Books and Bites, Ep. 113 === 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. Carrie: So before we get into today's books, we wanted to remind everyone about our upcoming book club discussion of So Far Gone by Jess Walter, and that will take place on June 16th at 6:30 PM. Registration is now open, and you just need to stop by the Customer Service Desk, where you can also pick up a free copy of the book. And this is a book that both Michael and I have read, as we've talked about before in the podcast, and both really loved. Michael: We are very excited to talk about it with you all, so please, please sign up- Carrie: Yeah Michael: and join us. Carrie: And you get, you know, a free hardcover book. We do [00:01:00] also have it on audio and in two formats: book on CD and Hoopla and Libby. eBook, so, large print. Michael: Yep, all the formats. Carrie: All the formats. All right. So today, we are discussing books with flowers on the cover, one of the prompts on the spring Books and Bites bingo, and of course, it's now May, so. We didn't get too many April showers, but- Michael: No Carrie: ... so hopefully, we'll still have some May flowers. Jacqueline: Yeah. Yeah, let's hope so. Carrie: So I noticed that there's a lot more variety in books with flowers on the cover than what you might at first think. I kinda knew that T. Kingfisher had some- Michael: Yeah Carrie: ... some books with flowers. What did you all notice about books with flowers on the cover? Michael: I thought, you know, initially, I thought, oh, nonfiction books, something about [00:02:00] plants, gardening. Jacqueline: I've noticed on the young adult fantasy novels that they all, a lot of them have flowers on them. It kind of seems like a new trend in a way. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Michael: See, you know, especially in my horror genre, I thought it was gonna be a little hard to find one, but it really wasn't. Carrie: No. Yeah, I noticed there were quite a few in the horror genre. And Jacqueline, you brought some interesting books with you today. You wanna describe some of those for people? Jacqueline: Sure. The Graveyard, it has a flower that's also a candle with blood dripping, so it's a- Michael: Ooh. [Laughter] Jacqueline: ... Really enticing cover with some... The edges have some dripping as well, so there's the flower on that. And then The Gilded Wolves also has flowers on it. But we were talking about how this newest trend is designing books, their edges or gilding or both those, [00:03:00] like seems like a newest thing that they've been doing in- Michael: Maybe like- Jacqueline: ... a lot lately ... Michael: paint the edges of them. Jacqueline: Yeah, painted. Michael: Make 'em pop. Jacqueline: It's kind of beautiful and- Michael: Yeah ... Jacqueline: and a lot of people want to look at beautiful things, so. Michael: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Makes 'em more of a collector's item. Jacqueline: Yeah. Carrie: You almost wanna shelve those with the spine in instead of out- Michael: Yeah. Carrie: ... Because it would look really pretty on your bookshelf. Jacqueline: Yeah. It's kind of enticing. There's one called The Unwild, and it has keys on it, and it's white keys with a turquoise background, and I'm thinking, "Wow." So to me, it seems like what are the keys for? I'm kinda interested in that one. Michael: Gotta read the book. Jacqueline: I know. Yeah. [Laughter] Carrie: All right. So we've got three good choices for you. Hope you find something that you like. Michael: Yeah. My book [00:04:00] this month is Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher, a book that will definitely get under your skin. Wolf Worm is a Gothic novel set in the woods of 1899 North Carolina. We follow Sonia Wilson, the daughter of a naturalist who's in a desperate spot and takes a job as an illustrator for a reclusive entomologist named Dr. Halder. He's a surly, unpleasant old man, and he's working on his life's project, a massive tome of parasitic and necrophagic insects. When Sonia arrives by train, she accepts a ride out to Halder's isolated mansion 10 miles outside of the town from Asa Phelps, a God-fearing man who wastes no time telling her about the devil that lurks in the surrounding woods. But she chalks it up to local superstition, and pretty much as soon as Sonia steps foot into the old Southern mansion, the mysteries begin piling up fast. She befriends Rose Kent, the housekeeper, and Rose's husband Jackson, and through them learns that there was another illustrator [00:05:00] working for Dr. Halder about a year earlier, someone who abruptly left, abandoning all her possessions, and who no one wants to talk about. Then there are the rumors and stories about people being found dead, strung up in trees deep in the surrounding woods a few years earlier. Then Sonia also has a terrifying night when she wakes up to find a very inquisitive possum covered in strange growths trying to force its way into her room, even trying to unlock the door. Soon after, while taking a break from illustrating insects, Sonia stumbles across a mysterious wedge-shaped shed in the woods that's padlocked and clearly something