Summer Reads & Lives Of Trees

In this episode, I’m continuing our tour through The Jiffy-Mart – my online bodega and members’ lounge – and this time, we’re stepping through the forest refrigerator straight into the Catskill Mountains. I’m bringing back my series "Tree Minute" to finally learn what I’m looking at out there in the woods. To help, I’ve teamed up with Giovanna D’Angelo, an education forester with the Catskill Forest Association, who graciously agreed to teach me how to tell a yellow birch from a black birch and why some aspens quake that way.

Then, I visit my friend, novelist Tom Grattan, to hear what he’s been reading lately. He’s got four summer books to recommend, from a queer coming-of-age classic to a smart novella about the illusions of perfection – and the page-turner set in upstate New York that everybody's been talking about for the past year.

Books We Talk About

• "Tramps Like Us," by Joe Westmoreland
• "The Hive and the Honey," by Paul Yoon
• "The God of the Woods," by Liz Moore
• "Perfection," by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes

Links & Resources

• Browse The Jiffy-Mart: thejiffy.xyz/jiffy-mart
• Follow me on Instagram: @jamescave
• Follow Catskill Forest Association: @catskillforest
• Follow Tom Grattan: @tomgrattan

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Until next time, I'll see you on the Instagram feed.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Jiffy Audio Newsletter podcast, a podcast about upstate New York that takes you places like right here. We're still right in the grab bag of goods. If you remember in our last episode, we took a tour of the new Jiffy Mart, the online bodega of the James Cave Instagram feed. That's me. I'm James Cave. We saw the bodega cat room. We looked at the cash register. We visited my office and we learned about how to approach writing land acknowledge for our organizations. Now, this is part two in the Grab Bag series, celebrating the grand opening of the Jiffy Mart. There's just so much to see here. This is where I have the premium subscriber community. It's got premium content like behind the scenes footage, audio exclusives, access to J Magazine, the style magazine of the feed. It all helps to support this podcast and all the other projects I'm doing around here. In fact, the Jiffy Mart is open right now. If you'd like to shop around, you can find it at thejiffy.com. or you can find a link to it in my show notes. And you can join the membership right there as well. It all helps to support this stuff. But now back to the tour. Over here, as you see, the book section is completely empty. I have no idea what to put here. There's just too many books. So later in this episode, we're going to visit novelist Tom Grattan at his house to see what he's been reading so far this summer. But first, I want to show you something. Over here against this wall, this is the forest refrigerator of the woods. This refrigerator, believe it or not, When we open it up, it takes us straight to the heart of the Catskill Mountains. It's like a portal. The problem with the forest refrigerator is that I have no idea what I'm looking at. When I open it up, there's just so many trees in there. I can't tell a tree from a tree. And that's a problem because I've started a series over on the Instagram feed called Tree Minute. It's all about trees. Here's the story. It was about 66 weeks ago. It was the depths of winter. When I looked outside in the morning light and I I saw the trees in the woods around my house just glistening like they were encrusted in diamonds. They were completely frozen top to bottom. Every leafless branch reflecting the morning sun like a forest of glass. It was really neat and so I thought, I've got to make some content out of this. I like trees. We should start a series about trees. So it became the first episode and then the only episode of a brand new series called Tree Minute. Here, I'll play that first episode for you right now. It's just about one minute long. Good morning. So the trees are really frozen. I feel like it's something that we should make for content. I feel like that's what nature wants. It wants to be seen on Instagram. So let's go look at the frozen trees. That's what we're doing on our first episode of Tree Minute. What happens when trees freeze? Did you know that trees are the largest living thing on the planet? Some trees out in California are larger and heavier than even blue whales. Isn't that something? And more than that, trees are essentially 80% water. And of course, if all that water were to freeze up, trees would be exploding all over the place. But not here, as you can see. So what's happening? Well, trees are softer and more flexible than glass or metal, obviously, which would burst under the pressure of frozen water. And as the water expands in and around the trees' interiors, the tree's tissue can stretch enough to avoid bursting, in most cases. And if you remember from Leafwatch Leap 2023, the leaves drop their leaves every year so as to reduce their need for water. Some trees, like maple trees, start to produce a lot of sugar for the winter because when the sugar dissolves in water, it lowers the water's freezing point, sort of like a natural antifreeze. This is why a lot of people like to tap into maple trees to make syrup. Isn't that something? Well, this concludes this episode So that's the idea. Tree Minute. Clearly, I think trees are important. I think they deserve space on the James Cave Instagram feed. But the thing about that first Tree Minute episode is that I got most of my facts completely wrong. So... If I was really to understand trees and really make space for tree storytelling here on the James Cavy Screen Feed, I thought it'd be important to bring in an expert who can really talk to us about trees from a place of knowledge and accuracy. So here we go. As I open up the tree refrigerator to the woods and walk through this cooler, transporting us to the middle of the Catskill Mountains, we're going to bring back Tree Minute, but this time in partnership with the Catskill Forest Association, specifically their education forester Giovanna D'Angelo who looks like she's already out there identifying some trees for us. Hey, let's go catch up with her and see what she's looking at.

