The Book Snug Podcast

S4, Chapter 9: Unforgettable Settings

• Stephany Yoder and Julia Dagen • Season 4 • Episode 9

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We love a book with with an evocative or atmospheric setting.  In this episode we are sharing some books with settings that lingered in our minds long after the story ended.

Julia's Books

  • The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
  • Island Queen by Vanessa Riley
  • Shadow of Night (All Souls #2) by Deborah Harkness
  • Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
  • The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell
  • The 7  1/2  Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
  • The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
  • The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Stephany's Books

  • Piranesi by Susannah Clarke
  • The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
  • The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
  • The Hacienda  by Isabel Ibañez
  • The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Other Mentions

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for listening to today’s show.  To support The Book Snug Podcast:

Say hello at thebooksnugpodcast@gmail.com.

Intro/Outro music:  Summer Fling by L-Ray Music

SPEAKER_00

Hello listeners and fellow book lovers. Welcome to the Book Snuck, a bi-weekly conversational podcast about books and the reading life. My name is Julia, and I'm Stephanie. And we are mother and daughter who love reading and talking about books. The ones we adore and the ones we don't. We're delighted you're here. So grab your favorite hot drink or ice cold beverage and settle in for another cozy, bookish chat.

SPEAKER_02

Good afternoon, Julia. Hi mom. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I'm glad to be here in the book snack. Yes. It's been a busy couple of weeks and it's nice to take a little bit of time.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Think about and talk about something fun.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. As I was prepping my notes, Ben asked me, What do you guys even talk about? Because I've not seen you read in months. And I explain that we do lots of other stuff too. But even in my non-reading time right now, I still enjoy talking about books and the stories and everything else. So I'm I'm agreeing with you that it is nice to take some time and talk stories and books.

SPEAKER_02

Yes. Hello, listeners. Hi, friends. Welcome to the show. We're so glad you're here. Yes. If you're new, welcome. And if you are returning listeners and friends, we're so glad to have you back. What are you drinking today, Julia? Since we always like to discuss what's in our cup before we really get started.

SPEAKER_01

Um we had Thai for lunch and I am drinking a taro milk tea. Yes.

SPEAKER_02

What does it taste like for those uh listeners and your mother who have never had it before?

SPEAKER_01

Tell us. It's really mild, and I don't put a lot of like there's no sugar in it. From what I understand, taro is just a root vegetable. Um, and so I always confuse taro with ube, and ube is a purple sweet potato. It taro is not quite that, but it's just a mild sweet flavor, and then there's milk in it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I was gonna say it's a milky drink. Yeah. And it's cold. I see the ice cubes.

SPEAKER_01

And it's lavender, so it's a fun drink.

SPEAKER_02

You look at it, you think it's gonna take like taste like raspberry or blueberry.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and it it does not.

SPEAKER_02

So well, I'm drinking a clementine Izzy. It's kind of a leftover from lunch. Yeah, Izzy's are soda or pop that's made with juice. So all of the sweetener is uh natural juices. Oh no, this is not clementine. I'm a liar. It's mango.

SPEAKER_01

Even still, yeah, yeah. Mango ones are good.

SPEAKER_02

They are very good. They're they're probably my favorite. I used to really like the Blackberry Izzy's, and I still do, but mango has edged the blackberry out just the slightest bit.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, I'm a sucker for anything mango.

SPEAKER_02

Before we jump into our topic today, which is going to be unforgettable settings in books, places that we've gone to with our reading that continue to stick with us for a very long time after. Yeah. I thought we could just talk a little bit about our reading.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Because you mentioned already that you're not really reading at all. And how could we possibly have anything to talk about? Is this still the case that you really aren't reading?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Um, and it gets worse and worse every week. My so new listeners, I am very pregnant right now. And if I'm not at work, I'm in bed with my feet up. Like, so my mental energy is tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Um, it's not that I don't want to be reading. I happen to be in my Amazon like TBR list a couple weeks ago looking for something else. And I was like, that book looks good. Like I wanted to read everything, but I just I can't focus. So um I haven't really read anything or listened to an audio book, like I know that I've talked about um in in a while. So it's frustrating, but it just it is what it is at this point.

SPEAKER_02

And you're not beating yourself up about it too much?

SPEAKER_01

There let's it there's no guilt. More so I feel FOMO. Like I feel like I'm missing out on stories. And um, I know this is only a temporary season and that reading will just look different for a little bit, but um spring is normally the time of year where I want to read like the romances or the fairy tales and things like that, and I'm not that's not happening, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Well, that's not happening for me either. Yeah, I am in I hate to use the word slump, but I just am struggling with reading, and I think I've done it to myself because I made a couple of reading intentions and I'm having a hard time letting them go, even though they obviously are not working for me. For instance, I picked up Middle March because it is the classic that I wanted to read this month. I am stuck in it and I can't seem to get out. I don't really want to pick it up and read it. Right. I have no interest currently in it. I'm not even far enough in to really care about the characters or the story. This is it's not a book that grabbed me from the get-go, like let's say Pride and Prejudice. Yeah. It's requiring a lot of mental energy on my part. And I'm just finding that because of the type of reader I am, I'm a one book at a time reader, one physical book, one audiobook. I feel I'm struggling with allowing myself to pick up another book. I think what I need to do is just let go of everything and just read whatever I want to read for a while. I'm not I'm not beating up, I'm not beating myself up about this. Right. It's just odd for me to be in the middle of April and only have one book finished for the month. That's very odd for me. That is. Even my audiobook, it took me a long time to really get into it. I'm enjoying it now. I want to know what's gonna happen. But it's just been kind of a just a struggle. Yeah. Not even I I don't I keep saying slump. I don't feel like I'm I'm in a slump. There are books I want to read. I just feel like I can't, because of my perfectionistic tendencies, it's hard for me to let this book go, middle March, and just do what I want to do. It almost sounds like instead of slumpish, you're more like restless. Like you just can't like I think that is true. I've picked up five or six books and read the first couple chapters and thought they were really good and then put them back down again. I'm putting them down though because I'm thinking after I finish middle March, I'll pick up this book. But I just think what I need to do is put middle March aside for another time and just let go of some of the plans I had for my reading year this year and just read what I want to. Yeah. I'm feeling a little restricted and it's impacting my reading.

