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Carrie: [00:00:00] 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 co hosts, Michael Cunningham and Jacqueline Cooper. 

Michael: Hello. 

Jacqueline: Hello, everyone. 

3_24 BB Reading party
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Carrie: [00:00:00] So we have an exciting event coming up next week. Michael, you want to tell us a little bit about that? 

Michael: Yes. So next Thursday, March 14th, from 630 to 730 in the evening, We will be having our first ever Books and Bites reading party. So, we will be doing some silent reading, uh, followed by some bookish conversation.

We'll be meeting in front of the fireplace in the main library with also some refreshments. And If there's a bingo square that maybe you're not quite sure how you, what you want to read for it, or you not really want to do, you can get that checked off here. That's another free space for you.

Carrie: That's right.

It's your choice. You get to choose whichever square you least want to do, and that'll be a freebie for you. 

Michael: Yeah, maybe you're not into bibliographies or books with beaches on the cover. We can take care of that for you.

Carrie: That's [00:01:00] right. Whatever, whatever you want. And I don't know if you mentioned there's no registration required.

This is kind of an easy, low stress way for you to meet some fellow Books and Bites participants, maybe some fellow readers, and also to get in a little reading time. 

Michael: We could all use a little more reading time in our lives. 

Carrie: I sure could. [Laughter]

Carrie: We're celebrating Women's History Month with historical fiction and non fiction about women's history.

It's one of the prompts on the Books and Bites Bingo Reading Challenge. And women's history is one of my favorite topics to read about, so this prompt wasn't a huge stretch for me. In fact, There's, you know, I have a huge list of books that I had to choose from for, for this episode. But how about you all?

I know, maybe, Michael, it might be more of a stretch for you. 

Michael: Well, there's actually several that I wanted to read, but just, I guess, the time, they were some big books, so I didn't have quite the time to read them, but , yeah, it wasn't hard for me to find one. 

Carrie: [00:01:00] Okay, and you Jacqueline? 

Jacqueline: I struggled a little bit with finding one.

The one I found, it talks, doesn't talk about women's history as much as just war and history and how it affects women. Mm hmm. More than like, and as wives, as, as people who work in the war, like volunteer, a lot of women volunteered in the war. So it talks a little bit about those kinds of things.

Carrie: Well, I think that's, I mean, that's part of history. I don't think it has to, you know, this was, this was fiction or nonfiction about women's history. So to me, that would, that would fit right in. 

Jacqueline: Good. 

Carrie: So one of the squares on the Books and Bites Bingo Reading Challenge asks participants to share a book that they enjoyed on our Facebook page or by emailing it to us at podcast at jesspublib.org.

So we thought we'd share some of those recommendations with all of you as they start to come in. [00:02:00] so we did receive one that relates to today's prompt, this is from Jamie, who writes, "I recently read the book The Gown by Jennifer Robson. It's historical fiction about embroiderers who worked on Princess Elizabeth's, or the late queen's, wedding gown.

I really loved it." And I thought that sounded like a really good option for this prompt.

Jacqueline: I love reading about that time period, actually, and women did so much in broadering, as well as fighting in wars. 

Carrie: Yeah, and we were just chatting, actually, about a book that I'm currently reading, that, oh, and I think the title is Threads of, Threads of Life?

But it's about the history of embroidery and needlework and its use, like, as a [00:03:00] way of subverting the dominant narrative. So I, I do think embroidery and, and that kind of thing is something that's often overlooked because it is seen as women's work, even though it's It's not. And we have an excellent example of that in our display case this month.

One of our staff members, Mark, who works at the computer desk, he crochets these beautiful lace doilies that his mother taught him how to do when he was a child. So I love it when we can defy stereotypes here at the library. 

Michael: That's awesome. 

Jacqueline: Great.

Michael: My recommendation this month is The Night Witches written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Russ Braun. If you're a regular listener, you might remember me recommending this [00:04:00] graphic novel all the way back in 2020. During World War II, the Soviet Union formed the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, recruiting women to fly night missions, bombing the invading Nazis as they cut deeper into Russia.

The Nazis came to dub them the Nachthexen or Night Witches, becoming quite the thorn in their side. The Soviet Union wasn't too keen on wanting the world to know about the roles women played in the war effort and many were instructed to never talk about it. But they played a large role serving as tank drivers, medics, machine gunners, snipers, radio operators, fighter pilots, and bomber crew.

