The Reading Culture: Yearbook 2024

Well, it's that time of year again. The hallways are empty. The auto out of office email response is on. You, hopefully, have a lot of spare time to get through that to be read pile that's been growing furiously on your nightstand throughout the year, which can only mean one thing. The 2024 reading culture yearbook episode is upon us.

By the

time I got to high school, I had a

teacher who we were doing, like, the organization fair, and she was the poetry club teacher. Like she started the poetry club, life poet society, and she's like, you know, are you interested? I'm like, well, I'm not really a poet. I'm a rapper.

Did you have a rap name?

Did you have a name?

Oh, weird.

Did you

go by, did you go by anything?

Of course. Well, no, we're not going

to talk about that. Come

on.

Oh my gosh. Oh, I was such a nerd, Jordan. So there was a game, Final Fantasy, that my brothers loved playing, and there was a character named Euna Leska. And so my

name was Lady Leska cause she was the summoner of souls.

Okay. That's what I do with my reps. I will summon people's soul with your raps.

Listen, at 13, you really think that is a great name. You feel very confident.

Lady Leska. Lady Leska.

Honorable mention to a s king, whose name, in case you hadn't noticed, spelled out asking. The reason we can't give her the award, other than the fact that Lady Leska is incredible, is because that isn't exactly an alter ego. Her name, Amy Sarah King, just happens to legitimately spell out asking, but we can definitely give her this award. She is most deserving of the teen whisperer.

I see my job as validating teenagers, which is the opposite of what we talked about in the beginning, which is bullying. I always say to them when I go in, I'm like, how many of you own a cell phone? And then they all raise their hands in high school. Actually, they almost all of them in a middle school and a lot of them in upper elementary school also raise their hands. And then I say, how many of you have TikTok or social media?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So think of it this way. In this day and age now, we have teenagers who can't talk about their trauma because their own adults won't be able to handle it. Let's think about this for a second. Right?

Yeah.

And while this is happening and the children are actually suffering, we are taking away books, which is akin to removing all the fire extinguishers before you blow the place up. But for me, I'm on that deeper level, which is, hey, kids. I know that, your life is completely messed up and all these adults are arguing over ridiculous crap that has nothing to do with you. Read this book.

Yeah.

See if it can make you feel validated.

There's a reason a s King has a hold on her teen readers, but her audience definitely doesn't end there. Nope. Julie Murphy actually read from AS King as her selection for a book that deeply impacted her. That happens often on this show, which leads me to our next award, the full circle. And this one goes to Mark Oshiro, who in his passage read from another guest of the show, Nina

Lacour. This is a scene in which their dynamic of their conversations switches to something so intimate so quickly, and it is awkward. And you as the reader can feel it's awkward. But yet it's it's so beautiful to me, and I think it also demonstrates this way Nina LaCour has of writing about emotions. Where I often describe people, We Are Okay is a book where every word is in his exact right place.

And on the topic of people admiring one another, well, this next award is not that. This story took a lot of courage to tell even if it happened a long time ago. The best not meet cute award goes to the wonderful, joyful, Nicola Yoon.

My love life was tragic. Really? Tragic. Are we talking

middle school, high school? Where are we?

No one loved me. Not in middle school, not in high school. School. I was extraordinarily shy. My mom was also really shy, but I was super duper shy.

But you have a million ideas of

the ways that people can and do fall in love,

And so we're thinking about it,

like, all the time. Right?

Right. I think that was part of the problem as I read all of these books and I was like, well, this is how love should be and all this stuff. Okay. Here's a terrible story. There was this boy, a basketball player in high school.

That's a reason in high school. That's sufficient.

Somehow, I got his phone number, and I called him, and told him I had a crush on him, and blah blah. And we had maybe 2 or 3 phone calls, and then he wanted to meet, and I said, okay, and I said, I described myself and what I would be wearing. This ends so poorly. Then I did, like, go in my outfit, and he was with, like, a group of his friends, and he saw me and I was doughty, unattractive, and whatever, and he was a jerk. And he saw me with his group of friends, and he pointed and laughed, and then they just walked on by.

