To Spoil Or Not To Spoil

Jenn Northington Sep 1, 2016

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Amanda and Jenn recommend hard sci-fi, darkly humorous fiction, personal finance books, and more on this week’s Get Booked!

This episode is sponsored by The Call by Peadar O’Guilin and Still a Work in Progress by Jo Knowles.

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The show can also be found on Stitcher here.

Questions

1. Hello Amanda and Co-Host:
I absolutely love your new podcast and look forward to listening to every episode. I have two questions that are similar in nature.
1. I just finished reading The Girl on the Train and it was amazing. However, now I feel like everyone else did when they finished reading A Little Life. Do you have any recommendations on what to read next to fill the void that has the similar narrative, set-up, style, etc.
2. The same concept regarding The Left Behind Series but does not need to be christian genre. Thanks so much and look forward to the next podcast. 🙂

-A. Becker

2. I read across literary genres but I seem particularly drawn to dark humor and flawed characters. One of my favorite series of the past few years has been Sara Gran’s wonderfully smart, philosophical and darkly funny Claire DeWitt mysteries but there are only two so far and only one more expected and I am in serious withdrawal. Any reads in any genre you can recommend that are similar in tone?

Sorry to be so weird and thanks for what you do. Leaving a five star review right now 🙂

-Cher

3. Hi Get Booked,

I really enjoyed The Martian and Dave Eggers’s The Circle. When Reading Lives interviewed Andy Weir, he mentioned that there are two different classes of science fiction, one being the more realistic “hard science fiction”. Based on the podcast I have Ready Player One on hold at the library, but are there other notable “hard science fiction” books to check out?

Love the podcast! And thanks for your help!

-Tara

4. I’ll be spending a month in Asia this September all by myself. Which means I’ll have a lot of uninterrupted reading time! So for that month I want to attempt to read my way through the cities I’m visiting. If you have suggestions of books by authors from Hong Kong, Japan or South Korea please let me know! (Bonus points if you can narrow it down to the cities I’m visiting: Seoul, Busan, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka).

Please no Murikami! I want to try something different!
-Kassandra

5. My name is Sabrina and I am a junior at university in the Philadelphia area. I lived in an apartment with a roommate that I pay for by myself, not through loans or my parents. I work two jobs and make a relatively pitiful amount (yay retail jobs). I have a sorta of budget thing going and manage to save about 100-200$ a month on average. I also manage to spend money on things like books, yarn, cooking appliances (makes me feel more like an adult). The point is, I cannot find any good books for personal finance. I want to know how to invest, retirement funds, bonds etc, anything that will make me more financially literate. I am not interested in getting rich. I just want something realistic and readable.

Happy reading!
Sabrina

Books Discussed

The Fever by Megan Abbott

The Stand by Stephen King

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante

Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

Jessica Jones: Alias Vol 1 by Brian Michael Bendis

Out by Natsuo Kirino

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, trans by Ken Liu

Time Salvagers by Wesley Chu