Anne Bogel [00:00:00] Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogel and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don't get bossy on the show. Our mission is to 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.

[00:00:36] Readers, we have such a fun episode for you today. But first, we have to talk about the 2023 Modern Mrs. Darcy Summer Reading Guide because it is coming out next week on May 18th, and our two live Unboxing events are that day as well. This is our 12th annual guide. It is packed full of 50 books I've read and loved and can't wait to share with you soon.

I want you to know what to expect and how to get that guide if you would like a copy. This year's guide features 50 books spread across seven categories. Most were chosen by me first. Ten of the books are team member picks that I have cosigned and read and thoroughly enjoyed.

For categories, we have summer staples like mystery and thriller, historical fiction, love stories, and nonfiction, plus sci-fi and fantasy, family novels, and a grab bag of assorted titles that didn't quite seem to fit any of the other categories, and then I realized they were all books about books. You don't have to read like me to find something to love for your summer reading list here. And with 50 titles, you have a lot to choose from.

At the risk of repeating myself, I want to make sure you know that this year, for the first time, our guide is not free. I talked about my thought process briefly here on the show and at length on modernmrsdarcy.com. If you would like to hear more about how the guide has evolved over the years and why we came to this decision, please visit the blog post on modernmrsdarcy.com dated April 12th. I go into detail there.

[00:02:03] The short version is that good things take time and they are costly to make and only getting more so, costly for our attention, energy, resources, and plain old cash. And we have decided to offer a robust guide experience for a price instead of offering a spare but free version.

For 2023, the Summer Reading Guide is an included perk for our community members and the Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club and What Should I Read Next? Patron communities along with Unboxing access. If you are a current member or if you join us any time this season, you won't pay anything extra for your guide. The guide and Unboxing are included in your membership.

You don't need to attend Unboxing to make your guide experience worthwhile, but I do hope you'll consider it. This is a big book party where I walk you through every title in the guide, why I love it, and why I chose it. I'll answer your questions about things like content and themes. Mostly we will just have a big old time together. I wish I could better convey the energy that happens at Unboxing, but it is so much fun.

We host two Unboxing parties on May 18th, that is the day the guide releases, at 1 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time. Members can access a replay video any time. That will be available the next day. We are also offering readers the option to purchase the guide and Unboxing a la carte. If you don't have the time or inclination to join a community, that option is for you. You will also have access to that replay video.

That means there are three ways to get the 2023 Summer Reading Guide and Unboxing access. Purchase the guide and unboxing a la carte, support the What Should I Read Next? Patreon or join the Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club. We hope you'll choose the option that's right for you.

One of our frequently asked questions is, what's the difference between Patreon and Book Club? I have good news on that front for you. Our modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club community manager Ginger Haughton and I just dedicated a patron bonus episode to answering that question. And because you all ask us so often and look, we get it, we decided to make that bonus available to everyone.

That means you do not need to be a patron to listen. Just visit patreon.com/whatshouldireadnext and scroll down to the post that says "By popular request: Anne and Ginger talk Patreon vs Book Club". I really hope you find this bonus useful.

[00:04:17] If you're not able or do not wish to join one of our member communities or purchase the guides separately, please know that we will keep with our longstanding tradition of sharing our minimalist Summer Reading Guide on the block. That minimalist guide includes the six Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club summer selections that we announced on the blog on April 26th and six additional Summer Reading Guide selections that I labored over.

I'll be honest, I thought and thought and perhaps over-thought this decision, but this is a big deal and I'm so happy with where we landed. And I can't wait to share the minimalist guide with you on the blog on May 18th.

Our minimalist guide is usually half the size. It's never been a dozen titles. But with this year's changes and the fact that we revealed our supersized summer Book Club lineup in April, I wanted to give everyone something to look forward to and something fun to discover on May 18th.

I'll also be talking about a whole lot of summer reading titles here on What Should I Read Next? all summer long. In fact, I've already mentioned a few Summer Reading Guide titles in our winter and spring episodes, and I know you will hear more of those mentioned later on in May and in June.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for reading. However you choose to participate in this community, we are glad you are here and we're so excited about what we have in store in all the places for this summer.

[00:05:32] Now for today's conversation. I am so excited to introduce you to Laurel Korwin, who is coming to us via our guest submissions page at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/guest. You know I hear from readers all the time, and one of the things I hear so often is that you would love a job that lets you read professionally.

Laurel doesn't work in a traditional book or publishing profession, but she has found that her career as a software engineer shares a surprising amount of overlap with her love of a great story. I was so intrigued when Laurel first mentioned this, and I can't wait to dig into it more today.

Laurel lives in San Francisco, and when she's not writing code or taking care of her toddler, you might find her adding to her TBR at one of her favorite local independent bookstores.

[00:06:15] Laurel is also a devoted traveler, although she hasn't been doing as much of that in the past few years. Instead, she's relied on books that take her to incredible and often otherwise unreachable destinations. You will hear more about that shortly. I cannot wait to dive into this conversation with Laurel and recommend titles that invite her to embark on new journeys this summer. Let's get to it.

