Welcome to the Reader's Roundtable edition of CADL Cast

with Jessica Trotter, Mari Garza and Cheryl Lindemann.

Welcome back to the Reader's Roundtable edition of CADL CAST.

I'm Jessica Trotter,

and I'm joined at the mic by Maricela Garza and Cheryl Lindemann.

Hey, ladies.

Hello. Hello.

How are you doing?

It's been a whirlwind summer.

I don't know how we got here.

Lots of partying going on.

Yeah, a lot of activity.

I mean, yeah, busyness. Busyness.

Lots of busyness.

Well, when we talked about our topic for this episode,

we we maybe had a specific idea in mind,

but as we prep, I think we've ended up wringing as much

meaning out of the phrase that we came up with as we possibly could.

So our our thought was reads for long nights and busy days.

And I think we are again, we've we've pulled

that every which way in our titles for today.

I think we've got short and easy for our busy days.

I think we've got books that are easy to pick up and put down.

We've got doorstep a doorstop at least to dig into in those long nights

or titles that are just sort of playing

with the title and, you know, bring light to the darkness in our long nights.

So I personally think that's perfect.

It's a fun use of our.

Yeah, we always end up in an interesting place

regardless of our whatever we come up with as a topic.

Yeah.

So I'm going to start this time.

The first book that I want to talk about is Golden AX by Rio Cortez.

This is a collection of poetry.

It is.

It was longlisted for the National Book Award.

We've actually talked

about Real Cortez Pushed for because she is the author

of the bestselling The ABCs of Black History.

Love that. Yep.

And but this is a book of adult poetry,

and it really explores

part of it really explores her family history.

They were she calls them, I love this phrase, afro pioneers.

So she has family that actually moved west

and sort of homesteaded in, of all places, Utah,

where a lot of people went to Kansas or farther across west.

That's not actually

a what we find as a traditional stop for African-American communities

as they were moving west, or at least not one that I was particularly aware of.

And it is fraught with its own issues.

There has been over in the past issues between the African-American community

and the Mormon Church.

So, I mean, that's explored a little bit in her poetry,

but it's also it's African-Americans in the West.

It's a meditation.

There are sections that are just a meditation on our present

as we are now, and the problems that we have and the positives that we have.

And then also kind of a planned pop culture.

This is one that if you look at some of the quotes on it, Roxane

Gay pops in and to say her look at pop culture is really quite interesting.

It's just a really fascinating, neat collection

that I think people should know about.

And again, it's one of those it's appealing to that.

You can pick it up, put it down.

But it's also really it's a small collection.

It's it's something you could read in a day.

That's a beautiful cover.

Yes, it does.

I, honest to God, picked it up for the cover before I realized it was real.

Yeah.

I can't wait to read that. Yeah.

Well, moving to another poetry collection from another author that we've talked

about quite a bit on the podcast, Joy Harjo put out a new collection this fall.

It's weaving sundown in a scarlet light,

50 poems for 50 years.

I want to mention to it has a foreword by

another fantastic author, Sandra Cisneros.

And this is again 50 poems from Joy

Harjo Canon, starting from when she was just getting started

with with poetry their very beginning into more recent poems.

And Joy Harjo is a multi multiyear poet laureate.

Not anymore.

Adelman is our poet laureate now.

But she was from 2019 to 2022.

She's a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation.

And her poems.

If you are not familiar and I know I've talked about her

a lot on the podcast before, but her poems are range from.

There's a lot about the power of ancestors.

There's a lot of poems about the forest removal

of the Muskogee Creeks to Oklahoma.

And there are poems about life and death, nature,

identity, current and historical

concerns of indigenous people.

Just a beautiful collection.

And one piece I just want to read from one of her,

The last poems is that

it's called Without maybe then

we will see the design of the two minded creature

and know why half the world fights righteously for greedy masters,

and the other half is nailing it all back together.

I, I was just, you know, knocked over by that passage

so I could not recommend this more joy.

Harjo Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light.

50 Poems 50 years.

And one last piece about this

book, Joy Harjo, I think, is a very accessible poet, too.

She's a poet that you if you're not if you say,

I don't really even like poetry or I don't know, you know, this is a poet

or she doesn't hold you so far away

that you feel like this is why I don't like poetry.

I don't get it.

You know, I mean, she she has ways of pulling you in and drawing you in.

She's one of those poets with that with that gift.

So Joy Harjo weaving sundown in the Scarlet Light.

And that one's on my list.

Well, I also have a poetry for we.

Do this without actually talking to each other.

Just say, you know.

We all have a book of poetry.

Let's put them together.

They only see the outside.

And this is by Carly Dacus.

And this is a really interesting book for children.

You know, you have to think about the mystery

of like what you're really thinking or what is really inside

and how difficult it is to convey.

