Our website - www.perksofbeingabooklover.com. Instagram - @perksofbeingabookloverpod Facebook - Perks of Being a Book Lover. To send us a message go to our website and click the Contact button.

You can find Folger Shakespeare Library at www.folger.edu

Now you may be familiar with the Folger Shakespeare Library’s editions of Shakespeare’s works. In fact, Carrie is still using some of hers from high school. But she had no idea this world-famous research library in Washington DC had a book club. As a Shakespeare enthusiast, she was definitely intrigued, and we are so excited that emma poltrack, the Arts Engagement Program Manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library, agreed to join us and tell us all about the book club.

Our book rec segment this week are books about…..book clubs! We’ve got two memoirs about book clubs–one made up of professor friends and the other between a mother and son. We’ve got a horror novel with a book club that battles vampires, an intergenerational mystery-solving book club in England, a women’s fiction novel about a book club that asks its members to present the book that matters most, and a writing and reading group for Punjabi women in London that’s breaking boundaries.

Books Mentioned in this Episode

1- The Last Garden in England by Julia Kelly

2- The Calculating Stars (A Lady Astronaut series) by Mary Robinette Kowal

3- The Martian Conspiracy by Mary Robinette Kowal

4- Dating Dr. Dil by Nisha Sharma

5- Tastes like Shakkar by Nisha Sharma

6- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

7- The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu

8- Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

9- Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

10- Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

11- Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons

12- Well Met by Jen DeLuca

13- Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

14- Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

15- The Fraud by Zadie Smith

16- It Goes So Fast by Mary Louise Kelly

17- The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehman

18- The Night We Became Strangers by Lorena Hughes

19- Shibby Magee by Carrie Kabak

20- A Five Star Read by Fellow Book Lover Abigail @nobadbooks - Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser

21- The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

22- The Book That Matters Most by Ann Hood

23- The Toni Morrison Book Club by Juda Bennett, Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Cassandra Jackson, and Piper Kendrix Williams

24- The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

25- The Busybody Book Club by Freya Sampson

26- Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows: A Novel by Balli Kaur Jaswal

Media Mentioned:

1- For All Mankind (Apple +, 2019 - present)

2- But That's Another Story Podcast (featuring Will Schwalbe)

3 - Whitehall House and Gardens Book Club - https://www.historicwhitehall.org/whitehall-book-club

Our website - www.perksofbeingabooklover.com. Instagram - @perksofbeingabookloverpod Facebook - Perks of Being a Book Lover. To send us a message go to our website and click the Contact button.

You can find Daria Lavelle at www.darialavelle.com and on IG at @daria.lavelle.author

What is a food that, when you smell it or taste it, reminds you of a person or a place? Our guest this week, Daria Lavelle, has written a novel titled Aftertaste that asks what would happen if you could summon ghosts with food. This isn’t a horror novel, so these ghosts aren’t here to haunt us in the traditional sense. But the main character, Kostya, is a chef who helps his clients find closure from their loss and grief through food memories. Lavelle’s novel is super unique, and she talks to us about her own Ukrainian-American family’s passion for food, how Covid and Russia’s war on Ukraine heavily affected its writing, and how love becomes the crux of all the book’s momentum.

Our book rec segment of the show features women in STEM doing all kinds of cool sciency, techny, engineery, and mathy things. We’ve got women doing research in the Amazon and under the sea, women physicists, young girls learning botany, Regency period women studying fossils, and female scientists who bring back a woolly mammoth.

Books Mentioned In This Episode

1- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

2- Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller

3- The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh

4- The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

5- A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat

6- Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach

7- A Five Star Read Recommended by Fellow Book Lover Kris N. @theretiredlibrarian - Beth is Dead by Katie Bernet

8- The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly

9- The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel

10- Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

11- The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner by Marissa Moss

12- State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

13- Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Media Mentioned --

1- Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2024)

2- Bringing Back Wooly Mammoths - https://www.npr.org/2026/03/04/nx-s1-5704318/colossal-woolly-mammoth-dire-wolf

Our website - www.perksofbeingabooklover.com. Instagram - @perksofbeingabookloverpod Facebook - Perks of Being a Book Lover. To send us a message go to our website and click the Contact button.

You can find Books with Betsy at https://www.bookswithbetsy.com/ and on IG at @books_with_betsy

This week, we chat with Chicago resident Betsy Tomszak who by day is a kindergarten teacher who reads lots and lots of picture books. After school hours, though, she is a reader of all kinds of other genres and the host of the podcast Books with Betsy. She was kind enough to invite us to be guests last summer, and we’re finally able to return the favor so she can tell our listeners all about her show. We get the nitty gritty about why she started the podcast and why she wanted to talk to regular readers.

Our book recommendation segment of the show this week is about characters in disguise. Sometimes a disguise is just to mask one’s appearance, but in other situations it is not only a physical disguise but an assumption of an entirely different personality and back story. We offer you historical fiction novels set in Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, a novel based on a medieval legend, a National Book Award winner, and a memoir.

Books Mentioned in this Episode:

1- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

2- My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar

3- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

4- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb

5- Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capo Crucet

6- So You Wanna Be On Top? by Sarah Hartshorne

7- Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

8- I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Hartman

9- Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

10- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

11- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

12- Summerdale by David Jay Collins

13- The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

14- The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

15- The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley

16- Sundial by Catriona Ward

17- A Five Start Read recommended by Fellow Book Lover Jeanine Neale @jeans_stacked_shelf - Nobody Knows You are Here by Bryn Greenwood

18- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

19- Master Slave, Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyoon Woo

20- Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear

21- Pope Joan: A Novel by Donna Woolfolk Cross

22- Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl

23- The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

Media mentioned:

1- Wuthering Heights (2026)

2- Shrinking (Apple +, 2023 - present)

3- The Good Lord Bird (2020)

4- Jateska Cultural Center - https://jasteka.org

5- Artwork by Vian Sora - -https://jasteka.org/abcs-events

6- Run and Read Chicago - https://www.readandrunchicago.com