Reading Round Up!

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hi.

00:00:03
Speaker 2: This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

00:00:08
Speaker 3: And this is Sarah hart Unger.

00:00:10
Speaker 1: I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families.

00:00:17
Speaker 2: Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. In this episode, we are going to be talking about reading, just in general, the role reading plays in our life, how we wind up reading, some strategies we've come up with over the years for making time for reading, for keeping track of the books we read, for finding new books, and just generally ways that we enjoy literature. So, Sarah, what role does reading serve in your life?

00:00:58
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:00:58
Speaker 1: Well, I just wanted to also give a shout out to say that this is a very cozy topic. So if it is starting to get darker where you live and you are just kind of seeking some calm and relaxing enjoyment, this episode hopefully will inspire you to think about your reading life and how that can serve you through the next several months. And so yeah, the role that reading serves in our lives. For me, it's all about relaxation. It's a hobby that I feel so immersed. I get into a flow state, and I always feel better after reading than I do after doing other kind.

00:01:32
Speaker 3: Of passive types of activities.

00:01:34
Speaker 1: I love to learn as I'm reading, and I feel like that happens almost as much through novels as it does through nonfiction, because if you're reading a book that's like in another person's voice or in another culture, you can truly, like feel what it might like to be somebody else in a way that you really can't do in other modalities, at least for me. And it's just it's probably the hobby that I find the most relaxing and enjoyable out of all all the things I do. Running a close second, but reading wins.

00:02:03
Speaker 2: Reading wins Wow. Reading whins ever running interesting to know? Yeah, I mean, I guess the world is just an interesting place. I've always enjoyed reading. I mean, you can learn a lot about the world through reading. I do tend to find it relaxing. But the key is choosing the right stuff. And I think over the years, I've really had to figure out who I am as a reader, because there's certain kind of books that I just I'm not going to be into. Like I don't particularly enjoy thrillers, for instance. I'm not into most mysteries, you know. And it's fine, Like I tend to gravitate mostly toward nonfiction in my pleasure reading. But with that, I've made a choice to read a lot of kind of classic literature that you might have read in school, or maybe I didn't read it in school, and therefore, you know, I want to make time for it now. But I tend to wind up reading those kind of historical classic best novels of the twentieth century or even the nineteenth century or whatever books for the fiction, because I like to read stuff that I know has stood the test of time.

00:03:10
Speaker 1: And I think this is actually really really cool that we are very different kinds of readers, because it illustrates the fact that there is no one right way to do reading. And in fact, even if you take the different ways that Laura and I enjoy reading, there are probably like ten more that are equally as valid and cool and interesting. And so I guess, if nothing else, you can take this episode in our different practices to realize that, like you can craft the reading life that works for you. So with that said, do you have different practices for fiction versus nonfiction?

00:03:41
Speaker 2: Well, I'm inclined because I'm inclined to read nonfiction for my pleasure reading that tends to be what I read at night. So if I'm in bed, you know, at ten fifteen and lights out is eleven, I will be most likely reading through some sort of nonfiction book at that point. With a few exceptions, if I get on anick or whatever any topic I find interesting, I do a lot of browsing in the library or figuring out what I want to read. I've read books recently on parking. I read a book on ultraprocessed food. I think maybe both of us read that. We could talk about it. I read books on human evolution, which is another topic I find fascinating. I read a book on Virginio Wolf's Garden. As for fiction, I tend because I've been doing my massive reading projects, which I'll talk more about later, my fiction tends to be during my work day as part of my morning rituals. So shortly after I sit down at my desk, I do my reading for the day whatever I have assigned myself in my big reading project, so that tends to be when my fiction happens.

00:04:44
Speaker 3: So yeah, we're totally opposite.

00:04:46
Speaker 1: Also, I have to comment that of the topics you're currently reading about, like the ultra process food and the evolution in Virginia Wolfs Garden did not surprise me, but parking was not one that I would have.

00:04:55
Speaker 2: You didn't have that on your Bingo card now.

00:04:58
Speaker 1: It was not on the Laura's Not Fiction Picks Bingo card. But yeah, for me, I'm totally the opposite. So nonfiction is pretty much just a morning ritual. It's the first thing I do pretty much every single weekday, not always on the weekends, but actually usually on my long run days because I need something to do while I'm drinking coffee and like waking up and getting ready to run, so pretty much like I'll have some book going and I usually know what book I'm going to read next. I tend to buy more of my nonfiction books as compared to novels because sometimes I like to write in it. I don't know like I like the possibility of highlighting it or keeping it, and I never know which ones are going to be like keepers that I'm going to want to refer back to Laura's books.

00:05:37
Speaker 3: I still have all of them, so that says something.

00:05:41
Speaker 1: And so yeah, my nonfiction time is like early and some of that self. Most of that's like in more of the self development type of sphere, but kind of in really different topics. Right now, I'm reading Virginia Soulsmith's Fat Talk. That is for our Patreon book club coming up probably after this air, So if you're interested in discussing that book with us, then maybe you could join and read that as well. So that's my nonfiction, and then fiction is like my other times. So other times, the main time would be at bedtime, like you know, when I lie down, and especially if Josh isn't home, like when he's home sometimes we'll watch the thing together, but honestly, he's like not home just as much as he's home in the bedtime.

00:06:19
Speaker 3: Hour, so I will read, and.