SPEAKER_01

That's what Iron Flame did to me. So I'm so glad that book is done. Because at one point then does it become more a chore? Like I'm checking this off of my to-do list, I'm clearing it off of my task list than it is to read something that's enjoyable.

SPEAKER_02

That's what middle march has definitely become. I j just to bring everybody into the circle, at the beginning of 2026, I decided I wanted to read 12 classics that I hadn't read before, and I wanted to reread 12 books. And the rereads could be whatever I was feeling I wanted to reread. And I think I shared when we did our quarterly review that one of the rereads I was doing was kind of holding me back. Not that I wasn't enjoying the book, it just wasn't the book I wanted to read at the time. Right. And I'm feeling the same way about middle March. It's I I'm sure that I if I give myself the time and space to read it and I'm in the mood for it, I think I will really enjoy it. But I'm just not there, not in headspace-wise, not in life circumstances. I'm just not feeling it at all. Yeah. So I think I need to give myself permission to just put it aside and read what I want to.

SPEAKER_01

And there's okay, this is my I'm weird about books and stories, right? And that almost for me is more respectful to the story, right? Of like, let's put it aside and give it the time and energy that it deserves instead of trying to power through it because it's what I I need to read.

SPEAKER_02

Because I've made this random decision and now I'm allowing it to ruin my reading right now. Right. I agree 100% with you. If if I pick a book up, number one, if it is not working for me, I'm putting it down because it's not fair to the author. Right. Or to the story, like you said, because I'm probably going to rate it low because I didn't have a good experience. I I feel like I need to be respectful of Middlemarch and George Elliot and the time and effort she put into that story by setting it aside and coming back to it later. It is a book I want to read. And like I said, I'm pretty sure I will at least like it. I may not love it. Right. I'm certainly not hating it. I don't really have any feelings about it at all. It is a long book. It's very long. And that could be in the back of my mind, right? Just me thinking I'm gonna be in this book for a really long time, and there are other books that I just really want to read. Yeah. Yesteryear came out this past week. That is the book about the trad wife influencer who does farm life, and then she wakes up and she's actually in the 1800s, and it's not a fun experience. Yeah. I would love to read that. I I read an interview by the author, and it intrigued me just where she got some of her inspiration. I have a feeling that she's gonna have a lot to say about Christian women influencers, how honest they are and transparent. I'm just curious. I think I'm going to have complicated feelings about the book, but I would really like to read it and see for myself.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So yeah, it just sounds like now is not the right time for middle March. I yeah, I think so too. And I'm even feeling like I need to step away from my spring pile of possibilities and just yeah, go out on my own and do whatever I want to do.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So that's my sad reading story. Well, we are today going to talk about books that we've read that have had settings that have been very evocative, that have kept us reading, that we've thought about afterward, maybe places we would like to visit. We wish we could visit. A lot of fantasy settings we will never get to visit, but we wish. Right. We wish we could. Before we even get into some of the books that you and I separately want to talk about, we could probably have done a whole episode just on the books that we've both read, not necessarily together, but in our reading history, that we think have spectacular settings. I listed some of them here. Uh, the Harry Potter series. I think J.K. Rowling has just done an exceptional job of creating the world of Harry Potter. Yeah. How she meshed our world with the wizarding world, how that all made sense, and then just all of the wonderful places in the book and how real they felt.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I mean, I don't remember when I saw the movies for the first time, but I definitely remember the reading these stories and feeling like it was so tangible that I would the amount of wishing I did in the middle of the summer that I would actually receive my letter and get to go. Um to Hogwarts. Yes. Or even um maybe this is more about the movies or not, but the trailers for the HBO series are not coming out. Yes, they are. And I have very, very mixed emotions about it. Oh, do you? Because it's not Hogwarts that they're using as Hogwarts. And so it's messing with my sense of what is the story. Yeah. Because the original movies do have a play in that as well. But you read these stories and you have this image of what you think the world is like, and then it's not portrayed that way, or it's portrayed definitely, then like right. Like it's like if somebody were to redo the Lord of the Rings movies, and the Shire wouldn't look like the Shire, right?

SPEAKER_02

It would feel really yeah, there would be some dissonance, yeah, cognitive dissonance. Yeah. Uh you you bring up a good point because when I started listing some of these books, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, the movies are enmeshed in my perception of the world. Right. Especially Harry Potter, because I watched the movies first and then I read the books. For the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, I had read those many, many times before the movies came out. I had very solid images in my mind of what Middle Earth looked like and what was going on. Right. But for Harry Potter, it is very hard for me to separate what the movies did for me as far as building the world in my head and what the books did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So maybe we need to make that clear that some of this is kind of mushy.

SPEAKER_01

Some of these early examples, I think. Right. Because I don't have any on my list that we'll get to. None of mine are movies, or if they are movies, I've not seen them.

SPEAKER_02

I don't think any of mine are either.

SPEAKER_01

Or if they are, I have not seen them either. So this is just more for our beginning conversation of shared stories.

SPEAKER_02

We also, I feel like for our three peas in a pod series, picked several books that have very evocative settings, places where I could very easily imagine where the action and the drama was taking place. Yeah. The first book I thought of was Dune. Yep. By Frank Herbert. Yep. Not so much the first part of the book, but what they end up on Arrakis. Yes, with the desert sands and the worms and how those tribal people lived, I could very easily picture it in my mind.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, and I read Dune while we were at the beach too. Yeah. So I, which honestly, if you're gonna read a book at the beach, this is a good one to do it. Um and so I I think of Dune and I automatically feel hot. And I think part of that is because I read it in that setting.

SPEAKER_02

And dry. I just remember the the feeling of the arid feeling of being dehydrated and the need for water, and it was so precious.

SPEAKER_01

Well, and I just always felt like there was something in my eyeball, like the sand was in my eye or like in my hair. Um, but I completely agree with that. So vivid a setting that literally I'm sensing it with my actual senses. Yes.

