Welcome, everyone, to our final episode of Season SEVEN of Reading With Libraries! 

It has been so great to read with you for this season – we just can’t bear for our book fun to end. So while we are on hiatus you will get a quick Browsing Books episode each week. 

We give you a book prompt each week, we talk about six books to meet the prompt.  

We have been producing these for a while now, so you can browse our entire archive on our website.

Usually, for our season finale, we share Minnesota books: stories set in Minnesota and/or books written by MN authors. You can listen to all our past MN book episodes on our website: cmle.org
This season though, we’re changing it up just a little! 

This is actually our second episode highlighting some of the awesome independent bookstores in our state. (Listen to the episode from last season here)
This week, we’re shouting out a few more favorites and talking about the books that the booksellers who work there recommend. 

Books recommended by Minnesotans! 

Who is joining us today? Friend of our podcast and occasional Minnesotan, Violet Fox! 

Thanks for joining us again today!

Beverages:

We have guests, we have our genre. We just need our beverages. Fortunately, we all came prepared with something to sip while we talk about our books. Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages. This week, all our beverages were featured in this great Star Tribune article about Minnesota-made beverages! And of course, feel free to sip along with us with any beverage that is right for you. Just join us in celebrating books, and discussing books!

• Hairless Dog black ale (nonalcoholic)
  • Malty, mellow, and smooth. Your new everyday dark brew! 
  • From Hairless Dog Brewing Company based in Minneapolis – the first domestic US 0.0% ABV craft beer brand, with truly alcohol-free products. Our brews are flavor-forward so you celebrate an active social life while making healthy choices.
• Violet:  Dampfwerk Distillery – based in St. Louis Park. produces Bavarian apple brandy, pear brandy and the new Pfeffersack fernet, with plans for more spicy and barrel-aged spirits in the works.
  • Barreled Apple brandy – Our Barreled Apple Brandy, produced from Minnesota-grown apples, are naturally fermented and distilled in the highest-quality copper still and lightly aged in French oak. She is as delightful as her younger self but perhaps a bit mellower, sweeter, and more complex.
• Loon Juice Hard Cider – from Four Daughters Vineyard in Spring Valley, MN. “Despite our name, Loon Juice contains zero traces of loon. Because that would be gross. Instead, all of our cans contain the perfect combination of nature and fun—two things we can all agree on. Everything starts with the best tasting apple around: The Honeycrisp.” Angie recommends the Mango Grapefruit flavor! 

Genre Suggestions:

We have a huge diversity of cultures and languages in Minnesota. There are a lot of Scandinavian descendants, as well as German descendants. And we have several Native American tribes across the state including Chippewa, Ojibwe, Lower Sioux, and Ojibwa or Anishinaabe. We have many groups of cultures who have moved here in the last fifty years, including strong populations of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Somali people.

We live in big cities, and small rural areas. We have deciduous trees and forests filled with pine trees. We root for the Vikings and the Wild. We have a pretty impressive great lake: Lake Superior; and to back that up we are known as the Land of 10,000 Lakes – but that doesn’t cover our whole range of lakes. We have waterfalls and historic sites. In short, we are a land filled with a diverse set of people and natural settings – and the literature of Minnesota is likewise exciting and diverse, and is filled with different kinds of settings, people, and genres!

We love books set in our lovely state, and of course, books written by Minnesota authors. On our site cmle.org you can find our many reading recommendations of MN books, especially as past episodes on this Reading With Libraries podcast! 

Also on our site: we will link to some of these independent book stores and their staff recommendations. These are just a few of the great indie bookstores in our state! As library people, we love sharing books, information, and stories in all forms and in all places. Maybe you checked out a library book you loved so much you just need to own it! We’ve got plenty of bookstore options for you to browse on our show notes page.

Our Book Discussion:

Now we are a little more familiar with this week’s genre, and we have enjoyed some of our special beverages, let’s get to the book discussion!

As always, all the images and books we link on our shownotes page lead to Amazon.com. If you click one and buy a nice book, or anything else, Amazon will give us a small percentage of their profits. Thanks in advance for helping to support us!!