00:06:22
Speaker 1: I also tend to use it like when I just randomly have free time, like if a kid is at a sports practice and I'm stuck in the car, I can whip out a book or at an appointment in the waiting room, or you know, just like at lunch if I'm not doing some work, So it's like fill in at other times. And the more I'm enjoying a book, the more I'm likely to just pull it out and like read it in the cracks and crevices of life. If I'm not enjoying it, then it tends to take me a lot longer because I don't pull it out randomly.

00:06:47
Speaker 3: And I well, we're going to talk about where we get our books.

00:06:50
Speaker 1: But I am much less likely to read the classics that I read in college, and much more likely to read like the hot like fiction picks that they are buzzy, some of them in the literary genre, and some of them like Ellen Hildebrand, who I love absolutely.

00:07:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, I tend to. I mean I read before bed. I'm trying to get in the habit of reading. If I'm stuck in Henry's room waiting for him to fall asleep some nights I should be reading. Then I tend to scroll, though, because I feel like if I'm stuck here and just do the total brainless thing. But if I have a good book, I will read it right, So that's the trade offs that's always there. I will read magazines sometimes at night too, if I'm particularly looking for something brainless, you know, So it does it fits in the crevices. It tends to be. Or like a weekend afternoon if people are gone sometimes I have some downtime, and so, you know, I try to make sure I have books that I'm interested in because if I don't, that time can very easily get spent on nothing and then it feels like it was wasted. But if I have a good book, you know, then even it's a book on parking, it's interesting because parking is actually about it's about urban des right, because so many not that we need to digress too far into this, but so many municipalities set parking minimums for businesses and housing, and that winds up creating downtowns that are more parking than anything else. It winds up, you know, it can overtime kind of destroy it downtown to make it not walkable because you're walking past huge parking lots to get to anywhere you want to go, and that feels dangerous and isolated and people don't like it. And it's also a way of limiting the stock of affordable housing, because if you require every unit to have even like two off space off street parking, which some places have required, that guarantees you will never be able to build like low cost multi family houses in an area. And so it's a way that people have kept real estate values up and minimized affordable housing, as you know, very much a nimby sort of thing. Anyway, parking affects more than you think it would. That's why I found it interesting to read that book.

00:08:59
Speaker 1: That is a funny digress, especially when I'm like, I feel like there's not enough parking in the world, and.

00:09:03
Speaker 2: Everyone thinks that, but it's because you don't see all the spots, right, you know, there are some places parking can either be available, convenient, or affordable, Like it cannot be all three. That's fair, so fair, And so if it's available and convenient, it's going to be expensive. If it's convenient and expensive, then it's there, right, I mean, you know, anyway, it's all part of the fun.

00:09:26
Speaker 1: I love it well, and I'll give a special note that you mentioned like reading in the afternoon, like that is my favorite, like reading, and then especially if there's enough time where I can then let the reading turn into a nap on like a Saturday afternoon is like, I don't know, up there with my favorite favorite activities.

00:09:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, I sometimes would like sit on my if I can get to my bed right like and nobody's going to bother me there, and if I can open the windows maybe if it's rainy or something. Just sitting there and reading a book is definitely a trait. But yeah, it's kind of harder to pull off sometimes, but when it does, it's when it's sweet because it was difficute. So do you track your reading? I mean you track your time? Do you track your reading in your timeloge? No, I do not unless it's something that I'm particularly calling attention to. So I look at my time logs from six years ago now when I archive my current one, because that's when the date cycle was the same. So Monday October sixteen was also a Monday in two thousand and seventeen as it was in twenty twenty three, so it's a six year cycle. And so I look up that date and I could see that that was the week that I was reading War and Peace for the first time, and so I started making notes on that when I was getting into it, and i'd be like at gymnastics reading War in Peace and parking lot. That would be my entry into that timelog. But most books I don't write about unless it's like again, I was reading a long book, and I'll white finish as I put read and then in parentheses finish or something like that in my log. But when I had sort of a massive reading year in twenty seventeen and then twenty eighteen, with a bit of a holdover from that, I did record it. I made a list in a notebook of all the books I was reading, and twenty seventeen it was well over one hundred books in the course of the year. Twenty eighteen was less. I probably have not anywhere close to one hundred books now, But that was just a year I happened to be on fire and went through a lot of the books that I had not read in the past and wanted to read. For whatever reason, I decided that was going to be my project for the year. But then I just kind of stopped. I don't know, I had henry. You have less time to do anything when you have a baby, sort of less mental capacity. I didn't want to set particularly challenging reading goals for myself and feel like I wasn't keeping up with it, and so then I kind of got out of the habit of that.

00:12:01
Speaker 1: That's fair, okay, So that's that you kind of skipped ahead to whether you were keeping reading goals, and I want to talk a little bit more about that, in addition to talking a little bit more about twenty seventeen, perhaps because that does seem like quite an outlier for you. But I will say I do track my reading. I don't do anything fancy. I love the idea of these gorgeous reading journals that are out there and that exist, but I don't use them. I actually just tend to like write it in my little Aaron Condren monthly i'll be like finished whatever. And actually I did get in the habit this year of tracking how many pages I read, which is kind of fun because I can see when I get stuck on a book, like it makes it obvious when I should just abandon ship, like been on page one hundred and twenty seven for a week now, like probably not going to read it.