she was not meant to find. From there, Sonia's investigation to all of these unsettling threads pulls her toward a horrifying truth. Dr. Halder's studies have led him down a twisted path, one that no one around him is fully prepared to face. The Southern Gothic atmosphere is immaculate. It's hot, claustrophobic, and thick with dread. You get strange mysteries, unsettling characters, and [00:06:00] this constant sense that the woods are watching and that something supernatural is at work. And what I love most about T. Kingfisher's writing, and what absolutely shines in Wolf Worm, is her ability to balance genuinely disturbing horror with moments of humor. She knows exactly when to let you breathe and when to crank up the horror. And make no mistake, this book delivers real visceral body horror. If you've read What Moves the Dead and remember what the book did for fungi, Wolf Worm does the same thing for insects. You will never look at them the same way again. And fair warning, you're probably not going to feel like eating a while or immediately after reading this book. But once your appetite comes back, I strongly recommend trying some North Carolina style barbecue. My go-to pulled pork recipe comes from meatchurch.com. All you need is a pork butt, your favorite seasoning, a little mustard to use as a binder, and if you can track it down, some Cheerwine, a true North Carolina staple. Smoke it low and slow for about 10 hours. Trust me, it's worth the wait. [00:07:00] [Laughter] Carrie: Yeah, might have to wait a little while before- Michael: Oh, man, yeah Carrie: doing that though. Jacqueline: Yeah. Carrie: So when you say body horror, 'cause I mean, it sounds, the book, when you describe it, it sounds creepy and kinda gothic, but body horror gives me a totally different image. What do you mean by that? Michael: So body horror is when usually something is happening or the body's transforming in some kinda grotesque way, be it maybe an insect getting under the skin or- Carrie: Okay Michael: You know,- Jacqueline: Ooh, like The Fly? Michael: Yeah, The Fly. Like, things are blood and guts. Carrie: Okay. Michael: You know, mutations and stuff like that. Carrie: Okay. So I had a nightmare or a dream last night. I don't know if it was a nightmare, but tell me if this counts as body horror. I dreamed that I was, like, [00:08:00] pulling worms, these long worms, out of the bottom of my foot. [Laughter] Michael: Yes, yes. Things like that. Yep. Oh, yeah. Jacqueline: Oh, that's creepy. Michael: There's, there's this book I read a few years... I can't remember if I did it for Books and Bites or not, called The Troop by Nick Cutter, and it's very much just straight body horror, where this parasitic worm gets in. It's like a tapeworm. And it, like, comes out of the body, and then, like- Carrie: Ew Michael: it comes out and, like, shoots other tapeworms out- Carrie: Oh, gross Michael: ... as it infects, and they're, like, coming under the skin. And yeah. Out, yeah. When you have, like, worms and things coming out, and... Ah, that's, yeah, that's body horror. Jacqueline: That's so disgusting. Carrie: See, I don't need to read a book for that. [Laughter] Michael: Yeah, you got it in your dreams. [Laughter] Carrie: That's right. Michael: Ugh. It's like, man. That's a tape- pulling worms out your... Woo. Yeah. Then eat some barbecue. [00:09:00] [Laughter] Carrie: I read Inciting Joy by Ross Gay. I first read Ross Gay's essay collection, The Book of Delights, back in 2020, a time when everyone seemed to need delight. That collection was a series of around 100 very brief essays written during a year in which he challenged himself to write about delight every day. As I said in my review of the book on this podcast, "Yes, this world is awful," he seems to say, "but if you pay attention, you can still find joy in it, too." The essays in Inciting Joy are longer than those in The Book of Delights and its follow-up, The Book of (More) Delights, but they share many of the same concerns. Gay, a Black poet, believes that joy, gratitude, and delight always exist alongside sorrow, grief, [00:10:00] and even anger. In the book's opening essay, The First Incitement, he imagines throwing a potluck and inviting everyone he knows and all their sorrows: "I'd like you to meet my sorrow, we holler to each other, dipping the flatbread into the hummus or eating the kimchi with our fingers because the forks are long gone. Good to meet you, we shout, smiling and nodding at the sorrow, who also smiles and nods and half shrugs and raises their eyebrows." Eventually, all the guests and their sorrows begin dancing together to Sly Stone's A Family Affair, "sweaty, stomping and shaking, tearing it up, the pictures falling off the walls, the books from the shelves, riotous this care, this carrying, this incitement, this joy." In the 13 essays that follow, Gay writes about such [00:11:00] topics as his father's death from cancer, gardening, skateboarding, Richard Pryor, pickup basketball, a community orchard, and more. In lyrical, funny, and thoughtful prose, he offers alternatives to the capitalist, patriarchal, and racist society he finds himself in. For