What We're Reading

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

0:30on Zoom and presented some of our recent favorites. And the choices were so good and surprising and everyone was so charming. I felt like sharing this bonus episode with the wider 99PI audience. Enjoy.

0:46Hello to SiriusXM Podcast Plus subscribers. This is Roman Mars here with a fun bonus episode for you. The 99PI team reads a lot. We read for research, we read for story ideas, and of course we read for fun. So we thought that this month it'd be fun to talk about the books that we're currently reading, and maybe we'll give you some gift ideas for the beautiful nerds in your life. So we have a whole mix of producers on the Zoom call with me, and I'm going to start with Lash Madan. Lash, what are you reading right now? Hello, Roman. So I, at any given moment, I'm always reading three to seven books at the same time.

1:24Every morning, I like to sit down with my coffee in my reading chair and sit down for 15, 20 minutes and pick a book from my stack of books in progress at random. That stack right now has short fiction, poetry, a memoir. It has communist speculative oral history, all sorts of things. But I got decision fatigue and struggled with picking one book from the stack. So I decided to, instead of telling you about books in progress, I want to talk to you about a book that's been sitting on my shelf for the last four years. I've actually never read it fully cover to cover, but I keep revisiting it every couple months.

2:10And my relationship to this book is actually really connected to my work on this show. So one thing I love about being a producer is that there's so many different phases of a production process, right? There's the pitching, the researching, interviewing, writing, scoring. The hardest phase for me is that brief window of time when I've submitted a first draft to an editor and it's in their hands, they're reading it, tearing it up with notes. And in this window of time, I cannot look at my laptop or my phone. You know, when someone's editing your Google Doc and you get all the notifications. So ever since my first story on the show, I started doing something that has sort of, it kind of unintentionally became a ritual in this very particular timeframe.

3:01I'll hand in a script, close my laptop, and I'll pickle something. Like literally? Literally, I will pickle anything I find in my house. It's like a distraction mechanism to stop getting anxious about how my editor is reacting to my script. And maybe it's because my first story was during peak pandemic and everyone was talking about fermentation, but I just needed something to do with my hands. And so the book that I'm constantly revisiting every time I work on a story for the show is called Usha's Pickle Digest, the perfect pickle recipe book. And I want I want to tell you about this woman, Usha.

3:43Okay. This woman is known on the internet as the pickle queen of India. In 1998, she self-published this pickling encyclopedia. It's not a modern cookbook. You can tell it was published on Microsoft Word. The foreword to the book was faxed to the publisher and just tacked into the book. There are over a thousand pickle recipes in there. And it reads like a textbook. Like there's only text and no images. I don't know if you'll be able to see, but I'm just going to hold the cover up for you just so you can see how old school it looks. Real self-published vibes for sure. Yeah. So this book, it actually has a cult following, but Usha never meant to publish a pickle book.

4:23And I find that whole story really charming. She's a retired lawyer now in her 70s. And it started for her as a collection of 25 or so pickle recipes that she scribbled into a notebook to pass on to her friends and family. and over time the number of recipes grew and grew and a book started to make logical sense but even then the purpose of the book to her was to conveniently share all her recipes with friends and family which is why when she published this book in 1998 she only printed 1 ,000 copies and gave them all out for free um and for years finding a hard copy of this book was a real challenge because Usha just wasn't printing them.

5:04The only way to get one was to email her herself. But for years, shortly after the book was published, Usha suffered a health condition and she would respond to the email saying, I promise to get you a copy soon. Some cooks and fans couldn't wait. They started self photocopying pages and passing them around. And Usha was supposedly like great. And eventually when she got healthier, she'd email people back with a free PDF of her book whenever they asked. So it kind of passed around the world in this way as an email attachment. And I love the book because it has the essence of an extremely comprehensive Google Doc passed around by an auntie who just wants you to know how to make things taste good.