This graphic novel takes what is known about the best known group, the Night Witches, and creates a story to get a glimpse of what their experiences were like. The novel follows. Anna Kharkova, a fictional Night Witch. It opens as Anna is recruited to join the 588th Regiment with her friend and gunner Zoya.

As they train and run missions in outdated and noisy biplanes they are referred to as sewing [00:05:00] machines. They develop a reputation among the Nazis and become known as the Night Witches. Anna is quite skilled and quickly becomes one of, if not the best pilots in the entire regiment. It starts to garner attention from her higher ups.

Not all of it good, especially from the Soviet secret police. She racks up a lot of achievements and eventually promoted a captain, but she also suffers countless hardships. She loses friends and lovers, fights in some of the fiercest battles of the war, like the battle of Kursk, and is shot down numerous times.

She becomes a POW and put on trial and has to survive a brutal Siberian gulag. She forges on, persevering in the face of daunting odds, wanting nothing more to serve her country, fly planes, and have the respect of her peers. The book is divided into three parts, with most of it taking place during World War II, and the last two chapters taking place during the beginnings of the Cold War in the 50s and 60s.

I thought the first part was particularly powerful. In addition to Anna, it follows a young Nazi named Graf, who is part of a Wehrmacht [00:06:00] unit that is driving into Russia. He isn't feeling so enthusiastic about all the brutality and savagery his squad members dish out to civilians and enemy soldiers alike, but they capture a night witch that was shot down.

There is a feeling throughout that Anna and Graf are destined to meet and may become allies or even lovers, but Garth expertly subverts those notions in a rather brutal way. The graphic novel, however, does end on a particularly emotional note. This graphic novel does not shy away from the blood and violence in the brutality of war.

Highly recommend this to anyone who is a WWII history buff or a fan of military history in general. I would pair this with a cold glass of kompot, made from a recipe I found on the website Natasha's Kitchen. Kompot is a homemade fruit juice enjoyed by many Russian Ukrainian families. You can use just about any fruit.

Cherries, apples, berries, pears, plums, etc. You're going to boil a gallon of water. Add your cut fruit. Bring back to a boil and once it's done boiling, you'll add about three quarters of a cup of sugar or to taste and let it completely [00:07:00] cool. Then you strain off the juice and refrigerate and serve chilled.

Perfect for a warm or hot day, which we'll hopefully see soon. 

Carrie: Yeah. I've seen that. I've seen that recipe for that. It might have been in that Ukrainian cookbook that we have. But it does look really, really good. 

Michael: Yeah, that's where I, I was starting to peruse those and I found that in there and I started looking around for some other ones.

So. 

Carrie: You mentioned snipers, female snipers in the World War II. I actually saw a book about that. It was, it's a nonfiction book when I was making up a list for Women's History Month on Overdrive. So it was like, I think it might even have been an oral history kind of book with some women snipers in World War II.

Yeah. Soviet snipers. It looked really, it looked really interesting. I mean, they were, [00:08:00] they were really young. They were, you know, early twenties, most of them. 

Michael: Yeah. They were, yeah. These pilots were super young and fresh out of. school. 

Carrie: Uh huh. Yeah. So, so women can do the, the really hard stuff too.

Michael: Yeah. Usually without the advantages, like without, you know, modern fighter, you know, fighter planes.

Carrie: Right. Exactly. Yeah. 

Jacqueline: During the wars, they, women worked, but then the men were like, well, they're going to go back home. But some of them didn't. And they did make a lot of headway.

Carrie: My book is by Cat Bohannon, and I love how the title, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, links female bodies to that very active verb, [00:09:00] drove. It's a strong signal for what's to come in a book that upends popular and, let's face it, scientific belief to argue that female bodies have been the primary agents of humans' evolutionary change.

Bohannon builds her case over nine well researched and lively chapters: Milk, Womb, Perception, Legs, Tools, Brain, Voice, Menopause, and Love. Each chapter traces the history of a female characteristic, either a bodily characteristic or a behavioral one, back to its Eve, the animal that the author believes first exhibited this characteristic.

One of the first Eves, for example, was a thumb sized, mouse like creature whose babies drank milk that she sweated through her skin. The book is full of amazing facts that [00:10:00] I kept reading out loud to my husband. In the milk chapter, for instance, Bohannon describes how the female breast can alter its milk composition based on information from the baby's mouth.