SPEAKER_00: 4:47

Okay, I'm going to... Let's see if we can identify that older tree, and that'll decide which one I talk about right now. All right, so we're here with yellow birch, or Betula alleghaniensis of the Betulaceae family. So yellow birch... is very distinctive in its bark. It's coming off in these thin papery curls. The bark is exfoliating. It's also reflective with this unique bronze yellowish golden color to it that is unique to yellow birch. Paper birch also exfoliates, but it exfoliates in larger sheets and the colors are different.

SPEAKER_01: 5:28

What makes birch so special,

SPEAKER_00: 5:32

huh? Well, to me, what makes yellow birch and also black birch so special is the winter green smell and taste in the twigs and the roots.

SPEAKER_01: 5:41

That's really cool. It looks like minty.

SPEAKER_00: 5:43

Let me see if I can... That might be a baby leaf over there. Yes! Okay, there we go. This, though, this is black birch. Smell that. No, James. No, James, smell

SPEAKER_01: 5:56

it.

UNKNOWN: 5:56

Oh.

SPEAKER_00: 5:57

It smells so good.

SPEAKER_01: 5:58

Whoa,

SPEAKER_00: 6:00

isn't that insane? They were one of my favorite trees when I learned them because I was like, no way. I was like, there's just no way. Yeah, yellow birch is one of the trees where I'm often like, who made this? Like who made all of this? Who put winter green tasting, smelling compounds in birch? I love it. So at the Catskill Forest Association, we are a nonprofit organization, and we rely solely on educating our members, and through that, getting the population around here to steward their forested land. So we rely mainly on education to do that through hands-on programs, through workshops, publications online, as well as our newsletter. Yeah, so I do a variety of different things. We fill a lot of niches for small landowners, everything from pruning and grafting apple trees to, you know, habitat cutting for wildlife and mushroom inoculation.

SPEAKER_01: 6:54

For me, like I have five acres of my place and I've got a range of trees. Why is it helpful for me to be able to identify them and understand what they do and just know them a little bit better? Why do you think that's important?

SPEAKER_00: 7:06

So there's no one reason that fits everything. everyone, but trees can be useful to everyone and to anyone for a variety of different goals. Like maybe you're heating your place with wood and maybe you want to get that wood from your property because it's coming from someone's wood. So why not yours? You know, you want to know which trees to cut. Maybe you want to know the health of the trees so you can pick the best trees to cut. You know, different firewood will burn differently, like different tree species burn differently. So you'd want to know how to identify them so you can tell which trees to take out. So you're not burning white pine in your fireplace, you know? We're here with Quaking Aspen or Trembling Aspen, Populus tremuloides of the Salicaceae family or the Willow and Poplar family. You can tell it's Quaking Aspen. It's got this very light characteristic bark. It's a light gray, almost white in some places. It's very smooth, but it's got these fissures, these light fissures going up and down. It also has chevrons, dark chevrons or eye-like patterns along the bark. If you go up on the tree and you take a look at the twig, you'll notice that the leaves of quaking aspen are alternately arranged on the stem, meaning they come off alternately on alternate points, not oppositely. If we take a look at the leaf, you'll notice what's unique is that the petiole or the stem of the leaf is flat, meaning I can't twirl it in my fingers. This is what gives the aspen the characteristic tremble or quake that gives it its name. So when the wind catches it, the leaves almost look like they're waving at you. But really, the biggest reason is that the trees are here next to us every single day. Everywhere you drive, even just stepping outside of your house, you know, we beautify our spaces with them. They clean the air in our spaces. I think it's just general knowledge at this point to be able to tell the difference between a couple of species. You don't have to be able to tell every single one apart, but just to have a general knowledge I think is respectful to the land and also something really useful that will come in handy in many different ways in your life.

