291: How Buddy Reads Boost Our Young Adult Reading

Have you ever found that reading with a friend makes a book even better? In this episode, we (Jen and Ashley) dive into the joys of buddy reading, spotlighting some of our favorite young adult books we've read together through Unabridgedpod Buddy Reads—a community reading experience we host monthly on Instagram.

We share how these reads have shaped our perspectives, helped us connect more deeply with the stories, and brought us closer to our reading community. From emotional reads like Darius the Great Is Not Okay to page-turners like Jennifer Lynn Barnes'sThe Naturals, we’re talking about the power of reading together and the books that have stuck with us along the way.

Whether you’re new to buddy reading or a long-time participant in our monthly chats, this episode is a celebration of shared stories and the friendships that grow from them.

Bookish Check-in

Ashley - Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ The Hawthorne Legacy (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Jen - Victoria Christopher Murray’s Harlem Rhapsody (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Unabridgedpod Buddy Read Favorites

Ashley's Mentions:

Jen Ferguson’s The Summer of Bitter and Sweet (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm) - Check out our book review

Joanna Ho’s The Silence That Binds Us (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm) - Check out our book review

Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s The Naturals (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Jen's Mentions:

Nic Stone’s Dear Martin (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Jacqueline Woodson’s Harbor Me (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Jeff Zentner's The Serpent King (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Buddy Reads Featured in Book Club Episodes

Adib Khorram’s Darius the Great Is Not Okay (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Find our discussion, on episode 159, here

Check out this blog post about mental health and bullying

Laura Taylor Namey’s A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Check out episode 180 here

Aiden Thomas’s Cemetery Boys (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Check out episode 201 here

Tiffany D. Jackson’s The Weight of Blood (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Check out our discussion on episode 240 here

Lit Chat Game

#shownotes #buddyreads #yalit

(A note to our readers: click on the hashtags above to see our other blog posts with the same hashtag.)

Interested in what else we're reading? Check out our Featured Books page.

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Full Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Jen: Hi everyone and welcome to Unabridged. This is episode 2 91, how Buddy Reads Boost Our YA Reading.

[00:00:40] Ashley: To get started, we're going to do our bookish check-in. Ashley, what are you reading?

[00:00:45] So one of the books I'm reading is Jennifer Lynn Barnes' The Hawthorne Legacy. This is book two in the Inheritance Game series. I think I shared a while ago when I read book one, we did The Naturals with something. The buddy read. With the buddy read, yeah. So we will talk about that today probably.

[00:01:03] But anyway, that was the first of her books I'd read and I did wind up reading that whole series, which I loved. And then I have been enjoying this one. I feel like I'm several years behind on this. I know it was really popular when it came out. But anyway, this picks right back up with Avery and her

[00:01:22] journey with the Hawthorne brothers to try to figure out all of these really mysterious things that are unclear to them after their grandfather had died, and Avery had inherited a ton of money from him, seemingly very randomly. And so, I don't want to say too much because I think all of it hinges upon book one.

[00:01:45] This is not a series where you can skip book one. You really do want to read an order, but I'm absolutely loving it. I was a little bit worried that I, it's been a little while since I read the other one, and I was worried that I would've forgotten too much. But I think that Barnes does a great job of helping the reader anchor in the things that have already happened without making it feel like a constant retelling of the events from the book before.

[00:02:10] So I really am loving it. I think she does a great job of creating really complicated characters who you love and also who do a lot of really reckless things that make you cringe about their choices. And so I am really swept up in it and so glad that my library holder came in, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in all the shenanigans that they get into in this one.

[00:02:35] So again, that's Jennifer Lynn Barnes with The Hawthorne Legacy, which is book two in the Inheritance Games series.

[00:02:41] Jen: I did hold back a squeal because, you know, I love that series so much and

[00:02:45] Ashley: Really good.

[00:02:47] Jen: a compelling writer. Yeah, I really need to finish going to through her back list because I just have loved everything of hers I've read.

[00:02:54] Ashley: Yeah, she's a lot of fun to read, and I also think the books have kind of a heisty feel to them, even though they're not... What is happening is not a heist. However, I love a heist book, and there's something about these that's kind of like that. There's a lot of like mystery to uncover, a lot of pulling at the threads of things to figure out one clue at a time, and all of that I think is just really well woven, and a lot of fun to read.

[00:03:19] Jen: I agree.