00:12:45
Speaker 2: You don't want to go to page one twenty eight at that point exactly.

00:12:48
Speaker 3: So that's been fun.

00:12:49
Speaker 1: And then I just keep a list on my blog with no no star writing, no nothing, just like this is what I read, it was this month, and was it fiction or nonfiction? So I can keep account for the year. And so that's kind of related to goals, like I seem to be naturally reading between like forty eight and fifty two books a year, like over the past. This would be the fourth year in a row that I hit that area. I'm When I try to go over that, I kind of like get a little stressed out, and so I don't know, maybe that's just like my natural sweet spot. I will say when the kids were younger, I definitely read fewer books because I was just more tired and didn't have like the drive or the concentration. Probably a lot of it was just sleep deprivation. It makes your brain less willing to I mean, maybe a better thing to have done during those times would have been to like find really light Like I don't think I had discovered Ellen Hildebrand yet, but if I had, maybe I would have read more during those postpartum years because I don't think I was ready to digest complex material at the time because I'm too tired.

00:13:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally makes sense. Well, let's take a quick break and then we'll be back with more on our reading lives. So we are back talking all things reading. So, Sarah, you actually tried some sort of rather structured scheme for increasing your reading this year. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

00:14:22
Speaker 1: Yes, I did want to talk about that, even though it didn't end up really sticking to it. So I had this idea that I wanted to read sixty books, which breaks out to five books a month, which again isn't like a huge stretch or change for my prior baseline of fifty. You wouldn't even think that would be that big of a deal. My idea was that I would try to just do two nonfiction books per month by looking to see how long my book was, and then like divide to get into like, Okay, i want to finish this book in two weeks, so I'm going to try to aim for one fourteenth of the book per day, and then over the course of the month, maybe with a couple skip days, that would add up to nonfiction books, and then for fiction book same thing, except I would thinking one tenth of the book for day so I could get through three in the month. So it was a nice math problem and it failed because I don't know. Some books I'm gonna read way faster than that, and then some books I get stuck on and sometimes are busier than others. And as much as I love structure, like, my reading doesn't fit into those very discreete finite buckets like that. And I'm okay with that. It was a fun experiment. I think it's actually more doable with a nonfiction piece, just because my reading time for that is so structured and so consistent.

00:15:34
Speaker 3: But also the problem.

00:15:35
Speaker 1: With a goal like that is that, like then you look at a long book and are like, uh, oh, I'm in trouble. Like I read Peter Attia's Outlive, which is nonfiction, and it was useful and it was a good book, but it was like very long. So I think it did take me a little bit longer than two weeks, but not because I was slacking in the pages department. So someone suggested that instead I could make page related goals, but I think I'm just not going to make it.

00:15:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was to say the mental math required to divide something by fourteen is challenging. I mean, the ten is not so hard if you're like looking at a b bit.

00:16:05
Speaker 1: It mentally, I think I just pulled out the calculator app on my computer.

00:16:08
Speaker 2: Said I need to read sixteen pages each morning in order to Yes, okay, well that's you know, that's an interesting idea. Oh it failed, it failed. It felt okay where for someone though I don't know, I'm sure somebody would totally get into that. And actually, honestly that was I mean, well, we can get it. My sort of my reading projects were sort of like that.

00:16:27
Speaker 1: So yes, let's talk about your reading projects, because you're really interesting with how you tend to create reading related projects every year which are separate from your writing projects, and I want to hear about like some of the current ones.

00:16:38
Speaker 3: And then I also want you to go back to twenty seventeen.

00:16:40
Speaker 2: And what happened that that year, the year that Laura was on fire. So yeah, I mean, I haven't been reading as many books, but I decided that I love the idea of doing a little bit of something every single day because it does add up over time, and you can get through huge things in the course of a long enough period of time if you commit to doing just a little bit of it. Every single day. And I think I got this idea because I don't know, Jeremy Anderberg runs a reading newsletter, might be worth checking out that people might enjoy reading his recommendations as well. But he was doing a project where he was going to read through Warren Peace at the rate of one chapter a day over the course of twenty twenty one, and I was like, well, that sounds cool, I'll do that. I truly enjoyed the book when I read it in twenty seventeen, and I'm sure I missed a fair amount of stuff, so let me go in and read it again. And so I did. And it was a very, very doable project because Warren Piece has three hundred and sixty one very short chapters. They're all about four or five pages each. Most of the printed versions of the book are around fourteen fifteen hundred pages. But you know, you do the math, that's four or five pages a day. And that's how Tolstoi wrote it, like he wrote it in a way that it lends itself to being read in a year. And because it was only four or five pages, you never get bogged down. I mean, people who attempt to read War and Peace just on its own, beginning to end without a timeline that many people abandoned it during this whole random aside, he goes through with the Freemasonry, you know, thing that was big and like Moscow at the time, and like people. The number of people who have abandoned it, either in the Freemason part or somewhere in the Battle of Borodino, like is huge, Okay. But when I was reading it this way, I was like, yeah, this, I don't like the Freemasonry part, but I only have like five more days of it to get through. And then I was and it kept going and it got a lot better again, so I found that quite doable. Enjoyed it. So then I was like, well, what else do I want to read? Like, you know, maybe I'll do the same thing. And I wasn't as into the books that Jeremy then chose to do as a year long reading project. He had multiple books he did for them twenty twenty two. I think he did another project. But I decided to read all the works of Shakespeare because I you know, obviously Shakespeare has a reputation as being a good writer. I thought it would be worth reading, and I had only read a few of the plays and seen a few of them, and so I wanted to be more familiar with the entire canon. There are in fact calendars out there for reading Shakespeare in a year. I've found one that looked good and I followed it, and that was a great experience. I feel far more familiar with so many of his plays. I am going through and rereading a few more now because I feel like you read it once, even you read it twice, you're probably missing some of the fun word play. And so I decided to, you know, go in and re experience some of those that I was not as familiar with. And then in twenty twenty three, I decided to read through all the works of Jane Austen, which was another one that obviously she's been around for a while so clearly has some sticking power. So I knew it was going to be worth reading, which is a key component for choosing these year long projects, and also that I really hadn't read her before. And it was the same thing of people get stuck in the freema andry part of War in piece. I had gotten bogged down in the beginning of Pride and prejudiced a couple times that I just could not get myself past some of the slower development because I wasn't as invested in the characters as you would be if you know you've read the book and then know the sound. Was like, Okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to read it all the works of Jane Austin at a pace of five to ten pages a day in order to get through them in the course of the year. So I bought a set of both her six major novels and her Juvenilia, which was bound as a collection as well. There's also a couple unfinished works that I that I purchased in a bound edition too, and so made it through all that. It turns out my counting was wrong. The it told me it had like three thousand pages and a lot of that was notes. So I finished in September, but yeah, it was you know, now I've done it. Now I've read everything Jane Austen wrote. I wrote read everything Shakespeare wrote, I've read Warren Piece twice. And this is just by doing it a little bit at a time every single day.