SPEAKER_01: 9:07

It is a calm day.

SPEAKER_00: 9:07

Yeah. It's a hot one today, and thankfully quaking aspen has a powdery-like residue on the bark, also called a bloom, that Native Americans would sometimes use as sunscreen or protection from the sun. The bark also has salicin in it, a compound that is anti-inflammatory, and the same compound you find in willows, also in the salicaceae family, that help with pain relief and was the inspiration behind aspirin. Yeah. My hands feel nice and soft now.

SPEAKER_01: 9:41

Because of the leaves or because

SPEAKER_00: 9:43

of him? Wow.

SPEAKER_01: 9:45

Thank you, tree.

SPEAKER_00: 9:46

Oh, look, they're going. They're quaking. They're quaking. Nice. Look at them go. So

SPEAKER_01: 9:54

can you talk to me about your process? Like what's tree identification 101? How do you get started on this?

SPEAKER_00: 10:01

I think I do have a process. It can differ from person to person depending on what they notice. Definitely starting up close with a tree when you're new to it. So, you know, looking at the bark first, sometimes bark is very characteristic of the tree. Even though it's a feature that can look quite different from species to species, there's certain characteristics that will only happen in that one species and And so that is what I like to learn are those key points of identification. Like I know when I'm walking up to a black cherry, that burnt potato chip-like bark, I'm not seeing on any other tree in our area. Or when I'm walking up to paper birch and I'm seeing that white papery bark that's peeling in these large curls, I know that that's not happening on any other tree in the area. And then from there, from the bark or from that characteristic main feature, I go to the more nuanced features that I'm not sure you know, if the leaves might look like other trees, but I can check my work that way. So I'll start with the simplest as I begin tree identification and work my way up to the harder ones. Now, as a forester, I like to check myself in the woods, so I'll start with the hardest piece of identification for me. So maybe I'll look at a leaf that looks like three other different tree leaves, and I'll see if I can guess based on looking at the leaf, or based on the bud in winter. And then maybe I'll use something more obvious, like bark, to check my work.

SPEAKER_01: 11:20

Now you're just flexing.

SPEAKER_00: 11:22

It comes Anyone can do it. Anyone can do it, James. Well,

SPEAKER_01: 11:25

hopefully after they watch Tree Minute with Giovanna, they will be able to do it.

SPEAKER_00: 11:28

Yeah, I'm happy to do it. And I'm happy that as we continue the series, we'll go into different seasons and show characteristic times for those trees. Maybe when we get to winter, we'll start to look at buds a little bit more and that's getting even more detailed. So I'm excited.

SPEAKER_01: 11:45

Here's a fun fact, and longtime friends of the James Gave Instagram feed know this already, but every year come October, the New York Department of Economic Development publishes their highly anticipated annual fall foliage map. It shows when and where all the leaves are changing across the state, and I pull out the James Gave Instagram feed leaf watch camera for our great leaf watch event. I point the camera at one leaf every year to watch the leaves do their annual changing of the colors through the experience of that singular leaf. It's always a different leaf every year. It's always a very different experience. Last year, it just so happened to be the quaking aspen Giovanna just showed us, Catskill Forest. Now, we haven't announced the Leafwatch Leaf yet for 2025, so there's still time to nominate your favorite leaf. We'll be making the announcement soon. And also, be sure to follow the James Cave Extreme Feed at James Cave, as well as Catskill Forest Association at Catskill Forest over on Instagram. We'll be sharing the first episode of Tree Minute very soon. Now, On to the summer books. Where do we even begin? Well, Tom Gratton is always a good place to start. Tom is a novelist, author of such books as The Recent East, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice, and In Tongues, which is one of my favorite books of 2024. He's been nominated for the Penn Hemingway Award and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. But more importantly, and possibly a career highlight for Tom, is that he is the official book reader for the Jiffy Audio Newsletter podcast. That's right. Every quarter, once a quarter, here on the show, I like to visit my friend Tom and talk to him about good books we should all read this time of year. And well, being summer now, one of the year's biggest reading seasons, I needed to know what type of summer books should I stock here at the Jiffy Marts Reading Corner. I mean, I only have space for four books, so they better be good. And one of the many wonders of the Jiffy Mart is that I've got this door here that leads straight into Tom's living room. It's like a direct access. And looking through the window here, it looks kind of like it's a stormy day over at Tom's. I hope we get there in one piece. Okay, we'll just open up the door here. Let's walk through. I hope he's expecting us. Okay, we're here. We're in Tom's living room.