SPEAKER_02

A couple of other books, and I will link all these episodes um in the show notes. The marriage portrait by Maggie O'Farrell, that is Renaissance Italy. Yeah. Is it Renaissance Italy? Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_01

It's the 1400s. Okay. No early 1500s.

SPEAKER_02

Okay. So but the palace where our main character lived and grew up, the descriptions of the animals in the basement, and then she goes to a villa after her wedding, and then she ends up at this very dark, dank place. The thing about the marriage portrait is I felt like the settings were mimicking what was happening inside the heart and mind of our main character. And I am drawing a complete blank. What her name was Lucrezia. Lucrezia. Yeah. So I felt like that was a very unforgettable many settings in a book. Yeah. I would even say The Murmur of Bees by Sofia Segovia.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, yes, murmur of bees, yes. It was 1800 something in Mexico.

SPEAKER_02

I was gonna say the Mexican Civil War, but I don't know that that's true.

SPEAKER_01

It was so this uh the influenza hits Mexico in the middle of the story. Okay. So I I know that. So early, early 20th century.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. But where they lived, the hacienda, the plantation, the kind of deserty surroundings.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Just was very memorable for me.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I agree.

SPEAKER_02

And then we did just you and I did a two peas in a pot, where we read The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. Right. And then we picked up What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher.

SPEAKER_01

Which was a really fun reading experience.

SPEAKER_02

It was a ton of fun. But both of those stories are extremely evocative. The setting plays a huge part in creating the feel of the story and the creepiness. Especially, I feel like what moves the dead in particular, the setting was incredibly creepy.

SPEAKER_01

I was just thinking about this. In the actual Poe version, I felt it was more suffocating because you knew that something was going on, but you didn't know what it was. It felt really freaky. Yeah. Versus in What Moves the Dead, you know that something is wrong, but it was the dampness, the the dankness, the mushroominess. Yes. That you could actually identify and like, I need to get out of the house because of this. Yeah. Not the mysteriousness, the nebulousness of the Poe version. Right. The fall of the House of Usher.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. You just you were in a crumbling mansion that was just kind of disintegrating from moisture and damness, but you didn't really know what the issue was. Yeah. And then even Outside by Ragnar uh Jonason. Jonason. Yeah. That Jay brought to the show, Your Dad. Yeah. The book was an okay thriller, but the setting was extremely intense. It was cold, isolated, in a cabin. Yeah. I can when I think about that book, that's actually the thing I think about is the setting, not so much the plot.

SPEAKER_01

Right. Well, and because we hiked in Iceland in a very, very small section of the hike, it was snowy and frosty and whatever. And so though part of that book involves hiking in the snow, I just paired how desolate and I'm never gonna get out of the snow. And like those feelings that I had while we were hiking, that again, very small portion of a hike that we did with the much larger sense of that story of so isolated, so alone, there's no end in sight.

SPEAKER_02

And friends and readers, we hiked Fimvordu Halls in Iceland. We hiked the whole thing. Yep. It took us all day. We missed our bus to come home. Yeah. Had to stay at a hostel. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

It's a whole experience.

SPEAKER_02

Very traumatic.

SPEAKER_01

Fabulous hike. So if you're hikers, 100% recommend. But there is a very small portion of the hike up towards the peak of it where you walk between glaciers and rock pits. Lava. Yeah. It's actually lava. So you trudge through the snow that's really high with your walking sticks, your ice picks, whatever, and then have to climb up these lava piles and then down the other side. It's exhausting, but it's the snow is slippy. Right. It is mentally exhausting more than anything. And so I I remembered that mental exhaustion. And then in that book, Outside, that was multiplied by like a lot because of just you're in the snow way, way, way away from everything.

SPEAKER_02

Right. When you when we talk about unforgettable settings, and I keep saying evocative settings, there are a couple of different things that can make a setting memorable for us or meaningful or impactful. And I think it's going to be a little bit different for each person. You just mentioned, and I expanded on the fact that we were in Iceland and we did experience hiking in the snow and the fog and the feeling of being a little bit disoriented and not knowing where you're going. That's a very personal experience of ours that somebody else reading outside would not necessarily identify with, and it would not make it quite as meaningful a read. And the setting may not be as impactful. I do think our own personal experiences are one of the things that make reading a book, and not just for setting, but for experiences and anything, make it more personally meaningful for us.

SPEAKER_01

Well, and I think that's what's so cool about reading as a whole is though we can share hey, I read this book, you read that book, let's talk about it. But it makes reading a wholly subjective experience to begin with, because you're bringing your own. Experiences or perspectives or what have you into the reading experience to begin with.

SPEAKER_02

Your own thoughts, feelings. Exactly. Your personality.

SPEAKER_01

Right. Your beliefs, your all of it. It just it's yeah. So it's interesting how we have this shared experience over the book, but then you're right, somebody else might might not at all. And so it's a totally different intake of that story.

SPEAKER_02

So keep that in mind as we bring our books. We have a couple different categories of books that we want to talk about that they're meaningful to us or we think they're unforgettable, but maybe some of our reasons may not be important to you. Right. I do think there is common ground though with unforgettable settings. I think a setting that is unique, that is not something any of us have ever experienced before. I'm thinking fantasy or science fiction, those types of settings can be impactful or unforgettable because they are new. They're not anything that we've ever thought about or experienced before. Because it's new material and unique, it makes it more memorable. So I think that's why, especially fantasy and science fiction and some speculative fiction can be very memorable, completely unforgettable just because of the world building and all of that. And we are going to talk about some fantastical books just because of that. I am a person who loves gorgeous descriptive writing. And if an author can do that and make me build an entire setting in my brain with very little effort, that usually ends up being an unforgettable setting for me. Right. Right. Can you think of any other ways that authors can make a setting unforgettable?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I mean, so we can look at the actual physical setting, right, of the trees and the sky and the place and all of that. But I also think that the um atmosphere of a story, the tension or the excitement or anticipation or whatever adds into all of that as well. And so I think if an author is sensitive to what the the feeling of what the setting is supposed to be invoking as well, um I think those two things coupled together make memorable settings for me. Make it very powerful. Yeah. But also if it's a cool place, it's a cool place.