Laurel, welcome to the show.

Laurel Korwin [00:06:42] Thank you so much for having me.

Anne Bogel [00:06:44] It's my pleasure. Our team was so excited to get your submission, and I'm really excited to jump in today. Would you start by giving our readers a glimpse of who you are when you're not talking on What Should I Read Next?

Laurel Korwin [00:06:55] Yeah. So I live in San Francisco and my job is in software engineering. I work at a real estate platform that has sort of homes on a map as well as a brokerage. And right now I work on the tools that allow other engineers to sort of see when things are going wrong with their features, but I've also worked on several other teams at the company as well.

And then in my off time, I am a mom of a toddler who's turning three in June and a voracious reader. So I read and write a lot of code in my day job, and then I read as much as I can on the weekends, on the evenings, on the bus when I occasionally go downtown.

Anne Bogel [00:07:32] Laurel, you mentioned in your submission that you had noticed a lot of synchronicities between reading books and reading and writing code, and that is so far from my wheelhouse, I don't even know what to ask. But I'm really intrigued to hear more.

Laurel Korwin [00:07:47] Yeah. So I came to engineering as a career pivot and I was really surprised by how much my love of reading and language helped me in the job. So engineers usually code in several different... what we call programming languages. Even at the same company, they are sort of different tools used for different things. And then you often pick up new languages when you're changing jobs. So having an affinity for spoken language actually really sets a great precedent for learning and really helped me when I started learning to code.

And I think that something a lot of people don't think about as well is that a lot of the job is writing code, but a lot of the job is actually reading code. Like our company code base is huge, thousands and thousands of files. So you kind of have to understand what's currently there, read through things, find the right place to put something. You often have to review others' work as well. So you're reading a lot of code in real time.

Anne Bogel [00:08:35] Tell me more about how code can be elegant or eloquent or on the other end of the spectrum, you know, like clunky and poorly phrased.

Laurel Korwin [00:08:46] Yeah. So just like authors of novels or books in general, I think that coders can have language, idiosyncrasies, or styles that go in either end of the spectrum, as you mentioned. and you can really pick up on those just as you can pick up on an author's writing style. So I have been able to tell by looking at the edit history of a particular piece of code before when something is really beautiful and it's, you know, JavaScript code, and I'm like, "Oh, I know that she writes really beautiful JavaScript code."

And then I look at the edit history and like, "Oh, yes, that's her." Or one engineer that I know often leaves the word... there's code comments, which are like little notes in the code that explain sort of something that the code is doing or some sort of context. And he often leaves the word "boom" in code comments. So whenever I see that, I was like, "Oh, Jamie did this. Jamie wrote this code.

Anne Bogel [00:09:37] Your signature.

Laurel Korwin [00:09:38] Yes, exactly.

Anne Bogel [00:09:40] Laurel, I imagine you've been a reader for a long time.

Laurel Korwin [00:09:43] Yes. Yes, since I was little, little girl.

Anne Bogel [00:09:46] Okay, so that's a fair assumption. I hear you saying that your love of reading and all the vast experience you have in that area really helps you when it comes to reading and writing code. But I'm wondering if this midcareer pivot has had an impact on your reading life or if that's worked the other way as well.

Laurel Korwin [00:10:04] I think that I have been interested in reading more technical books or more sort of nonfiction in some ways since I started coding. You know, I often try to read sort of workbooks in my free time, and it doesn't often go so well if it's just the technical tome. But there are lots of really wonderful books that I've picked up that sort of get on technical things or things like that in a more narrative nonfiction sort of story-like way, which I really appreciate.

Anne Bogel [00:10:29] Yeah.

Laurel Korwin [00:10:30] And I don't think it's only in this genre of coding, but just across the spectrum.

Anne Bogel [00:10:34] Is there a title or two that springs to mind as an example?

Laurel Korwin [00:10:38] One that I have on my shelves that I actually need to read is called The Code Book by Simon Singh. I might be mispronouncing his last name. But it's basically sort of the history of cryptography and I've heard really good things and really want to read it.

But another one of my favorite ones is This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by... I think her name is Nicole Perlroth, and she's the tech reporter for The New York Times. And that is a terrifying read, but a really good one. It's basically sort of a narrative history of cyber warfare and espionage and all the bad things that can happen when bad people are able to hack into companies' technological systems, light systems, all sorts of things. It's really, really scary, but really, really good.

Anne Bogel [00:11:25] That is one of the best titles I've ever heard. And that sounds fascinating and terrifying all at the same time.

Laurel Korwin [00:11:31] Yeah. It's also a door stopper, so be aware. It's I think like 900 pages long or something like that.

Anne Bogel [00:11:37] You know, you and I were just chatting before we hit record and something I learned very quickly is you don't seem to be afraid of those really long books.

Laurel Korwin [00:11:45] No. I really love strong worldbuilding and I am not afraid. I, in fact, really appreciate and enjoy really long books. Sometimes if I see a book that's 200 pages, I sort of instinctively go, "That book's too short. I really want something longer and meatier to get into."