SPEAKER_02: 14:06

Tom, are you okay? How are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you?

SPEAKER_01: 14:10

Oh, I'm good. I'm doing well. Thank you so much. I know I just jumped in here out of the blue, but I was hoping you could talk to me about summer reads. I know that I have not been reading that much because I've been so busy trying to get this Jiffy Mart off the ground, but I know you've been doing some reading, so I thought it might be interesting to hear if there are any good summer reads that you have found that you might recommend that we stock here at the Jiffy Mart reading book aisle.

SPEAKER_02: 14:34

Of course, I have a bunch. I will limit it to four because I could talk about books for many more hours than we have. But yeah, so Summer Reads, I think there are so many books that came out recently that are great. Some of those will be my recommendations. Some of them will be books that are a couple years older because I think it's sometimes nice to go back and see the books that people maybe have missed. But the first one is technically, we are recording this the first day of july so pride is over but i think obviously you don't just read queer books in june unless you're a heathen my first recommendation is a really amazing book called tramps like us by joe westmoreland it just it came out originally in the early 2000s was reissued last month by fsg disclaimer it is my publisher They asked me to write a blurb for it, which is how I found out about the book. But I became obsessed with it, and I've become sort of a proselytizer for this book.

SPEAKER_01: 15:32

I love it. So MSG.

SPEAKER_02: 15:34

For our stress, Drew. Sorry. Oh, yes. I was speaking in publishing parlance, as if everyone knows what that means. And as I said, it was for our stress, and Drew reissued it, which some publishers have been doing lately. Books they felt like they were published maybe 15, 20 years ago, but feel like important books. pieces that need a little more attention. And so I really appreciate that certain publishers, including for our stress through does that. So it is a queer coming of age novel that begins with a young man living the narrator living in Kansas. And it's kind of a road trip novel too. So he ends up in New Orleans for a while and then in New York and San Francisco. And what was really interesting about it is a lot of it takes place in the early 70s through the early 80s. So it's really that period between The Stonewall Riots and the AIDS crisis is just... The intensity of that is just unfolding as the book ends. But it's this sort of space between that. I think there's so much understandably fiction about the 80s and the AIDS crisis and queerness dealing pre-Stonewall. And so I think just the fact that he focuses on that is really interesting. But it's also, it's just a really well-told story. He... What I really loved about it, there's a real directness to his writing. It feels really unadorned. It feels like if you have a friend who's just really smart and interesting telling you a great story. So there's not a lot of flowery language. It just feels like a really lived-in story. And thinking about Edwin White, it feels a lot like some of his early work, which felt both... like a historical artifact, but also this really incredibly moving story about being a young queer person in the world. And I think one of the things I just loved about it is this protagonist is who we follow through this world through falling in love and having his heart broken and the beginning of this illness that really decimates his friends and his community. But he's just such a smart, thoughtful character for us to follow. And he's this really interesting character combination of really self-aware, but also kind of guileless, and there are moments of selfishness, but he's also really lovable and really altruistic, and it gives it a real authenticity. It almost feels memoiristic, even though it's a novel, because it just feels like someone's life unfolding. And also, it was really moving because, in this phrase, chosen family is really overused in the world now, and I think it's now become, I don't know, it feels like it's lost what it really means, but especially a lot of queer people then and still now have to, that's family for them is often chosen family. And this group of people sort of navigating the world and just figuring it out and having lots of sex and fun, but also feeling a lot of sadness and, and the world just changing in such dramatic ways for them and how they sort of try to survive when, when survival for them is by no means a foregone, foregone conclusion. It just, it really, um, It's a really moving book, and I think any reader who likes coming-of-age stories, queer stories, stories about love and figuring yourself out and kind of sexy books, I think it's a perfect fit for anyone who would, for that. Called Tramps Like Us by Jo Westmoreland. It's a really beautiful book.

