Books & Beyond: March and April

Cli-fi, YA fantasy, literary fiction, and travel books. The stats this month are highly on trend.

March and April were full of excellent and entertaining content, with a heavy lean into reading and podcasts (lots of train travel!) and a lean away from streaming services (geo-blocking!*). I’ve added a few new podcasts to the must-listen category, thought (again) about whether it’s finally time to take action on my Dungeons & Dragons curiosity, and wondered what Felicia Day is up to these days (resulting in two more podcasts to add to my list….)

Here’s a look at what inspired me enough to earn a place in this bimonthly roundup. As a reminder, you can keep up to date with my reading over at Storygraph if you’d like. All book links are through Bookshop, supporting my favorite local indie, Bookworm of Edwards.

Books I’ve Read:

A few quick notes on the twelve books I read this period: I’ve been leaning into my unintentional trend of cli-fi reading in 2023, inhaling at least two more books that I’d categorize in this sub-genre (possibly 3, and even one non-fiction title that feels tangentially relevant here.)

I’m generally on track for one 5-star read a month (which means I’m either choosing really well, or being more generous than usual with my 5-star picks: in 2022, I only had 7 books total on my 5-star list.) Here are the 4 titles that got 5 stars from me in March & April:

• A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine. Okay, I don’t know why I waited so long to read this book, but I just adored it. A unique world that didn’t feel like too heavy a lift to understand, characters you want to root for, and questions of politics, technology, and culture. Yes, please.

• Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Just as delightful as everyone says it is!

• Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road by Kate Harris. One of the best testaments I can give to a book is capturing the quotes that moved me on the page. Here’s one: “Beyond avenging my childhood ideas of explorers, and figuring out how to be one myself, I wanted to bike the Silk Road as a practical extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people's minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides. So there I was, rich in unemployable university degrees, poor in cash, with few possessions to my name beside a tent, a bicycle, and some books. I felt great about my life decisions, until I felt terrified."

• Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. One of my most unputdownable reads of recent memory, featuring eco-activism, suspicious billionaires, and a wonderful New Zealand setting.

Podcasts I’ve Loved:

• The Pop-Up Pod: S2 Bonus Episode. This is a paywalled podcast for Patreon subscribers of Nicole Antoinette (who I’ve mentioned before—you can also find her here on substack). This episode featured a fascinating conversation with Erin Axelrod of LIFT Economy, which subsequently led me to this non-paywalled podcast episode. I loved discovering LIFT Economy and as a result, went on to learn about Denizen, a project/collective that asks: Can we envision a society that is more equitable, caring, and regenerative? And if we could envision such a future, how might we transition from where we are today? Denizen's work is centered on an ongoing inquiry that explores these questions, spanning six themes: economics, politics, justice, technology, culture, and consciousness.

• What Should Anne Read Next? As you may already know, I’m on the team at What Should I Read Next?, but usually I do my work in the background. In this episode, I got to join Anne to talk about a whole bunch of delightful reading suggestions that came from our listening audience, and I talked a little bit about my favorite nerdy reading genre.

• The Off The Grid podcast with Amelia Hruby. While I’m not planning to entirely cut ties with social media (and let’s be honest, Substack is ultimately another social media platform, albeit with thoughtful differences), I’ve listened to many episodes and have found so many gems of truth and inspiration in Amelia’s conversations. If you’re an entrepreneur curious about how to promote your work and connect with your people without being a slave to the algorithm, I highly recommend giving it a listen.

• Working with Wood, and the Meaning of Life: Nick Offerman on On Being. I listened to this as I walked through shrines, streets, and parks of Kyoto, and I just loved the conversation so much. Perhaps because I listened to this while in Japan, it made me think back to chapters from the book Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town by Hannah Kirshner.

Shows I’ve Watched:

• Daisy Jones and the Six. I watched the series on Amazon (while I didn’t love the book, I could appreciate how it was really well done), and it came together for me incredibly well on the screen. The music, casting, and story just shone.

• Benjamin Zander: Interpretations of Music (Fauré: Elegy). Beau discovered this YouTube video from six years ago and we then proceeded to go down the rabbithole of all things Benjamin Zander, who is among other things, the founder of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. If you love classical music (and even if you don’t), give some of his videos a watch (and a listen.) It’s a powerful reminder of how inspiring it is to see (and hear) something beautiful done incredibly well.

Your Turn:

What have you read, watched, listened to, or discovered in the past few months? Please tell us all about it in the comments!

*I know, we could use a VPN for this. It hasn’t yet been a priority.

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