5:48And I think that's why I love it. It's amazing. I love this story. Like, I think this should almost be a story for this show. Although, what would you do when the script was being edited? I know, right? I don't want to cannibalize your safe haven that you go to when you're not thinking about stories. But this is such a great idea. Usha's Pickle Digest, the perfect pickle recipe book. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. I love this. Yeah. And I should say that even though historically this book has been hard to get a hold of because there's been so few copies going around, it did four or five years ago come online.

6:32So you actually can buy this now as a gift for someone you love. And I would highly recommend that. Could I just read, like, rattle off a couple different possible pickles you could possibly make? Absolutely. Okay. I recently made a sweet and sour orange peel pickle, watermelon rind pickle. There's jackfruit pickle. You could pickle gooseberries or lotus stems or banana flowers. Like really anything. I think, yeah, nothing escapes pickling for Usha. Yeah. I guess not. Yeah. I just love that so much. I love it. I love it. I think this is the perfect gift for anybody just because it's like in and of itself, the book is this amazing story, which is so cool.

7:18Well, anyway, well, that's awesome. Thank you so much. Everyone has a lot to live up to because that's almost a story in and of itself. So thank you, Lasha. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks. Okay, up next is Chris Berube. Chris, what book do you have for the 9MPI audience? Well, Roman, this year I've been reading a book that I think our audience will get a lot out of. It's called The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Really interesting book about urbanism and history. I read it this year for the second time because we were doing it and have had a great time reading it all over again. But may I recommend another huge book I've been reading if you need another thousand page plus nonfiction piece to fill that void in your heart.

7:59It's called What It Takes, The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Kramer. Have you ever read this book, Roman? I have not. Okay. Do you know what it's about? No, no. So, yeah, please tell me more. Yes. This book is another gigantic tome, another one that looms large for people who are politics nerds. It's about the 1988 presidential race. So the book follows all of the candidates running in the primaries. So it's like Dukakis, Joe Biden, and on the Republican side, Bush and Bob Dole. And it gives you very interesting histories of all these people. Basically, I think the takeaway is that all of these people are kind of monomaniacal.

8:39Like anyone who wants to be the president has to have something that's a little deficient in their personality is kind of the take of the book. It's very interesting to have read this during the election this year. Obviously, to read a contemporary history, it is interesting to compare all the ways that things are different and the way things are the same. For this one, a lot of stuff is very different, especially reading about the Republican Party in the late 80s because their two candidates are like George H.W. Bush, who's this kind of country club patrician Republican. And on the other side, Bob Dole, who is just obsessed with the deficit and is like, we just have to cut, you know, as much as we can to get the debt under control.

9:17And neither of those types of Republicans is like relevant at all right now. Yeah. So that's super interesting. One thing I really took away from this book, when Republicans talk about Ronald Reagan, and they did it during this election too. They always talk about Ronald Reagan as like the greatest figure in their party. It's like Lincoln and Reagan. Those are the two great Republicans ever. Reading this book from 1988, it is very clear that at the time, Republicans did not like Ronald Reagan. They really hated Ronald Reagan. So I have a quote that I wrote down. This is from Bob Dole, who was at the time the leader of the Republican conference in the Senate.

9:53And this is what he said about the president from his own party. Bob Dole used to tell a joke to the people that he worked with. He said, boys, there was good news last night. A bus full of supply-siders, supply-side economics people like the people in Reagan's camp, a bus full of supply-siders went off a cliff last night and everyone died. There's bad news. There were three empty seats on the bus. So this is within his own party at this point. He has so thoroughly lost his own conference that people are like, we got to get past Reagan. Like there's sections in the book about how campaigning for the Senate in 1986, people were like, don't send Reagan.

10:29Don't send Reagan to campaign for us. We don't want him here. So it's really interesting to read these contemporary histories to sort of see how they've been tweaked and revised over time. And yeah, even within the Republican Party at that time, next time you hear Ronald Reagan, the great Republican president, just remember what Bob Dole said about supply siders going over a cliff in a bus. So What It Takes by Richard Ben Kramer, really very readable, compelling book if you need just a gigantic nonfiction thing to fill the place that the power broker was holding for you this year. I love it. This is kind of perfect.