SPEAKER_01: 18:52

Feels like a story of today.

SPEAKER_02: 18:54

Yeah, it does. I mean, that's the thing. I think the way the friendships evolve in the story and... and how he just comes to understand himself in the world feels just really universal. And I mean, he is, he does start in, I think he's late teens or early twenties at the beginning of the book, but it goes for, you know, 15 years. So it's, but so you really, it is a story you watch someone grow up and someone who is really just compelling and You have a lot of, I have had a lot of love for this character by the end. And I think that's when you just, when the book ends and you're like, I will miss this person. And that's something that I thought was really remarkable about it.

SPEAKER_01: 19:30

Okay, what else do we have?

SPEAKER_02: 19:32

I'm a big short story reader. So, and I think you can read them in any season, including summer. And I've also been thinking about, since our last book conversation a few months ago, There are so many amazing writers in the Hudson Valley, either who live here or write about this area. And I've gotten to know many of them or just know their work. And so I thought, especially since we are in the Hudson Valley, it's nice to really focus on at least one writer who's from our orbit. So this is a short story collection, the most recent story collection by the writer Paul Yoon. It's called The Hive and the Honey. And it's an amazing book. It did... I think I've talked about this before, probably in our last conversation, that short story collections don't often get a lot of attention. This one got a good amount. It won the 2024 Story Prize, which is basically the biggest short story prize in the US. And Time Magazine said it was one of the 10 best books of that year. And there's a real reason for it. It's seven stories. And there's incredible range in his work. He often writes about characters in the Korean diaspora, but... Some stories take place hundreds of years before. They take place in different parts of the world, really different experiences. And each story, you think you know what it's about or going to be about. And then he moves in a direction that totally upends what you're expecting and makes the stories more emotional, more surprising. He writes just really beautiful, flawed, complicated characters. And there's a real delicacy to his stories and to his sentences. It doesn't mean that the stories... a lightness to them. He writes about these very big topics, including, you know, of violence and immigration and all these things. But there's just, he can boil down a really complicated moment to sort of this one perfect image. So it's almost like he's like a miniaturist, whatever I think. So even though many of the stories are quite long, it just feels like he can distill a whole life into a 20-page story, which is a real feat. And there's a real range to each story. But if you are thinking about you're a short story reader and you really love beautiful language and complex characters i would recommend reading paul yoon also one of the stories in the book i have um right here i see it over there i have it here i think it's the last story which is a gorgeous story it was in the new yorker a few years ago and it's called valley of the moon and it's an amazing it's it is the story where it is a whole life of several characters that somehow he packs into 25 pages in a way that doesn't feel rushed or any, it just, it feels like a complete world and these lives. And so that's in the New Yorker. He also had a story really recently, maybe four or five months ago called war dogs in the New Yorker. So if you think you might want to read this, if you have a New Yorker subscription, you can read those there even better. They, the New Yorker has a, podcast called The Writer's Voice for each every week when they publish a story the writer actually reads that story on the podcast so if you have any sort of streaming platform Paul's also a great reader so you can read this Story Valley of the Moon in the New Yorker if you wanted to but I guarantee once you read it or listen to it you will want to read the whole thing but for short story heads this is really what you should be reading right now.

SPEAKER_01: 22:52

So short stories do you feel like I wonder sometimes I think maybe a short story collection could also be seen as like a concept album or something like maybe each track or each short story could be seen as an under some sort of other larger concept. Do you think that way about short story collections or how do you look at short story collections and how would you think of Paul's sort of book here fitting into something like that?

SPEAKER_02: 23:12

I mean, I think in a way there are there are thematic threads. It's not like there are some story collections like Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout or or Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones, which the former is this character appears in some way in every single story. And then the second one, it all takes place in one neighborhood in DC. So they have much more, their organizing principles are much clearer. This is, this doesn't have that, but I think just in terms of people, there are themes about surviving in a complicated world and self-discovery and sort of, and just how to sort of make a life. So I think his is more of a concept album or, or, it feels a little more diffuse in terms of the connections, but they all work really nicely together. And I think also some collections, because it's quite short and the stories are, you can really read a couple in a day, no problem. It's something that you sort of are carried along with really easily. So I think some collections really do have much more of a clear organizing principle. Whereas this, I think it's just him exploring different characters in the world and, and you know, stories from hundreds of years ago versus stories happening right now. And there are connections between them, these subtle connections between these characters and sort of how they figure out the world that I think is really beautiful.