[00:03:20] Ashley: What about you, Jen? What are you reading?

[00:03:22] Jen: So just this morning I started Victoria Christopher Murray's Harlem Rhapsody, and I had a hard time putting it down. It is excellent so far. So this one centers on Jesse Redmond Fauset. It is historical fiction. It is based on a real person who was a key part of the Harlem Renaissance, and yet I know nothing about her.

[00:03:43] She was the first Black woman who was the literary editor of The Crisis, which was a magazine that was very key. It was run by the double NAACP during the Harlem Renaissance. And at the beginning of the book, she's just moved to New York with her stepmother, who is a white woman who married Jessie's dad when she was 12, and she was white.

[00:04:11] She was Jewish, she did convert, because Jessie's father was a minister, preacher. Yeah, those dynamics are really interesting. So her mother actually had married, he was the second of two Black men that she had married, and she is really interested in integrating both ways. So she both thinks that white people should be more accepting of Black people, and that Black people should be more accepting of white people.

[00:04:32] So that's an interesting dynamic. And then the other really interesting dynamic is that Jesse Redmond Fauset was having an affair with WEB Du Bois before he hired her to run the magazine, and she does not ever want to get married. She decided that when she was quite young. She has a lot of career aspirations, and yet I can already feel, like I already have this sense of dread, because the book is hinting that this relationship is going to be problematic for her as she's trying to build her career.

[00:05:04] Because the apartment that Du Bois set up for her is about a mile from where he lives with his wife and daughter. So I sense a lot of drama coming that that's about as far as I am. So she has just where I left off, du Bois had this idea to start a children's magazine to help children understand that black excellence is a possibility, and she's just

[00:05:28] pitched her proposal for that and she just met county Colin. So the, yeah, so it's neat. She also met Nella Larsen in an earlier chapter, so it's neat to see all these figures of the Harlem Renaissance surrounding her. I do feel guilty, I guess, that I didn't know her name automatically, but, so I'm interested to learn more about her and her career.

[00:05:50] Ashley: Wow. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. And same that I haven't heard of her, and so I'm glad that her story's getting told. But yeah, that is

[00:05:57] Jen: and

[00:05:57] Ashley: somebody I wasn't familiar with either.

[00:05:58] Jen: I feel like I should have known. I love the Harlem Renaissance. I teach poetry from the Harlem Renaissance every year. And yeah, so that's a gap in my knowledge that I'm eager to fill.

[00:06:08] So that again is Victoria Christopher Murray's Harlem Rhapsody.

[00:06:13] All right, well we are going to shift over to our main discussion about how Buddy Reeds boost our Ya a Reading. And we wanted to do this episode because we actually started doing these buddy reads in January 2020. And every month on Instagram we have a buddy read chat for our book club book, which all of you have heard about because we have episodes on those, but we also do a YA Buddy Read.

[00:06:40] And sometimes they're the same as our book club pick, if our book club pick is a young adult book, but often those books don't get any play on the podcast because we don't have devoted episodes to them. And we have read some amazing titles. So yeah, we just wanted to highlight some of the books that we've loved.

[00:06:59] These will be shorter synopsis, but hopefully they'll be enough to give you a taste of some of the things that we've read. We are always open to more people joining these buddy reads. And yeah. Ashley, I don't know if there's anything you want to add there.

[00:07:13] Ashley: Yeah, I guess, like Jen said, we discuss these on Instagram. I was totally unfamiliar with the phrase Buddy Read, so if you are not familiar with that, that is just the term that is used. I don't know Jen if you know where that came from or what, but anyway, on Instagram, when people say Buddy Reed, what they mean is you will read along with a group of people and then have a chat about it.

[00:07:36] Often the chat is a text-based chat, but sometimes people do have video calls instead to talk about them. But Buddy Reed is a kind of book club. I mean, I don't know Jen, if there's any distinction there.

[00:07:46] Jen: Not really.

[00:07:47] Ashley: I mean for us, we say book club for the ones that we are going to talk about on the podcast as well.

[00:07:54] And our buddy reads are always young adult as opposed to our book club where we read more widely different age groups and genres. Whereas in the beginning we really, when we started doing the buddy reads, we wanted to a lot of our core. Listeners and audience have to do with that age group. And so we wanted to make sure that we were supporting the teachers, librarians and other people who are always looking for great books to recommend to young adults.