SPEAKER_02

So I wonder too, if maybe what characters are experiencing in the setting and how that's described on page can be helpful too.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

To make it more memorable.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Why don't we jump in to our categories? Okay. And I think we're each gonna just do a book. Okay. The five different types of settings that we're going to talk about are a fictional or fantastical setting that we can't forget. A setting uh that where the author vividly creates a place we've been to or we want to go to. The author brings a historical setting to life for us. Weather or a season makes it memorable. So this would be hot, cold, rainy. We were talking about damp, dampness, anything like that, a big thunderstorm. And then finally, we're gonna do spine tingling. So this is not necessarily horror, but it was it will probably be anything that falls within that general umbrella. So gothic or ghosty, anything like that. And then finally, if we have time, we'll each do a wild card. And this is just gonna be something, uh, a book that we want to talk about because the setting was so great and we want to share. Why don't you start, Julia, and tell us a book that has a fictional or fantastical setting that we can't visit, but we wish we could.

SPEAKER_01

So I will be transparent. When I first was looking at these notes, I looked at the this category of these categories as structuring my thoughts. Okay. But on my list, I have quite a few that could fall under the fantasy category, but they also fit in other places as well. Okay. Um the one that I think I want to mention here for a fantastical setting is um in 10,000 Doors of January by Alex Ziharo, there's lots of cool places that are visited, right? Because it's about doors leading into different worlds. Right.

SPEAKER_02

It's a hard portal fantasy where you go to different worlds through every door.

SPEAKER_01

Right. One of the ones that's kind of talked about the most or spent the most time in is this place called the written. And it's essentially an island or a series of islands where storytelling and writing and the written word are incredibly important. Um, I always pictured this as they were talking about it as blue water and white, almost like a Greek island, right? Of white buildings, um, whitewashed, blue water, bright sun. But what was cool to me um in this place was that they used tattoos to tell stories. Um, that it was how you demonstrated that you were married or your level of education, um, that both men and women got tattoos. And what drew me into this place as like I need to visit is again just the the focus on the storytelling and the writing, and that that was such an integral part of their culture, um, and how they just saw that as an an integral pillar of uh their society, which because I'm weird about stories and writing, um, I think that that's why it pulled me in. But also any place that looks like a Greek island, I want to go to.

SPEAKER_02

So that's interesting because that's gonna come up again. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

But I mean, uh any place within the 10,000 Doors of January book I think would fit easily in here. Um hard portal fantasy stories are just how can you not want to go to all of these places? Uh but again, the written is the one out of that book that stands out for me.

SPEAKER_02

Even I read the 10,000 Doors of January. Even the was it the library where all of the artifacts were, even that part of the book was interesting. Oh, in the in the real world. In the real world, when she was living with her benefactor. I I would agree. I think 10,000 Doors of January had a lot of interesting settings in it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, man, if anybody wants to develop the technology of um portals and portal fantasies, please do so like now, because that would be so fun.

SPEAKER_02

The book I want to bring to the show, I have mentioned before. I tried really hard to pick books we haven't talked about yet, but it's hard because I've I want to talk about books that have really impacted me. Right. And these are the books that have really impacted me.

SPEAKER_01

Well, right, too. And if a book is hits us in some sort of way, it's gonna hit us in some sort of way, regardless of when we talk about it or not.

SPEAKER_02

The book I want to talk about is Pyreneese or Pyranesi by Susanna Clark. This is a book about a man who calls himself Pyreneese, and he lives in a world that is completely different from ours. When you start this book, you're kind of thrown into his journal and he is just describing his days, but you have no idea what he's talking about. Throughout the story, you come to understand what this world is, you come to understand who Pyreneese is and why he is there. But for a good portion of the beginning of the book, you are as clueless as he is. He knows a little bit more than you because he's a very intelligent person and he's observant. So in his journal, he keeps track of what's going on in this world. So you get an idea of what his world looks like. And I'm just going to read a portion of the book so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about with having no comprehension of what this world is because we don't have a comparison. The book is written in journal form, and in one of his journal entries, it's titled A Description of the World. And he has entry for the seventh day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the southwestern halls. Okay. So that's how it's written. I am determined to explore as much of the world as I can in my lifetime. To this end, I have traveled as far as the 900th and 60th hall to the west, the 890th hall to the north, and the 768th hall to the south. I have climbed up to the upper halls where the clouds move in slow procession and the statues appear suddenly out of the mists. I have explored the drowned halls where the dark waters are carpeted with white water lilies. I have seen the derelict halls of the east where ceilings, floors, sometimes even walls have collapsed and the dimness is split by shafts of gray light. In all these places I have stood in doorways and looked ahead. I have never seen any indication that the world was coming to an end, but only the regular progression of halls and passageways into the far distance. No hall, no vestibule, no staircase, no passage is without its statues. In most halls, they cover all the available space, though here and there you will find an empty plinth, niche, or apse, and even a blank space on a wall, otherwise encrusted with statues. These absences are as mysterious in their way as the statues themselves. So he lives in this vast world that's just halls and stairways and columns and statues. There is a sky, but it's a ceiling sky. And if you know anything about Piranici, the name, he was an artist, an Italian artist. And if you go and look up his work, you will get an idea of what this world is like. Sure. But it's just, it was just such an incredibly interesting read. And the world is unique among any that I have ever experienced in my reading before. So that is Pure and Easy by Susanna Clark. The other thing about this book is you can read it and come to completely different conclusions at the end as to what is actually going on.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So I highly recommend it. If you like uh fantasy, it's a fairly short book. It's a standalone and it is a mystery. So if you like mysteries, it's a good mystery too. Yeah. Okay. The next category we're talking to talk about are books that vividly create a place that we've been to or that we want to see. What is your recommendation, Julia?