SPEAKER_01: 24:33

Okay, what's next on your list? Is it another

SPEAKER_02: 24:35

Paul by any chance? It is not a Paul, it is a Liz. So I, as you can perhaps tell, I often read sort of these quiet, introspective literary books, but I was, sometimes I get, I get a hankering for something different. And I'd seen this book before, All over the place. And a lot of people said it was really great. It's called The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. It came out last year. I believe it would technically be labeled a crime-slash-thriller book. I don't always know if those distinctions or siloing literature is that useful, because I do think that it's a really well-told story and... It's one of those books you just, once you start it, she's really good at not letting you stop because she... Is it a page turner? It is a page turner. It is one of those books where I'd finish a chapter, I was like, well, now I can go to bed, or now I can brush my teeth, or now I can do the dishes, and the chapter would end. And I'd be like, oh, Liz Moore, what have you done to me? I have to keep reading. It takes place in the Adirondacks in 1975. There is a summer camp there that is... owned by a wealthy family who has a big summer house just up the hill from this camp. And when the book begins, the wealthy family, the main couple, their 13-year-old daughter who's been at that camp, one night they wake up and she has disappeared. And so it becomes this story of this person's disappearance. But what I thought was so well done in this book is that I think there are 10 or 12 point of views. She moves from point of view, everyone from the parents to... the daughter who's disappeared to one of the camp counselors. And so because of that, you get such a full picture of this world. And in doing that too, there's so much tension even before this disappearance. This wealthy family who summers in the Adirondacks is surrounded by this town and this community of working class people who are just struggling to make ends meet. And they really survive by serving the needs of the wealthy people who come for three months out of the year. So there's this inherent tension there that I think is done really well. Additionally, one of the characters, probably my favorite characters, is a woman named Judy, who is a police investigator. What's really fascinating is that she was in the first class of state troopers to graduate from the academy where they accepted women. And then it's a few years later, and now she's the first female investigator for the New York State Police. She's also quite young and And because of this, she is just navigating so much on all the ends of sort of people dismissing her, people assuming that she's a secretary or whatever it is, or just they're assuming that she doesn't have the authority she has. So she is a really, really well done character, really fascinating, really smartly done. And just sort of, that was 50 years ago. So 50 years ago, that was the first time women were allowed to be state troopers in this state, which isn't a long time ago, especially for those of us who are middle-aged. So I found all that really interesting and the way it's about class dynamics and gender and, and sort of just the insiders of the outsiders, this community. And I think she perhaps is so compelling because she lives a few hours away. So she is both an outside, she's an outsider in all these different ways. Also the other detectives sort of don't give her the time of day because she is a woman. And so, It feels like a Kate Winslet vehicle.

SPEAKER_01: 27:57

Do you think about, like, thinking about this when you're reading these? Do you cast them by any

SPEAKER_02: 28:02

way? I mean, I think the character's name is Judy. Well, actually, I think her parents are Polish immigrants, so her real name is Judita, but she goes by Judy because Americans can't pronounce names that are... complicated sometimes. So she's, I think, maybe 25 or 26. So I think it would be maybe Kate Winslet of 20 years ago could have done it. But I think she also could play one of the other characters. I mean... Oh,

SPEAKER_01: 28:25

maybe like a Saoirse Ronan.

SPEAKER_02: 28:26

Saoirse Ronan, for sure. Anyway, so it's really well done. It's really surprising. It is a total page-turner. And I thought it was really well written, too. And I think oftentimes crime and thrillers, they don't get credit for the images and the sentences. And I think it's also... there's really strong writing too, in addition to really strong characterization and a fantastic plot. And so it was just one of those books I was kind of addicted to and I couldn't stop reading. It's a longer book because there's a lot happening in it rather than the Paul Yoon book, but it's totally worth it. And it doesn't ever feel like... It's dragging or it's too long. When you get towards the end, you're like, wait, how is this going to end? And that's a great feeling when you haven't figured out the end and you still want to know. So I think she's so great with plot. She's so great with character and complicating the narrative. So it is a quintessential summer read because it's fun and plotty and dark. And it takes place in the summer in the Adirondacks. Oh, that's so relaxing. Is that bad for the recording that we're listening

SPEAKER_01: 29:28

to? That's actually quite a vibe, especially because we're talking about a mystery. We are,

SPEAKER_02: 29:34

and I think there are

SPEAKER_01: 29:44

some thunderstorms there. to The Unseen World and The God of the Woods, which we just learned about from Tom's selections of Summer Reads 2025. But what does it mean, Tom? Because your book has also been optioned, is that correct?