Anne Bogel [00:11:59] I will keep that in mind as we talk today and think about what you may enjoy reading. Laurel, what is your reading life like these days?

Laurel Korwin [00:12:06] So, I, right now, have been on a kick of reading a lot of novels and then occasionally breaking it up with a very dry nonfiction book. But I have been working my way slowly through my shelves, which I have very large stacks, which I think is something I mentioned in my reading struggles as well. But I have a hard time branching out from my to-read list to find something new. If you could look at my bookshelves, you could see why.

Anne Bogel [00:12:33] I hear that. Laurel, you just referenced reading dry nonfiction, and when most people call nonfiction dry, they don't mean it as a good thing. It didn't sound that you meant that as a slam. Would you tell me more about that?

Laurel Korwin [00:12:45] Yeah. So the book that I finished recently is called Do Not Disturb, and it is the story of sort of the political history of Rwanda told through the lens of this murder of the former espionage chief or intelligence chief. And I would describe it as dry just because there's a lot of very nuanced historical detail about, you know, different elections and different battles or army groups or things like that.

It's definitely not kind of like your easy-read nonfiction book. And it was also, you know, they talk about the genocide, which is very intense and very devastating. So it was definitely a more challenging read, but one that I enjoyed.

Anne Bogel [00:13:25] Okay, that's really good context. Thank you for sharing that. What else do you find yourself drawn to these days and how are you choosing your books?

Laurel Korwin [00:13:32] I have found myself lately choosing books from a lot of authors that I'm already familiar with, I guess. I'm currently about halfway through The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. I read A Visit from the Goon Squad years and years ago, so I don't really fully remember it. But now that I'm reading The Candy House, it's like, Oh yes, this character sounds familiar. And I go kind of look up the backstory.

I also just picked up A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. I'm kind of looking at the shelf to remember the title as we speak, and I've read the first two books in her series about Thomas Cromwell and really liked them. And this book that I sort of have bookmarked to read is similarly historical fiction about the French Revolution. I feel like I have been grabbing books by authors I'm familiar with and sort of a comfort-read type of thing where I know that they'll do a good job.

Anne Bogel [00:14:19] Is that something you'd like to continue or just something you're noticing about how things are right now?

Laurel Korwin [00:14:24] Just sort of how things are. I definitely think that I'll continue it. But I think as far as book recommendations go, I love recommendations for other authors I might not have heard of. You know, I can go on and look up an author's whole bibliography on the interwebs, but I might not be able to discover a new author.

Anne Bogel [00:14:42] Well, I'm excited to learn more today, and we're going to do that by hearing about what you love. Are you ready to jump in there?

Laurel Korwin [00:14:49] Yeah, absolutely.

Anne Bogel [00:14:52] Laurel, you know how this works. You're going to tell me three books you love, one book you don't, and more about what you've been reading lately, and we will talk about what you may enjoy reading next. Laurel, how did you choose these titles?

Laurel Korwin [00:15:04] What I did was I looked through my Goodreads history for the last year or so. I organized all my have-read books on Goodreads and just tried to pick out ones that I either really loved or are sort of indicative of something that I really love or, you know, a certain type of book done really well and came up with these three titles.

Anne Bogel [00:15:22] I like that approach. Tell me about the first book you loved.

Laurel Korwin [00:15:26] So the first book that I picked was The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. This one is a multigenerational novel about a black family in America. And the narrator, Ailey, I think I'm pronouncing that right, hopefully, grows up in Washington, D.C but she spends her summers in a small fictional town in Georgia where her family has a really long and complicated history.

Chunks of the book are told in her perspective and then large parts of it follow the stories of her ancestors going back many hundreds of years, including her mother and older sister. It covers the horrors of slavery, but it also tells a really rich and engaging story about her family's life in the decades after the Civil War. I particularly loved the author's depiction of Ailey's relationship with her uncle, Root, who is a professor at an HBCU that she later attends.

Anne Bogel [00:16:15] That is not a short book, Laurel.

Laurel Korwin [00:16:17] Yes, it is a long book. Another long book.

Anne Bogel [00:16:21] Coincidence or not at all?

Laurel Korwin [00:16:23] I think not at all. I definitely had it on my shelves for a while waiting for the right time to read it. But I really loved it. I mean, I think that one thing that I noticed at the end of this book was I sort of look back and thought, you know, "This was 800 pages and lots of different stories, like could anything have been cut?" And really, I think the answer is no. Every story was so crucial and so powerful and just really gave me an appreciation for the author about how it all came together at the end.

Anne Bogel [00:16:49] Okay. This is one that I have been meaning to read for some time and have currently downloaded on Libro.fm but haven't begun yet. So thanks for the nudge.

Laurel Korwin [00:16:58] Yeah, definitely.

Anne Bogel [00:16:59] Anything else I should know if I'm going to pick it up?

Laurel Korwin [00:17:01] I think the only other thing I would say is that Jeffers, I learned, is a poet and I think that you can really tell when you read the book. Her prose is just so beautiful, and every word just seems so deliberate and so perfect for the context in which it's used.

Anne Bogel [00:17:14] Oh. Which reminds me of our coding conversation. And as a reader who cannot write Java, that sounds really enticing.