[00:08:20] So that was why we started devoting those buddy reads to young, young adults specifically so that we could read whatever for the book club, but then also felt like we were continuing to serve that part of our audience and, and a passion of ours, of making sure that young adults are getting great opportunities to read awesome books.

[00:08:37] So, you know, we find those by reading them and so that was how we kind of got started with it. But absolutely what Jen said that like, we read these really great books that both of us are like, whoa, this was amazing, but we don't always talk about it here. So we just wanted to make sure we took some time to share about that.

[00:08:54] If you're looking for ways to read along, or if you're looking for great young adult books, this is a good way to find some.

[00:09:02] Jen: Yeah. All right. Well I think what we can do is just take turns highlighting some books that we've loved. If you are intrigued after this episode and want to join us, you can check us out on Instagram at unabridged pod, or you can just search the hashtag unabridged pod buddy read, and you should get a lot of results there.

[00:09:20] We try to tag all of our announcements and yeah, it's as easy as joining and, you know, you could be a lurker the first time and not really participate in the conversation if you just want to see what it's all about. We tend to do Rolling Chats now, which just means we have a date by which everyone we hope will have read the book, but they can chime in whenever with their thoughts.

[00:09:40] yeah. And so that's our model right now, though. It has been different in the past, so. All right. Well, Ashley, what's one book you would like to highlight?

[00:09:48] Ashley: So one that crossed my mind when we were talking about doing this topic is Jen Ferguson's The Summer of Bitter and Sweet. And this one is set in the Canadian Prairie. And it is an indigenous story of Lou who is in the summer.

[00:10:08] I think she's in the summer before. It's been a little while since we read this one, but I think she's the summer before her senior year for sure. She's getting close to the end of high school and she is really looking at the complexity of her life. She's uncovering some things about her family. She's trying to figure out how to navigate relationships.

[00:10:31] She's learning a lot about herself as a person, and it's a lot of a coming of age story of her figuring out some things about herself that are really important. And I think the reason that it came to my mind is just that it's one that I absolutely had not heard of on my own and wouldn't maybe not have read.

[00:10:48] And I just thought it was phenomenal. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a really powerful story, and I thought it was quite different from anything else that I had read. So that's Jen Ferguson's The Summer of Bitter and Sweet. And again, I think it's just a great example of where I'm so glad I do participate in the Buddy Reads because it's one that I don't know that I would've

[00:11:06] found on my own, and that I thought was a really powerful and important story that was different from a lot of the other things I'd read.

[00:11:14] Jen: I love that one, too. Yeah. That's still the only book of hers I've read, but she's one I should revisit.

[00:11:20] Ashley: What about you, Jen? What's one that you wanted to talk about?

[00:11:23] Jen: One of the first ones that popped into my head is actually technically middle grade, is Jacqueline Woodson's Harbor Me. And that is about a group of friends who are placed in the same class in their middle school, and they all have very different situations and challenges in their lives. One student, for example, is afraid that his family is going to be deported.

[00:11:47] One girl is dealing with the death of her mother, so they each have things going on, but what I remember most about that book is just the sense of support and of love between them. I feel like it could not be more relevant right now because some of the issues that they are dealing with in their lives are things that are really coming to the forefront of our culture right now.

[00:12:09] And so I feel like it would still resonate topically, but there's also just this beautiful sense of the ways that these kids can come together, sometimes more effectively than adults can to support and love each other. And it is a book that, yeah, just is so warm and so beautiful. It's very short. It's a fast read, but it is so powerful.

[00:12:35] So Jacqueline Woodson's Harbor Me is one that has really stuck with me.

[00:12:39] Ashley: Yes, I love that one so much. And absolutely if you've not read that, it is well worth the time. It reads so quickly and it is very impactful. And yeah, like you said, I think just uplifting. I think it's, if you're looking for hopeful reads, this is a great one to read right now.

[00:12:57] And to encourage kids to read too. Like it's just such a powerful book and a good, it's just... I think Woodson often does a really great job of showcasing empathy, like how to cultivate empathy, why empathy is important, and how having empathy in our lives can really make our lives so much fuller.

[00:13:17] Jen: Yeah.

[00:13:18] Ashley: It's such a good one.

[00:13:18] Jen: What's another one that stuck with you, Ashley?