00:20:58
Speaker 3: I love it.

00:20:59
Speaker 1: As you're talking about this, I'm like, what reading project would I like? And I was thinking maybe I should go back next year and reread all of my favorite Mirkani because I was obsessed. You had one Q eighty fourmentioned there, which is what got me thinking about it, And I'm like, I wonder if I would like still like those books or appreciate them as much as I did when I was in my twenties and thirties when I first discovered them. And I mean, that would really appeal to me. So who knows, maybe you will inspire me to try my own reading project. I can't imagine it being like my main reading thing, because I really do just like seeing something on a blog and like picking up the buzzy one that's in the front at Barnes and Noble or something. But like a little side project maybe for a few months would be fun. Okay, So let's talk format, a polarizing topic in the reading world. So physical, audio, kindle digital?

00:21:50
Speaker 2: Well, what do you do?

00:21:53
Speaker 3: I like physical. I'm like really old school that way.

00:21:55
Speaker 1: I just like enjoy it more and I'm usually carrying a bag big enough to throw in a book, so it's not like this horrible inconvenience. Maybe if I read one hundred books a year, i'd have to like, you know, pack three on vacation or something like that, but usually I can get away with one to two on a trip. So yeah, I du a ton of library holds and I just pick up physical books and return them. And it's old school. I had a Kindle for a while. I guess I still have it. It's a paper white. I didn't like the act of swiping to turn pages, and I just felt like, even though it has a percentage done, even either distract me too much thinking about the percentage done or I felt like I got lost in the volume. I just didn't enjoy the process as much. And I'm like, it's not like paper books are like a hardship. And then once I figured out you could like not even necessarily buy them, but get them from the library in paper form, I was like, yeah, this is me. I like looking at the covers. I like seeing them stacked up on my shelf. I love paper books. Audio I almost never do. I think it's because like when I'm running the oxygen amount in my brain, I can't focus like I can focus on podcasts because they're light and they're you know, if you're listening to this right now, I know it's not taking all of your brain cells, and that's okay, we forgive you. And I like music when I run if I want to, like have a certain mood or I'm trying to run intervals. But I'm just like never excited to pick up an audiobook, even though I'm excited to pick up a paper book.

00:23:17
Speaker 3: So I'm old school. What about you.

00:23:19
Speaker 2: So I read both paper and kindle, you know, electronic books, and I mean, on some level, I do prefer the paper and so for that I people send me books sometimes I always enjoy reading them when I have them in paper. That way. I go to the library and I get books, and I certainly get a lot of random stuff. And I've recently been checking out like coffee table books, which is a really fun thing to get from the library because buying them would be ridiculous or storing them in your house, but you know, hey, getting them for three weeks from the library is like a win all around, and get to look through something that's pretty in that brainless time before bed. But one of the things that made me able to read so much in twenty seventeen, in the year that we were hinting at this before, I managed to read over one hundred books, which was not all short. Books like that included Warren Piece, Kristin Lavren's Daughter one Q eighty four. Team of Rivals was another one in there that was like a seven hundred page book. I mean, there were just a ton of really long but Grant's memoirs, I'm going to throw that one in there, The Memoirs of ulysses Us Grant not short, but I read it anyway. The only way I was able to get all those books sort of quickly and then have them with me to use at any time that I wanted to read was to have it on my phone, and so I read a ton on that tiny little screen. I literally that year I read Warren Piece on my phone. But what it meant is that you want to talk about the percentage going up, the percent would only go up. It was like something like thirty four swipes per percent. I counted it at one point, and you know, you wouldn't get a percent in any given sitting. But if you're sitting there, like for fifteen minutes at gymnastics, you could get through ten of those pages, and then you know, you get through another ten somewhere else, and then you've made it through a percent of the book, and so I just found it so much more convenient that I was willing to give up the need to have it in paper. Now for my reading projects, I've invested in paper copies. So I read through a paper copy of Warren Piece. I read through paper copy of all Shakespeare's plays, except if I was traveling, then I'd get it online and read through my daily allotment. You know, it's available, it's in the public domain, and then I would, you know, Jane Austen, I took the books with me, like, I just would take the book while traveling if I needed to. But yeah, that I read in paper. But yeah, for your average whatever book I was trying to read through, when I was really getting into the reading, I I would do the kindle and not like a big kindle, like a little app on my.

