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On this episode, we’re kicking off the Books and Bites 2022 Reading Challenge with debut novels.
Books and Bites
JCPL librarians bring you book recommendations and discuss the bites and beverages to pair with them.
1_22 Books and Bites
[00:00:00] Carrie: Welcome to the Books and Bites podcast. Each month we bring you book recommendations and discuss the bites and beverages to pair with them. I'm Carrie Green, and I'm here with my cohosts Michael Cunningham and Adam Wheeler. Hello? Hi. So, we're kicking off the new year with a new Books and Bites reading challenge.
We've got 12 new reading prompts in store for you for 2022. Adam, would you like to explain how this year's challenge
will work?
[00:00:29] Adam: Sure. I can absolutely do that. So for the Books and Bites, 2022 Reading Challenge, it's a little bit simplified. It's still for adults and teens, you can read or listen. But we are waiting until December to take any submission forms, so just keep track of your work until then to be entered into a drawing for a Kindle Paperwhite or a $100 gift card to Joseph Beth booksellers.
You'll just need to complete 10 out of 12 reading or listening prompts. And that will be your entry, super easy peasy. You can read them in any order you want you'll just need to complete the 10 different challenges. And if you, if you feel the need to, you can use one book for two challenges, but you can only do that once.
If you want to get some suggestions, come join our in-person Books and Bites club. Take a listen to our podcast as you are already doing or read our blog on the website. We've even got a display inside the library we change out every month. You can get some bonus entries every time you read a book which is by an author who's a member of a marginalized or underrepresented group.
So this wouldn't really be James Patterson, but if you wanted to read Tiffany Jackson that would be a good example. So as you're getting ready to get started our first one, which is the theme of this episode is a debut novel. February will be an inclusive or diverse award winner. So something like you could do a Coretta Scott King award winner, something on the Rainbow book list
if you want some help getting started. And then the third one is a book recommended by a young person. So that's open to interpretation. If you want to ask a teen or a child, younger siblings or, you know, even if it's just like to you, a young person is in their twenties. That's okay, too.
Yes.
[00:02:22] Carrie: Age is definitely relative. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:25] Adam: You could probably even argue that you got a recommendation from a person who is young in spirit. We're probably not going to shoot that down. We're not
[00:02:34] Carrie: going to know that's true. That's true. Are there particular prompts that you all are excited about?
Michael? Is there, is there any prompt that you're looking forward to
[00:02:43] Michael: One
that sounds pretty interesting is a book that takes place near the ocean. And I'm also. Looking actually looking forward to trying a manga.
Adam's favorite.
[00:02:56] Adam: I was looking forward to that too. I want, I want the whole team to be on the same page and do a manga once and what may or may not have negotiated that I would agree to do a biography.
well, it'll be a good experience for everyone. I'm sure. I'll find a biography. Biographical manga. Yeah.
[00:03:22] Carrie: I'm actually, well, I'm looking forward to both of those manga, just because I haven't ever read one before. But biography, because a lot of times I just don't have time to read those with, along with our other challenges.
So it will be good to get back into reading a biography. Yeah.
[00:03:41] Michael: Yeah. It's been a long time since I read a biography.
[00:03:44] Adam: I mean, we both read that Jim Gaffigan book, that's kind of a biography, right?
[00:03:48] Michael: Food: A Love Story. I guess.
[00:03:51] Carrie: Eh, were there, were there footnotes or notes in the back of the book?
[00:03:58] Adam: I mean, does it have to have references?
[00:04:01] Carrie: Um, I mean, we didn't put it in with the prompt, but they definitely help.
All right. So today we're talking about, as Adam said, our first prompt, a debut novel. I think one thing that people maybe don't consider is that sometimes debut novels go on to become classics, like To Kill a Mockingbird, which we talked about in our last podcast,
[00:04:30] Michael: or maybe it's their only book.
[00:04:32] Carrie: Yeah. As in the case of Harper Lee.
So it doesn't have to be a recent debut novel. It could be you know, maybe you have a favorite writer and you've never read their first novel. So there are multiple ways you can go with that.
[00:04:46] Adam: Yeah. And there's some extremely popular ones. So The Hate U Give was a debut novel and it has just taken the publishing world by storm as far as I'm concerned.
And that is a very hard book for a new author to follow up. She has done very well, actually. Yeah.
[00:05:04] Carrie: Yeah. That's a, that's a great example too.
[00:05:06] Adam: Angie Thomas, that's the name? I was trying to think of it. I was, I was vamping. Yes. Angie Thomas is The Hate You Give
[00:05:13] Carrie: and we've got three more options for you today.
So stick around.