Laurel Korwin [00:17:22] Absolutely.

Anne Bogel [00:17:23] Laurel, what's the second book you love?

Laurel Korwin [00:17:26] The second book is called Blackout by Connie Willis. This one is the first in a two-part historical fiction series. And I loved both books but I could only pick one, so I picked the first one.

Anne Bogel [00:17:37] Okay, well, just notice that we're lumping more in.

Laurel Korwin [00:17:40] Yes, definitely. This one is part of a world that Willis has written about in other books as well or sort of a world she's talked about before, where historians at Oxford have invented a way to time travel to the past for historical research.

So in Blackout, the historians are sent back to World War II England on various assignments by the director of the time-travel lab, who is named Mr. Dunworthy. One woman works as a maid in a country house and she gets to know children who are evacuated from London during The Blitz. Another one works in a department store in London. And then a young man ends up sort of stranded, helping to evacuate soldiers from the beach at Dunkirk when he had been expecting to go to Pearl Harbor and did a bunch of research to go to Pearl Harbor and then ends up in this crazy situation.

And as we sort of talked about before, this is a bunch of different sort of chaotic storylines that don't fully resolve until the second book. But when I read this, I really completely fell in love with Willis, and I started seeking out her other books, especially her time travel ones, as we sort of discussed before this show recording.

She has one about the Black Death, which I actually read in the beginning part of the pandemic, which was potentially a mistake, and one about Victorian-era England. And I just love... I mean, I'm such a history nerd as is probably apparent. It just checked all the boxes for me. Like I have wished so many times that I could be one of those historians traveling back in time. That just seems like the world I want to live in.

Anne Bogel [00:19:02] I love that. That sounds amazing. And would you lump the whole Oxford Time Traveler series as your favorite if you could?

Laurel Korwin [00:19:08] I could. I definitely think Blackout and All Clear were my favorites. Say Nothing of the Dog was the Victorian-era one. And that was sort of more... It seemed more of a comedy almost, which I enjoyed as well, but it didn't strike the exact kind of narrative urgency as Blackout. So it was a different tone but I still enjoyed it.

Anne Bogel [00:19:27] She has a new one coming out this June that I'm really excited for readers to get their hands on.

Laurel Korwin [00:19:32] Yeah, she's fabulous. I am so excited to read that one.

Anne Bogel [00:19:36] I'm glad to hear it. I really enjoyed it. Laurel, what is the third book you chose as a favorite?

Laurel Korwin [00:19:42] The third book is called Boom Town by Sam Anderson. I heard about this book on the Slate Political Gabfest actually, and I am so grateful because I probably never would have picked it up on my own. But it tells the story of Oklahoma City through a bunch of different narratives. There's the lead singer of The Flaming Lips who lives there, there's a weatherman he tells a story through, and then there's this crazy story about the land run in the late 1800s, which I had never heard about before.

But basically the government opened up a settlement of all this land that had belonged to various Native American tribes and everybody basically rushed in all at once to buy it. So the population grew from zero to many thousands in basically one day, which is just a wild story. But a lot of the story is told through the lens of the Oklahoma City Thunder, which is the city's basketball team. And there are 2012 through 2013 season, which is hugely dramatic.

I love this book because I think it schooled me on a lot of things I knew nothing about. I am not a sports person at all, anybody who knows me will say. But my husband loves basketball. And when I was reading this book, I would start saying things like, "Wow, Russell Westbrook sounds like he's really a jerk." Or, you know, I would ask my husband, "How did you feel about Kevin Durant's injuries?" And he was like, "What is going on? What are you reading?" It is a great little dive into something new.

Anne Bogel [00:21:03] I'm wondering if your love for this book and perhaps for the writing style says anything about your taste. Like I've seen Sam Anderson praised for having a sharp eye for the quirky. And in reviews of this book, Oklahoma City is often described as one of the great weirdo cities of the world, which kind of makes me think of Connie Willis and her sense of humor. Do you think that's a coincidence? Or maybe some of the things that really drew you in to this nonfiction narrative?

Laurel Korwin [00:21:29] Yeah, I think that that's absolutely right. He really has a knack for these little stories that illuminate or tell a larger story. It was just really engaging. It was impossible to put down. And I think really, again, like interesting me in sports content is very challenging, and yet somehow he managed to do it. So I think that that says a lot about his prose.

Anne Bogel [00:21:51] I love you qualifying for all our similarly non-sports ball-obsessed readers that this is still a friendly book even if you're not super into basketball or at all into basketball.

Laurel Korwin [00:22:02] Yes, absolutely.

Anne Bogel [00:22:03] Okay. I love those kinds of books that take us by surprise. Like we wouldn't have custom ordered a book about the Oklahoma Thunder and Oklahoma City. But like, here it is. And you love it so much.

Laurel Korwin [00:22:12] Yeah, it was great. I still recommend it to people just as a general read it. It's really wonderful.

Anne Bogel [00:22:17] That sounds so good. Now, Laurel, tell us about a book that was not a good fit for you.