11:01I'm surprised I don't – I haven't heard of this more. I don't know why I haven't. But I just – but I really – this is amazing. I would be – I'm going to pick this one up for sure. Totally. You know, I think – is it probably because the 88 election doesn't really feel important anymore, right? Like it's like Bush was a one-term president, right? And like we don't really think about his presidency as an era the way that we do with Reagan or Clinton or Obama or Trump now. Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, like when I'm looking like on Amazon where this book is like paired with is books like Game Change and things that I'm a little bit more familiar with.

11:41It's also possible that it's just because it came out in the early 90s, which I was in college then. And so, therefore, I have a kind of a cultural black hole during the periods of 1990 to 94 that if it was really, really, you know, if it was really, really big at that moment, I didn't – I was not paying attention at that moment. So – but I – this looks amazing. I'm super excited to check it out. Well, thank you. Well, enjoy. Absolutely, Roman. I hope you have some great fun reading time ahead over the holidays for you and your family. I appreciate that. Thanks. Okay. So, up next is our producer, Vivian Lai.

12:14Hey, Vivian. Roman Mars. How are you doing? I'm great. So what books are you reading right now? Okay, so I am a not very literate person. I do not like to read. When I do, it is usually like a really smutty romance book. You just happened to catch me at a time that I actually am reading books. I'm not embarrassed to say on the air. and I'm reading actually three books right now which I will probably never finish because I'm reading three and I have a short attention span and I keep rotating them and I might finish them in like three years but so in the mornings I have been reading a book called Orbital by Samantha Harvey it's a book that takes place over 24 hours and it's the life of a group of astronauts on an International Space Station.

13:07And yeah, and there's there's no plot. It's kind of like the Martian, but without all the stuff, like there's no science and it's got the science and it's got meditations on life. And it's got, you know, it's very poetic. And it's just about like nature. And yeah, it's really beautiful. It's very meditative. So it's something that I've been reading in the morning kind of like scene set my day. I am not someone who's very interested in Mars. That's kind of a red flag for me. If you say that you want to go to Mars, I'm like, no, sorry, talk to somebody else. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or just please go and don't talk to me.

13:43Yes, exactly. Yeah. But there's something about like reading about space in this way that makes you feel very big and very small at the same time. So it's just a nice way to set my morning. Yeah. Before bed, I've been reading a book called Martyr by Kava Akbar. You probably heard about this one. This one has been a big one this year. This is one that's on my shelf that I want to read because it's the type of book I like a lot when I'm not reading nonfiction. Yes, I read a lot of fiction. I love fiction. But yeah, it's incredible. It's a really fun read. It doesn't sound like it's a fun read. It is about an angsty Iranian-American writer who is recently sober, and he seeks out this artist who's terminally ill and her last artwork is essentially dying in a museum.

14:28And it doesn't sound upbeat, but it's weirdly upbeat. It's from the perspective of multiple characters who are kind of like searching for the meaning of life. But yeah, it's really fun and really funny in odd ways. And it just, it feels very fresh. So I really recommend that for people who are looking for like a page turner this year. Awesome. Well, I'll put that more to the top of my queue because it's been one that's been sitting there that I've been excited about. That's awesome. But yeah, that one holds up. In light of the election, I have been revisiting Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

14:59This is the last book that I'm kind of listening to right now. I'm listening to the audiobook. And this is an old one from like 1985. People have probably heard of it before. It's about the effects of television and electronic media on politics and how, you know, it's turning news into entertainment and that's ruining discourse forever. You can probably imagine why I'm revisiting it at this moment. I think of this title all the time. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I've been listening to the audio book when I cook. And the experience is kind of like if you gave Joe Rosenberg like three shots of whiskey and you just asked him what's wrong with discourse and you just kind of talked at you for like three and a half hours, that's what it's like.

15:34So if you want that experience, check that out. I'm right here, Vivian. Oh, I know. I know. And you know, this is true, Joe. So great. But I do have one bonus recommendation for a smutty romance if people are looking for one. Oh, yeah. Sure, lay it on us. Yeah, I read this year and really enjoyed How to End a Love Story by Yuen Kwong. So, yeah, it's about trauma a little bit. So just a little bit of a warning there. But it feels a little bit heavier. But it's a really nice read and it has one of the most accurate representations of what it's like to fight with your Asian parents and then make up from that fight.