[00:05:28] Adam: Alright, peeps, my very first read for Books & Bites 2021 is Can't Stop Cursing You with art by Natsuko Uruma and story by Kensuke Koba. My understanding is this is a debut graphic novel..manga because I've not found any other works by Kensuke Koba; that said, I can't for the life of me find specific confirmation anywhere that this is, in fact, their first publication. If I'm mistaken, it's at leastthe first novel by Kensuke Koba that I and possibly you, dear listener, have encountered.
Enough classification caginess, though! Can't Stop Cursing You is a surprisingly gory publication from Square Enix (known for their rated T video games featuring emotional storylines and fantasy violence) and Yen Press.
Like, I was NOT expecting sprays of blood and displaced intestines from the same company that generally doesn't even show blood in their games. The point is, the suggested audience from the publisher is Older Teens, but I'd definitely suggest this as a manga for adults or very mature teens.
Now, Can't Stop Cursing You is basically a detective story with dark fantasy elements wherein we have unreliable narration from both the villain and the detective. In the fictional school of Yami High, modeled after a normal Japanese high school, we follow the conflict between Mikiya, who has built a carefully calculated persona as the unofficial prince of Yami High as a front for his nefarious inner self, and Curse-Breaker Saeyama, stationed in the school under the guise of a biology teacher and tasked with discovering who in the school has contracted with a Curse God.
It's no mystery to the reader that Mikiya is the contractor-- we get to know all his motives, the way he became a contractor, and we are shown every step of how Mikiya plans his curse-killings. Put simply...well, as simply as I can make it, Mikiya's contracted Curse God will kill any individual Mikiya wishes; the catch is that there are mostly unspecified parameters to meet before the curse god will kill an individual, and Mikiya must curse-kill 30 people in 30 days or he'll be killed (and seemingly damned) by the curse god.
We know from the start that the curse killings are initiated when Mikiya calls an individual using a specified phone number; we see this when he calls an unfortunate classmate who answers and is subsequently crushed by the giant hand of the curse god, her blood and guts spraying akimbo. However, there are times when the curse-killing may kill someone else unexpectedly or the killing fails to...well, execute. So, this is an interesting series because it escapes being a whodunit mystery. Rather, the mystery lies in figuring out the parameters for curse killings to succeed while both Contractor Mikiya and Curse-breaker Saeyama navigate a time-sensitive battle of wits.
I won't give away the ending, but I will say this battle of wits comes to a satisfying conclusion within the first volume, and I'm inclined to read more.
That said, there are some negative points, the STRONGEST of which falls into my most loathed trope of fantasy writing--overexplanation due to lack of faith in the reader's intelligence. I really had to push myself to get through the beginning of this volume because nearly every page felt like it was explaining and re-explaining the book's terminology ad nauseum. Like, I get that we're introducing some mythos and fictional terminology, but I also appreciate when a writer plops down a word or fantasy concept and trusts the reader to connect the dots based on other information in the story
[00:09:30] Carrie: I totally agree with that. And not just fantasy about science fiction, I think has a tendency to do that a lot.
[00:09:37] Adam: Okay. All the time. It drives me insane. Like, oh my God, I get, I understand what you're trying to get out here. It's totally fine. And you know, yeah. I, I think leaving some concepts, concepts up to interpretation is pretty healthy leads for good conversation.
My other big criticism is the way supporting characters almost immediately buy in to pretty much any and all information; I feel like I could tell them flamingos subsist on a diet artisanal chicken tenders and bacon jam and their response would be something like "Hipster Flamingo, I'd heard the stories but never seen it before! Amazing." BUT I get that we're covering a lot of ground with limited text, so some narrative shortcuts are expected, I guess.
[00:10:25] Carrie: tell me what those flamingos were doing again?
[00:10:28] Adam: Um, eating some really tasty chicken tenders with bacon jam as the condiment, of course they were, probably with a cold IPA.
The final word is I'd recommend can't stop cursing you by Nazi Orama and Ken's KACO about two fans of death note or anyone who enjoys an engaging detective story with a heaping tablespoon of. This debut title isn't currently available at JCP L but maybe Michael would like to add the series to our adult graphic novels.
You don't have to answer here.
[00:11:03] Michael: Might look into that.
[00:11:05] Adam: That's
a, that's a solid, maybe
That
[00:11:07] Michael: does, that did peak my interest for all the gore and blood.
[00:11:12] Adam: Oh, good. Good, good, good. As for a bite to go along with this, I recommend fire roasted sweet potatoes from the guys in cookbook. And that is available here at JPL and hardback.
Basically. It is just going out and getting yourself a good fire, going and tossing some sweet potatoes in there until they finish cooking. And in all of the interim, you can talk with your friends and try to figure out who is the traitor among the group. That's how I, that's how I, that's how I equate this with the story.
Yes.
[00:11:46] Carrie: That sounds like a perfect way to eat sweet potatoes though. Like, I mean, that's the great thing about sweet potatoes. You can just stick them in a fire and they'll still be good at the end.