Laurel Korwin [00:22:23] So the book that I chose for this category was When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro. And I should start by saying that I've read and loved a lot of other work by Ishiguro, like Remains of the Day or Buried Giant I particularly loved. But I did not love this particular work. So, fan of Ishiguro, but this particular one just didn't sit right with me.

Anne Bogel [00:22:42] Tell me more about it not sitting right.

Laurel Korwin [00:22:44] So it's the story of a man named Christopher Banks and he grows up in Shanghai until both his mother and father disappear when he was young. They disappear separately, but very close together, temporally. And then he's sent to live with his aunt in England. And he eventually becomes sort of a famous detective there.

As an adult, he goes back to China to try to solve the mystery of his parents disappearance, which is sort of alluded to be this hugely important case. And the resolution is going to change the world in ways that are sort of unclear.

And I think that that kind of leads into what I didn't like about this book, which is that a lot of it was really hard to follow as a reader. I think that perhaps he was trying to purposely blend reality and imagination sometimes to develop the character of Christopher and sort of paint him as an unreliable narrator, which is a device that, as a reader, I've enjoyed in other books. But in this particular book, I just found it too hard to separate out what was actually happening.

I also found the pacing to be a bit strange. Like he jumps around a lot and then the last bit of a book of sort of a whirlwind tour through Shanghai that felt too fast and then at the same time like it would never end and I would be stuck in the same wild time loop forever. So yeah, again, I really love other Ishiguro. I have Klara and the Sun on my shelves to read, but this one was just not for me.

Anne Bogel [00:24:01] Well, at first I was wondering if it was the emotional detachment in this narrative style that didn't do it for you, but it sounds like that wasn't the only thing at all. That there's a lot of pacing and feel that also just didn't land.

Laurel Korwin [00:24:17] Yeah. I think Buried Giant, he sort of uses that same tone, and I really enjoyed it in that context. I did think it was a little bit weird in this one, but I'm not against it perhaps as a tone. But everything just didn't fit right together with this book.

Anne Bogel [00:24:33] Well, that is really interesting. I am noticing that many people loved this book. And Ishiguro has such an accomplished body of work. This is not a book that's noted as an exception generally, but it is an exception for you. So that's really interesting. I'm glad you shared it.

Laurel, what have you been reading lately? You mentioned Do Not Disturb by Michela Wrong about the political history of Rwanda. What else is representative of your reading life these days?

Laurel Korwin [00:25:01] So one really fabulous book that I just finished was called Lady in Waiting, which is the memoir of a woman named Anne Glenconner, who was Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret for several decades. And it was just such a wild, weird, funny book. I mean, she really kind of tells all and is very honest.

I wouldn't say that she's going to win some Nobel Prize for literature or anything. But the stories that she told about the royal family and about her life, and in particular her husband, who is a really wild character, were just so interesting. It was just a really fast but good read.

Anne Bogel [00:25:33] Well, that sounds delightful.

Laurel Korwin [00:25:35] Yeah, I would definitely recommend it, especially if you're into the royal family, which I sort of am.

Anne Bogel [00:25:43] That's good to know. I'm not going to produce any picks along those lines. I don't think so unless something occurs to me in the next 10 minutes. But that's still really interesting to note about your reading life because I would not have guessed that.

Laurel Korwin [00:25:54] Yeah. I also read The Palace Papers by Tina Brown about a year ago and really love that too. She has written Palace Papers and then The Diana Chronicles and sort of a whole genre of, I think, well-reported and relatively unbiased stuff about the royal family. So it's sort of a weird niche of my reading life, but...

Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a book that I read recently that I really enjoyed. It is by an author Ingrid Rojas Contreras who grew up in Colombia. And this book is a novel, but it reads as potentially autobiographical in parts, at least when you read some of the postscripts.

It is the story of a girl growing up in Colombia and sort of her relationship with her family's maid. I don't want to give away too much in spoilers, but there's a lot of drama that happens later on in the book, and sort of the interplay between those two characters becomes really important.

Anne Bogel [00:26:47] I love that. So you've got this dry nonfiction, again, not a dig, something you enjoy. You have the royal stories, you have 1990s [Bogota? 00:26:58]. Yeah, this is a fun span, Laurel.

Laurel Korwin [00:27:00] I feel like reading to me is sort of like traveling through the page. So I try to read widely and really get interested in different parts of the world and different stories.

Anne Bogel [00:27:09] Yeah. Well, that brings us to your summer reading project. When you send in your submission, you told us that you were stewing over an idea to potentially explore this summer. I'd love to hear more about that now.

Laurel Korwin [00:27:21] Yeah. I really love to travel. It was something that I did a lot of before the pandemic and before parenting, which introduces whole new travel struggles. I haven't been doing a lot of traveling lately. But I would really love to travel on the page this summer to destinations that would be impossible to get to outside of a book.

This was kind of my idea for myself to feel a little bit better about not traveling in reality, that I could travel to destinations that I couldn't get to anyway. My example, I think, that I included in the show notes was a book called Speak, Memory by Nabokov, which is his memoir of sort of his childhood in Russia when he was a member of a pretty aristocratic family, and then he had to leave Russia after the Russian Revolution.