Yes, this was like one of the most mind blowing things that I read. So, if a baby is sick or stressed, the mother's breast will sense that and will change the composition of the milk to give the baby what they need. And this is all happening while the baby is feeding, like instantaneously. 

Jacqueline: Wow. 

Michael: How does that?

Jacqueline: It's interesting. 

Michael: What's the physiology behind it? 

Carrie: I mean, they don't really know. She argues, you know, as a result that women's bodies are responsible for human immune systems. And for our being able to survive a [00:11:00] pandemic because it's that milk, you know, we all know that breast milk is really important for baby's development.

And that's part of why, because the mother's body is responding to what the baby needs. I could go on and on about how awesome the female body is, but I suggest you read the book instead. But of course, along with all the awesome, there's plenty to be angry about, like the fact that scientists don't study women's bodies because of their fluctuating hormones.

Or the fact that girls outperform boys in school up until puberty, and the author suggests that a combination of factors is responsible for that shift in girls, such as, oh, you know, constantly being told that they're not good at math, and also dealing with the chronic stress caused by the unwelcome male gaze, which they begin [00:12:00] noticing shortly before puberty.

So, despite this book's doorstopper length, I mean, it's, it's a hefty one. You don't want to fall asleep reading this book. I found it to be a zippy and even page turning read, thanks to Bohannon's engaging and often funny prose. For example, she writes that "being in a matriarchal primate society is a bit like spending your entire life in a high school where the popular girls rule.

It's Mean Girls." Even the footnotes and endnotes, and there are plenty of both, are compelling. I sort of, like, was skipping them, and then I would go back and, well, I was reading it on my Kindle, so I had to scroll through the endnotes, and then I started reading them, and they were just [00:13:00] as interesting as what was in the text, so I actually ended up reading them all.

In honor of our primate mean girl's relatives, pair Eve with chocolate covered frozen bananas. I found several different options for this recipe, but the blog The View from Great Island had the simplest one, a copycat for Trader Joe's Gone Bananas that uses just three ingredients. And we'll link to the recipe on our blog.

Jacqueline: It's really interesting, especially that the part about the breast milk, you know, there was a big push. Um, I don't remember what era it was, but to use formula and not to feed your babies. And so it's interesting how, how maybe that affected the development of, in that time period. 

Carrie: Or maybe immune systems.

Jacqueline: Yeah, definitely immune systems. 

Carrie: Yeah.

Jacqueline: Yeah.

Michael: And you were talking about like, you know, girls not allowed to be good at math or whatever. And I was thinking, was it, [00:14:00] was it Hedy Lamarr, who was an actress, a famous actress? And she was like Like, wicked good at math that she developed, was it during World War II she 

had it?

Carrie: Yeah, I can't remember exactly what she did, but, was it like code breaking or? 

Michael: That's what I want to, that's what I think, did she help break the Enigma machine or maybe that's 

Carrie: Something like that. Yeah. Yeah, she would, yeah. I can't remember the details exactly, but yeah, she was really really smart. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Carrie: This book was like, equal parts, wow, women's bodies are very cool, but then, jeez, the patriarchy.

Jacqueline: Yeah. 

Carrie: Like, although even when she talks about, you know, she says primates, you know, there are matriarchal primate societies, but they're not necessarily, you know, she says, I wouldn't want to live in a primate [00:15:00] matriarchal society. Like they're not, they're not totally the answer either.

Jacqueline: The elephant, the female elephant is actually the, the lead, the lead matriarch of the 

Carrie: Oh, yeah. I didn't, I didn't know that. Yeah, I mean, for sure. There are matriarchs and, and there are matriarchal societies, you know, a lot of Indigenous cultures were matriarchal. So, um, so that, that's also one of her other arguments is that, it hasn't always been the patriarchy.

Yeah, yeah. There are other options. 

Jacqueline: The Amazons.

Carrie: But it was, it was really a fascinating book. And I actually, even though it was, it was so long, I, I've read it really fast because I just wanted to keep reading. It was like, like I said, like a page turner for me. 

Jacqueline: Can you mention the title [00:16:00] again? 

Carrie: Yeah, it's got kind of a long subtitle, but the title is Eve and then how the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution.

Also this author appeared on, I think it was The Daily Show with, it wasn't the normal host, it was um, Sarah Silverman. And she was hilarious, so if you want to get, like, a more in depth overview of the book, I recommend just Googling the author's name and The Daily Show, or it shows up on her website, too.

But she was really awesome. 

Michael: I bet that was a fun interaction. 

