Ep 542: The delight of a reading rabbit hole

What Should I Read Next?

In this episode of 'What Should I Read Next?', host Anne Bogle helps guest Jane Baldwin navigate her reading roadblocks and reignite her passion for meaningful literature. Jane, an accounting manager

Key takeaways

• Thematic reading clusters ('book flights') can transform passive reading into an engaging, intentional experience.

Main topics

• Meaningful reading
• Book clusters and thematic reading

Notable quotes

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

Conclusion

Jane leaves the conversation with a clear plan: begin with biographical context for 'The House of

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Oh my God, that is hilarious. I just threw that out. But honestly, those are kind of interesting like titles to compare next to each other. Those Speaker 3 (0:07) books have a lot to say to each other. I'm sure we'll say more about that. Speaker 3 (0:13) Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogle, and this is What Should I Read Next? Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader. What should I read next? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read. Every week, we'll talk all things books and reading and do a little literary matchmaking with one guest. Speaker 3 (0:43) Readers, the coming fall weather means sweatshirts will soon be back in my wardrobe rotation, and I have loved the chance to create a few especially cozy styles for the Modern Mrs. Darcy shop over the years. Our latest is the Modern Mrs. Darcy MMD Sorority Sweatshirt, tailor-made for your fall activities on or off campus. Choose from a crimson or blue jean colored comfort color sweatshirt adorned with navy felt applique letters and white stitching. We also still have a handful of colors and sizes. in stock from our 2024 book camp sweatshirt design. Order your fall sweatshirt and shop our refreshed for fall collection of bookish merch at modernmrsdarcy.com slash shop. Speaker 1 (1:25) Every Sunday we cover the week's tech news on This Week in Tech. Hi, this is Leo Laporte from the Twit Podcasting Network, inviting you to join me with Jacob Ward, Molly White, and Harry McCracken as we talk about the end of the big lawsuit against Meta and what it means for us, NVIDIA spending lots of money trying to get into the AI software game, and real details on that Hugging Face attack. What you hear will shock you. You'll find it at twit.tv and wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (1:56) Readers, today's guest has tackled a significant reading project, but she's running into a few roadblocks and is hoping I can help. Jane Baldwin lives with her husband and two dogs in her not long ago adopted and much loved city of St. Louis, where she's an accounting manager by day and a devoted gardener and Dungeons and Dragons regular by night. Jane came to us with a desire to feel more intentional in her reading life. She wants to experience the satisfaction of engaging in what she calls meaningful reading more often and sticking with something challenging, but she finds herself easily distracted by the new and shiny. She has ideas for different reading projects, but has gotten overwhelmed by the possible options and hasn't done any of them yet. Right now, she's attempting to fill some gaps she's identified in her American literature reading to date, but she's finding herself stalling out. Jane's put her finger on what to her is an appealing strategy for boosting her enthusiasm for this project. She is wanting to identify clusters of books that can be in conversation with each other, similar to the way we talk about book flights around here. And if you don't know that phrase, no worries at all. Jane and I are about to talk about it plenty. We will catch you up. Today, Jane is here with her self-appointed 10 classic books she's been meaning to read, and we're going to see if I can identify both contemporary and classic options that will provide interest and context to some of these older picks. We're talking about everything from The House of Mirth to The Shampoo Effect, and along the way, we're noticing how much some of Jane's chosen shiny and new books have in common with these older titles she's been less excited to read. But hopefully, at the end of this episode, this'll change. This is good nerdy fun, and I can't wait to dive in with Jane. Let's get to it. Jane, welcome to the show. Speaker 2 (3:41) Thank you so much. I am so delighted to be here. Oh my gosh, Speaker 3 (3:44) the pleasure is mine. I am very excited about what we have in store for us conversationally today. Jane, would you start by just giving the readers a glimpse of who you are? Tell us a little about yourself. Speaker 2 (3:57) Yes. So I am 33 years old and my husband and I live in St. Louis, Missouri. We've been here for a... About five years now, which is hard to believe. We are both Southern transplants. So he was born and raised in Nashville. I went to grad school there, started my career there, and that's where we met. But then we ended up moving to St. Louis for work opportunities. We have two rescue dogs. One is a 10-year-old grouchy, small