SPEAKER_01

So I've talked about this book before, and I'm pretty sure in a most recent episode. Um, but I felt like I would be so remiss if I didn't mention it here, and that's Island Queen by Vanessa Riley. This is the story of, oh, I think it was in the um Forgotten Women episode we did. Because the story is based around um a woman who freed herself um living in the Caribbean. She was a slave, freed herself, and went on to become um a respected businesswoman um and really quite influential across the Caribbean. Very, very little is known about her, um, but her her business records exist. So this is the story that Vanessa Riley kind of composed looking at what might have been her life through to you know, through to the end of it. Um we have been to a couple of places in the Caribbean, um, and one of the places in the story, Grenada, is where my husband and I honeymooned. And so it was a cool place, a cool way to kind of look at all of those islands and how they were interconnected and how um business moved between them and people moved between them. And but Island Queen takes place in the 1700s, and so not only are you getting that historical component of it, and are you getting this woman's story, but then you're also getting the heat of the Caribbean, and you're getting the blue water, and you're getting the blue sky and the palm trees and vegetation. Yeah. And having been to these places or some of the places already, I it's what we talked about earlier of like I could tangibly feel the environment or smell the sea, or um Grenada is a rocky island. So we've been to St. John, which I know is not part of that run of islands as much, but no, um but it is in the Caribbean, right? That one's rocky. We've been to the Bahamas, which is flatter. We've been to um there's one or two others that we've been to that are a little bit flatter. But Grenada has um jungles on it, and there are parts of the story that talk about the jungle and clearing the jungle away. So I was able to pull off of those memories and kind of envision it. And um again, this is just another I've been there, I read this book, I got to kind of to pair the memories together.

SPEAKER_02

Do you think that your memories enhanced your experience of the setting of the book, or do you think the writing was just so good that it makes it unforgettable for you?

SPEAKER_01

I think it's both. I think the writing was able to capture what my memories were. Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Um that's a good way to say it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Uh yeah, I think that's I'll just leave that as there it is, because I think that that's the truth of it. Is I think that Vanessa was able to capture completely this sense of these islands in the way that I remembered it from being there.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

I am gonna talk about a book that takes place in a place that I want to go to. It takes place on the island of Crete, which is part of Greece. And the book is The Moon Spinners by Mary Stewart. I don't know if I've talked about this book by her. I have spoken about other books by Mary Stewart. She is best known for writing an Arthurian legend retelling with Merlin, but she also wrote many, many, many uh romantic suspense novels. And her super special skill is creating sense of place because they take these stories take place all over Germany, France, couple different islands in the Mediterranean. This one, like I said, takes place in Crete. It's about a young woman who is a secretary at the British Embassy and she gets embroiled in witnessing or helping witnesses to a very awful crime. So her life is in danger. She falls in love with one of the other people. You know, it's romantic suspense. It's a ton of fun. But the reason that this book is so memorable for me is the setting. Mary Stewart just did such a wonderful job of writing what it was like to be outside in Crete. I'm just gonna read just a couple of excerpts. She wrote, I could smell verbena and lavender and a kind of sage. Over the hot white rock and the deep green of the maquis, the Judas trees lifted their clouds of scented flowers, the color of purple Daphne. The waters were smooth and gentle, but with an early morning sting to it, and a small breeze below the salt foam splashing against my lips. The headland glowed in the early sunlight, golden above the dark blue sea that creamed over the storm beach at its feet. Here I swam, the water was emerald over a shallow bar, the sunlight striking down right through it to illumine the rock below. It threw the shadow of the boat fully two fathoms down through the clear green water. The trees were spindly, thin stemmed and light-leaved, aspens and white poplars, and something unknown to me, with round, thin leaves like wafers that let the sun through in a dazzle of flickering green. Between the stems was a ride of bushes, but mostly these were of light varieties, like honeysuckle and wild clematis. And she just goes on and on like she can make anything sound so wonderful. She talks about the whitewash buildings and the beautiful bougain via that grow against the wall, and yeah, the how warm it is and the sunshine. And you just you just know that you were right there with everybody, not just in the action, but experiencing the world. Yeah. And I so badly want to experience that in real life, maybe someday. Yeah. So that is my place. But this is just one of her books. I would recommend any of her books if you want to do any kind of armchair traveling. My favorites of hers are This Rough Magic, which has a similar tone to The Tempest by William Shakespeare. But there's a dolphin, and they spend a lot of time on the beach and swimming. And then Nine Coaches Waiting is based in France, and you just get a lot of the feel for what the French countryside is like. Yeah, if you want to escape for a little bit to a different place on the real earth, read Mary Stewart. Okay. It kind of eases us into our next category, which is historical fiction. And these books are books that are able to take us back to a certain place in time and make us feel like we are really experiencing what is going on and what life was like at that time. Do you have a book for us?

SPEAKER_01

I do. The book, okay, so I have complained and complained about this series. Um, but this book I feel has done an exceptional job at capturing this particular point in time. Uh the series is Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, and I've shared my thoughts on that. Um, but the second book, Wheel of Time, the characters are now in Elizabethan England. And that is one of my favorite time periods to read. And as far as I understand, and I could have my information completely wrong, but as far as I understand, Deborah Harkness is actually a professor of history. And so it made sense to me that this book felt so fleshed out in terms of what was, like what is, you know, what would have actually happened, what might not have happened, what might have been the customs, the cultures, like that kind of a thing. At one point within the story, they're talking about a daily book that the lady of a house would have kept in order to maintain the household. And they're using that in in the book, or the right places for a woman to walk alone, or even if she's married, can she be on chaperoned and all of the different customs and things that were going on? Um she writes a lot of settings within the series that feel very real and very very tangible, but the this story specifically, Wheel of Time, um, just stuck out to me as like, oh, I can actually see this time period. I can actually feel the starchy collars of the big lace or the the smell of the streets or the Thames or the sound or lack thereof of soft shoes on the cobblestone or whatever else it might be. It really brought that period of time to life. Um so I'm gonna put that one on the table, even though I didn't like the whole series.

SPEAKER_02

Right. Oh, I I 100% agree that you can be captivated by a place or a setting in a story and not particularly like the story. I was like That with the light pirate by Lily Brooks Dalton. She was writing about Florida in not necessarily a post-apocalyptic world, but a world where the natural experience is falling apart, and Florida is becoming more and more covered with water and what life would have been like. And that part of that story was just fascinating to me. And she created a very real, tangible world, but I did not particularly care for the story. But the world is memorable. Yeah. I can I can think of particular passages from that book even as I sit here now. Yeah. I wouldn't reread it for that.

SPEAKER_01

No, I wouldn't either.

