Bridget Crocker's debut memoir, The River's Daughter, releases today so what a way to celebrate by releasing her interview we did for the Dog Pod!

As a young girl, Bridget sought refuge in the river from a tough childhood. During a near-drowning experience, the river spoke to Bridget, telling her to SWIM! and she survived. Bridget felt the river chose her and her life has been intertwined with rivers all over the world ever since. Tune in and make sure to get your copy of her book, The River's Daughter, today!

Times are tough right now. Turn on the news for a millisecond and it is one anxiety-inducing breaking news alert after the next. Whether it's learning something new, laughing, getting inspired, or just relieving your brain from the now for a few chapters, books are a balm to the soul, especially for these times. In our second BookTalk round table, Julie, Erin and Maggie talk us through the books that are helping them get through.

Books Mentioned:

• Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
• Night Vision by Mariana Alessandri
• Half an Inch of Water by Percival Everett
• Figuring by Maria Popova
• A Book of Bees by Sue Hubbell
• A Woman Among Wolves by Diane Boyd
• The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb
• Counterattacks at Thirty by Won-pyung Sohn
• VenCo by Cherie Dimaline
• Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline

Want to support the continuation of the Honest Dog Pod? Buy books from us! Shop in person, online, or over the phone (https://honestdogbooks.com/). For audiobook lovers, purchase our picks on Libro.fm (https://libro.fm/honestdogbooks) and if you're all about the e-books, support us on Bookshop.org (https://bookshop.org/shop/honestdogbooks)

And don’t forget to subscribe, rate our episodes, and share with your people!

Thanks for listening and keep on reading!

BONUS EPISODE!

The last Saturday in April is known among bookworms nationwide as Indie Bookstore Day. It can be the second biggest weekend for independent booksellers just behind the winter holiday time. At Honest Dog Books, we had a store full of book talks, music, and lively conversations with customers. Kara set up the Dog Pod in the main shop to talk to some HDB staff about their picks from the day, let customers hop on the pod for a chat, and even got some lovely poetry and music from Joel Glickman. It was a fantastic day and we at HDB can't thank you all enough for your continued support.

Books Mentioned:

• There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib
• The Cheesemaker's Daughter by Kristin Vukovic
• The Cautious Traveller's Guide to Wastelands by Sarah Brooks
• The Sirens by Emilia Hart
• The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman
• Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
• Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe
• We Refuse by Kellie Carter Jackson
• Hands of Time by Rebecca Struthers

Want to support the continuation of the Honest Dog Pod? Buy books from us! Shop in person, online, or over the phone (https://honestdogbooks.com/). For audiobook lovers, purchase our picks on Libro.fm (https://libro.fm/honestdogbooks) and if you're all about the e-books, support us on Bookshop.org (https://bookshop.org/shop/honestdogbooks)

And don’t forget to subscribe, rate our episodes, and share with your people!

Thanks for listening and keep on reading!

After their One Tough Broad book club meeting, Julie knew she needed to talk to author and wolf biologist Diane Boyd more. So she asked Diane to do a Zoom interview for our Dog Pod and we are so glad she agreed. Originally from Minnesota, Diane has been living and working out west studying wolves for four decades. When she started, she was the only female biologist in the United States studying wild wolves. She shares some incredible stories: like freeing a wolf from a trap on New Year's Eve to risking her own skin to prevent a wolf from dying of hypothermia. Diane is one tough broad, one badass woman, and we hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did speaking with her.

SHOW NOTES

• A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery by Diane Boyd

Want to support the continuation of the Honest Dog Pod? Buy books from us! Shop in person, online, or over the phone (https://honestdogbooks.com/). For audiobook lovers, purchase our picks on Libro.fm (https://libro.fm/honestdogbooks) and if you're all about the e-books, support us on Bookshop.org (https://bookshop.org/shop/honestdogbooks)

And don’t forget to subscribe, rate our episodes, and share with your people!

Thanks for listening and keep on reading!

Our first round table Dog Pod BookTalk!