Well, this book

just approaches so many different topics

that little children might be, you know, having going on inside.

And at a time when especially we talk about feelings

or are trying to encourage children to express

feelings and talk about feelings and not keep things bottled up.

I thought this was a perfect, perfect book.

This book, you know, the poems take on

just having memories of your family, your friends of grief,

remembering a lost grandparent.

There's a poem in there about losing a friend who has had

chronic illness his whole life, and he finally passes away.

And the one that really struck me

is on the day my dog died.

That's the title. On the day my dog died.

I cried and cried and cried.

This is my whole poem.

There's nothing more to say.

I cried and cried and cried on the day my dog died.

And just like these feelings, you can just sense four kids

just wanting to

linger over and express.

I just really thought it was a very

inspiring book to help children know they're not alone.

They. They can

feel these feelings and still be okay.

Good for use for teachers, too, in a way,

as like writing prompts, inspiring kids to write their own feelings.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, kind of jumping away from poetry,

but still kind of maybe off of that title

and sort of the feelings and

dealing with our feelings and dealing with hard times and that sort of thing.

I'm this is this is maybe the most out there use of our topic,

but I read the Light We Carry by Michelle Obama,

which is a really inspirational set of reflections on her experiences.

And it sort of examines the tools and habits

she's developed and used to get herself through things.

And it's just it's really lovely.

I mean, a, you get some really neat stories.

An inside look at some of it

she's talked to sort of glossed over in her previous book, and she goes into

more depth because she, you know, because she is looking at, well, how did

what did they lean on

to get through those moments or what did I have to think about?

Some of it's sort of like knowing that you have to face your fears now,

knowing that you have to listen and realize that what that thing is

in the back of your head, you know, it's telling you all the stuff is your fear.

And you need to know

that first response.

You need to think it through, you know, that sort of thing.

I listen to most of this.

She's wonderful.

And for me it was a lot of nodding along in the sense

that it took me a lot of adulting to get to some of these places.

So in a way, I kind of feel like it's it

a it'd be a perfect book for new adults,

people starting in their careers early on in their careers.

It would have been lovely to have somebody say

some of this stuff to me, even if I'm not getting it.

But you know,

you sort of step back and say, oh, that's that's that's what she meant

when she said that it would it might be really helpful to some people.

And I, I really think this would be comforting.

Challenging but comforting also read

it might be a gift to it's just it was just a neat read.

So my next title actually ties

a little bit back

to an email, these titles and the poem that might be read out loud

this one is called Good Grief and Loving Pets Here and Thereafter by E.B.

Bartels.

And this when I saw this come through, when I actually was purchasing,

I really flagged it to go back to, I have to say, as a nonfiction selector

for cattle, that pet books are very, very popular.

We have certain branches that are dog branches, but all across the board,

dogs, cats, domestic pets are so popular with children, you know,

children's books for adult books, memoirs, that sort of thing.

And I found this one to be extremely unique.

You know, there are books by Caitlin Doty

and other authors about about rituals of death with humans.

And they're always there's a lot of interest around those,

but this one actually is about rituals of death

and just about death in general of pets.

And I found that to be really notable and unique.

I mean, a lot of memoirs will touch on the death of a pet.

And that's part of the part of the story.

But this is more about, you know, as a culture,

how much we love our pets, about the pet industry talks about that a lot.

The numbers of people with pets and how the lengths that will go to care for pets.

But that as a culture in particular in America,

we don't really have good rituals about death with pets.

And so if you lose a pet

and you're

grieving, there isn't sometimes the same support

that you would get if you lost, you know, a human and you're in your life.

And so this talks about that and it also talks about the author's experience

growing up with a number of pets

and some of the shame she has about how she cared for a pet.

And it didn't go well and it died or, you know, a beta fish in college

and how it brought all of her roommates together.

So just these anecdotes, wonderful stories.

They're all in the little bits, which fits our theme because I think

you can dip in and out of this book and read a chapter at a time.

It goes to Japan, goes to a really beautiful pet cemetery

that actually has a ceremony for Death for pets, goes to Kentucky to,

you know, Secretariat's grave

moves all across and tons of different pets are covered, not just dogs and cats,

which most books focus on those, but it is fish, it goes to hamsters.

And there's all sorts of stories in here.

So I think this is a great book for a pet lover

and it's sad, but it's more about memorializing.

It's more about that love of pets, more than about, you know, about sadness.

It's more about how do we memorialize these pets and gives readers

that room to understand that it's okay to feel that way

and to maybe think about their own rituals for honoring their pets

when they do pass on.

So good grief, I'm loving pets here and here after by E.B.

Bartels.

Rachel Okay, so I have a very short

adult nonfiction title that I want to talk about.