SPEAKER_02

I have a book that has a historical setting not as old as yours. My book takes place in 1912 in the tenements of Brooklyn, New York. And it is called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It is the coming of age story of Francie Nolan, who lives in Brooklyn. Her family is very poor. When the book starts out, she's 11. And I think it follows her up until she graduates from high school, maybe even a little bit later than that. But you just follow along as she grows up, as her family changes. There's grief, there's happiness that's happening. But throughout all of this, in the background, you have New York City almost as a character. And Betty Smith is such a beautiful writer. She just brings, she just brings it all to life so well. Now I love this book. So it's really hard for me to separate the setting from the story. But for me, it's the whole package. And I I definitely felt like I was living right along, Francie, in the tenement, watching her mother work her fingers to the bone and going to school and taking care of her little brother. And yeah, just what life was like at that time in history in New York City. So I'm gonna read a passage just so uh our listeners can get a feel for what this is like. This is the very beginning of the story, it's in chapter one. Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York, especially in the summer of 1912. Somber as a word was better, but it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it, especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer. Late in the afternoon, the sun slanted down into the mossy yard belonging to Francie Nolan's house and warmed the warm wooden fence. Looking at the shafted sun, Francie had the same fine feeling that came when she recalled the poem they recited in school. This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, stand the druids of Eld. The one tree in Francie's yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches, which radiated from the bow and made a tree which looked a lot like an open green umbrella. Some people called it the tree of heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps, and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenement districts. You could t you took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard, and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew it came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats. Feather beds were pushed out on the windowsills to air, and the tree of heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people. So that's just a taste of the writing and what you get throughout the book. So even when you're getting Francie's story, you're just getting all of this background on what Brooklyn was like, what it was like to live in 19, I think it's 1912. Oh, 1902 to 1919. Okay. Yeah. So very good. And I don't know if it's just because it's my kind of writing, but very, very evocative.

SPEAKER_01

I have that book and it's one that I want to read. Like it's I obviously have it because I want to read it. And um, I think it's gonna go the way for me of like middle March, as we were talking about earlier, that I'm gonna have to be in the right frame of mind to read it. And if I don't and if I don't time it right, it's gonna be a it's not gonna go very well.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you feel like you're gonna get stuck in it and you won't be able to get out. Right. It's it really is not that kind of book. It doesn't sound like it with the start there. Sure. But the action, like there's stuff happening almost immediately.

SPEAKER_01

I just I know it's going to be a hard read because of what some of that stuff is. And so I wanna like now is not now is not the time for me to pick it up, is I think what I'm saying. So like it's yeah, it would have to be timed, right?

SPEAKER_02

I was I only read it for the first time maybe 12, 13 years ago. We're moving on from historical settings to settings where the weather or a season plays a very important role in the book and is very has been very memorable for us. So do you have a book like that? I do.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Where the crawdads sing. Yes. By is that Delia Owens? Yes. Yes. Um, this is again another one that I could have put for have been here because this takes place, it's in the Carolinas, and we go regularly to North Carolina. Um, but within the story, it's mostly the marshes. Is that maybe the right word I want to use there? Um, and it's a poor, a very poor um young girl who pretty much raises herself because she's abandoned. And she has to learn life on the marshes, fishing and taking care of herself and building relationships. And a lot of the book is nature writing. It is. Um, I remember a passage specifically about watching just the dragonflies over the water, or about the frogs, or about the fish. And because we've been to North Carolina for the beach, I know how hot it can get in the summer. And how humid. Oh, how humid indeed. And so as the book plays out over a number of years, every time that the summer would come back up, again, it was one of those where I could sense, physically sense the the stickiness in the air or smell the hot water that would exist, or whatever else it was. Um but I think this is a setting where the weather and the season, yes, but because it's truly a an actual like land territory, it almost makes its own setting, its own environment in which it exists. If that makes sense, like because it's a true marsh versus desert versus like whatever else, it has its own ecosystem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and so yes, it rains, or yes, it gets you know changes with the season, but it it it exists as its own self within that.

SPEAKER_02

It's a per not a person, it's a character, yeah, in the story. Yeah, the setting actually becomes a person, yeah. I feel like that too with the book I'm gonna bring, and I I brought this to the show before, and I apologize, but I did just reread this, so it's very fresh in my mind, and it fits perfectly into this discussion. And that is The Snow Child by Ewan Ivy. This story takes place in Alaska, and it covers a Russian folk tale called the is it the snow girl? It's about an older couple who can't have children, and they build a little snow child in the first snow snowfall, and the next day the snow child is gone, and this little girl comes to their house. Ew and Ivy has taken that folk tale and made it more American, but it still involves a middle-aged couple who have a difficult history with childbearing, and they decide to move to Alaska to leave all that behind, but their marriage is faltering, and the work of you can imagine in 1920s Alaska trying to farm is extremely difficult. They're older, they're not as like vital and full of health and strength. Everything is a struggle. And in the beginning of the book, the way that the setting is described kind of matches what they're going through emotionally. Then they build a little snow girl and she disappears, and then a little girl starts coming to their house. But the Alaskan wilderness is so beautifully portrayed. Ewan Ivy lives in Alaska. I think she grew up in Alaska. Her love for that area of the world is so evident in the writing. I couldn't even find like a small passage because it's just all of it, it's it's interwoven throughout. There's a lot of snow, there's a lot of descriptions of the land during winter, the river during winter, what the animals are doing. And it's not, she doesn't sugarcoat anything. So you're getting the brutality of the Alaskan wilderness and then all the beautiful parts of it too. And it's just lovely. It didn't make me want to go and live in Alaska, but I certainly would love to experience it and definitely experience it in the wintertime. It is just such a beautifully written book. And I'm saying that after having reread it, and I ended up loving it more the second time around than I did the first time. Can't I can't recommend it enough. If you like gentle fantasy, if you're okay with not having all the answers all the time, and if you love beautiful writing, it's just wonderful. And there's a very good story about a married relationship in there too. Yeah. It's just beautiful. When I use the word evocative, this is the book that I'm I'm referring to. I I would say crawl or the crawled sing too is very evocative of a fair a certain place in the world. Yeah. Yep. Do we have any other categories, Julia? I think there's two left. Okay, spine tingling. Yeah. Can you think of a book that did the setting so well that it kind of gave you the creeps?