In this episode, Julie, Erin, Maggie, and Claire have a round table discussion about North Woods and Martyr! as well as what they're currently reading. Oh, and a very important (and overdue) Shop Dog update.

Books Mentioned in the Episode:

• North Woods by Daniel Mason
• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
• Crush by Ada Calhoun
• You'll Do by Marcia A Zug
• Disfigured by Amanda Leduc
• The Sirens by Emilia Hart
• Dysphoria Mundi by Paul B Preciado
• Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal
• O Sinners! by Nicole Cuffy
• Winter Pasture by Li Juan
• The Day Leap Soared by Blair Braverman

Want to support the continuation of the Honest Dog Pod? Buy books from us! Shop in person, online, or over the phone (https://honestdogbooks.com/). For audiobook lovers, purchase our picks on Libro.fm (https://libro.fm/honestdogbooks) 

And don’t forget to subscribe, rate our episodes, and share with your people!

Thanks for listening! Keep on reading.

We're continuing our theme of badass women for March. Last December, we hosted an author talk over Zoom with Rebecca Donner about her latest book, All The Frequent Troubles of Our Days, and we were thankfully able to record it to share with more of you here!

Rebecca is the great-grand-niece of Mildred Harnack, someone you sadly likely haven't heard about. From Rebecca's website: "Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. As early as 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin...Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now."

Rebecca talks us through some of the in-depth research she had to do for the book, how she learned about her great-grand-aunt, and awes us with the perseverance of Mildred during such horrifying times (that eerily parallel our times now).

SHOW NOTES:

Tech note: This is a recording of a zoom conversation where we had some minor technical issues. Rebecca's audio unfortunately does dip in and out and times, but thankfully most of her audio came out just fine. We apologise for any listening hindrance this may cause at times.

Rebecca's website: https://www.rebeccadonner.com/all-the-frequent-troubles-of-our-days

Want to support the continuation of the Honest Dog Pod? Buy books from us! Shop in person, online, or over the phone (https://honestdogbooks.com/). For audiobook lovers, purchase our picks on Libro.fm (https://libro.fm/honestdogbooks) 

And don’t forget to subscribe, rate our episodes, and share with your people!

Thanks for listening!

We were so fortunate to not only have one badass author in our presence recently, but two. Pam Houston and Deborah Jackson Taffa came to town for a live author talk event in February and we got them to talk to the Honest Dog Pod the morning before. Thanks to both Pam and Deborah for taking the time to sit down with us and for the powerful conversation.

Pam Houston is making her fourth appearance at Honest Dog Books. She is an instructor at the American Indian Institute of the Arts and UC Davis. She teaches writing workshops all over, including at Bayfield's own Wild Rice Retreat. She is the author of the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me. Her most recent book, Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood and Freedom, is her call to action. 

Deborah Jackson Taffa is the director of the MFA program in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and a hometown treasure in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her memoir Whiskey Tender, about growing up as a mixed-tribe Native American torn by the pressures of assimilation, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award, as well as longlisted for a Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction. The memoir was named a Top Ten Book of 2024 by The Atlantic and Time Magazine. It also made top book lists at Esquire, NPR, Elle, Audible, Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, and of course, Honest Dog Books and other outlets. The Washington Post praised Whiskey Tender for its “mesmerizing dive into tumultuous childhood stories and its excavation of a particular place and time”—that being New Mexico’s Navajo territory in the 1970s and ’80s. 

SHOW NOTES

• Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood and Freedom by Pam Houston
• Whiskey Tender: A Memoir by Deborah Jackson Taffa

Want to support the continuation of the Honest Dog Pod? Buy books from us! Shop in person, online, or over the phone (https://honestdogbooks.com/). For audiobook lovers, purchase our picks on Libro.fm (https://libro.fm/honestdogbooks) 

And don’t forget to subscribe, rate our episodes, and share with your people!

Thanks for listening!

Back in January, Julie's daughter Caroline was home from college so we took this opportunity for a mother/daughter book talk. In this episode Caroline talks about how not-so-great her reading year was, compared to Julie's best reading year yet (helps when you're a bookseller and not a college student). They also talk about how being pressured to read a book makes them want to read it less, how stating a book wasn't liked by Julie helps it sell in the bookstore, and so much more.

