Welcome to the second bi-weekly Mookse and Gripes newsletter! Thanks to all of you who signed up, and I hope this newsletter is welcome in your inbox!
One thing I did not know when I published the first newsletter was that you can comment on these! Not only does this give us another way to hear from you but it also gives you all a way to talk to each other! I think this will be wonderful, especially when we have questions or polls. Though, of course, you can still email mookseandgripes@gmail.com or talk to us on Twitter and Instagram. In both of those places I’m @mookse and Paul is @bibliopaul.
Our Latest Episode: Episode 29: Summer Reading…
The official start of summer is just around the corner, but with kids finishing school and Memorial Day in the past, it feels like summer is already here. Warmer weather, longer evenings, outdoor eating . . . it can be such a lovely time of year.
And, of course, there’s summer reading! While I never really participated in a summer reading program, I always loved to look at summer reading lists. I still love to look at summer reading lists. There’s a sense of possibility, of discovery, of growth, and of fun.
And so in Episode 29 Paul and I devote a good chunk to discussing summer reading in general and plans for our own hot months of 2022.
And part of those plans include a Mookse and Gripes Podcast bookclub. We invited listeners on Twitter to vote for one book that we will read this summer, and you can go vote as well. The four books to choose from are Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones, William Trevor’s The Children of Dynmouth, and Willa Cather’s The Lost Lady.
Click on the tweet above and it will take you to the Twitter poll.
…and Assigned Reading II
We also come together in this episode and talk about our second batch of assigned reading. You may remember Episode 22: Assigned Reading I, where Paul and I assigned each other a short story (Paul assigned Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women” and Trevor assigned Mavis Gallant’s “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street”). We enjoyed that so much we decided to cap off our recent Episode 27: Short Books, Fiction with some more assigned reading, this time of short books of fiction, of course. Paul assigned Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s Aphasia, and I assigned Jean Giono’s Ennemonde, translated by Bill Johnston. These are puzzling books that we both liked, and it was nice to figure some more things out in our conversation.
We hope you like this episode! The full shownotes are at the end of this newsletter.
Upcoming Schedule
The rest of June has been planned but not recorded, which means these could change a bit depending on the availability of our guests. But we hope it’s the following!
June 16: Episode 30: Three Books with Brian Berrett. Brian is my brother, and back in 2012 he joined me for the original iteration of The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast. Paul and Brian have never spoken, but they know each other through the podcasts, and I’m excited to have him back! He’ll be talking to us about three of his favorite books, kind of like Frances did in Episode 7, which was so fun!
June 30: Episode 31: New Directions with Mark Haber. Mark Haber is the author of a book I have talked about a few times on the podcast: Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. He also wrote Reinhardt’s Garden. We are excited to have him join us to talk about one of our favorite publishers: New Directions. Check out a great article Mark wrote about his long love for New Directions here.
Skipping ahead a few more episodes, as you may know, every time our episode number ends in 5, we will use that episode to focus on an author. Our first, number 5, was Cormac McCarthy; 15 was Emily Dickinson; 25 was Jane Austen. For episode 35 we will be talking about Stephen King.
This will be an interesting one because I don’t think we’re going to be nearly as positive on King as we have been in our other author focus episodes, though we’ve each read a lot of Stephen King and acknowledge his books played a large role in our reading youth. We’d love to get your thoughts and share them! This episode won’t be recorded until August, but that will be here soon . . .
Random Tidbits: A Patreon Bonus Episode
On May 24, we released a Patreon bonus episode, a kind of chatty catch-up. We will not change our regularly planned and scheduled podcast episodes, and those will always be free. Still, we wanted to offer something extra to Patreon supporters. And that goes for supporters at all levels, starting at $1 per month up to whatever. We plan to release bonus episodes every month. Thanks to your support, in every way!
Episode 29 Shownotes
All of the books we discuss in this episode:
Aphasia, by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
Ennemonde, by Jean Giono, translated by Bill Johnston
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, by Stephen Ambrose
A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean
Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, by Philip Connors
River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile, by Candice Millard
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Jade City, by Fonda Lee
Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury
We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart
Atonement, by Ian McEwan
The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson
The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford
It, by Stephen King
The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley
“Getting Close,” by Steven Millhauser
Trust, by Hernan Diaz
Paradais, Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes
Inland, by Gerald Murnane
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel
The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
Speedboat, by Renata Adler
Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges
The Children of Dynmouth, by William Trevor
A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather
The Revolutionaries Try Again, by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
Hill, by Jean Giono, translated by Paul Eprile
Melville, by Jean Giono, translated by Paul Eprile
A King Alone, by Jean Giono, translated by Alyson Waters
The Open Road, by Jean Giono, translated by Paul Eprile
Occupation Journal, by Jean Giono, translated by Jody Gladding
Other Links
About the Podcast
The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast is a book chat podcast. Every few weeks we are talking about some bookish topic or another.
Please join us! You can subscribe at Apple podcasts or go to the feed to import to your favorite podcatcher. You can also listen to us on YouTube, if that’s your thing (though I’m still trying to figure that out, so be patient if there are some strange uploads and re-uploads).
Many thanks to those who helped make this possible! If you’d like to donate as well, please visit our Patreon page. We have been reworking the Patreon, and I’m excited that I figured out how to get Patreon subscribers early access to our episodes! Every supporter has their own feed that he or she can use in their podcast app of choice to download our episodes a few days early. We are also working on bonus episodes for certain tiers, since we really want to show our thanks. Please go check it out!
I’m glad that there’s a M&G newsletter, thank you for doing this for your followers. I enjoy the podcast more and more each time I listen to it. The pace of the discussions and the topics chosen, as well as the variety of titles discussed are perfect. I especially liked the dustiest book episode.
For a future episode I would like to know if other readers ever experience what I call reader’s block, when no matter how many books I start none of them hook me. I sometimes think it’s because I’m spoiled for choice, usually though I don’t know what it stems from, but it’s very frustrating when it happens.
Do other readers experience this and if so what do they do? Sometimes I re-read a beloved book, sometimes I read short stories, lately I use that time to read some of the Greek classics I’ve recently discovered that I love, if it’s particularly stubborn case, I don’t fight it and instead binge watch Call the Midwife or Lord of the Rings until a particular title calls to me. Which more often than not is one of the dusty books that has been patiently waiting to be noticed.
You're going to get tired of seeing my name, but on tbe Summer Reading Part II episode Paul mentioned having a book that belonged to his grandfather. Among a few treasured books from previous generations, including my sweet dad, are a couple of books that came down to me from my great-great grandfather Henry Hulbert who wrote his name and 1890 in the front cover. These books were passed to my great-grandfather, Lowell Bliss, who wrote his name and "grandson of Henry Hulbert" on the inside cover. The books are a bit radical for their time: The Clergy A Source of Danger, Religions of Man and the Ethics of Science, The Book of Religions, and my favorite is A Stellar Key to The Summer Land by Andrew Jackson Davis. My great-grandfather was a Spiritualist and A Stellar Key.. is a Spiritualist book. I think the author was mentioned in A. S. Byatt's Possession, but I have to double check.
I bet a lot of book lovers have books passed down from parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and others that are now treasures. Maybe you could talk about that one show.
Thanks again for the wonderful podcasts!
Wendy