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In episode 86, we first spoke with Melissa Joulwan during the COVID pandemic. She is one of the co-hosts of the Strong Sense of Place podcast. Melissa has been one of our favorite guests to date. You will here the original interview in the second half of the show. For something a little new, you will hear us chat this time around to both Mel and her partner David Humphreys. Since we last spoke with Melissa in 2021, they have added a short weekly podcast to their lineup called the Library of Lost Time in which they each recommend a book and a fun distraction. In this remix, they tell us all about this short concept podcast and they each share a book about a library with us! (Carrie is now reading David’s suggestion.)

A Strong Sense of Place is both a podcast and a website where readers can find interesting bookish conversations with our guest this week, Melissa Joulwan, and her husband David, two expatriates living in Prague located in the Czech Republic. In this week’s episode, she tells us about how they select the places they will visit each season, why place in a book has to meet very stringent specifications, and how roller derby helped her make some big life decisions.

Books Mentioned in this Episode:

Podcasts mentioned--

Books mentioned--

1- Pockets: An Intimated History of How we Keep Things Close by Hannah Coulson

2- The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

3- The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

3- Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld

4- Unseen City by Amy Shearn

5- Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume

6- Forever by Judy Blume

7- The First Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders

8- Archie McNally series by Lawrence Sanders

9- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

10- My Antonia by Willa Cather

11- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

12- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

13- The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova

14- She Walks These Hills by Sharyn McCrumb

15- The Phryne Fisher mysteries by Kerry Greenwood

16- Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

17- Less by Andrew Sean Greer

18- The Curse of Jacob Tracy by Holly Messinger

Movies or TV adaptations mentioned in this episode:

1- Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (Amazon)