00:26:01
Speaker 3: Phone, kindle app on your phone. I've done that before as well.

00:26:05
Speaker 1: I like that even less than the kindle, But I like, yeah, I do think that the size of your books matters.

00:26:11
Speaker 3: So it's a good point, Like I don't know that i'd want to carry one Q eighty four around. That might be one where I.

00:26:16
Speaker 1: Actually would prefer the kindle want to read it, I would actually weigh down your bag.

00:26:20
Speaker 3: Like that thing is a brick. So I think, and that's.

00:26:23
Speaker 2: How I that's how I did it. And I I mean, so I did Kristin Lavin'sadder in paper. But I read a lot of that on vacation, so it was just sort of there with me, you know, we had driven to the vacation. But yeah, a lot of those books, I you know, the Grants Memoirs is definitely I had it on on the kindle, on the app on my phone. But there's some upsides to the app, by the way, so even if you are team paper, which I do like paper, there might be some reasons to consider doing this to fill in the crevices of time where you'd like to read an extra book here or there. You can get library books through the Libby app, so just link. You know, they're probably other apps out there, so you might check with your local library which they use, but Libya is a very popular one, and you just link your library card to the app and then whatever your library system has in their digital collection you can borrow. And some systems actually have you know, if you don't aren't a resident there, you might be able to pay a fee, and some districts have much more extensive ebook collections than others, so you can look into that. I don't know. I'm not going to give specifics because I'll get them wrong, but if you are into that, you might want to look into that concept. The other upside if you are getting ebooks on Amazon is that they will give you a free sample of just about anything, and it is not like a stingy free samples. It's often ten to fifteen percent of the book, so you can just download that free see if you like it. If you do, it is very easy to then go in and order the rest of the book kinda will put it right where you stopped, like, they won't make you go find where you were in the sample, like it. You will open the book in the app to that spot once you buy it, and that way you know what you're getting. So it's like browsing in a bookstore. They're giving you the experience of being able to browse the book in the bookstore even though it's electronic.

00:28:16
Speaker 1: And that is amazing, especially like if you are traveling and don't have a book with you and you're not near a bookstore, like, oh my god, you have, you can.

00:28:21
Speaker 3: Read any book like that.

00:28:22
Speaker 2: Yes, you know, you could like quickly in the airport download fifteen percent of three books and that would get you through the flight and then probably one of them you'll be really into it least, and you can like then once you get off the plane, download the rest of it. But that way you're not stuck. Ever.

00:28:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's awesome. That is a benefit. So reading related blogs.

00:28:43
Speaker 1: Podcasts or books to gram, I'd actually like, I don't know any bookstagrammers because I avoid and I'm glad, but I know there is a wide world of bookstagram out there, including a woman who is in my book club and she'll be like, oh yeah, I presented on that book on my Insta live or whatever, and I feel bad and I'm like, well, you're a book club, so I can hear you do it.

00:29:01
Speaker 3: In like fline.

00:29:02
Speaker 2: So it's fine for an audience of six.

00:29:05
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, Well.

00:29:08
Speaker 2: Both of us definitely big shout out to modern Missus. Darcy and Bogel has an excellent books empire. She has a podcast called what Should I Read Next, where she recommends books to various people and talks with authors and other people. She also has a website where she has lists of books, So we are airing this. We recorded this a little bit before Halloween, so one of her topics recently was like spooky but not scary books for Halloween. It'll be like a list of twenty books. And the upside of the way Ann puts her content in there, I'm not going to like every book she recommends, but I can tell from her write ups if I'm going to like it, and I think that is a real service because she makes it pretty clear like what kind of reader this is for or things that are in it that then you will understand if it's a book you're gonna like.

00:30:02
Speaker 1: Agree, I love her lists. I often pill for like half of her fall list onto my fall list.

00:30:08
Speaker 3: Like that.

00:30:08
Speaker 1: She's very influential because I've had really good success with her picks, and I have a feeling my taste aligned somewhat with hers, which is just like a lucky thing. But she's been a fantastic resource. I don't know if you listen to Currently Reading, but we actually had the host on her podcast like way back in the day, Meredith Monday Schwartz, who's a CEO but also co hosts this very successful book podcast. I think she was just getting it started maybe when she came on, but it's been a new favorite of mine recently. I just she just has like a great rapport with her co host. Sometimes she vuries the co host. They often will do like a deep dive on one book and I love but it's like something I read and I can hear what they think about it.

00:30:49
Speaker 3: And they even do kind of.

00:30:50
Speaker 1: Like reading adjacent topics, like they talked about like a reading retreat that they held, which was super fun to hear about. So that's another favorite of mine.