SPEAKER_01

Seven and a half deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Okay. Explain. I will. So this story by Stuart Thurton plays on Groundhog Day, meets Agatha Christie, meets Black Mirror, if you will. Um, essentially the main character, you don't know who the heck this person is until the very end of the story. But he's essentially I don't want to give too much away. Part part of the premise of the story is that you have seven days to solve a mystery, and if you don't solve it in seven days, you restart. And each day you wake up as a different person. So it's like you're playing clue as all the different characters to figure out the crime. Right. To get all their different perspectives. Right. So the it takes place in a manner. I think it's Gilded Age or Golden Age of English manor. Like it's a fancy party that's happening. Like early 1900s. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Um and so you're you have this manor house that you can kind of move around in and and explore. Um, and you have people dressed in beautiful gowns or in beautiful suits or whatever. Um, and at one point in the story, you're looking into a part of the manner that's falling down. And so, though on the outside it's all glittery and glamorous and whatever, you begin to see that there's actually a whole part of this manor that is like not okay. Um, the grounds are extensive, but like you can't go outside of certain bounds. And so I think the whole thing is a it's a complicated setting because not only are you different characters, um, but your whole space is really limited in what you can do as well. Um, and it's hard to really talk about this too much without giving away as to why it's happening.

SPEAKER_02

And you don't, this is a type of book you pretty much want to go into without knowing anything.

SPEAKER_01

Right. Um, but it just stuck out to me as I felt like the this is where the atmosphere where I was getting at earlier is just as important as the actual like physical setting. Because when I think of this book, I remember this like I don't know what's going on, what is happening, I need to figure this out. Um, while also being able to essentially, you know, manipulate the environment to leave clues for yourself or X, Y, and Z. And um yeah, this is it's a it's a wild setting experience for sure.

SPEAKER_02

I agree. I it is very unique. The uniqueness of it, I think, makes it memorable and powerful. Yeah. And the atmosphere, that claustrophobic and a little bit like manic because it's in a you have a certain amount of time that you're trying to figure things out. You don't want to have to start over again. It doesn't matter. I don't want to say anything else. Right, right, right. Yeah, it is very claustrophobic, very stress-inducing.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And a large part of the story also takes place at night. So yes, you wake up and you can see some of the daytime, but the the focus of what you're trying to solve happens at night. So then you're also getting the dark shadows, and if you're out in the gardens, then it's the can you see what's going on? And so it's people lurking around. Right. Right. Yeah. So there's lots of interesting elements to this setting that make it feel really heightened and um just a wild, a wild setting.

SPEAKER_02

Agreed. I was thinking of an author that we have both read, and she's really good at creating an atmospheric setting that's spine-tingling, and that would be Simone St. James. She's written several books: The Broken Girls, Sundown Motel, Cold, The Book of Cold Cases, and then I just read her newest one. Something about dark.

SPEAKER_01

I don't know, but she also wrote Murder Road. Oh, yeah, Murder Road. I know the one you're talking about, and I can't think of it.

SPEAKER_02

Her new one is a box full of darkness. She, even when I don't appreciate the stories, some of her early, early ones that we didn't mention, I didn't necessarily like the story. Yeah. But she can still do a haunted house or a spooky situation really, really, really, really well. But I'm not gonna talk about her. Oh man. I want to talk about the hacienda by Isabel Ibanius. This is also a haunted house story. In this situation, we have a young woman who is pretty much destitute, relying on family members who do not want to take care of her to take care of her. She is, she's receives a proposal from a very wealthy young man who has very good prospects for a position in the government. He owns this big hacienda. She doesn't even think twice. She marries him, and that is it, goes to his house and almost immediately realizes that something is very, very wrong with this hacienda. And Isabel Abania from there just creates this really great, very suffocating feeling of a haunted house to the point where if you read the book at night time, you just constantly have this like feeling there's something behind you. If you're in a dark room, like you don't want to, you don't want to go up the stairs in the dark or be in the hallway in the dark, because it just feels like there might be something behind you.

SPEAKER_01

Right. Like I can't get my back close enough to the headboard of my bed.

SPEAKER_02

Like I have to be. It was a great experience. If you like that, I would not say true horror, but if you just like that very spooky kind of ghost breath on the back of your neck feeling, yeah, the hacienda is a good one. And because it was happening in a different building than just a normal house, it just gave it a little bit of extra flair for me. I enjoyed the story, I thought it was interesting, and I would highly recommend it, especially in the spooky season, like end of September, October. Yeah. Or doing summer ween if you'd like to read horror in the summertime. Yeah. It was very, very good for uh a haunted house story. Okay, we have one final category, and that is the wild card. So, Julia, just pick any book you want to and tell us about the setting and the atmosphere.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I'm gonna pick an author.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Um, so Erin Morganstern, I've read two of her books. So the Night Circus, I feel like needs to be included in this conversation. Absolutely. And then I'm also gonna add the Starless Sea, which is where it's essentially a crumbling place where people gather to read and or tell stories. Okay. Um, the Night Circus, I felt like was more fleshed out. So that story, I won't go into incredible detail, but it's a magic circus that pops up suddenly and goes away suddenly, and it's black and white with red. So it feels very eye-catching and only comes at nighttime. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Has very interesting tents and exhibits and yes.