dog energy. Her name is Francie. And then an 11-month-old puppy named Scout, who is already three times her size. So two very different dog energies going on, but we love them. For my day job, I am an accounting manager. So most of my days, work days, look like... me just in spreadsheets and numbers, all sort of analytical things. So reading has definitely been a kind of an escape, total opposite of what I do for work, which I love. Speaker 3 (5:07) Do you want to tell us about The Novel Neighbor being your local indie? Speaker 2 (5:10) Oh, yes. So fortunately, I live about a mile away, which is walking distance on a good day, to The Novel Neighbor, which is my local indie. I actually am on their young professionals board for their nonprofit. It's called the Noble Neighbor. And so what we do is we help fundraise for author events at the local public schools in the area. I mean, there's several a year where we'll have buy books for students and then the author will come in and do an author visit. And so it's just been so much fun getting to be a part of that. I've gotten to meet some great people on the Young Professionals Board. And our big thing that we've been doing is we'll do a kid-lit trivia. So we'll have kids about age 8 to 12 come in. And people at the Novel Neighbor actually help write some of the trivia questions. But it's all to raise money for these author visits. And so it's a lot of fun. We really enjoy doing that. In addition to that, I've gotten into gardening. So we bought our house in St. Louis about four years ago. And whenever we bought it, my goal was just to not kill whatever was in the ground. I didn't really grow up gardening, but I did not want to be the young homeowner with a bunch of dead, dying plants around her house. So I started to really get into it. And now four years later, I am trying to negotiate with my husband how much more of his lawn I can take up with new beds to plant more things in. And so that's a lot of fun. And another thing that I've started doing is we host a weekly D &D game or Dungeons and Dragons game with our friends at our house. And that is definitely not anything I ever thought I would get into. It was something that my husband kind of got interested in during the pandemic. And then he slowly but surely convinced me to try it with him. And so, yeah, now once a week we'll have people over in our basement and play D &D. And we've made friends that way. And it's a lot of fun. And it's kind of stretched me in ways that I never thought. But it's... I'm really grateful for it. Jane, Speaker 3 (7:31) are there ways that that connects with your reading life? Because you told me what you've been up to lately, and I'm wondering if there's a connection there. Speaker 2 (7:38) Yes, slightly. So one of our friends mentioned a book series that has gotten pretty popular called Dungeon Crawler Carl. And my husband and I have actually been listening to those recently on audiobook together. We've found ourselves on a couple of long road trips. And so we will just, we've been cranking through those and have really enjoyed them. And so this past weekend, a couple of local bookstores put on a bookstore crawl. It was a dungeon crawler Carl themed bookstore crawl that we went on. So we had to do different like. tasks and at each of the different bookstores, including at the Novel Neighbor, which was so fun. And it was honestly just an excuse to hang out with friends and buy stuff at our local indies. And yeah, it was a lot of fun. Speaker 3 (8:29) That sounds like a blast. I mean, five bookstores in one afternoon sounds like a blast. Speaker 2 (8:34) Yes, it is. And I'd been to most of them, but there was one that I hadn't been to yet. Honestly, St. Louis is such a reader's city. It's very bookish. We are very lucky with the number of authors who come through and we'll do author visits. And then also we have so many bookstores. And so it's always fun to have an excuse to go to a bookstore that maybe isn't your closest one, but it's still fun to go visit and see what they have in store. Jane, would you tell us more about your reading life? Yes. So I was just the stereotypical bookish kid. I came from a family who really encouraged readers, even my extended family, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles. I mean, they were always big readers as well. And so I always was encouraged to read. And so it has always been such a big part of my life. My mom, this is kind of a nerdy memory that just came to me, signed my brother and I up for reading camps during the summers whenever we were kids. So I kind of have like fond memories of that as well, but definitely always have been a reader. Even in middle and high school, my friends fortunately were readers as well, and so swapping books with them. I felt a lot of pride because I introduced my friends, my friend group in high school to like the Twilight series and the Hunger Games series, which is kind of fun. But then once I went to college, I actually, even though I'm an accountant now, I majored in English for a semester because I loved reading so much, and that's what I thought I wanted to do. But I'm also a bit