00:30:59
Speaker 3: And then Ten Things to I Tell You.

00:31:00
Speaker 1: It is not a book podcast per se, it's Laura Tremain's podcast, and every quarter she'll do a book specific episode, and I just I really enjoyed that because she also tends to have two guests with like different book opinions on it with her, and they like review the best books they read in the quarter and they debate them and they're really fun. So those are my main sources. And also Real Simple Magazine.

00:31:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, they have a write up of about five books every month that they give a shout out to. Yeah, I've The Wall Street Journal has a review section every Saturday, which is a good source for finding book reviews on contemporary books. They do a book review every day in the main section, but the Saturday one is when they review multiple books. I've written for them on occasion, so read my opinion of books there. I also Jeremy Anderberg is another one. You can look up his newsletter. He recommends a lot of books. He does a pretty extensive reading life and has read a great many books. For instance, he had a project where he had read a biography of every American president, so he has extensive knowledge and many recommendations, so you might want to check that out. I in the past would look at O magazine, but that has now gone quarterly, so there's just, you know, less space for them to be recommending books that are newly out. But I think they do still do book reviews, so that's another good place as well. So, Sarah, how do you actively manage your TBR list then your to be read list if you're relying on library holds, because that always strikes me as kind of a hard game to play.

00:32:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, well you can play it fairly easily if you like. If you see too many coming up at once, our library allows you to like push them forward so you can like put some on pause.

00:32:47
Speaker 3: So that's generally how I do it.

00:32:50
Speaker 1: It's part of my monthly review process to audit my library holds and see where I am and make sure I'm like don't have a million things reserved that I don't want anymore and things like that. I keep a like list of books that I'm interested in on my blog, so I can like always refer to that if I'm out of ideas, or sometimes like I'll just read a post by end Bogle and like just immediately dump a bunch of things sound really exciting, so I'll just dump them all on my whole list at once, and then whatever comes to me first is what I'm going to read first. So a little bit of library roulette that makes it maybe even more fun.

00:33:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't have a good process for this right now. I don't have a to b read list that I'm keeping anywhere. If I read a review of something that sounds interesting, I'll try to like take a picture of it so I know that I can go back to it at some other point. I mean, if we're talking like a print one, not obviously you can click straight through if it's an online one. Usually, but now that's probably something I should put more mental energy to. But you only have so much, and I've been doing the big reading projects. I guess the year that I decided to read all the works of Shakespeare, I didn't feel like I really needed to also be managing a huge TBR list of other stuff. So that is what it is. You pick and choose what you're going to do book clubs. So tell us a little bit about your book clubs. Sarah.

00:34:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I did start one in my neighborhood maybe a year ago, and it's been going really well.

00:34:10
Speaker 3: We meet every six weeks or.

00:34:12
Speaker 1: So in one of the local houses, and usually we take turns picking the book. It's super casual, Like I think I was hearing about somebody complaining about like elaborate dinner spreads for book club and feeling intimidated. Like no, we each like bring an item from Trader Joe's. Like it's I mean, very casual. Or people bring wine but not like a meal, so it doesn't take any If you're hosting, it's like no work. Basically, it's like I get out some chairs and it's been really fun. We tend to have a lot of like differing opinions. The books to Grammar has very strong opinions. And we just read Hello Beautiful by Annapolitano, which was a great book club pick because it was not one of my favorite books, but it's so many people's favorite books, so so much to talk about, characters, to dissect, et cetera.

00:34:55
Speaker 2: Excellent. Yeah. Would we have the Patreon community book club? So Best of Both Worlds has a Patreon community where one of the things we decided to do this year was pick four books and read through them and discuss them as a group. And so we've done a couple, including Dori Clark's The Long Game. We did This is not a book about Benedict Cumberbatch did that earlier in the year. We did Gretchen Ruben's Life in Five Senses. We'll be reading Virginia Soulsmith's Fat Talk in November, so you know, that was fun to do to have that book club in the discussion with it. This past summer, I ran my own sort of Laura Vandercam literature book club. Does not count of being in a book club, but I decided that I wanted to resurrect some of my older books and have discussions about them with people, So I created an online book club that people signed up for. We went through Off the Clock, Juliette, School of Possibilities, The Courtland Boys, and My Work in Progress and Orwegen Secret to Enjoying Winter and we discussed each of them on Zoom. And so that was really fun to give me an occasion to talk about some of those topics that I hadn't looked at in a while and maybe introduce some readers who'd read more recent stuff to some of the older work.

00:36:15
Speaker 3: Are those available on zoom In case somebody wants to virtually experience the lar Vanderkam Book Club in the future, you.

00:36:21
Speaker 2: Can email me if you would like to. We'll see you know, they're not for broad put out on YouTube kind of thing, but I'd be happy to help out somebody who happened to read an older book and wanted to check out what we were talking about.

00:36:34
Speaker 1: Cool, all right, well, book favorites. I wrote this question, I'm like, what's your favorite book so far this year? And then what about ever? And then I was like, I'm not answering that.

00:36:44
Speaker 2: I love that she created the question and then more phuses to answer it.

00:36:47
Speaker 1: That's oh my gosh, Well this year, I just finished tom Lake by Anne Paget, and I just loved it. I had read her memoir these precious days, like recently, and I think that made it even better, because like I could hear so much of Anne's voice an essence in Tom Lake, even though it was a novel, and it just had this like peaceful pacing to it, and it made me feel like so calm and good. I don't know, I just I loved it. It's my favorite so far this year.