[00:13:21] Ashley: Another one I really loved was Joanna Ho's The Silence That Binds Us. That is when we did not as long ago, the years just run together. I'm like, when did we do this? Was it last spring? I think maybe. Anyway,It's about Maybelline Chen, and she is a Chinese Taiwanese American

[00:13:41] so at the very beginning, in this very high achieving community, her brother Danny dies by suicide and everyone's profoundly, he's shocked and. Of course Maybelline is devastated and her family is devastated, and yet there is this community backlash from part of the community that wants to place all this blame.

[00:14:09] It was not the first of that type of thing to be happening in the community. And so there's a lot of blame going around. There's some outright racism happening. There's a lot of judgment and May and her friends get caught up in all of that. And I just think such a powerful book, such a beautiful portrayal of how complex all those things, like mental health and social issues and all of those, how complex unpacking all of that can be.

[00:14:39] And yet what I really loved about it is the focus on activism and this idea that even when these really horrible and hard things happen that teenagers can. Should make effort to empower themselves to bring about positive change. And I think that the book just does a really great job of both not simplifying how complicated all of that is, how much pressure there is to not act in the face of what people are... like when people are trying to silence you.

[00:15:12] How easy it is to give in to that silence, how that is the simpler pathway. Sometimes the safer pathway, like all of that's really explored. And yet me and her friends continue to recognize the importance of taking a stand. And so we really see that. So, I mean, I just thought it's, it's brilliantly done.

[00:15:31] It's such a great read. And again, that is Joanna Ho's The Silence That Binds Us.

[00:15:36] Jen: Yeah, that when I saw that on your list, that novel, really there are just moments in that book that I can picture so vividly still, even though it's been a little while since we read it. I think the writing is so... She's a really strong writer, so the plot is compelling, emotional, I ugly, cried more than once.

[00:15:57] And then there are also moments of writing that you could definitely highlight. Like if you wanted to teach this with students or recommend it to students, there are moments that you could highlight for sure.

[00:16:06] Ashley: Absolutely. Yeah. Joanna Ho is the author of several children's books, so I knew her from her book, Eyes That Kiss in the Corners, which is a beautiful book, but I did not know that she was also writing Young Adult, and so I just really enjoyed seeing, I mean, she's just a very versatile and talented writer.

[00:16:25] Yeah. What about you, Jen? What's another one you've loved?

[00:16:29] Jen: So when I first started brainstorming, I had this realization not too long ago that I was highlighting a bunch of books that were book club picks as well. So I want to mention them even though they've gotten plenty of play on the podcast. So Adib Khorram's Darius the Great is Not Okay. Still one of my favorites and it has a sequel now that was.

[00:16:47] Is equally as good. Laura Taylor Namey's A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow was such, oh... It's light, but there are also some really heavy topics that it is dealing with. Aiden Thomas's Cemetery Boys was the first thing I read by Thomas and I have just become committed to reading all of his books.

[00:17:07] They're so, so good. And Tiffany D. Jackson's The Weight of Blood, which is a retelling of Stephen King's Carrie. That mixes horror and social justice in a way that is just amazing. So, okay. Onto my actual pick.

[00:17:21] Ashley: If you have not read those or listened to the episodes about those, absolutely. Those are great ones for Jen to highlight, and they were ones that. I, I loved all of those as well and, and rarely, different from each other. Also, like different genres. you know, a lot of different things about them, but I think all four of them are just like powerhouse books that we really loved.

[00:17:42] Jen: So I will officially, now that I'm done cheating, highlight Jeff Zentner's The Serpent King. And I will just say I have never made it through a Jeff Zentner book without it making me sob at some point. And this was no exception. This is the first book I'd ever read by him. And it focuses on three best friends.

[00:18:03] I would say Dill, for me is the main protagonist and he is dealing with the fact he, so his family are Pentecostal and his dad is a Pentecostal minister who is incarcerated because of some crimes he committed, but Dill has a really complicated relationship with his mother and his father and with how they expect him to live his life and the role that they

[00:18:35] expect him to take. They just have a really different vision for who he should be and how he should function and what his future goals should be than he does. And he has, his female best friend is Lydia, who has a fashion blog. They live in the Bible belt. They live in the deep south. She yearns to be a fashion influencer.

[00:18:57] She has a really successful fashion blog.And then the third friend is Travis, and he loves fantasy and world building and cosplaying as much as he can get it in his community. And just watching, you know, they go through some challenges with each other, but watching their relationship build through the book and seeing they're, they're right on the cusp of graduation.