It's called How to Keep House

While Drowning, a gentle approach to cleaning and organizing.

And this is by Casey Davis.

Oh, wow.

This was really in some ways a stunner of a book as compact and short as it was.

It is you know, there are lots of books out there

about organizing and cleaning, and everybody has a formula.

And I'm not going to say that this person does not, but

I would say that she really gives more of a philosophy.

Casey Davis

does is a counselor and she works with a lot of people,

I think, who are struggling with fatigue,

depression, anxiety,

ADHD, a lot of conditions

that might affect how well or not well you clean your house.

And one of the things that she repeats over and over again

is that cleaning is not a moral issue.

It is you are not immoral if your kitchen is

not spotless every single day.

You know, she talks about how your care tasks, which would be,

you know, the things that you do each day to take care of yourself and your home.

They don't all have to be done at once

so that everything is perfect at once.

She just repeats quite a bit, like just being slow and gentle,

quiet with yourself, really releasing

people from any sense of shame

that you know, people may have received growing up about,

you know, if you're not clean, then you're not worthy, whatever.

I, I found it really, really moving.

And in fact, I actually listen to the book three CDs.

I listen to the first CD like three times.

It was just so stunning in some ways for me personally.

And the last thing I just want to say about the book is that she also repeats

this.

You know, remember that your space,

you know, you don't exist for your space.

Your space exists for you.

You don't have to take care of it.

It takes care of you.

So don't don't fret.

That's my my book of the month, for sure.

Yeah. Okay.

And the running joke around us is that I've had that book.

I had that book.

It was staring at me.

I'm looking at it. It's tiny.

And I still didn't get to it because girl stuff, all that stuff.

So now it's back on my list together.

Yeah, yeah. I really do want to read that.

That is a really popular book in our library system right now.

It's been checking out holes all the time on it

and it really is counter cultural.

I feel like I read almost all of those books, you know what I mean?

And there's not one to me that's quite like that.

I mean, that is such a different argument and so validating

of of the human at the center of it rather than shaming.

Right, right. Right.

Or striving for perfection.

Yeah.

So again, it's back on my list.

So I'm the one that wrote the doorstop.

I really want

everybody to know about BABBEL by

our AV Kwong Rebecca Kwong.

This is a follow up to her award winning Pepper War Poppy War series.

It's it's

a deeply detailed, engrossing, standalone,

historical, dark it academia fantasy

set in 18 like an alternate 1830s British Empire.

It follows the story of an orphaned Cantonese boy

who takes the name Robin Swift.

He swept off to England.

And there's a very strange and weird story

developing about his origins that he's sort of seeing happen.

And he's trained in Greek

and Latin and set up to basically be entered into Oxford

to study language at the Royal Institute of Translation or Babble.

Kwong is a ladies translator.

Martial scholar, degrees from Cambridge in Oxford, now studying at Yale.

And she's using her background to scrutinize

linguistics, history, politics, culture, customs.

She's ultimately

really looking at colonialism and empire.

It's giant. It's lovely.

The audiobook is fabulous is but it is one of those things,

if you don't like this, this is going to be hard for you.

But it's one of those things that has footnotes.

They are some of them are like deeply nerdy

language footnotes and some of them are snarky,

you know, well, you know, that Dickens guy didn't really like people of color.

You know, it's sort of it's it's very it's really interesting

that the side notes and the, um, but it's just a very obvious

deep love of language and a look at how language is used in empire.

So it's, it's I really think people should check it out.

It sounds really good.

Something reminds me of buy it with that.

I don't know why.

I don't know if it's like the literary piece or something like that.

I don't know.

That looks really, really cool.

Wow. I mean, I'm I will tell you, I am not all the way through it.

Not a lot of the way through it, but it is.

But I know I've been through it.

I know the story.

I know where it's going.

It's just really well done.

So excellent.

I have to end here from from the books that I have.

I have two books about libraries and the love of libraries and being a librarian.

Of course, I'm always drawn to these books, but I think that not

just librarians would love books about libraries.

The two that I have are Nikki Giovanni's a library and library girl.

How Nancy Pearl Became America's most celebrated Librarian.

And both of these are love letters to libraries.

Nikki Giovanni being the multi award winning acclaimed poet.

So this is really a poem beautifully illustrated by Erin K Robinson.

It's bright, it's lively, and it's like the best poetry.

It's sort of literal, but also very metaphorical about

not just the library, but about what the library brings

to the life of the individual.

And in particular, in in this particular instance,

a young girl who goes to the library and where the books can take her

and take her life and take her in, you know, in her mind, in her imaginings.

And there's an excellent afterword in this book about Nikki

Giovanni, his experience going to the library.

She did go to a segregated library.

