Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:23 — 15.1MB)

We recap our highlights of Book Expo America. Then we announce the winners of our Summer Reading voting and invite you to read along with us. And in “Two Books We Can’t Wait for You to Read,” Ann tells us about American Music by Jane Mendelsohn, and Michael discusses Mrs. Somebody Somebody by Tracy Winn.

Book Expo America

Ann and I tell you all about our trip Book Expo America, where we saw lots of authors and new books coming out this fall. Check out our Flickr Photo Set from images of some of the things I saw. It was wonderful for to see all of the enthusiasm at the show for The Passage, a book we told you about several months ago. The title and release date were plastered on everything from badge holders to giant banners.

Join Us for our Summer Reading (14:22)

Thank you to everyone who voted for the books than Ann and I will read this summer. Here we tell you about the books that won – Middlesex for me and The Poisonwood Bible for Ann – in the hopes that you’ll join us in reading one or both of these. We’ll talk about the books in late August and hope to be able to have a live call-in book group of some kind (more to come on that).

Two Books We Can’t Wait For You to Read (19:21)

My book for segment three is Mrs. Somebody Somebody by Tracy Winn, a collection of linked short stories which all take place in the mill town of Lowell, MA, and which span the last half of the 20th century. Ann tells us about American Music by Jane Mendelsohn, author of I Was Amelia Earhart. The new novel is about an Iraq War veteran and his masseuse, who can “feel” stories as she massages him.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:54 — 12.0MB)

Michael is away, so today’s podcast features an interview with first-time novelist Holly LeCraw, author of The Swimming Pool.  Holly and I talk about her path to being published by Doubleday, and her adventures in finding a literary agent for her book.

Learn more about Holly at Hollylecraw.com, and be sure to check out her tour schedule. If you have a chance, I’d love you to attend one of her events — and tell her you “met” her on Books on the Nightstand!

Many thanks to Holly for her patience with me as a new interviewer. It’s not a role that I’m used to. I very much enjoyed our conversation, and I hope that you do, too.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:56 — 12.0MB)

Embarrassed to dog-ear

It’s true: in segment 1, I confess to turning down the corners of books to mark my place, especially on advanced reading copies. Michael and I talk about various ways to mark a page in a book, and it appears that we have different rules for different types of books. What do you do?

No Bookmark Required for these (05:10)

We love big fat books, but sometimes short books are just the thing needed at a particular moment. Of course we have some recommendations:  Michael likes The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett, a novel about a middle-aged couple in London who discover that they have been robbed and that everything they own has been taken except for the clothes on their back. He also recommends You’re an Animal, Viskovitz, by Alessandro Boffa, which is a collection of short stories featuring the character Viskovitz, who in each story is a different animal.

Since I can’t pass up an opportunity to gush about Ian McEwan, my choice for short book is The Comfort of Strangers. This is a a brilliant, dark, psychological novel that could be considered a horror novel in a sense, though there are no monsters or zombies.

One Book We Can’t Wait for you to Read (Outsourced edition) (14:15)

Michael and I both loved Howard Frank Mosher’s early novel, A Stranger in the Kingdom, and we both wanted to talk Howard’s latest novel, Walking to Gatlinburg. But truly, nobody talks about a Howard Frank Mosher novel better than our colleague Ron Koltnow. So we asked Ron to call in and be our guest recommender for this segment.  I hope you enjoy hearing a different voice this week!

And we’re off!

Michael and I will be gone next week at a company sales meeting, hearing about books that will be published in the Fall of 2010. So we’re going to turn next week’s show over to our listeners. Many of you called in recommendations for your favorite “big” books, and have the chance to win a copy of The Passage. Next week we’ll play some of those calls. I hope you enjoy it!

photo credit: :Day 53: A Kind of Miracle by quinn.anya via Flickr

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:49 — 13.6MB)

Ann discusses the Percy Jackson movie and shares her daughter’s opinion on how it compared to the book. But there’s more news for Rick Riordan fans: the first book in his new series, The Kane Chronicles, comes out on May 4, 2010. Click on the link to read an excerpt.

Next, we discuss books that have been made into movies that are just out, or due out soon: The Last Station, a look at Tolstoy’s final year; Thinking in Pictures, the basis for HBO’s Temple Grandin; Creation a new movie about Charles Darwin, might lead moviegoers back to The Origin of Species; the new HBO miniseries The Pacific drew inspiration from both Helmet for my Pillow and With the Old Breed; the non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City is the basis for Matt Damon’s new movie The Green Zone. Michael ends the segment with a look at two comics series. One has been made into a movie, The Losers, and one is the basis for the Fox TV show Human Target.

In segment three, Michael recommends Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, the story of an unlikely friendship in a small English village. It was recently reviewed – glowingly – in the New York Times. Ann tells us about Henning Mankell’s latest novel, The Man from Beijing. Mankell is best known for his Kurt Wallander mysteries set in Sweden, and while this book does begin with a Swedish mystery, the story also travels to 19th-century California and to Africa. (Click here to listen to an NPR story about the book and to read an excerpt.)

movie theater image by katstan

____________________