SPEAKER_02: 30:10

Yeah, my second book has been optioned. So it can mean lots of things, and oftentimes it ends up being just a nice possibility that doesn't become anything, which I'm saying that because I'm trying to not get my hopes up. But to be optioned essentially is a production company or a director or sometimes a well-known screenwriter is interested enough in your material that they pay you a small amount of money for them to have the exclusive film and television rights for usually 18 months and then after those 18 months they can either extend it for another year or so or if they move to if they're moving forward in terms of going into production or pre-production, then the author starts to actually make proper money. So an option typically is just a small amount of money they give you so that you can't offer the rights to anyone else for that time period. And my agent was reminding me, because I got a little... in a tizzy about being optioned. And I was like, and she was, and she reminded me that most of her authors have been options and very. So, I mean, I've been optioned by a director who is an indie director and is a big fan of the book, reached out to me after reading it, not through any agent. This is in tongues, right? And he and his screenwriter are working on a screenplay now. So, and he even said to me, you have a better chance of me making it because I don't just, because big production companies also, I think what they do is they option 20 different properties. I, I hate calling a book a property, by the way, but that's what they refer to them as. They would call it content. No. 20 different books, and maybe they go forward maybe with one. So I think it's often just to give themselves some options. They option for options, right?

SPEAKER_01: 31:51

I guess it makes sense now when you put it that way. So

SPEAKER_02: 31:54

we'll see. I mean, I don't...

SPEAKER_01: 31:55

Now, are you the writer? So I know that there are some who kind of write for a mass audience, knowing full well that they're most likely to get optioned to get Shondaland treatment or to go on Netflix or something. Do you think about that when you're writing anything? No,

SPEAKER_02: 32:10

because apparently I write sort of weird people who... often make strange decisions. And I, and I like stories that there is some closure, but not, but it's, it's still there. There's still sort of an openness to an end of the story. So I don't, I definitely don't write thinking, Ooh, I'm writing this to be a movie. I know. I think anytime you write trying to make the book something other than what you sort of want it to be, then I think readers can tell too. I think there are some writers, I don't know, Liz Moore is an amazing, she writes great plot and characters and I wonder if the kind of, I think the kind of writing she does, this very sort of story forward, plot driven stuff is easier to translate. So I still don't, I don't imagine she was, she sits there and says, who will play the lead in this story I haven't written yet? I don't think she's, I mean, maybe she does. I've never met her. But I think at least for me, It's like a lovely possibility, but there's a worry, too, because the book is so its thing, and then I think changing it to a different medium is going to just change it.

SPEAKER_01: 33:16

So that's great. Liz Moore, Love, God of the Woods, Liz Moore. So what's next?

SPEAKER_02: 33:20

Okay, and I'm probably going to butcher this writer's name, and I apologize to him. The novel's called Perfection. It's a novella, actually. Vincenzo Latronico, I believe is how you say his name. It was translated by Sophie Hughes from Italian. It is a novel about two expats, a man and woman who are romantic partners, living in Berlin in the early 2010s. We don't know exactly where they're from. They say they're from a country in southern Europe. Of course, because the writer's Italian, I kept assuming it was Italy, but they never actually say that. Anyway, but it's a particular time in Berlin, a couple decades after the wall fell in reunification, but... I mean, now if you go to Berlin, which I find fascinating, you will go to a cafe and you order something in German and they'll say, this is an English-only cafe. Because it's such an international city now, which as someone who speaks German, I get a little on my high horse about that. Oh, you speak German? I do, yeah, because my mom was German, so I spoke German growing up as a kid. So I get all excited to go in there and order a coffee and they're like, English, please. And I'm like, ugh.