00:37:15
Speaker 2: I might like it. I might go for a peaceful pacing of a novel. Maybe that would work for me. Maybe not. We'll see get around to it eventually. So yeah, I don't. I don't. I definitely don't have a favorite book of all time. I will say that I had I did. This is going to sound so like egotistical. I enjoyed rereading The Courtland Boys. It's been six seven years since I read it the last time, this novel I wrote, and so it was almost like experiencing it as a reader coming to it. And then you know, I know that I wrote it, like and so obviously I know what happens, but I forgot the exact order of things or how I describe things, and so it was, you know, experiencing it somewhat as a reader would, and I actually got really into the story. So I enjoyed reading that this summer. Like, Laura, that's your own book, that's not allowed.

00:38:07
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's good if you write the kind of book that you're excited to read. I mean, who better, Like, you know, envisioning yourself was like the reader and then crafting towards it. So yeah, it's probably like tailor made for like everything that you love. It does have a lot of little Laura asque easter eggs in it. It is a really fun book.

00:38:24
Speaker 2: So yeah, it's funny. I listen to this podcast like I'll often listen to this podcast twice in the cars because I'm the perfect target audience. We created a podcast that Laura wants to listen to. We're all everyone else is just along for the ride apparently, No, no, no, not at all. We think a lot about what our listeners might want to hear, and please feel free to write us with feedback as well. All right, moving on, so reading and kids reading reading and kids, well we read to the little ones. You know, that's sort of you know, read bedtime stories to the little ones and get them into it. There's always that kind of time when the kid gets they're able to read to themselves, but they want stories that are a little bit more complex and they're capable of reading themselves. You can kind of stretch out the time that you're reading and introduce sort of chapter books with them then. But when we sort of try to build structurally some reading time into our lives is the older kids have to be in their rooms at nine o'clock with no devices, but lights out isn't till ten o'clock, so they have an hour. Sam and Ruth are almost always reading with that time. Jasper's often doing homework at this point. I mean, I don't take his work his school laptop away. He puts his phone away, but he doesn't put the school lap to away, and okay, that's fine, you can use that for homework. Alex is a little bit harder to get him to read. He'll read some graphic novels if he's into them. Sometimes he'll do little projects like he made a lot of paper airplanes of different types of stuff. But one really cool thing that happened is that Jasper and Alex are reading Harry Potter together, so Jasper read it out loud, read the first book out loud to Alex and then they started watching the movie together. And now they're starting the second book. So that's pretty cool.

00:40:08
Speaker 3: That's a lot too. I mean it sounds like one book, but that's like a long book.

00:40:12
Speaker 1: I mean we I think we had attacked that project of like reading all of Harry Potter, and I think we got through the first book.

00:40:18
Speaker 3: But it takes a long time. So go go, Jasper. That is amazing.

00:40:21
Speaker 1: I love that my kids do not generally read to each other. It's usually I'm reading to Genevieve or Josh is reading to Genevieve, and then sometimes like Cameron Aniba will come in and listen, which is really cute, even when it's kids books, like they just want to be part of it.

00:40:35
Speaker 3: And then there were some periods.

00:40:36
Speaker 1: Of time where like Josh would also read something to Cameron, Like they had a couple of yeah, like chapter E books that Cameron wasn't is excited about picking up himself, that didn't mind hearing them if Josh would read them to him. So that's kind of that transitional phase. But now, if you like the keys to getting them to read are like letting them pick whatever they want, no judgments on it, if it's a Minecraft graphic novel or like even like a Minecraft guide.

00:41:00
Speaker 3: See I'm judging, but don't judge.

00:41:02
Speaker 1: Read.

00:41:02
Speaker 2: Stop judging. They're reading the reading.

00:41:04
Speaker 1: So if I and having periods of time when there's no devices, because I mean maybe maybe your family's different, but for my children, if there is an option of iPad or book or video game or book, like, they're never going to pick book on their own.

00:41:19
Speaker 3: And that's okay.

00:41:19
Speaker 1: So I just have to make sure there's some time when it's like you're done with devices. If you choose to read, then that's available to you. And if it's a book that they enjoy, then they're going to choose to read.

00:41:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I'd like to put out here there. I mean, we like to read, and I know a lot of our listeners love to read, but that's not not all adults love reading as like their chosen leisure time activity. And if you aren't that person, that is totally fine. And if you have children for whom that is not their chosen leisure activity, that is also totally fine. You know, again, it's good to be reading some stuff. But just because you don't have a kid who is checking out two dozen books at the library and trying to sneak the flashlight under the covers to be you know, it doesn't mean that you've failed in any way. People are just different. And I know many adults who are intelligent people but just are not as much into reading and their leisure time. It's just not something they choose to do as much. And that is absolutely fine, and it's fine with the kids. But yeah, if you you know, so we can try to share our love of reading. We just always have to remember that kids are their own people and they are not us, and when they are different from us, it doesn't mean that we failed. It means that your kid is not you, and that's all there is to it.

00:42:34
Speaker 3: And that's a lesson you can keep on learning your kid is not you.

00:42:38
Speaker 2: Again and again and again. So do you want to do Love of the Week or question first?