SPEAKER_01

It feels like something. So we talked about Harry Potter earlier. It feels like something that would exist in like Hogsmead or like part of that wizarding world because of just how unique it is and how special and unique. Right. Um, this is a fabulous one, I think, to read in the fall because of just you've been using the word evocative. For me, Night Circus is evocative, right? Like you, I listen, if the Night Circus ever came to our town, I would be there all night. Like I just would want to explore everything and see everything. And yeah, there's I think there's no way to capture this the sense of this place without reading the story. I I I think that's just the nature of it. The Starless Sea, this other book. Um, the book is weird. I just am gonna say that. Um, I think she was trying to do too much with the storytelling component and just it fell apart. What is so interesting to me about this place is it's almost like a quote unquote secret society for readers. And you can kind of be invited or you can kind of stumble upon it. And what's interesting in the story is you kind of catch this place after it's heyday. Um, and you kind of get snippets of what it might have been like in its heyday of people, you know, parties happening here and masks, and it's there's layers to this place of like rooms with books and um old, old copies of books, or um a balcony that overlooks a golden sea, even though you're buried deep within the earth, or just a place to write stories that there were people's people who were considered like the keepers, where like they would write the stories and protect what went into the Starless Sea and what you know what could or couldn't go out of this place. And uh for me it just felt like a a tribute to again storytelling and story writing and and all of those things. And so I would love to have seen it in its heyday kind of uh a thing. And then of course, because you're seeing it afterwards in the story, stuff happens to it, which then kind of you know means they have to go build another one. But uh as a ravenous reader, dude, would I have wanted to find that place? So those are my two wild cards.

SPEAKER_02

My wild card is going to hearken back to historical setting, and it's also going to be a book where this setting becomes a character, malevolent character. This is the Poisonwood Bible by Barbara King Solver. And this is the story of the Price family who go as missionaries to the Belgian Congo in Africa in 1959, and they are. Wholly unprepared. Everything they take with them is completely useless. Everything they actually needed to know and to have with them, they did not. Their father is a bit of a fanatical religious lunatic and is also very, I'm gonna say arrogant, refuses to take any kind of suggestions from the local people to help him garden properly or take care of his family. I mean, it is just it is a disaster. But the entire time you're dealing with Africa, and this is a Belgian Congo, it is not very settled. So there's a lot of political stuff going on. The natural world is described regularly. I just remember reading this and feeling like the entire time everything was covered with a layer of red dirt. Like this red dirt was just everywhere. This is literary fiction. There is a lot going on in the story. It's told from the perspectives of the daughter and the mother. They each take a turn, like every chapter is a different person describing what's going on with them and then the world around them. The father is not, does not have a voice, but he is a central character in the story. But Africa as well is very much a character, and you leave that book feeling like you've experienced Africa right along with the family. It's complicated. I have complicated feelings towards it because of the way that Christian people are portrayed. But I I understand the perspective and I can absolutely see how this particular family ended up the way they did. Right.

SPEAKER_00

Right.

SPEAKER_02

But I highly recommend it just for the African setting and the interactions of white people with the African people at that time in history.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

It almost, as you were talking about, that reminded me of um what's the book we read with Aaron? Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness. They're almost no, I know that they're very separate stories, but yeah, but they would have there would be good conversation there. Yeah, like almost comp-ish, of like approaching this, knowing, learning that like this was not the right way about this.

SPEAKER_02

Right. Attitudes of white people just walking in somewhere and thinking they're going to take over and run the show and everything's gonna be peachy key. Right, right, that they know best. Yeah, right. So that's that's my story. I was just sitting here thinking that maybe too the reason that we are captivated by certain settings is that the author does a good job of pulling in our senses, like sense of smell, sense of hearing, taste, touch. So it's not just descriptive writing. Okay, this the sun is yellow, the sky is blue, but there's a lot of other sensual, um, what's the word I want? Like attraction. They're they're drawing on our other senses to make something be more real or more meaningful to us.

SPEAKER_01

It's the phrase of show, don't tell, but it's also now feel and show, not just tell.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Or sense and show, I guess, essentially.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's very true.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. All of the places that we've talked about for the most part, I I know I think we've done an episode or at least tabled an episode of like these are the places we want to visit that we've read about. Um, I don't want to visit all these places.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I like reading about haunted houses for the most part, but I don't want to be there. And I really, I'm not sure the Poison Wood Bible setting is up my alley.

SPEAKER_01

No. But but I think it would be cool to like see these places in action. Like to see the seven and a half deaths, like to actually see how that would operate. Yeah. Or like you mentioned Simone St. James. I am not, I'm not getting involved with that, but I'd love to see how that motel operated at night. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Like so experience it, but from a safe distance where you're not really experiencing it, it's not gonna hurt you, right?

SPEAKER_01

Like a Disney attraction. I just want to be on a nice, safe track, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Drive through, see it all happen.

SPEAKER_01

Controlled environment. But then there are places that I'd love to like actually immerse in, like the written or the islands of uh Crete or some of those other things. Yeah. So Dune, I'm not going to Dune. No thanks. Hogwarts. All of it's gonna be a problem for me. I don't like to be hot, and that would not go very well. Esphinters aside. Um we would love to know, readers, if you have uh listeners, readers too, but we would love to know if you have any settings that you just feel are so like memorable or real or tangible or just really marked for you and your reading experience.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

What makes a memorable setting for you or a memorable yeah, setting is I think how I'll just leave that.

SPEAKER_02

If you listen to us through Buzz Sprout, we do have it's called a fan mail link. If you click on that, you can send us your thoughts. We'd love to hear what you have to say.

SPEAKER_01

Please. Um, we have no idea what's coming up next.

SPEAKER_02

This is the struggle right now, right? Right. What we think we want to do when it rolls around, we have a hard time pulling it together. So there will be a show.

SPEAKER_01

Something, there'll be something. Yes. Um, but just stick around, I guess, and see what happens. I know we say this all the time, but it's just a little gentle reminder. Um, if you like what you've been hearing or like hanging out with us, please just rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and or on Spotify or both. Um, share us around, tell your readerly friends. Um, one, it helps us get seen by people who would also enjoy um the show or books that we're talking about, whatever. Um, but it's just fun to build our little community too. Thank you for spending part of your day with us here today, and we'd love to have you join us again in the Book Snug for the next chapter.

SPEAKER_02

Bye, friends. We'd love for you to continue today's conversation with us at the Booksnug underscore podcast on Instagram and at the Booksnug Podcast on Facebook. All of our episodes can be found wherever you listen to podcasts, as well as at our website, thebooksnugpodcast.budsprout.com, where show notes for every episode can be found. We'd love to hear from you. Email us at the booksnugpodcast at gmail.com.

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As C.S. Lewis, one of our favorite authors, so famously said, you can never have a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me, and we wholeheartedly agree.