Thank you for listening over the years and helping us reach our 200th episode! To celebrate this milestone, we invited special guests to call the Book Cougars hotline and recommend two forthcoming books they can’t wait for all of us to read. This idea was inspired by Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness, hosts of the podcast Books on the Nightstand, who had a segment called “Two Books We Can’t Wait for You to Read.” Chris and Emily met through Books on the Nightstand; their sunset inspired our sunrise.

As an homage, we were thrilled to have Ann and Michael contribute to the segment along with other guests that have been featured on the podcast over the past seven years including Amy Tector, Andrea Wang, Bianca Marais, Caroline Leavitt, Davina from BookBrowse, Fiona Davis, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Jennifer Savran Kelly, Jenna Miller, Rachel Barenbaum, Kelcey Ervick, Luanne Rice, Jung Yun, and our Mystery Man – John Valeri. We asked our author friends to shout out their new or forthcoming books. Your TBR List just might explode! #SorryNotSorry

And that’s not the only exciting segment in this episode. We crunched the numbers and share our Listener Top Ten Reads of 2023. They are:

Tom Lake – Ann Patchett

Hello Beautiful – Ann Napolitano

Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver

The Covenant of Water – Abraham Verghese

Lessons in Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store – James McBride

Yellowface – R.F. Kuang

The Reading List – Sara Nisha Adams

Remarkably Bright Creatures – Shelby Van Pelt

The Fraud – Zadie Smith

Unlikely Animals – Annie Hartnett

Signal Fires – Dani Shapiro

Absolution – Alice McDermott

The Postcard – Anne Berest

As always, we share what we’re currently reading, what we’ve read, and Biblio Adventures we’ve been on. Emily visited White River Books and the Carbondale Public Library in Colorado. She also attended Aspen Words featuring Ann Patchett in conversation with Elizabeth McCracken. Chris paid her respects to the Barnes and Noble closing in Naperville, Illinois (they’re opening a new format store in nearby Oswego), and visited one of her favorite used bookstores, The Frugal Muse in Darien. She also attended Biography International Organization’s Biography Lab, an online forum about the craft.

If you’re in the Connecticut area, join us on Friday, February 2nd at 5:30 pm ET at Bank Square Books for the launch of Luanne Rice’s new book Last Night. Then on Sunday, February 11th at 5 pm ET, Chris’s wife Laura Thoma will be reading from her work-in-progress as part of the Chester Arts & Literary Weekend.

Reminder: our first quarter readalong book is Indigo by Beverly Jenkins.

All the books we mention in this episode are in the show notes at https://www.bookcougars.com/blog-1/2024/episode200.

Thanks again for listening, and Happy Reading!

Chris & Emily