[00:11:56] Adam: Sweet starchy taste in us.
[00:12:10] Michael: My recommendation for a debut novel is Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy.
Set in the hills surrounding Cashiers, North Carolina, the novel opens with Jacob McNeely sitting on top of an old water tower watching over what should be his high school class graduating.
But Jacob, a fatalistic 18-year-old, decided to drop out of high school and break-up with the love of his life, Maggie Jennings. Because even though he yearns to escape out from under his father's shadow and wants nothing to do with his brutal legacy, he knows he stands no chance of escape and doesn't want to drag Maggie down the same path. He's a McNeely, the son of Charlie McNeely, the iron-fisted meth kingpin of this corner of Appalachia.
Charlie owns the local police and plugs any leaks that need plugged, if you know what I mean. He's an extremely violent man and will do anything to maintain his control. Just take a look at what he did with his Jacob's own mother, now a meth addict because Charlie got her hooked on it, and now forces her to live in a derelict shack hidden away from everyone because she became a problem for him.
One night, Charlie, who uses his auto garage to launder his money, asks Jacob, in an effort to get him to take on more responsibility, to assist a couple of his mechanics with handling a problem junkie who knows too much about his operation. Things go sideways a bit during the interrogation and is the catalyst that kicks off a series of events that leads Jacob down a path there is no returning from.
This is Appalachian noir at its finest. It is almost Shakespearean with its tragic characters and the way it weaves the themes of family, fate, love, and justice throughout its pages. Personally, it gave me some strong Hamlet vibes. It doesn't telegraph anything, leaving you guessing right to the end as you race along at a breakneck pace. In a couple of reviews of the book I read, it was described as Daniel Woodrells' Winter's Bone meets Breaking Bad but told from Jesse Pinkman's point of view. I would mostly agree with that.
After reading and having time to think on it, I can say that this book has definitely cracked my list of all-time favorite reads and had made me a big fan of David Joy. Sorry to gush, but I can't recommend it enough and his other books are just as good. It's hard to think this was a debut novel and I can see why it was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 2016. You find it in our suspense section and is also available through the Libby app.
Nothing says North Carolina cuisine like BBQ. Since the weather right now isn't conducive to smoking and not everyone might have a smoker, I found a really good recipe for Carolina-style BBQ recipe that uses a slow cooker from Taste of Home.com.
It calls for a boneless pork shoulder, brown sugar, paprika, onion, cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, along with a few other ingredients. After cooking for 6-8 hours on low, shred it and serve it on buns with coleslaw. You can find the link to this delicious recipe on our blog.
[00:15:16] Carrie: Sounds good. You know, my, my brother has a smoker that you actually just put the meat in it and set the set, the temperature
and it basically just does everything for you. Like it's so it's, it looks like a grill. And there's an app, so you can like start it from like, elsewhere, like start it from the app and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. You put wood in it or it's like little pellets, pellets, wood pellets.
[00:15:53] Michael: That's kind of what I have yeah, Traeger grill.
You can just put pellets in it and he can kind of set it. To smoke or you can turn all the way up and use it like an oven and you can see when the pellets are getting low. It's really nice.
[00:16:08] Carrie: So, so you could do that in your a smoker, huh?
[00:16:13] Michael: Oh yeah,
I did it a couple of weeks ago. And it turned out really good.
[00:16:19] Adam: You can
make us some tasty sweet potatoes and the
[00:16:21] Michael: Oh, man
[00:16:23] Adam: potatoes. If you cared about us, Michael.
[00:16:38] Carrie: So my book is the dictionary of last words by PIP Williams. And this is her, her second book, but it's her first novel. So I think she wrote a memoir that was published first. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a historical novel inspired by some of the real people and events surrounding the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. The book opens in 1886 when main character Esme [Esmay] is six years old. Her mother died when Esme was a baby, so she spends a great deal of time at the Scriptorium, the garden shed turned OED office where her father works.
Esme often sits under the sorting table, which the editors use to sort the slips of paper that contain a word's definitions and sample quotations. One day, the top slip that defines the word "bondmaid" slides to the ground, and Esme picks it up. The male editors promptly forget about it, and the word doesn't make the dictionary's first edition--an omission that also occurred in real life. Esme stores the slip in a trunk, beginning a lifelong habit of collecting words. Like bondmaid, the words she collects are often words related to women. Additionally, she collects slang words and other words not deemed important enough to include in the OED--either because of their subject or because they've never been recorded in a scholarly or literary publication.
The Dictionary of Lost Words is a sweeping narrative that follows Esme from childhood through the beginnings of the suffrage movement, World War I, and the publication of the dictionary's final fascicle in 1928. It brings to light women's contributions to the dictionary and considers how its contents were shaped by the biased views of white, Victorian men. As Esme notes when reconsidering the word bondmaid: "...I realised that the words most often used to define us were words that described our function in relation to others. Even the most benign words--maiden, wife, mother--told the world whether we were virgins or not."