16:17So if you're an Asian American person, just, you know, I go into that with that in mind. Great. Well, these are fantastic recommendations. For someone who says they don't read, you're sort of reading a lot of good quality things. This is a complete coincidence. Like, honestly, yeah. Otherwise, I'd be watching, you know. Gilmore Girls again in the other room. That's awesome. Well, I'm going to do a proper sort of summary just so people are taking notes. So it's Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Martyr by Keve Akbar, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, and How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kwong.

16:52You got it. Thanks. Awesome. Thank you, Vivian. We have recommendations from Jason and Joe and me after the break.

17:07so up next is producer jason de leon hey jason roman mars what's going on i don't know i'm just like really excited about all these books like i wasn't expecting that i would learn from this i thought we were just going to do this for the for the audience and the you know listeners out there but like now i'm really into all these books that people are suggesting well i'm gonna take it down and not share. Okay. Because as people on this team know, I had a kid this past year. That's right. That's right. She just turned a year old. And so I'm here to talk about a fantastic book that I'm reading that I read three times in a row every night, very slowly to her.

17:39It's called Hoppity Frog. Okay. So this Hoppity Frog, where is Hoppity Frog? Is he in the coral? Not here, but this is a tiny tadpole. So I do this over and over and over again. That's awesome. I I remember those days very, very, very much. When you get into the age of them liking more complex narratives, it is like the most refreshing and amazing thing in the world. I can see it washing over you. It's just like it's all of a sudden I would, you know, when you start reading Roald Dahl or like I would, I Terry Pratchett, like the We Free Men and stuff like this. We're just like when that when that happened with the kids, I was just like so excited.

18:24I was excited about reading time versus like that, you know, like you're mostly excited about it, but you read the same thing again and again. It does sort of like get into your brain. It's like an incantation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, but on a more serious note, I've been struggling to find time to read in the past year, as you can imagine. Of course. And so despite the fact that I've read something like 200 children's books, I've been trying to find a grown-up book to read. And basically to institute time for myself to create this time to read, I do a novel in the morning where I have like 15 minutes and I just try to get through a novel little by little.

19:01And I do poetry at night because by 8.30 or 9 o 'clock, if I'm like in repose, I'm out. You're full of sleep. Totally. I'm going to bed. Same, same, same. And so I just finished this book. It's called Scattered Snows to the North. um it's the most recent collection of poems by my favorite poet carl phillips um are you much of a poetry person roman i'm not i mean it's but it's because of lack of exposure and sort of knowledge i i i would love to be a person who loved poetry more so but yeah uh well let's see if i could tell you a little bit on at least on this specific poet let's see if i could do it um because for me, I don't know.

19:41I just like, I love poems because they just require my full attention. And my attention is so pulled in so many directions right now. And I'm like also like a former athlete. And I feel like reading poetry is like doing sports while sitting still. You have to like almost wrestle this dynamic in your head and read the words very carefully. You have to read letter by letter, word by word, line break by line break. And then you do it all over again and you and like interpret different meanings from it. I don't know. To me, it feels very sport-like in that way. That is an amazing metaphor. I've never heard that before.

20:15And it makes reading poetry all of a sudden make sense to me in a new kind of way. That's, oh, you might've already told me. Yeah, there we go. It's like working out. All right, well, maybe now I'm not. Maybe I'm not selling it now. But yeah, no, but I get what you mean. I get what you mean. My problem with poetry and for a lot of things like graphic novels and stuff too or whatever is like I tend to read for plot and information and I'm not a real like I love people put together interesting and cool and beautiful words but but I but my habit is just like give me the information as fast as possible and and so yes and so the idea of it being an exercise would put me in the right mindset for it I think yeah yeah that's what that's really what it is like and like for me i i also i read that way too i love i love a good plot i love good um all that stuff but sometimes i find myself just like going through like i'm just like not reading i'm just like yeah totally and this makes me read anyway so um yeah so carl phillips latest book uh i mean he's written a lot of poetry works i've read his full collection now by this point He started publishing in the 90s.