Gay, joy exists in spite of those things. They exist in resistance to them. Where the essays in The Book of Delights are tight and compressed, those in Inciting Joy sometimes seem unable to contain themselves. They burst at the seam with footnotes, which, especially in some of the later essays, often seem to take over an essay's main thread. While I am all for busting genre conventions, I did sometimes find them to be distracting. Still, at a time that feels even more disconnected than 2020, [00:12:00] I found Inciting Joy to be a much-needed reminder of what's important. As Gay states in the last essay, "the luminous mycelial tethers between us, our fundamental connection to one another, the raft through the sorrow, the holding through the grief joy is, reminds us again and again that we belong not to an institution or a party or a state or a market, but to each other." In that same essay, Gay writes about drinking lemon balm and mint tea at a gathering at Black Oaks Center, a community resilience project in Illinois. Lemon balm and mint are two of the first things to come up in my own garden. Though they are from the same plant family, they have different benefits. Lemon balm can help calm you and promote sleep, while mint can help revitalize you. I also [00:13:00] find it helps when I'm especially stuffy. You really don't need a recipe to make tea out of them. I just throw some fresh leaves in a teapot, steep for five to seven minutes in boiling water, and sweeten with a little honey. You can drink it hot or cold, use more or less of the lemon balm or mint depending on the time of day, and add a little lemon juice if you want. Jacqueline: Sounds great. Michael: What is lemon balm? I've never had that. Is it- Carrie: Yeah, I mean, it's a member of the mint family, so it's just, I mean, it's an herb. Michael: Okay Carrie: And it tastes kinda lemony. Michael: Lemony? Okay. Carrie: Yeah. So you can use it in place of lemon at some times, but they say that it helps with anxiety and calming you before bed and... Michael: I need that for myself and the children. [Laughter] Carrie: Yeah. Michael: Lemon balm. Okay. Yeah. Jacqueline: Yeah. So the sorrows, is that like a metaphor, or is, like, the sorrow within them that [00:14:00] when you've mentioned that? Carrie: He's kind of embodying the sorrows in that first essay. Jacqueline: Okay. Carrie: But, yeah, no, I mean, he's talking about everybody carries- Jacqueline: Okay ... Carrie: you know, you can't just have joy. Joy lives alongside grief and sorrow and- Jacqueline: Oh, okay. Michael: Ying and yang Jacqueline: That sounds interesting. Carrie: Mm-hmm. I listened to The Book of Delights on audio, and he reads it, and I really loved it on audio, so I kept waiting for us to get the other books on audio, but we never did, so I ended up reading them. So I do recommend, if you haven't read The Book of Delights before, I highly recommend listening to that one. He's a poet and he's a performer, so, you know, a lot of times authors are not so great at reading their own books. But I think poets are different, like, generally are better at reading their work. Because they do it [00:15:00] more than, you know, most fiction writers or, you know, nonfiction writers. So yeah, definitely recommend that. And I got to see him. He came to Transy maybe the last year or the year before last, and I got to go to that, and he was really great in person. He's just... He's really funny and so the books definitely have that humor as well as the sadness that goes along. You know, some of his essays are about how laughing about our, you know, when we tell stories about people who have died, you know, our loved ones who have died, and we're able to laugh, and it kind of brings them back to us. Jacqueline: That's wonderful. The book I chose is Powerless by Lauren Roberts. The cover is [00:16:00] striking. It features a dagger wrapped in purple flowers. In the story, the flowers are actually forget-me-nots, which are blue. So I'm not sure why the designer chose purple instead, but visually, it's a beautiful, eye-catching design. A great cover always makes me want to take a closer look and see if the story is something I'd enjoy. Powerless is a young adult dystopian fantasy novel and the first book in the Powerless trilogy. The story takes place in the Kingdom of Ilya, a society reshaped by a plague that killed thousands. Among the survivors, some developed special abilities, sometimes more than one, and they are known as Elites. But many people did not develop powers at all. They are simply called Ordinaries. King claims that Ordinaries carry an undetectable disease, which is why they never gained powers. Because of this, he banished all the Ordinaries from Ilya, insisting their presence weakens the Elites. Any Ordinary [00:17:00] found hiding in the kingdom is executed. Our main character, Paedyn Gray, is one of these Ordinaries. Her father was a healer who trained her to fake the ability of a psychic. Paedyn is beautiful with long silver hair, but she has no real powers. When she accidentally saves the king's son, Kai, she's forced into the Purging Trials, a brutal competition meant to showcase