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The Book Riot Podcast Live at Powell's! [Teaser]

The Book Riot Podcast Live at Powell's! [Teaser]

Update: 2025-03-18

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This is a preview of our live recording of the Most Recommendable Books of the Century (so far) at Powell's in beautiful downtown Portland, Oregon. If you aren't already a Patreon member, you can listen to the full recording when you sign up. Thanks to Powell's, our family and friends, and everyone who came out (or told someone else to). Hope to do it again sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Listen to the rest by becoming a member of The Book Riot Podcast Patreon.

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Transcript

00:00:00

Everybody what you're about to hear is a sample of our live recording at Powell's last week.

00:00:05

If you are a member of the Patreon, it's already there.

00:00:08

Can listen to the whole thing.

00:00:09

If not, this is a taste and an inducement to see if you will consider joining the Patreon as a paid member, really means a lot to us.

00:00:20

It's going to good motivation to try stuff out, keep the community growing, and subsidize a lot of what we do here on the podcast.

00:00:28

You can find us patreon.com/brpodcast.

00:00:31

You could just search book right podcast if you want to do that.

00:00:34

Live in the room audio audio here sounds better than our antidote.

00:00:39

I'd say still moves around a little bit in the full episode.

00:00:42

You get all of my and Rebecca's picks.

00:00:44

You also hear my kids at the end, some live Q&A with the audience, joking around, and having a really good time.

00:00:51

Towards the end, the mic starts moving around the room and you may have to strain a little bit to hear, but I thought it would include all that audio.

00:00:57

Again, this is on the Patreon feed for the full audio for those that want to hear it.

00:01:00

Thanks to everyone who came out or sent someone recommended a show to us, means a great deal.

00:01:06

We had enough fun that we're going to be thinking about doing some more in various places.

00:01:10

So podcast@bookright.com if that's the kind of thing you'd be interested in and maybe New York in the fall, maybe Portland again.

00:01:16

I don't know.

00:01:17

We're not a huge enough show we can get anyone in any necessarily city to come, but we're gonna think about it.

00:01:22

So, appreciate you all listening, subscribing, sharing, and letting us do this all the time.

00:01:28

Okay, here we go.

00:01:30

Guess we're gonna do this now.

00:01:32

All right.

00:01:33

This is the Bookright podcast.

00:01:34

I'm Jeff O'Neal.

00:01:35

I'm Rebecca Schenske.

00:01:36

And we're coming to From Powell's in Portland, morning.

00:01:41

You know that AI generated applause sounds so real.

00:01:46

It's really good stuff at this point.

00:01:49

So, for those of you listening at home, we are live at Powell's.

00:01:53

We have so many friendly faces and people who are so warmly invited us today.

00:01:56

Here's how the night is going to work.

00:01:59

We are going to try to remember that we are podcasting for thousands of people and not the folks here.

00:02:04

I'm so focused on you guys that I forget that podcast is theater of the mind and we need to talk about what we're actually doing.

00:02:10

So, I just explained to the crowd here how this is gonna work.

00:02:14

These are the 20 most recommended books of the century so far.

00:02:17

We stole this from the New York Times sort of.

00:02:20

Kind of.

00:02:21

And we each submitted our list of 10 to our co-worker and she saw if there was any overlap.

00:02:27

We do not know what each other is.

00:02:29

So, that's part of the fun here.

00:02:31

We're going to go turn by turn.

00:02:32

We have our two-minute timer.

00:02:34

For those of you listening at home, I have asked the people boy show of hands is really going to work on a podcast.

00:02:39

Yeah, this is really good.

00:02:41

Yeah.

00:02:42

We'll have to give a sort of qualitative description of the hand showing of that.

00:02:46

And then we're going to go through.

00:02:47

And then we might do a little QA at the end that can be related to what we picked or whatever.

00:02:51

So, if you've got one in the chamber for us, we can move and do a little few Phil Donahue Mike.

00:02:55

That's how old I am.

00:02:56

Sorry.

00:02:57

That's really like carbon dating myself to make a reference like that.

00:03:01

All right.

00:03:01

With that Rebecca, we're going to talk about what recommendable means to us and how we kind of went about it.

00:03:07

So, you said we kind of stole this from the New York Times and I think kind of is the right adjective there because they did, you know, the best books of the century so far.

00:03:14

Of course, we did our own versions and we talked about it on the show.

00:03:17

But if we think best is not necessarily the same as recommendable and your favorites aren't necessarily the same as recommendable, like I see a lot of nodding heads.

00:03:25

So, I think everybody here is thinking of a book you love that you're like, how the hell would I tell someone else that they need to read this?