It was a Carnegie branch.

And she was it was a colored library.

And she was not allowed really to have the books

in one of the other branches.

But her librarian, Mrs.

Whitehead, would get the books for her, and she reflects at the end of the book,

and thanks, Mrs.

Whitehead, for the wonderful service, or Mrs.

Long, rather for the wonderful service that she had.

But she realizes that she must Mrs.

Long must have gone through something to get those books to her.

So this is a powerful, beautiful book.

And I love these types of books because if you

you know, if you're checking this out from the library,

you can reflect with the child about what the library means to them.

And then also look back on history and realize that libraries were not

the access was not the same for everyone in our in our history.

And then library girl is about Nancy

Pearl, who is a sort of famous librarian,

and she even has an

action figure that has been created after her.

And this is actually a michigan story

because her library branch was the it's a Francis

Parkhurst branch of the Detroit Public Library.

MM Yeah.

And this is about, this is a story that I think a lot of kids can relate to

because it's sort of about being really nerdy about something,

being really passionate and even getting possibly teased for it.

And she was a library girl.

She went to the library, checked out scads of books, all different topics.

It's also about the relationship with Mrs.

Whitehead, her librarian in this book, and about how Mrs.

Whitehead sort of saw saw something really special in her and said, hey, you know,

what do you want to give a report to the other kids about horse books?

And so she was terrified.

Yeah, it's just like this, this journey with her model

horse toys and she, you know, journeys to to the library.

She, you know, she has a mishap and mayhem, but she finally gets there.

And then after she gives the report, her peers,

she's opened up their eyes to the joys of books and reading,

and they start to accept her and so it's really a story,

I think, about following, following what you love and really

embracing your own geeky self and whatever you love and turning it

into your passion. And look, she is

probably still considered one of the most famous librarians.

So this was the spark that that started that was yeah.

So library girl, Nancy Pearl story.

Okay,

well, I have a couple more books.

I have a children's picture book, which is actually a children's nonfiction book.

The title is When the Sky Glows and it's by Nell Cross Beckerman

and it's illustrated by the amazing David Litchfield.

And this is a book that approaches

different things that happen in the sky.

You know, he starts out by

the author starts out by talking about lightning

and how in some places like Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela,

it's like considered the lightning capital of the world,

because you've got all this lightning that is going off with thunder

and it's because of, you know, static electricity.

And so it's this spread one right after the other.

You know, he talks there's a section on fireflies,

the solar eclipses that we up occasionally

get to see in Michigan or maybe every few hundred years, I should say,

you know, rainbows.

I didn't know Hawaii is considered the rainbow state that that escaped me.

I was like, really?

So I had to look that up and, you know, just the different ways

the sky will light up based on things happening in the,

you know, with the weather or animals doing their thing.

So I really, really enjoy this.

I would say it's kind of maybe like grade to right on up to grade four.

They would have no problem reading it.

But even as a parent reading it aloud with a child

taking it, you know, talking about, you know, nature and the sky that we see

outside in the many different colors and and forays they can take.

I really like that one.

And then the last one that I have is actually for cozy nights.

I love short stories and very often I don't know about y'all.

I get really, really tired and I'm like, Yeah, okay, I've got about 20 minutes

and maybe 30 minutes to try to get some reading in.

And this is a perfect book for that.

It's scattered showers by Rainbow Rule,

and it's a collection of nine short stories.

And actually four of them have already been published

when I was reading

like I think this seems familiar and I went back in like, oh, yeah, okay.

But there's, as you know, stories in there about, you know, the new year

winter, the one

that really stuck with me is actually it's kind of really more a new

of a new adult sort of story because the setting is a college campus

and there's these two people, you know, to do different floors.

I wonder, was playing her music

just way too loud and the guy starts to give her CDs.

And the thing is, she's just really broken.

She's just broken up with a boyfriend.

So she's really, really miserable.

And it's like this whole, like, dorm college, campus dorm.

And it is very nostalgic.

I mean, for those of us who experienced a dorm situation

at university, I'm thinking of you know, MSU and my days

at McDonnell Hall and the Land and all just like it's just really,

really magical in that way to, you know, think about it.

But it was funny, very funny.

And also like I really appreciated seeing that

the relationship between the two strangers where the guy's like, Look,

you are, your music is too loud and he starts slipping her music CDs.

And so you can sort of tell, like, I couldn't quite figure out

if this is supposed to be set way back when I figured it was because of the CDs.

Yeah, but I remember when people would make CDs for others then.

Yeah.

So he did that.

So I highly recommend Rainbow Girl.

I was really glad to read it.

Right.

I guess then I think this is a great, great set of stories.

Set a range of

titles to express the theme

that we were kind of thinking of and thank you.

Thank you.

Do you?