Elite abilities. Since she has none, she must rely entirely on her fighting skills and her ability to bluff her way through. Like The Hunger Games, the contestants train together before the trials begin. But unlike that series, this competition also includes balls, dinners, and royal events hosted by the king and queen. What makes this year's Purging Trial unique is that the King's son, Kai Azer, is competing, and the King expects him to win. Kai's power allows him to borrow abilities from anyone, [00:18:00] but his father forces him to train in other ways, including learning to injure and heal himself. He becomes a ruthless hunter of ordinaries. Meanwhile, the King's heir, Kit Azer, attends all the festivities but isn't allowed to fight. Paedyn is in danger, not only from the competition itself, but also from the King's son. If either of them discover she's an ordinary, her life is over. She is constantly walking a tightrope, terrified of being exposed, also trying to ignore the feelings she has started to develop along the way. The story is told from alternating points of view by Kai Azer and Paedyn Gray. If you enjoyed The Hunger Games, you'll enjoy this book. It shares an element of the battle royale genre, themes of survival, betrayal, loss of innocence, and state-sanctioned violence, but without only-one-can-survive rule. I finished the entire trilogy in just a few days. I haven't read the two novellas yet, which explore the other [00:19:00] characters' backstories, but they're on my list. And I found a simple recipe for lemon tart, Kai's favorite food, on crazyforcrust.com. So... Michael: Yeah, all about the lemon today. [Laughter] Jacqueline: Lemon balm, lemon tart. Yeah. Carrie: I love lemon tarts and desserts and- Jacqueline: Mm ... Carrie: yeah. It's good. Jacqueline: This one's a pretty easy, I mean, any teen could do it, 'cause it's like she takes like a cookie, sugar cookies already pre-made, and she makes that the crust, and then she puts lemon filling in there, and then berries. And so very quick and easy- Carrie: Mm-hmm ... Jacqueline: for those people in a hurry. Carrie: Yeah. Yeah, sounds good. Have you ever had the Shaker lemon pie? It's also pretty easy. I haven't made it in a long time, but they, you know, Shakers believed in using, you know, everything. Like the whole, the whole animal, the whole part of the vegetable or fruit. [00:20:00] So they slice the lemons very, very thinly, and then all you do is, like, I think add sugar. I think it's just the lemons and sugar. Maybe there's some vanilla. And you put it in a pie crust and bake it. And it's delicious. Jacqueline: Yum. Yeah. That sounds good. There's a lot of... Is there a lot of lemon history with Shakers? I noticed we went to a festival that one time. They served, like, lemonade with bourbon, and I'm just wondering if that was, was it because of the Shaker history or like- Michael: I don't think so. Jacqueline: No? Michael: Okay. I think just 'cause, you know, that's a good combination. Jacqueline: Okay. Carrie: Yeah. I mean- That's not, you know, they mostly lived in the Midwest and the Northeast, so those aren't places where lemons are, like, readily available. So I'm not really sure why the lemon pie was- Michael: I guess maybe it was so scarce they tried [00:21:00] to- Carrie: make sure they used it all Michael: Try to use it all. Yeah. Yeah. So expensive or something, Carrie: yeah. Mm-hmm. Jacqueline: That's probably true. I remember when, like, oranges, you know, a few hundred years ago, you just couldn't have. You couldn't just go to the store and buy oranges. Michael: Oh, yeah. Jacqueline: You had to ... Only a few times a year, so, like, people would have them at Christmastime. Carrie: Mm-hmm. And they are getting scarcer now because Florida's citrus industry is just pretty much decimated right now, with the greening disease, and development, and all of that stuff, so. Michael: Geez. Jacqueline: Oh, no. Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so, um... [Laughter] The flowers that were on the cover, what was the connection between the flowers on the cover and the book? Jacqueline: Well, he gives, Kai gives Paedyn flowers a few times, and- Carrie: Okay ... Jacqueline: and he's like, "I gave you f-," he gives her forget-me-not so she won't forget him. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Jacqueline: [00:22:00] Because he's worried that- Michael: Gotcha Jacqueline: ... 'cause the brother also, you know, there's always the trilogy in YA. We didn't mention it, but you know, so which brother will she choose, and is also part of the- Carrie: Mmmm. [Laughter] Jacqueline: the book, but gotta happen anyway. Michael: The old love triangle. [Laughter] Jacqueline: Love triangle. But what was you, remember multiple narrators? So I also had to include that. Michael: We're doing that next month, Jackie. [Laughter] Carrie: Jackie loved that one. Jacqueline: Yeah, my favorite. [Laughter] Carrie: Thanks for listening to the Books and Bites podcast. Our theme music is The Breakers from the album In Close Quarters with the Enemy by Scott Whiddon. Learn more about Scott and his music at his website, adoorforadesk.com.