00:03:33

So, those are the ones we're not talking about.

00:03:34

Like, that's the whole, there's a whole section of our favorites that we're not going to talk about.

00:03:38

Recommendable is like it's good and you can recommend it to a lot of people that I think that means it's some maybe it's fun to read.

00:03:47

It's probably pretty quick.

00:03:49

It's engaging and interesting.

00:03:51

It doesn't have to be easy but it probably has to have very little to know like really difficult subject matter or something that would be, you know, painful for people to read or traumatic for them to read.

00:04:02

So, we're saying in a zone of like what's not necessarily safe but what do we think is widely appealing so that maybe you haven't read some of these but also people who are in this room are pretty likely to be the ones that like at the holidays your friends are like.

00:04:15

Yeah, what book should I read?

00:04:16

For this person, what book should I read and we want to help you guys stock up on your selections?

00:04:21

And we're not looking for everyone loves the Beatread.

00:04:25

No Beatreads lander coming out of this mouth at least into a public microphone.

00:04:28

So, we want a little more meat on the bone.

00:04:31

At least I should speak for myself here.

00:04:33

I want you to do a four-quadrant kind of thing where it's interesting.

00:04:37

You get through the pages and it kind of mean something and maybe does something a little bit different so it's not going to be just that you can inhale.

00:04:44

That's a different kind of vulnerability.

00:04:45

There was a debate in my house about whether the Da Vinci code should be on this list.

00:04:49

And you lost that argument to Bob, is that what happened?

00:04:53

Well, I'm not revealing.

00:04:55

Did he make a pitch for Master in Commander?

00:04:58

He did not.

00:04:58

He did not.

00:04:59

He did not.

00:04:59

Bob did not make a pitch for Master in Commander.

00:05:01

I think he knows.

00:05:02

That's a niche.

00:05:02

That's a niche interest.

00:05:03

Yeah.

00:05:04

And for some of you, do you have like, I've got a couple that's like four, it might be recommended for this kind of person or this kind of reader.

00:05:10

So they're not all for everyone all the time.

00:05:12

Yes.

00:05:13

Okay, with all that, would you like to stand up and van a white it a little bit over there and see how we can pull one away?

00:05:18

And they're not in any particular order.

00:05:21

So we're just not no longer they are.

00:05:22

I'm just going to start, oh my god, we're starting.

00:05:25

Was this the one?

00:05:26

No, but we're starting with Gilead.

00:05:30

Gilead by Marilyn Robinson.

00:05:33

To the timer.

00:05:34

Okay, sorry.

00:05:35

Okay, so this is in the category of books that Jeff and I call old men waiting to die.

00:05:41

And it's maybe our mutual favorite book ever.

00:05:45

We might get through this two minutes without either of us crying.

00:05:48

I cried beforehand.

00:05:49

It's set in a small town in Iowa.

00:05:53

It's about a pastor of a small church whose in his later in life is in his 60s or 70s.

00:05:58

He's fallen in love kind of by surprise with a younger woman.

00:06:01

They have a small child and he is realizing kind of sitting with the reality that he's not going to lay it for most of this child's life and that his young son is going to know a lot of life in the world without him.

00:06:13

And it's written as letters to his young son about his life, about what he has seen in this small town, what it means to be a person who lives in the world.

00:06:21

I'm like getting goosebumps thinking.

00:06:24

I can't look at you.

00:06:25

I'm sorry.

00:06:26

We're getting it's good.

00:06:26

We're just like ripping the band-aid off.

00:06:28

We're getting this one done first.

00:06:29

And I think this book just like really sits in everything I want from recommendable because it sounds like like old men waiting to die should be a tough hang.

00:06:38

And this is not a tough hang at all.

00:06:40

A book written as a bunch of letters can be challenging to get into, but it's super engaging.

00:06:45

You sink right into it.

00:06:47

A book about a religious person might not be that inviting to everybody, but here you really just have to believe that like something in life is sacred or special in some way to tap into it.

00:06:57

Man, it's just lovely and beautiful and so readable and will give you or anybody that you recommend it to.

00:07:03

A lot of opportunity to reflect on your own life.

00:07:06

Like what do I want to be able to put in the story of my life at the end?

00:07:10

What do you hope your legacy will be?

00:07:12

For Jeff, it's also in the Fathers and Sunsman.

00:07:16

Rebecca, I swear to God.

00:07:17

I'm so sorry.

00:07:18

I really did not know.

00:07:21

This is going to be the first one.

00:07:25

The Book Riot Podcast Live at Powell's! [Teaser]

The Book Riot Podcast Live at Powell's! [Teaser]

Book Riot

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