse So Dark ​ and Lonely.

KEREN: I love a good retelling of a fairytale.

ANNE: Well this one is Beauty and the Beast. Kemmerer has said that she is kinda obsessed with like it was her favorite. She watched the Disney version over and over and over, but of course this isn't your ordinary Beauty and the Beast. She has a modern day 17-year-old girl. Her name is Harper. She lives in D.C. and life is not going well. Her mom is dying of cancer. Her dad's long gone. Her brother's in trouble, so she's on the streets of D.C. when something happens to transport her to the woods of Emberfall, which is a fairytale world ruled by a prince who is the Beast that we would know from Beauty and the Beast. And this poor guy, who is not sympathetic in many ways, but in others he is because he has been cursed by the evil Empresses to live this year of his life over and over and over again. And he's done it 300 something times, I think.

At the end of every autumn, he turns into a monster. He eats everyone in sight, and he has to begin again at the beginning. And the only way out is to fall in love. So of course, we know this is how the story goes, but the way that Kemmerer imagines the story is really interesting. So she comes in. She meets the prince who's reliving the fall of his 18th birthday 300 times now. It always ends badly. And there is definitely some dark stuff here. I mean, there's stabbing, you know, people being eaten. The Empress, she's a scary lady. But the 17-year-old girl, her name is Harper, she's funny and snarky and she's kind and courageous. Oh, and also worth mentioning is that she has to cerebral palsy, and what that looks like for her is she has a limp. And something that I really like about the way Kemmerer handled this in the story is she does has a character with a disability. It's important in the story, but it's not the main point of the story, even though it's very much part of her identity because people underestimate her because of this.

Harper is vulnerable but also strong. Very relatable. There's also a little bit of a love triangle element that readers are very split on. [KEREN LAUGHS] There's a sequel coming in early 2020, so if you're like ahh, what's going to happen next? You will not have to wait long. How does that sound to you?

KEREN: That sounds like a lot of fun. I really, really like fairytale retellings. Like I love Marissa Meyer Cinder series. ​ ​

[00:51:19] ANNE: Oh, yes. Ohh, and my kids just blew through her newer series which starts with Renegades.

KEREN: Yeah. I just read those too.

ANNE: I feel like a lot of readers have a Cinder-shaped hole-

KEREN: Yes.

ANNE: In their hearts and they're just trying to fill it up.

KEREN: Mm-hmm. And it sounds different to what has been done before, so kinda excited about that.

ANNE: Well, one of the potential challenges with fairytale retellings is it is very easy for them to veer into melodramatic territory, but I think Kemmerer treads lightly and handles this really well.

KEREN: Awesome.

ANNE: Okay, Keren, here's what we talked about today. The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty, ​ ​ Recursion by Blake Crouch, and A Heart So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer, which isn't ​ ​ ​ that a great name for a Beauty and the Beast retelling?

KEREN: It really is.

ANNE: I mean, come on. [KEREN LAUGHS] Of those three books, what do you think you'll read next?

KEREN: Maybe I'll start with Recursion because I don't know, there's something about it being ​ ​ set in my home city that right now is speaking to me. But they all sound really good. And I'm also a multi-book reader, so I might be reading at the same time.

ANNE: And I hope you really enjoy it. Thank so much for talking books with me today.

KEREN: Oh, my God, thank you so much. This has been so much fun.

[CHEERFUL OUTRO MUSIC]

ANNE: Hey readers, I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Keren, and I’d love to hear what YOU think she should read next. That page is at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/193 and it’s where you’ll find the full list of titles we talked about today. You can follow Keren’s travels and gaming enthusiasm on Instagram @kform27.

Subscribe now so you don’t miss next week’s episode, in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and more. We will see you next week!

If you’re on twitter, let me know there @AnneBogel. That is Anne with an E, B as in books -O-G-E-L. Tag us on instagram to share what YOU are reading. You can find me there at annebogel and at whatshouldireadnext. Our newsletter subscribers are the first to know all the What Should I Read Next AND One Great Book news and happenings; if you’re not on the list you can fix that now by visiting whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/newsletter to sign up for our free weekly delivery.

If you enjoy this podcast, please share it with a friend, leave a review on Apple Podcasts, or check out my book I’d Rather Be Reading, for yourself or a friend. And be sure to check out our ​ ​ short form sister show, One Great Book, where each week I pull out one stand out selection off my personal bookshelves and tell you all about it in ten minutes or less. You can listen to One Great Book wherever you listen to this show.

Thanks to the people who make this show happen! What Should I Read Next is produced by Brenna Frederick, with sound design by Kellen Pechacek. 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.