Jacqueline: Female comedians are just some of the best. I mean. 

Carrie: Oh, yeah, definitely. And, uh, and that's another, you know, defying gender expectations kind of role, I think. 

Jacqueline: Yeah, I think so, too.[00:17:00] 

The book I chose for this month's prompt is Lovely War by Julia Barry. The love stories of two World War One couples is told through the frame of the goddess of love's own love story. Ares the goddess of war and Aphrodite the goddess of love are involved in a passionate love affair. Her heartbroken husband Hephaestus the god of fire and forge follows them to a hotel and imprisons them in a golden net.

Hephaestus accuses Aphrodite of infidelity with his brother Ares when he catches them together. A heartbroken Hephaestus hold a trial to find out if his wife ever loved him. Aphrodite pleads guilty to the charges. Her defense is that she's lonely and no one loves her. When questioned about the fair, she tells him she does not love either of them because she believes that although they might want her, neither of them genuinely love [00:18:00] her.

Aphrodite believes that no one can truly love her because she is the goddess of love. Even humans can only worship her because she is perfect and mortals are not meant to love perfection because eventually they become disillusioned and destroyed by it. She's envious of the way mortals love. Unlike gods, they need others.

Gods don't need anyone and don't understand real love, mortal love. Aphrodite convinces Hephaestus and Ares to listen to two love stories of ordinary mortal couples so they will have a better understanding of romantic love and will hopefully understand love. Ares grumbles that her romantic stories will be boring, but Aphrodite reassures Ares he will not be bored because the stories involve soldiers from the Great War, which of course is his favorite topic.

Aphrodite explains that for many reasons, war and relationships are inextricably linked. Frequently, couples' relationships are tested during war times. Can their love survive the changes many go through during wars? Others [00:19:00] may find love because there is a war. Both couples in Aphrodite's stories would never have met if there had not been a war.

For instance, our first couple, Hazel meets James when she's playing the piano at the parish dance. He gets up the courage to approach her, but time is short because he's due to leave for the war in one week So with a little help from the Aphrodite's the goddess oversees all budding romances,

he persuades her to dance with him. They have a marvelous time together They go to a tea shop eat lemon cake served by the goddess and stroll through the streets of London Although she's not supposed to interfere Aphrodite keeps whispering words of encouragement to James. She whispers kiss her several times in his ear.

Hazel, too, wonders if he will kiss her. The two are crazy about each other and make plans to meet again the next day. James plans to kiss her when he leaves for France, but his orders were changed and he has to leave without kissing her. He doesn't even get to say goodbye. To be closer to James, Hazel volunteers to go to [00:20:00] France with the YMCA and play piano for the soldiers.

It is there that she meets fellow musician Aubrey, the self proclaimed king of jazz. Aubrey and Hazel, both pianists, form a friendship through their love of music. When he seeks her out, she introduces him to her roommate Colette. Aubrey is a black soldier and the white soldiers threaten his life when they discover he's seeing a white woman.

His fellow African American soldier is murdered by an American white soldier for seeing a white woman. The men are not the only ones in danger. A prisoner attacks Hazel at the prisoner of war camp where she's volunteering. The two couples face many life changing traumatic events. Not only are their lives endangered on the battlefield, but they must also fight prejudice and hate to survive and keep their sweethearts.

As the two couples traverse the war, it keeps pulling them apart and testing their love. Can both couples survive this war? Barry's novel addresses the horrors of people suffered during World War I, but it addresses the heroic [00:21:00] deeds of black soldiers as well as white soldiers. I listened to the audio of this World War I novel.

If you like audiobooks, I would recommend listening to The Lovely War in this format. There is so much music composed and played and performed during World War I. Also, there are many musical references and the listener gets to hear the music at the end of many chapters. Music transitions the reader into the next chapter or scenes.

Barry clearly did her homework when she authored this novel. I would highly recommend listening to her historical note at the end of the book. For my pairing, I chose a recipe for lemon sponge cake made with rice flour. Wheat and sugar were in short supply during the war. Sugar was often hard to come by, which is why the lemon cake Aphrodite served Hazel and James was such a treat.

And I found that at thefoodhistorian. com. 

Carrie: Cool! So, you said before we started recording that this was kind of recommended for people who [00:22:00] loved, uh, Blanking out on the title. 

Jacqueline: The Book Thief. 

Carrie: The Book Thief, yeah. Is it because it's a war story or why, why do you think they would appeal to people who read The Book Thief?