SPEAKER_01: 34:28

Anyway, so. You want to go in and try to show off? Yeah. Or

SPEAKER_02: 34:33

to show that I'm not just one of those Americans who assumes everyone will kowtow to my limited language abilities. Okay, back to the book. Even though they live in Berlin and their group of friends is largely international, there are very few Germans in their group of friends, they all work online. This couple is graphic designers. And it's really a book about the internet. I'm pausing when I say that because even saying that, it makes it sound really uninteresting, but it's a really well done, really fascinating book. But it's about sort of the way that sort of everything is so curated online. So even whenever this couple goes away, they will rent their apartment. And so it begins with them sort of staging the apartment for all the pictures for Airbnb. So it's basically this fantasy of curation and the internet that we live in and sort of how we think we can sort of curate our lives.

SPEAKER_01: 35:24

Almost like a presentation of self, like how do we want to be perceived? Yeah,

SPEAKER_02: 35:28

it's like a faux authenticity. And so the novella is, it's quite satirical in a lot of ways and sort of poking fun of... how everyone's like, you need to go to this restaurant and get this one thing, how we fetishize things. So we fetishize a restaurant or a kind of food or a place. And in fetishizing things, sort of often what is amazing about that food or place or thing gets lost. It's also, as the book goes on and, you know, the Syrian refugee crisis is happening, so the complicated things happening in the larger world start seeping into this community, sort of you see sort of how small and precious in a kind of derogatory way that this world is that they are trying to survive in and also for them it starts to feel kind of hollow for this couple as well it's quite a funny book actually one thing and one of the reasons I'm sort of obsessed with it there are very few scenes and there is no dialogue in the entire book And I don't understand how he did this. He really breaks so many of the quote unquote rules of fiction writing in this piece. It's so much describing spaces or them moving through spaces or going to some party or thinking that this party is the thing that's going to make them feel whatever the thing is that they feel like they're lacking. And

SPEAKER_01: 36:46

I love that for a summer book selection, because a lot of beach reads are kind of like 95% dialogue. You know what I mean? It's all conversation.

SPEAKER_02: 36:55

No. And this is, and also just the way he, the details he picks is really smart, both in sort of satirizing this world, but also there are moments too, where you are kind of seduced by the world of we, as we all do, when you see something on Airbnb and you're like this, this, this, little house on a cliff will save me first of all and then if you rent it and you get there you realize next to the cliff is 17 gas stations or whatever or all the things so there's this whole idea of this as the title is a perfection that we're going for that is this sort of false promise of making our lives feel meaningful and full so it's a really smart book it's a book of now that I think that really sort of critiques our world in a way though what I did really appreciate is it didn't feel like it was mocking the main characters. They're sort of stuck in a world that we're all stuck in and sometimes it feels emptier than they wish it would. I mean, one thing about perfection that's interesting is the internet has made the world smaller in a lot of ways. And so the fact that they're hanging out, they're going to dinner parties, and every person at the dinner party is from a different country, and they're all, and sort of the way that English has become the default language for all these itinerant digital nomad communities. So, yeah, it's a really fascinating, smart book, and it's another book you can fly through. I think of the four books I recommended, I think this book and Paul's book are really quick reads, and the other two are perhaps a little more substantial, but they're all really compelling and it's just, and I also want more people to read it because I want people, I want to talk to people about how he pulled it off because sometimes as a writer, you read something and like this works and I don't know how it works or why it works. And that is really exciting. And then makes me feel a little like, how can I figure this out? But so I just want to talk to more people about it because I think it's so well done.

SPEAKER_01: 38:50

I've got Tom's summer reading list in the show notes to this episode. And I've also got an article on the website at thejiffy.xyz. You know, also Tom and I talked about a lot of things. We also talked about blurbs. It's one of my favorite literary topics, the art and craft of writing a good blurb about a novel. It's an audio exclusive that I'll share just for premium members over in the community. You can upgrade to get perks like audio exclusives. It supports this work, and it's all very fun. The community is a thriving place, and I hope you enjoy the stuff that I provide over there. Okay, well, question on the topic of blurbs. What would your blurb be about the Jiffy Audio Newsletter podcast? Let me know, because you can shoot me a text. Send me your blurb of the podcast. There's a link in the show notes for shooting me a text, and I think that's it for this episode. And I'll be back in my next episode as part three in the grab bag series to see where will the grab bag of goods take us next. Until then, I'll see you over on the Instagram feed.