So the Russia of his childhood becomes kind of this inaccessible, forever vanished place. And I just found his depictions of it really beautiful and sort of, you know, tinged with this nostalgia. This is a place that he can never get back to, but it's so formative to his personality and his life.

Anne Bogel [00:28:22] That's so interesting. So I loved hearing about that Nabokov. But also this project isn't just to read historical fiction and fantasy. It's more specific than that. So can you tell me a little more about how you're conceptualizing where you want to go in the page?

Laurel Korwin [00:28:37] Yeah, I think that this really goes to, you know, as we discussed earlier, my love of strong worldbuilding. I feel like, you know, some people, when they read, are looking for plot, some people are looking for a character. I'm really looking for worlds.

And to me, this idea of impossible places really well describe the ability to kind of lose yourself in this immersive experience that you would never be able to have in real life, whether that be in history or in some sort of fantasy world or maybe in the present day in real life and just some sort of experience or world that you would never be able to get to otherwise. It's really powerful.

Anne Bogel [00:29:09] So if you're going to go there on the page, you want to feel like you were there.

Laurel Korwin [00:29:14] Yes.

Anne Bogel [00:29:15] Okay. Not just a few little factoids or somebody telling you it's set in 1872. Like you want to look around and see it, metaphorically.

Laurel Korwin [00:29:22] Yes, exactly.

Anne Bogel [00:29:24] Okay. Oh, that's so much fun. Laurel, you have this summer impossible travel project. Is there anything you'd like to add about what you're looking for in your reading life right now?

Laurel Korwin [00:29:37] Yeah, I think that my other struggle that I mentioned... "struggle" is a hard word for reading. I mean, you know, it's a pleasure and a hobby. But I have this really long list of to-read books that I've collected over the years. A lot of them are on my shelves and then a lot of them I just sort of have bookmarked in my mind. It's like, "Oh, I need to read the next book by this person," or "Oh, that sounded good."

And I think that I often struggle, you know, when I go into a bookstore to pick something up off the shelves that I've never heard of and give it a chance because I feel like I have so many things that I've already lined up to read. So I'm really excited for this conversation and to hear about some things that I probably never would have picked up on my own or had never heard about but will end up enjoying.

Anne Bogel [00:30:17] Well, I'm delighted to hear it. Let's see what we can do. Laurel, You love The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Jeffers, Blackout, and also All Clear, you wedged that in there, by Connie Willis and Boom Town, the nonfiction Oklahoma book by Sam Anderson.

Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans Just didn't fit right for you. And then lately you mentioned that you've been reading Do Not Disturb by Michela Wrong, Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. You mentioned your royals books, The Palace Papers and Lady in Waiting. And now we're thinking about what you may enjoy reading next.

And I'm remembering some of the phrases you used to describe yourself, especially you are a history nerd, you love strong worldbuilding. And we talked about your impossible travel project, you want to feel like you're there.

It sounds like a lot of details do not go amiss when you're reading. You're not scared of long books, although I'm not sure we have long books for you today. Listeners, if you have a long book for Laurel, especially one like a little offbeat that maybe is not at the front of the bookstore right now, you got to go to the show notes and tell us all about it. That's at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

Laurel, okay, let's do this. Are you ready?

Laurel Korwin [00:31:34] I'm ready.

Anne Bogel [00:31:35] I'd love to start with a nonfiction book if you're good with that.

Laurel Korwin [00:31:40] Sounds great. Yeah.

Anne Bogel [00:31:42] This is one that has been waiting on myself for just the right reader. This is a nonfiction work that came out just about a year ago. It's by Jeff Nussbaum, and it's called Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History. I like this for you because I think it's a very dense and compact package of stories of what could have been. Is this a book that you're familiar with?

Laurel Korwin [00:32:08] No, I've never heard of this one.

Anne Bogel [00:32:09] Okay. I'm not sad about that. It's from Flatiron, a publisher that I really like. And they're well-known. Their titles are out there. I like this book for you because it shows just how fluid history can be and it takes you inside, like deep inside all these different specific situations, some of which you'll know and be very familiar with, some of which might be news to you, like you never realized that there was a crisis averted in that moment.

But what Nussbaum has done is he's tracked down these undelivered speeches of history. And in the introduction, please do not miss it, he says, These things are often pretty hard to find. Like if you are writing a speech about what you're going to say if something terrible happens or what you're going to say if you lose an election when you ended up winning, like you don't want anybody to see that speech.

Probably two people in existence have seen that speech, but somebody has to put their hands on it. And often, he says it's the person in the office who's been there forever who has the keys to the filing cabinet. But he says that he's organized this book into six parts, and each section represents a category of speech that might go undelivered. And I want to tell you what those are. He explains this in the introduction. Again, do not miss it.

[00:33:20] So one of his options is words that are just too hot. And this is the initial rhetoric that's written that's like fiery and passionate and oh, but that gets tempered based on the expectations and demands of the organizers. Like it's decided, like, That might be too aggressive for the moment, or that the tone is just wrong for what's happening at the events. And you'll recognize some of these speeches.