SHOW NOTES

Books Mentioned:

• How I Became A Nun by César Aira
• I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
• Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• Circe by Madeline Miller
• Sula by Toni Morrison
• Brave the Wild River by Melissa L Sevigny
• The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
• All The Beauty In The World by Patrick Bringley
• The Postcard by Anne Berest
• Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston
• A Small Corner of Hell by Anna Politkovkaya
• All The Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner
• The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black
• Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir
• How To Read a Book by Monica Wood

Thanks for listening!

Want to support the continuation of the Honest Dog Pod? Buy books from us! Shop in person, online, or over the phone (https://honestdogbooks.com/). For audiobook lovers, purchase our picks on Libro.fm (https://libro.fm/honestdogbooks)

A romance enthusiast and romance skeptic walk into a bookstore...

Kara and Erin - a romance enthusiast and romance skeptic, respectfully - sit down to talk through the divisive genre. They talk a bit about the history of romance writings, try to recall their first time…reading a romance book, and sift through some of the pros and cons of romance books.

Whether or not you read romance (or smut, or romantasy, or erotica, or all of the above, etc. etc.), it’s here to stay. It is a layered and complex subject with a centuries’ long history. It is buzzing in sales right now thanks to the BookTok phenomenon, but it is certainly more than a hot trend. Let’s just say, romance books really shouldn’t be judged by their covers. 

Grab some chocolates and press play!

Show Notes

Books Mentioned:

• The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M Auel
• The Present by Johanna Lindsey
• Crush by Ada Calhoun
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas
• Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas
• Want by anonymous, collected by Gillian Anderson
• Haunting Adeline by H D Carlton
• Icebreaker by Hannah Grace
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Twisted Games by Ana Huang
• Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
• Hogbook and Lazer Eyes by Maria Bamford
• Leg by Greg Marshall
• Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead
• The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward
• The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
• Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James
• Juice by Jessica Haerdle
• Anonymous Sex by anonymous, edited by Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
• A Curious History of Sex by Kate Lister
• Lady Chatterly's Love by D H Lawrence
• Queer Werewolves Destroy Capitalism by MJ Lyons

Erin and Kara Romance Book List at Honest Dog Books

Support us on Libro.fm!

Want to support the continuation of the Honest Dog Pod? Support Honest Dog Books! Shop in store, online, on Libro.fm, or order over the phone!

https://honestdogbooks.com/

Thanks for listening!

Julie, Erin and some additional Honest Dog Staff get together to talk about their favourites from 2024, what their reading year was like, and more!

Want to show your support for Honest Dog Books and the Honest Dog Pod? Buy books! Online or in store: https://honestdogbooks.com/

EVENT NOTE!

• Julie mentions looking forward to meeting Deborah Jackson Taffa. Well, you can too! Her and fellow author Pam Houston are doing a LIVE! Author Talk at Honest Dog Books on Saturday February 8th 2025. Get your tickets online or over the phone: https://honestdogbooks.com/events

Books Mentioned in the Episode:

• The Lost Journals of Sacajawea by Debra Magpie Earling
• Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods by Mariana Alessandri
• All The Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner
• Brave the Wild River by Melissa L. Sevigny
• Once Upon a Prime by Sarah Hart
• North Woods by Daniel Mason
• Waterlog by Roger Deakin
• Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman
• The Horse by Willy Vlautin
• Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin
• State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg
• The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg
• Amanda Paradise by CAConrad
• The Last of Its Kind by Gísli Pálsson
• By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult
• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
• A Curious History of Sex by Kate Lister
• Financial Feminist by Tori Dunlap
• Crush by Ada Calhoun
• Also a Poet by Ada Calhoun
• The Fur Person by May Sarton
• Lost Cat by Caroline Paul
• Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
• I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
• The Bookseller at the End of the World by Ruth Shaw
• Whiskey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa

Final Notes:

• Check out https://libro.fm/ for all things audiobooks!