• Buffalo Coffee & Books: Bookseller Charlie Aldrich recommends Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh. 
  For the first time in seven years, Allie Brosh—beloved author and artist of the extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller Hyperbole and a Half—returns with a new collection of comedic, autobiographical, and illustrated essays. Solutions and Other Problems includes humorous stories from Allie Brosh’s childhood; the adventures of her very bad animals; merciless dissection of her own character flaws; incisive essays on grief, loneliness, and powerlessness; as well as reflections on the absurdity of modern life. This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features all-new material with more than 1,600 pieces of art. Solutions and Other Problems marks the return of a beloved American humorist who has “the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian” (Bill Gates).
• Zenith Bookstore in Duluth (sells new and used books plus fun gifts, staff is amazingly helpful, yes this is Angie’s favorite bookstore) 
  • Bookseller Hope recommends The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk.
    Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.
  • Bookseller Beth recommends The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura
    Almost every afternoon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt sits on the same park bench, where she eats a cream bun while the local children make a game of trying to get her attention. Unbeknownst to her, she is being watched–by the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who is always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes, what she eats, whom she speaks to. From a distance, the Woman in the Purple Skirt looks like a schoolgirl, but there are age spots on her face, and her hair is dry and stiff. She is single, she lives in a small apartment, and she is short on money–just like the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who lures her to a job as a housekeeper at a hotel, where she too is a housekeeper. Soon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt is having an affair with the boss and all eyes are on her. But no one knows or cares about the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. That’s the difference between her and the Woman in the Purple Skirt. Studiously deadpan and chillingly voyeuristic, The Woman in the Purple Skirt explores envy, loneliness, power dynamics, and the vulnerability of unmarried women in a taut, suspenseful narrative about the sometimes desperate desire to be seen.
• Turtle Town Books & Gifts in Nisswa – plenty of unique games and kid-focused materials
  • Recommends Gull Lake Memories: A Kayaking Adventure by local author Nichole Delafield-Bromme
    Nichole wrote a love letter to Gull Lake.  In it she explores the seven classic resorts and restaurants around Gull Lake she and her cousin traveled to by kayak.  She also shares memories of her family’s cabin on Sylvan.  The book includes wonderful photos and beautiful paintings. 
• Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis
  • Bookseller Emily recommends Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency by Bea Koch
    Regency England is a world immortalized by Jane Austen and Lord Byron in their beloved novels and poems. The popular image of the Regency continues to be mythologized by the hundreds of romance novels set in the period, which focus almost exclusively on wealthy, white, Christian members of the upper classes. But there are hundreds of fascinating women who don’t fit history books limited perception of what was historically accurate for early 19th century England. Women like Dido Elizabeth Belle, whose mother was a slave but was raised by her white father’s family in England, Caroline Herschel, who acted as her brother’s assistant as he hunted the heavens for comets, and ended up discovering eight on her own, Anne Lister, who lived on her own terms with her common-law wife at Shibden Hall, and Judith Montefiore, a Jewish woman who wrote the first English language Kosher cookbook. As one of the owners of the successful romance-only bookstore The Ripped Bodice, Bea Koch has had a front row seat to controversies surrounding what is accepted as “historically accurate” for the wildly popular Regency period. Following in the popular footsteps of books like Ann Shen’s Bad Girls Throughout History, Koch takes the Regency, one of the most loved and idealized historical time periods and a huge inspiration for American pop culture, and reveals the independent-minded, standard-breaking real historical women who lived life on their terms. She also examines broader questions of culture in chapters that focus on the LGBTQ and Jewish communities, the lives of women of color in the Regency, and women who broke barriers in fields like astronomy and paleontology. 
  • Bookseller Roxie recommends Desmond Cole Ghost Patrol: The Haunted House Next Door by Andres Miedoso illustrated by Victor Rivas
    Welcome to Kersville, a town with a spooky history and a collection of ghosts and spirits who are major mischief-makers. Most kids spend their days without ever seeing or dealing with a ghost, but some kids get stuck with a haunt. When that happens, they call Desmond Cole Ghost Patrol. Desmond is the hall monitor of ghosts and monsters. There’s no job too spooky, icky, or risky for Desmond. I’m not like that at all. My name’s Andres Miedoso. I’m Desmond’s best friend. We do everything together…including catch ghosts. Seems cool, right? There’s only one problem: I’m afraid of everything. With easy-to-read language and illustrations on almost every page, the Desmond Cole Ghost Patrol chapter books are perfect for emerging readers.
• Subtext Books in downtown St. Paul 
  • From their collection “Best Books of the Worst Year” (aka 2020):
  • World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
    From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction―a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us. As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted―no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape―she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance. “What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts.
  • The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun
    For 10 years, Yona has been stuck behind a desk as a coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specializing in vacation packages to destinations devastated by disaster and climate change. Her work life is uneventful until trouble arises in the form of a predatory colleague. To forestall any disruption of business as usual, Jungle makes Yona a proposition: a paid “vacation” to the desert island of Mui. But Yona must pose as a tourist and assess whether Jungle should continue their partnership with the unprofitable destination. Yona travels to the remote island, whose major attraction is an underwhelming sinkhole, a huge disappointment to the customers who’ve paid a premium. Soon Yona discovers the resort’s plan to fabricate a catastrophe in the interest of regaining their good standing with Jungle – and the manager enlists Yona’s help. Yona must choose between the callous company to whom she’s dedicated her life or the possibility of a fresh start in a powerful new position. As she begins to understand the cost of the manufactured disaster, Yona realizes that the lives of Mui’s citizens are in danger – and so is she.
• The Irreverent Bookworm in South Minneapolis (no staff recs on their page but looks like a very cozy and fun place!)

Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State, by Christopher P. Lehman

Sherlock Holmes and the Rune Stone Mystery, by Larry Millett

Conclusion

Thank you so much for joining us for this discussion! And thank you for being with us all season. You know the book group is always better when you are here with us.

Thank you so much to our returning Guest Host Violet! It’s wonderful to have you here with us, sharing all your good book knowledge.

We look forward to seeing you next season! We’ll have a short book episode for you next Tuesday, so be sure you are subscribed!