That is so traumatic. It

was terrible.

I know.

It was terrible. Oh my god.

Were you just like I mean, obviously, you were devastated,

and that was

just I was crushed, crushed. Even like talking about it now, and I've talked about it a couple times, it still just makes me go, you know, like that feeling of you know how nothing is as evocative as, like, the sort of shame you felt at something? It's so True.

I know. Especially around that, around, like, relationships and

Right.

You put yourself out there. You call them.

Yeah. I mean and I was really shy. Right? So this was so unusual for me. But yeah.

find yourself Fred. I'm don't you can't put that one on there, but that

you know?

Don't worry, y'all. She's happily married today to her hubby and business partner, David Yoon, and not to Fred. My conversation with this next author illustrator was so special, and it was her perspective on the world's relationship to art that inspired us to bestow the citizen of the world award on Leigh Wen Pham.

I just always felt like I was better understood visually on the page than even standing in front of someone. I've always found that the world is much, much kinder to art. I spent a lot of my twenties traveling around the world, and while I used to hate the way my face looked in that Vietnamese people couldn't tell that I was Vietnamese right away because my my grandfather is French, and so I've I've sort of got the bigger eyes, and I've got a bigger nose, and I don't quite look the way other Vietnamese people look. So Vietnamese never quite let me into their circle in the same way. They, you know, they would think I was from another culture.

But, you know, when it comes to connecting with people, sometimes what seems like a world of differences on the surface is just that, the surface. If you look a little deeper, you often find that you have much more in common than you might think. Our next award celebrates just that, and it goes to Henna Khan who, despite being from a different background, religion, and, well, century than a famous literary character, found a deeply meaningful connection that in part inspired her own writing journey. And for that, we're giving her the odd couple award.

Martin Luther King Library invited me to do to speak at an award ceremony for letters and literature, which is a I think it's a national contest where students write to authors living or dead who had an impact on them. And so I was reading the finalists for the competition, and they were really moving letters, and I was like, okay, what am I gonna talk about during my my comments? And so I thought about who I would have written to if I was in high school and what I would say, and I I thought of Little Women, I thought of Louisa May Alcott, and why this book resonated so deeply, and I realized that this is where I saw myself probably more than anywhere else in the books I was reading because even though it was written a 150 years ago, a lot of what was in here felt very familiar and comforting to me. Things like the strict gender norms were recognizable to me, the respect for parents. Like, that was something that always threw me as a teen, especially as a little kid but even more as a teen, was watching teen shows and seeing the way kids could sass their parents and, you know, talk back and, like, I hate you.

And then, well, I'm guessing you I don't know. For you, like, did you identify with Joe with, Joe?

Totally. I didn't realize that the book was not Jo's book. I mean, I knew it that there were chapters told from the other sisters' perspectives, but I just kinda got through those to get back to Jo's story. It felt like similar stories to me. So I was like, doesn't everyone identify with Joe?

Right. No. Right. Okay. No.

But there must be. Yeah.

Yeah. Of course. But interesting. Yeah. So there's, like, the both, like, the recognition of the norms, but also, like, identify him as a young person, like, questioning them.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I love the fact that she pushed back and didn't feel you know, felt like she was more and and the fact that she was a writer. I was a little writer too, and and I actually wrote a family newspaper.

Oh, like Joe. Yeah.

And I didn't realize it until much later that, oh, I that must be where I got the idea from. I don't remember getting the idea. I just remember doing it.

If we called up Derek Barnes and asked him to give an acceptance speech for his award, at the top of his thank you list would definitely be his son, Solomon, or Solo. In fact, it would only be fair if we awarded this to both Derek and Solomon for the best advice given and taken. Not just taken, but you'll hear that Derek went all in on Solomon's words of wisdom, and that's why he wins the all in award.

When I was struggling, and I always tell this story about how I end up writing Crown. Here, right in this this is my office back here. You know, I got furniture and the awards and everything is up. But this room used to be completely bare and nothing. And I used to sit in here and work on one of those 30 books that I wrote during my downtime.