Sometimes they're speeches that represent a change of mind or a change of heart, where someone is facing two choices of the path forward they could take and how they're going to present it to the people, and at the 11th hour, they have to opt for one or the other. But when you have the undelivered speech, you have that really concrete evidence of their thought process.

One example is the speech that Nixon would have made had he refused to resign, and that is in this book. Another example is like, if there's a big crisis or if a crisis was averted, his example here is that New York City was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy in 1975. And there's a speech in this book that the mayor was going to give that says, "Folks, we're out of money and here's what it means and here's what happens next." But that didn't actually happen in history.

[00:34:29] There's ones about war and peace, like the Eisenhower speech that he prepared to give about the D-Day invasion failing, which we know is not what happened. But this book invites you to consider what might have been what might have happened next.

There's speeches about elections and their aftermath where somebody won or didn't, and there's lots of concession speeches and victory speeches in this book that we're not given. And then there’s speeches where events intervene and some external factor prevents the speech from being delivered. Like Condoleezza Rice was going to give a speech the evening of 9/11 that was going to be significant and was never given because they intervened.

Something interesting on this note is that the book ends with four speeches that four leaders were going to deliver but they died before they could deliver them. Pope Pius, FDR, the speech JFK was going to give the night he was assassinated, even Albert Einstein.

So I think this is like a nonfiction version of an alternate history, which incidentally, is a category of book that is easily Google-able, if you choose to do so that I think could be really fun and promising for your project this summer.

But there was just one note in the opening that was so delightful. I have to share it. You can hear me flipping pages. He introduces each chapter with a speech and a quote from that speech. But he has this funny little note in the beginning of the book that says, "The quotations you see on the title page of each chapter aren't technically quotations because they feature unspoken words from never delivered speeches." But the Chicago Manual of Style doesn't have a guide for that, so he put them in quotation marks. But they're not really because it was never said. And I just thought, Huh?

Laurel Korwin [00:36:08] Oh, that's so interesting. Such a weird quirk.

Anne Bogel [00:36:11] Yeah, like what an interesting truth to hold in your hands. Actually, that kind of feels like a coding problem, Laurel.

Laurel Korwin [00:36:18] Yeah. No, that's really interesting. Especially, I'm just really sort of impressed by the scope of that project, having to research and find and dig up all those speeches. I'd love to know how he did that. He probably talked about it in the introduction or what have you, but that sounds really interesting. And to your point, kind of an alternative history, and especially for speeches where I was alive and sort of remember the context or the situation, imagining the delivery of that undelivered speech could be really interesting and really powerful.

Anne Bogel [00:36:48] I hope so. I think it might be a fit for you and I hope you enjoy it.

Laurel Korwin [00:36:52] Thank you so much.

Anne Bogel [00:36:54] Okay. Next, I think I want to take you back in time to the Troubles in Ireland. How does that sound?

Laurel Korwin [00:37:00] Oh, that sounds really interesting.

Anne Bogel [00:37:02] Okay, Laurel, none of these books are terribly long. I think Undelivered might be the longest one I'm currently contemplating and it's just under 400 pages. The book I have in mind for you about the Troubles is Trespasses by Louise Kennedy.

This is her first novel. It just came out last November 2022. The reason I like it for you is because of what you said about worldbuilding. Like you want to feel like you are there. You want to experience the time and place.

So, ostensibly, this is a story of forbidden romance set in Northern Ireland during the 1970s, during the Troubles. And you could read lots of interesting nonfiction about the Troubles, too. Patrick Radden Keefe has an amazing book about the Troubles. But we're taking you there fictionally.

So in this book, a young woman, she's Catholic, her name is Cushla, she makes her living tending bar and she falls in love with a man who is older, of a different social class, married and perhaps worst of all, a Protestant to her Catholic.

So what happens is they see each other in the bar, they're interested immediately, but things don't really get rolling until Michael asks her to teach him and some of his friends to speak Irish. Those lessons are very interesting. One thing leads to another.

But what I like about this book for you is the backdrop of this story. It's gritty. It's realistic. It is just brilliantly illustrated in these pages because you can see how to Cushla and to Michael and to all their friends the Troubles are just the backdrop of their life, their vocabulary.

Like the children in Cushla's class, she's a school teacher, talk about what's happening in the news, and they use words like incendiary device and rubber bullets and booby trap. These are the vocabularies of 7-year-old children because it's what's happening.

And people are disappearing and there's fear, and you don't go certain places, you don't go with certain people and you look out. And her being involved with a Protestant is bad, bad, bad for all these reasons but it's just taken for granted in the text. But as a reader, reading from 2023 California, in your case, you're not taking it for granted. You're just sunk deeply into what it would be like to live as Cushla, as Michael during this time.

But in addition, there are so many interesting things about just the way they live apart from the political trouble. Like Michael is an upper-middle-class bohemian and you see what they're eating and what's on the walls and how they answered the telephone and what that telephone looks like and what's gracing the coffee table and the kitchen counter.