I loved The Book Thief, by the way. 

Jacqueline: Uh, just the historical fiction novel. Okay. Like, like the book, like people are always asking about war books, historical fiction, war, so that wasn't, that was, 

Carrie: I wondered if maybe like the voice of the gods, cause you know, death is the narrator in the book thief. So I wondered if that was like, the reason 

Jacqueline: that would be a good connection.

Carrie: Oh, okay. 

Jacqueline: Yeah. Well, Hades is actually, we, of course we meet Hades in here too and Apollo because I don't want to spoil anything, but there are a few deaths in the 

Carrie: Well, I mean, 

Jacqueline: of course, yeah, 

Carrie: World War 1. There were a few deaths. 

Jacqueline: Actually, someone, one of the main characters is, is killed in a bombing, [00:23:00] but they beg everyone, like she begs to go back and Aphrodite begs him to let her come back.

So there's that aspect of that. And there is a lot, a lot of history in here, but it's, it doesn't, it's subtle. But when you read the historical notes, you're like, Oh, if you make, if you're not familiar with World War I, you really make that connection when you read the historical notes at the back. And she does, she actually talks about, she has real life people that were in the book that were actually killed because of different.

You know, black men were murdered by white soldiers, you know, just because they were seeing a white woman. And, because they were like, you can't date our white women, so, it was crazy. And women were in danger, they were, atrocities that they suffered in Belgium, in the first of the war, like they were like murdered and [00:24:00] raped for no reason, just.

Kind of depressing. Sorry. War is depressing. 

Carrie: Yeah. War. War is depressing. I mean, it's, I don't know how to feel about the fact that it also is in some ways responsible for women being able to make, you know, break out of their traditional roles. What do you think, Michael? 

Michael: Yeah. I mean, World War II was, I guess, the big one that.

Put them in a workplace and kind of break them out of the that housewife role, Rosie the Riveter. But then you got some, I think it was World War II, The Radium Girls. Mm hmm the book I wanted to read that one for this prompt, but I didn't have the time. That's a big book Yeah, but like they they got broke they broke out of that mold, but they were also Lied to and, you know, taken advantage of.

Carrie: Right. 

Jacqueline: [00:25:00] Mm-Hmm. , many like women, African Americans. Yeah. I mean, they were like, these, these African Americans like fought in the war and when they came back, the, actually the French were like, praised them and gave medals and everything else. Mm-Hmm. . But when they came back to America, they were like treated horribly.

Carrie: Yeah. 

Jacqueline: And some of the women, like they actually kicked the women out because they were when they working for the YMCA, they let the black man came in and talk to him. They didn't do anything, just talked and they kicked him out for talking to a man in there or in their room or whatever. So 

Michael: that brings, uh, sorry, I didn't mean to, um, librarianship, like it was male dominated.

And I think most of them that was that because of the war, is that? 

Carrie: I don't know, that's, that's a good point though, yeah.

Michael: It's become, you know, female, you know, predominantly, largely female I guess I should say. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Michael: Since then, so [00:26:00] it was kind of that little flip.

Jacqueline: You mentioned like people didn't always save the stuff that valued the stuff that women, women worked

like embroidery, but now that there's female librarians and stuff like that. Hopefully they seem to be saving this kind of thing. Hopefully, 

Carrie: Right. Yeah, I think we were talking about that maybe before we started recording but that that embroidery book that I mentioned earlier. Yeah, she talked about protest banners that British and Scottish suffragettes had made and embroidered and That they weren't saved by the curators of the museums because they didn't think that they were important.

Yeah. So, so yeah, hopefully, I mean, and that, that applies to diversity, I think, you know, across the board. It's the reason why we need diverse workplaces. And 

Jacqueline: that's true. And the, yeah, the, the Black man thought, you know, he was going to make inroads by going to war and fighting for [00:27:00] his country. And I'm sure women.

I thought the same thing, you know, I'm going to go to work and do things for my country. 

Carrie: And, yeah. But, and then the fifties happened, so yeah, yeah. It's interesting, always interesting to look back at history and see how far we've come, but also how far we still have to go.

Thank you for listening to the Books and Bites podcast. To learn more about Books and Bites Bingo, visit us at jesspublib.Org forward slash books hyphen bytes. Our theme music is The Breakers from the album In Close Quarters with the Enemy by Scott Whiddon. You can learn more about Scott and his music at his website adorafordesk.

com.