00:42:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're out of order, but our love of the weeks are kind of bookish, so let's just do them.

00:42:47
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:42:49
Speaker 1: So I love that Annabelle is currently reading starring Sally Jay Friedman as herself by Judy Bloom, just because I think I read that book thirty times at least, and it's just fun to like hear her enjoying it. And also the setting means so much more to her than it did to me because it's set in Miami Beach. They go to quote Central Beach Elementary School, which I feel like is probably North Beach Elementary School where she used to go to school, because there's no Central, there's only North and South unless there used to be one in the middle.

00:43:17
Speaker 3: And I just think that's super cool.

00:43:19
Speaker 1: So I'm enjoying like seeing her reading that, talking about it, looking over her shoulder, and like realizing that I like have photographically memorized certain pages of it, et cetera.

00:43:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you mentioned this is something you didn't enjoy, you found stressful reading on the kindle that it says what percent you've read? I actually love that. I sort of automatically do that in my brain. Like when I have a paper book and I see that it's two hundred and forty pages, I'd be like, oh, here, I'm forty pages in, I'm one sixth I'm eighteen percent in. You know, I'm sixty pages in, I'm twenty five percent in, I'm eighty pages in, I'm thirty three percent in. You know, this is just I don't know the way my brain works, and so it's kind of fun that that's apparently the way the Kindle's brain works too. So I was like, oh, I don't even have to do the calculation anymore. It's right there, and there is a way to hide it. By the way way to hide, you can hide you have a percent, Yeah, you can hide all of that. So just figure that out, all right. So the listener question this week comes from someone who is asking about parent teacher organizations go by different names some people, they're called Home and School Association, parent Teacher Association, parent Teacher Organization PTO PTA whatever. She says, I have a new kindergartener in my neighborhood public school, and I am excited to engage with my school's parent teacher organization. When I attended the first meeting, I was surprised that it was a little sleepy. I have time and energy to help this organization, but I am a PTO newbie. So she says, it seems like PTOs have multiple goals between supporting teachers, encouraging volunteerism, fundraising, strengthening school community. It's all exciting because there's something for everyone, but also daunting. So where does she start? Does she have any do we have recommendations of, you know, things that she has that we've seen people do with PTOs that are great, Any patterns of success or pitfalls we could share.

00:45:08
Speaker 1: I don't have personal experience like being in or like active in a PTO, but I will say I'm super grateful for my friends that do it.

00:45:16
Speaker 3: One of my friends is actually like PTO.

00:45:18
Speaker 1: President at our school, and I can tell that she gets a lot of satisfaction from being this like major bridge between administration and teachers and parents and making sure that each side is heard, and like to some extent, there's like a I don't want to say mediator, but like an integrator role between everybody's priorities and preferences. And also just a lot of planning. So you know, if that is your strength, that might be a really fun thing to get involved in. I also want to put out the alternative if you didn't want to have a specific PTO leadership role, to like volunteer for very specific things like Okay, I will be in charge of this event, or I will take shifts in the book fair or like for me, I'd like to go on field trips or things like that. Actually even well I got asked, but I also volunteered too, like if one of they have some parents do like keynote talks like for the school throughout the year. So I'm doing one of those. So more like specific things that answer to my strengths and like are on my schedule tend to be what I do. But I mean, I think it's totally awesome to have working parents, especially involved in a PTO to help with inclusivity of other working parents, like they're more likely to find hey, maybe nine am on Tuesday isn't the best time to have an all parent meeting, or if they do have the meeting at that time, to make sure there's a recording available, things like that.

00:46:33
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, Like Sarah, I've done more specific projects like you know, help with the book fair or do a class project or a field trip rather than doing an open ended leadership role. But I really really appreciate the effort that others put into it because it can make a big difference in a school community. So my guess is, you know, volunteer for what is open and available this year that looks interesting to you in terms of leadership, and I think by the time you have a second grader, you'll be running the place, So that sounds great if your school isn't in such tight financial straits. I know fundraising is certainly something some organizations do, but if that's not your school's biggest concern, which again I don't know, but if it isn't, then you would probably have your biggest value both in supporting teachers and in strengthening school cohesion. So the school cohesion part of it would be like creating fun events for kids like the grade level socials or all families like an all school picnic or fun day, and then things for parents to get to know each other, like some sort of social event people might be excited to attend, like at a local restaurant or something like that. And on the supporting teachers front, I think you would really be creative with this. I'd encourage reaching out to lots of other people who are involved in PTOs of the different things they've done, you know, whether it's bringing coffee from Dunkin Donuts on a certain schedule for the teachers, or whether it's making sure there's always a parent volunteer available on certain days for things for projects that are harder for teachers to manage on their own. But you just, I mean, have a real open communication with your teachers about what that is that they would feel most supported doing. But I feel like those are the two things that a PTO can best do for a neighborhood school. And it sounds like you have.

00:48:17
Speaker 3: We're excited for you.

00:48:18
Speaker 1: You'll have to let us know how your PTO journey goes, what you've learned along the way, and maybe we can report back to our listeners.

00:48:24
Speaker 2: Absolutely well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking all things reading, the reading life, how we read, what devices we read, on getting kids to read, and all that good stuff. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.

00:48:40
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoebox on Instagram, and you can.

00:48:49
Speaker 2: Find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.