21:32And I don't know which book number this is, but it's his latest book. He just won the Pulitzer last year, two years ago, for this book called Then the War, which was an incredible book. It is so, so, so very good. And that is another recommendation for people. And that book was about like power, I guess. Capital P, power, lowercase p power, all kinds of power. um a nice uh you know uh addendum to the power broker about power okay and like uh and the thing that i the thing that i like the most about his work is that it feels like a conversation that he's having that i'm following along like the way he's thinking in that moment and i just kind of keep following along the way he's thinking and so that last collection was about power this one that i just finished reading it's a lot more about like questioning knowledge i guess um it's a little bit more like, what is our obsession with the past?

22:30Is it a worthy endeavor? And so like in the title poem to the book, it's called Scatterstones to the North. And he is a scholar of like Rome of the Roman empire. And so in this poem, he's questioning the utility of that knowledge. So I'm going to read just a little bit of it just so you can get a taste of it. Does it matter that the Roman empire was still early and it's slow unwinding into never again? then as now, didn't people burst into tears in front of other people or in private for no reason that they were willing to give or they weren't yet able to? So I don't know. I just kind of, he tries to find the human at the center of the thing and trying to strip it of the power of all the other stuff that's around it.

23:16Yeah. I love that. That's so good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I guess one last thing I'll say about Carl Phillips' work, And just kind of the work of poets that I admire in general is that sometimes I love their stuff so much that I refuse to hear their voice. Like, I get all these things in my feed of being like, here's the poet that obviously you've been looking up their work and stuff. Like, do you want to hear them read a poem? And I never, ever want to hear them read the poem. Interesting. I'm like, I'm just like afraid that if I hear the human voice to the words that the thing will lose its magic.

23:56And so he's, he's like one of those people for me. Like my best friend, one of my best friends lives very close to where he lives on Cape Cod. And whenever I go visit, I'm always like, am I going to run into Carl Forbes today? And would that be a good thing or a bad thing? in the grand scheme of things, it would be lovely to meet him. But I don't think I want to. That's so interesting. Well, that's a great recommendation. I love this window into your mind and how you think and process things. That's so cool. So you mentioned reading a novel in the other part of the day. What's your novel? Oh, yeah.

24:35My novel that I'm reading right now is this book called blackouts by Justin Torres. Um, and that book is, it's, it's just, it's, it's like an amazing piece of work. It's a, I I'm only, I don't want to talk too much about it because I'm only like a third of the way through it. Um, but it reminds me of my actual, my, my true favorite book, which is Pedro Paramo by Juan Rufo. And that is like this book that inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write 100 Years of Solitude and all that stuff. And so it's very short, actually, Pedro Parama. It's only like 110 pages or something, but it is just perfect.

25:13Every sentence is perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect. And they actually just made a Netflix movie about it that I am horrified to watch. But it is Rodrigo Prieta, the director of photography for a lot of great things. So I imagine it looks beautiful. I'm just afraid of what, they did with the story yeah i mean especially if so much of the magic for you is the perfect sentences that there's no way to convey perfect sentences on a in a netflix movie yeah yeah unfortunately yeah but but that's awesome well these are two very uh interesting so it's black outs by justin torres and scattered snows to the north poems by carl phillips thank you jason Yep, of course.

25:58Oh, yeah. And Hoppity Frog. And then Hoppity Frog, of course. Sorry, not to forget, not to leave Hoppity Frog out of this, but Hoppity Frog sounds delightful. All right. Well, so our last contributor that's going to talk about books that he's reading is Joe Rosenberg. Hey, Joe. Hey, Roman. How's it going? I'm good. I'm really excited by everyone's, like we were going to all come on and then people are going to drop off and go on with their day of production. And I've noticed that everyone is still on the Zoom because they are so like entranced by people talking about the books that they like, which is amazing.