The next awardee is not only an imaginative writer, but he's also an avid lucid dreamer. And if that's interesting to you, he told us all about it in his episode. And so to Minh Le, I present the most moving dream award, or an alternative title might be most likely to inspire Christopher Nolan to make an inception sequel award. Minh shared with us how he was with his grandmother when she passed, and at that time, he didn't speak Vietnamese really at all. But years later, after learning more Vietnamese, he had a dream that altered that reality.

It was such a powerful moment for me because when my other grandmother passed away, I remember going to see her in the hospital, and I spent the night with her, I was like holding her hand, and she was talking to me. I was like, I can't understand. I don't know what she's trying to tell me something, and I don't have the language to understand it. The I don't wanna say failure, but the my inability to process that moment the way I wanted to and to be able to accept her message was something that was lingering for forever. You're never going to get that back, but to be able to have that more than my other grandmother was really powerful.

just making me cry. Like, I just, like I mean, I do cry, but I'm straight up

masking case right now. Okay.

This ties back into a dream or a conversation about dreams. Something that I do sometimes to practice my Vietnamese is if I have trouble sleeping, which is often, I'll, like, try to narrate my day in Vietnamese so that I'll, like, get into the habit of doing that and then kind of, like, drift off while I do that. So I was doing that a couple months ago, and then I was dreaming, and I was, like, walking down the street, and my grandmother walks up, the one who passed away years ago, and she walks up, and we go for a walk. And we're talking in Vietnamese, just having a conversation for, like, a couple blocks. And then at the end she, like, touched me on the shoulder, and she says, this is so nice.

Wow.

It's so nice to be able to finally be able to do this. Then I woke up, and it was, like, as close to closure as you could get. Right?

If you're close to tears now, like I am, please keep that tissue box close. Everyone on the show reads a passage from a book that impacted them deeply, but Shannon Hales took it to a new level. And that's why she has earned the award for best life lesson from literature.

So I'm a redhead, and I avoided reading Anne of Green Gables because everybody was always comparing me to her. And then when I was a freshman in high school, I was actually in a production of Anne of Green Gables. I was not in. And I decided to read it then, and I gassed inhaled it. I was like, okay.

Here, you can imagine Shannon reading her excerpt from Anne of Green Gables. And now the reaction to Anne.

For me, coming to this moment after everything that came before, it's this pure moment where someone is loved for just being who they are, not for what they can do, not for how productive they are or helpful they are. And, in fact, they're quite annoying often, and yet they still have value. The hope of that really moves me.

Yeah. That she's so precious still to them. Okay.

I cry when someone cries, and I'm going to cry. It's

why I resist crying because it's like a virus, and I don't want to make anyone else cry, but I can't help it. I loved that as a kid. It felt hopeful to me as a kid. As a parent, it brings me to tears.

Oh my god. Yeah.

Just thinking.

As a parent to be like, I I love my kids for being who they are, and the relief of that because I think when I was younger, a younger mom even, I felt like I had to tell them how to be in order to be safe, in order to be good. All of those things, I had to tell them how to be. And the beauty of letting go of that and realizing, no. I'm just supporting them in becoming who they actually are and whatever they are is beautiful. And the metaphor I use with my kids that they understand is we have this wonderful, very fat asthmatic rescue cat who does nothing.

Yeah. That's very beautiful. What's your cat's name?

His name is Michael Hat. Last name, Hat. So his nickname is Mike Hat.

Now as much as the show is about fun stories and emotional moments, we also do wanna make sure you're getting some valuable takeaways and not always about creating culture for readers to grow, although that's very important. But sometimes, we just like to give out some good old fashioned life advice, and there was nothing quite as good as CeCe Bell's contribution, which is why we're giving her the Owning It award.

Before El DeFo came out, I could not tell people or ask people to repeat themselves or to just come right out and say, oh, I didn't understand you. I'm deaf, or I'm a lip reader. I couldn't I was not able to say any of that. I would just fake it 100%, and that could lead to some real problems and a lot of extra anxiety that was not necessary. So I've become much better at advocating for myself.