If you enjoy the lyricism and strong sense of place in the Mary Russell series, you might enjoy this book. I especially enjoyed seeing the Scriptorium and the Oxford University Press offices come alive. While the writing can be a bit preachy at times and Esme a little too perfect, the setting and focus on women's relationships kept me engrossed. Although Esme grows up without a mother, she is loved and mentored by Lizzie, a servant; Ditte, a historian and dictionary volunteer; Tilda, an actor and suffragist; and even Mabel, a former prostitute who supplies the definitions of many curse words.
Several reviews call the book a comfort read, and while I would agree with that description for most of it, consider yourself warned that more people died than I would normally expect in a comfort read. A pot of tea and warm rock cakes are just the thing to console you through the book's sadder moments. A close cousin of the scone, rock cakes are slightly sweet and packed with dried fruit. Esme begins making them as a child: "Mrs. Ballard used to say that rock cakes didn't care if your hands were warm or cold, deft or clumsy. She relied on them to distract me whenever I was unable to accompany Lizzie, or when I was out of sorts. They'd become my specialty."
I made a batch this past weekend with orange zest and dried cranberries, and they were easy and delicious. As a side note, these would be the perfect treats to make with a young Harry Potter fan. Apparently, Harry Potter loves rock cakes, too.
[00:20:59] Adam: Oh, that sounds nice. I always appreciate a good kind of historical fiction that digs into some kind of buried women's history.
That's always a good, good eye-opener.
[00:21:13] Michael: Yeah, those rock cakes. We need to make something and come in here and trade it.
[00:21:21] Adam: I'm going to just do an easy dip, a little spread.
[00:21:23] Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. A little Books and Bites tasting.
[00:21:28] Adam: So that word was it bonmaid or bondmaid? Okay. Like financial bonds. I don't know.
I'm just trying to figure out what that is.
[00:21:41] Carrie: No, it's like, I'm a slave you know, like, like someone who is bonded to be in service.
So you, you may have heard of like indentured servants or, you know, that was a kind of slavery to. So definitely a word that is very important to, to a female worldview in particular. And yeah, it actually was left out of the OED in the first, first round. I, I think one of the things that was really fascinating to me about reading this book was just imagining how
they kept track of all of those definitions without computers. You know, they had little slips of paper slips of paper that they bundled together and they were getting, I don't know if you've read maybe The Professor and the Madman, which is a, a nonfiction book about the OED. But, you know, they had volunteers all over the country that would send in quotations of the word of words that they would bundle all together.
Have you all ever seen an entry from the OED? Cause it's a little different than just a regular dictionary.
[00:23:01] Adam: I want to say
I have, but I might just be lying.
[00:23:04] Michael: I feel like I have, but it's probably been awhile.
[00:23:07] Carrie: Yeah. So it gives, like, it traces, you know, different meanings and gives example quotes, you know, and they, and the examples, you know, it'll trace like the first found use of this word so that you, you can kind of see how the language changes and where words came from when they were first used and stuff like that.
So I mentioned the word fascicle. It was such a huge undertaking that you know, they were, they didn't publish it all at once because that would have taken, that would have taken well, really like 40 years, I guess. Cause this was, the book started in the 1880s and the final fascicle for the first edition wasn't published till 1928.
So you know, they were coming out with just letters or, you know, a half letter at a time. So it's really interesting.
[00:24:02] Adam: And I don't even know how I would go about at that point in time, proving that a word was a word and coming up with a standard definition, like there was no internet. I don't know how many of that kind of reference book had been made before.
So I, I don't know. I don't know. And
[00:24:24] Michael: you said they included curse words?
[00:24:26] Carrie: They didn't, she, the book. You know, the character and the book was she was collecting words that were not in the dictionary, like various curse words, which, you know, in some of the examples she gives are words that Shakespeare used, you know, so there's certainly a strong reason to have them in the dictionary because they were written down and like what we consider literature, but, you know, some of them was just like, words that were, you know, ordinary working people, working class or poor people, and they weren't necessarily written down.
It was just slang words. And there was such a difference between the vocabulary of the classes that they weren't considered important.
[00:25:17] Michael: Yeah. Language is fascinating. And I took a course of the history of English at, as an undergrad and just learning some where these words came from, and you know how there's some isolated communities where they still speak, like it's, you know, the 18th century and have dialects like that.
It's pretty, pretty wild.
[00:25:45] Carrie: Thanks for listening to the Books and Bites podcast. Our theme song is The Breakers by Scott Whiddon from his album In Close Quarters with the Enemy. You can learn more about Scott and his music on his website, adoorforadesk.com.