And Cushla's family too. Her Catholic family, they're bar keepers, like what their lives are like, what their homes are like, what they talk about, how she gets involved in her students' life when something terrible happens at school. There's so much texture and granular detail here that I think you will find it really, really interesting, maybe even as much as the history.

Also, she's so good with language and a turn of phrase. And I hope that you will also find the structure and framing of the novel as a whole elegance because it's not a straightforward linear narrative. It's a bit more stylized than that. Laurel, how does that sound to you?

Laurel Korwin [00:40:13] That sounds really interesting. I did read and really enjoyed the Patrick Radden Keefe. I think it was Say Nothing.

Anne Bogel [00:40:20] Yes, that's the one.

Laurel Korwin [00:40:22] Yeah. I haven't read a lot about it previously, so it was really interesting. And this sounds like a similar sort of deep dive. I really love the sound of all those sort of textural details almost, so that you can get the real feel for the world. That's exactly the kind of thing that I really love in fiction. So I'd be excited to check that out.

Anne Bogel [00:40:40] I'm so glad to hear it. Okay, next. Do you want to stay in the 20th century or do you want to go way back to the first?

Laurel Korwin [00:40:47] Oh, let's go way back.

Anne Bogel [00:40:49] Okay. So this is a sleeper popular genre novel. You have chosen a story of Pompeii. This is called A Day of Fire: A Novel of Pompeii. So the concept here is that there are six interlocking stories, and each is penned by a different author. Some of the names you will know, some of them I'm fairly certain you will not.

Kate Quinn is the one who first drew me to this particular collection. She was the name I knew at the time. The others are Ben Kane, E. Knight, Sophie Perinot, Vicky Alvear Shecter, and Stephanie Dray. And each one of these, when this was published in 2014, was already very accomplished in their own right.

And unlike many such collections of compiled stories, there are no weak links here. I don't know what their process was for putting this book together, but I would be fascinated to find out because each author weaves threads from the other stories into their own, which means you do have a novel. This is not a short story collection.

I'm not as familiar with the other author's work, but something I thought was really fun about Kate Quinn's story, which is called The Senator, is that she brings back two characters from her stand-alone novels into this story of Pompeii. And every author is writing about a character from a different social class, different background, different experience of that fateful day in Pompeii. Because the story does unfold over the course of one day, and it is the story that Vesuvius erupts.

So not only do each of these six focal characters in the short stories have their personal dramas happening, the whole time Vesuvius is rumbling in the background, and people are starting to realize, like, "Hey, what is up?"

Obviously, Pompeii was leveled by Vesuvius. This is not a place you can visit. And I think you may really enjoy going back to imagine like, what... Not only what was happening in that community. What did it look like? What did it sound like? How did it feel? Because there is a lot of that texture and granular detail here that we talked about with Trespasses just now that you enjoy. You love stories that do that significant worldbuilding, and these authors are all very good at that.

But also you get to see the details of their individual lives, the senator, the gladiator, the wife. And you get the compilation of what happened on that day back then with so much attention to historic detail. Laurel, how does that sound to you?

Laurel Korwin [00:43:18] That sounds really interesting. I really love the take on the point of view changes from actual different authors. I think that that would be a really interesting read. And I also really love the sound of what you described with Kate Quinn sort of bringing in a character from her other book. I think that that's really interesting and would sort of give me a fun breadcrumb to explore some of her other writing. But yeah, definitely sounds like an impossible destination, my initial project.

Anne Bogel [00:43:42] Now, you mentioned having a lot of books that you already want to read, which makes me feel less bad about not handing you a massive, massive book you could really dig into, like the 860-page Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. This one is just over 300 pages, but I hope that it feels sweeping to you. And like how cool to go back to the first century in the pages of a book, which, as you said, is the only way you can get there.

Laurel Korwin [00:44:09] Yeah, absolutely.

Anne Bogel [00:44:11] Well, Laurel, I'm so excited to hear what you think and what you think you might read next. So of the books we talked about today, we discussed Jeff Nussbaum's Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, the recently released novel of the Troubles and the multi-authored book about Pompeii, A Day of Fire. Of those books, what do you think you may pick up next?

Laurel Korwin [00:44:39] It's really hard to pick, but I'm sort of drawn to Undelivered. I just feel that reading all of those sort of almost lost-to-history, alternate-history sort of speeches would be really interesting. And I'd be really intrigued, to your point, to kind of read the introduction and see how he ties them all together and how he describes them and think about them in the context of what I've experiences of history.

Anne Bogel [00:45:02] Laurel, I'd love that for you. And I hope you find it fits just right.

Laurel Korwin [00:45:06] Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure.

Anne Bogel [00:45:08] Oh, thank you. Thank you for talking books with me today.

Hey readers, I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Laurel and I'd love to hear what you think she should read next. Let us know in the comments at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com, where you'll also find the full list of titles we talked about today.

Readers. I talked a lot about the Summer Reading Guide at the top of this episode, but if you want those updates in writing right in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter. That's at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/newsletter.

Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by Will Bogel, Holly Wielkoszewski, and Studio D Podcast Productions. 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.