Wow.

But now, new me, older me, is able to before I even get into the cab, practically, I say to the driver, I'm deaf. I'm a lip reader. Don't talk to me. And the trip is beautiful.

Right.

It took me a long, long, long, long time to get to that point. And that has made my life far easier to navigate. But there probably are fewer mishaps because I preempt them. I'm ahead of them.

You know what's still finding its way under countless trees this holiday season? The same books that have been holiday staples since the nineties, Harry Potter. Despite being over 30 years old, it remains a global phenomenon, introducing new readers to its world every year. But let's face it. There are some undeniable issues with the series.

They're titans, and, unfortunately, because our community and culture globally loves nostalgia. They don't want to move forward. But the young people like 1 foot in the old and 1 foot in the new, one foot in the thing that they loved. And it's like, Oh, it's like that, but we've got these new things. And so I intimately use my librarian training when I'm sitting down to create ideas, thinking about what are the ingredients of this big Titan property like Percy Jackson?

This next awardee is a name I'm sure you've been seeing everywhere recently, thanks to an, ahem, Oz some movie musical that just came out. Yes. We're talking about Gregory Maguire. But long before he was a celebrated author, there was a little boy having fun doing what all kids love to do, read the dictionary, which is why he's being awarded the Merriam Webster award.

We grew up in a house where the dictionary lived on the same shelf in the kitchen as the cookbooks because we were referring to it at least once a meal. Something would come up, and my mother would say, is

that from the Latin

or the Greek? And my father who had not studied Latin or Greek, nonetheless, loved etymology, and passionately, they would go scraping through the pages to find the answer to a question of the root of a certain English word and share it with us. And all of my brothers and sisters and I are etymologists and fetishists for different dictionaries. We get together at Thanksgiving and, you know, some families get together and talk about the game or they argue about politics. We get together and we talk about the proper use of the portatory subjunctive.

A hoot.

Okay, y'all. We're aware that most families do not get together over the holidays to read dictionaries at the table, but some fun non screen related table games may be of use to you over the next week or so. So for our last award, I leave you with the best dinner party game, which goes to one of my favorite storytellers, Daniel Nayeri.

So to remystify the world in some ways, I think, you know, we live in the information age. We live in an age where very few people want to live in mystery. Like, if you're in a restaurant with somebody and you ask

Everything feels knowable.

It's so knowable. It's and it's so it's Yeah. And, unfortunately, it's so boring. Like, sometimes, you know, one of my favorite games at, like, a restaurant is to ask a question that's kind of slightly slightly stupid. Right?

and who can who's

gonna pick up their phone and Yeah.

But and everyone does. Everyone is like, well, we don't but their immediate move is to, well, let me get this supercomputer out of my pocket, and I'll find out for you. And I'm like, no. No. No.

Is that Sherry's coming in 2 one? One that you actually

I don't know. I just came up with it.

Now I'm thinking about it, but okay. Alright. Go ahead.

It's such it's a good one. Right? I don't actually know. So it's there's probably some some, you know, reason with the with the golden ratio or something. Who knows?

who knows?

Just leave me to my ungoogled mystery, please. The the metaphor you'd have to use is, like, signal to noise ratio. Right? I think the I guess what I'm trying to say isn't that I'm anti information. I just think there's a lot of noise in that kind of space, and I enjoy a quieter, sometimes more mystified space.

Yeah. You can check our show notes for why cherries grow into pairs. So

because they love each other. You already answered it.

On that loving note, it's time for me to grab my neon purple puffy pen and sign off on the back page of this yearbook edition. Have a great break, heart emoji, book emoji.

Love,

Jordan. For real, I hope that you enjoyed that sampling of highlights from our past season. And, hey, there are a ton of superlative authors that we've interviewed that we didn't get to today. Nina Lacour, Elliot Schraefer, Katherine Applegate, John Hsu, and there are so many more. So please take a listen if you've got some time over the break.