practical and analytical. And so I ended up switching my major to accounting, but I still minored in English. So about once a semester, I would have an English lit class where I could, you know, have all of my business and accounting and that sort of thing. But then I'd have Shakespeare or I had women's lit or African-American literature. So even during college, there was. Definitely less of personal reading, but I was still really enjoyed my college English classes. But starting young adulthood, like early in my career, I felt like my job was very, it took a lot out of me. So I kind of fell out of reading for pleasure. It was like something that I wanted to do, but I found it. difficult to make the time and kind of have the brain space until I really started getting into audiobooks. So around the pandemic, I discovered Libby. And from there, it really started to take off. That's about the time I found this podcast and also the Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club. And so, yeah, since... probably 2020, 2021, I felt like my reading life has really taken off, and which has been such a delight. It's been such a joy to have the desire to read, but then also be able to make the time for it and being able to discuss it with other people has been really lovely. I would say lately, though, I have been reading a lot and I have I feel like I've been kind of in tune with a lot of the buzzy, the popular, the kind of noteworthy recent releases. But I found myself kind of seeing my reading life as being checking things off of the TBR or kind of gravitating towards the flashy and the new. And I'm kind of taking a moment to pause and think about, is this satisfying? Am I wanting a bit more? intentionality, I guess, in my reading life. And so that's kind of what I'm, I guess, looking for right now. Speaker 3 (12:35) You know, I've read your submission, Jane, and I know about the project you're working on, but I didn't know about your history with your literary education. I'm wondering if those two things are converging this season in your life. Speaker 2 (12:47) I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that those classes, like just that kind of like... one class a semester of English Lit that was just totally different from everything else going on in my life. Having classroom discussions, having obviously like a professor, a PhD, like talk through these things with me. I really, really loved that. It was just such a fulfilling thing, even though it wasn't like going towards my career necessarily. It added a lot of enrichment. to my life, a lot of meaning. And I'm a very, I'm a curious, I'm a thoughtful person. And so it's really nice to have things that add balance to your life. Definitely. So I've been reading along with Pride and Prejudice this month for Austin in August, doing the annotated version. And I have loved that so much. I've never done the annotated version. I've read Pride and Prejudice a couple of times. at this point, but going through with the annotations has been so delightful. And so I'm kind of looking forward to more of that kind of experience in my reading life. Speaker 3 (13:58) Oh, okay. I am really wondering how many readers are nodding along going, yes. And how many are like, what are you talking about? Annotations being delightful. Jane, can I tell you my favorite so far? Because I'm doing this Pride and Prejudice read-along of the annotated edition too. Speaker 2 (14:14) Okay, yes, absolutely. So very early in the book, Speaker 3 (14:19) Bingley moves to Netherfield and there's lots of gossip in the community about... Who he is and how much money he makes and who's going to come live with him. And then there's a ball coming up and there's lots of chatter about how many people he's going to bring. And he ends up showing up with not Speaker 2 (14:34) the expected number of people, but the little annotation Speaker 3 (14:37) says. Speaker 3 (14:39) gossip is so important in this novel. Let me tell you what that's looked like so far and let me hint at how it's going to play out. And I was just like, ooh, juicy, tell me more. And like gossip is not a word that I had previously associated with Pride and Prejudice, even though, holy smokes, it's everywhere. That's my favorite. Speaker 2 (14:59) It is everywhere. I've loved it. Or there is one of the footnotes or annotations about just the novel in general, not like that specific novel, but novels during the 19th century and how they were kind of looked down upon. And so just to look over and it's like, oh, there's two paragraphs just about the novel and how it was perceived in the Regency era. I was like, oh, that is fascinating. I just love all of that background. I'm a very curious person. I can go down a rabbit hole so easily. Like I'm thrilled to go down any rabbit hole. And so yes, I am adoring these annotations. Speaker 3 (15:47) Okay. So you are curious by nature. You can go down any rabbit hole and you want intentionality. Exactly. I think all these things, all these things are going to come to the fore today. Okay. Jane, so you've been listening a while and you're reading life. has been, what were your words? It