[00:19:25] And so seeing how they are all dealing with that transition. Both in their individual lives, but also with each other is beautiful. I don't want to give any spoilers, but yeah, I found it to be a very moving book about a group of teenagers that we don't often read about. So I really like that part of it and seeing how they are dealing with the inevitable parental conflict that comes with teenagers, but in a different way than usual.

[00:19:50] So that is Jeff Zentner's The Serpent King.

[00:19:53] Ashley: Yeah, I love that one, Jen.

[00:19:55] Jen: Yeah, so good. Alright. What's one more Ashley?

[00:19:59] Ashley: One more for me. Well, first, Jen mentioned some that we covered, I had said right at the beginning, so I just wanted to circle back to that. Jennifer Lynn Barnes... We read The Naturals, which is a great example for me, where right at the beginning if I had not been reading with a buddy Reed, I would not have continued that book because it is.

[00:20:19] Pretty grizzly. There are parts that are really grizzly and because it is about a serial killer, the whole, the whole thing is about serial killers. And so that is not my jam. I do not like true crime. I don't really like things that explore, they're really dark. This is not true crime, but I don't like the ones that explore that part of humanity particularly.

[00:20:39] But this is a great example where, because we read it with a group, I stayed with it and then I loved it. I think it just really. All the things I said about her Hawthorne series, about The Inheritance Games, like this is true in The Naturals also, like really complex characters who are trying to figure out the right thing. Yeah. So anyway, I'm not going to get into details. I just want to say that I think what I love about Buddy Reads is sometimes they push us to read something that we might not read otherwise. And while it's always okay to say like, this is not for me, I think that. Sometimes for me, I'll just speak for myself as a reader.

[00:21:14] I do need a nudge to like try something that's a little bit different and then often I am so glad I did so... And obviously me reading her other series speaks to the fact that like I discovered an author I never would've known anything about if it hadn't been for the buddy reads or I'm glad for that.

[00:21:29] But I wanted to share also just for one more to highlight is Nina LaCour's We Are Okay. I. I did love LaCour before, so this is an example where I did know the author, but I had not read this one, and it has just really stayed with me. I think that this is a book that showcases how isolated people can be.

[00:21:54] And we really see that, in this and also how community can save us. And so I think that it's an important book. So Marin in this one. Is she's like traveled across the country to go to college and we see her at the beginning of winter break, and she's entirely alone, essentially, on the campus because everybody has gone home. But she stayed and we just see that she's kind of unraveling. And we don't necessarily know why, but as the story unpacks, we come to find out why she went across the country, why she left

[00:22:33] Jen: her grandfather that she lived with so much of her life, and we start unpacking the grief that has shaped her life, but also her grandfather's life and how they're carrying that very differently. And then like how that impacts her current situation. So she kind of flees the space and then in the book, it's very much focused on her best friend as coming out to visit, and she has a lot of complicated feelings about that.

[00:23:03] Ashley: And so I just thought it was a really powerful book. I think it really gets into what a mental health crisis can look like. And how important it is to like, take those steps to stay connected to people, even if you are having to push a little bit and why that's important and what a difference it can make.

[00:23:20] So Marin is really, like I said, in the beginning you can kind of see that she's unraveling. and then when her best friend comes, we start to unpack why she left and like what is going on and how she's trying to handle all this all by herself as a freshman in college and. you know how that has to change, like something has to change for her.

[00:23:38] So again, that's Nina LaCour's We Are Okay. I love that book, but another one where I'm so glad that we read it together because it was such an important read for me. So

[00:23:47] Jen: Yeah, that book was incredible. I just keep thinking about LaCour's spare writing and it's, it's so slim, but yes, you get so deeply into her consciousness. It's really beautiful.

[00:23:58] Ashley: What about you, Jen? What, what other one did you want to mention?

[00:24:01] Jen: So I want to harken back to our very first Unabridgedpod Buddy read, which was Nic Stone's Dear Martin, and I know Nic Stone gets plenty of publicity, but there's something momentous about that being our first it, the book has now had two sequels, so I have not read the the third book in the series, but this first book is about justice, who early in the book

[00:24:25] has a very negative experience with some police officers that is totally unjustified, and he is really wrestling with how to move on from the incident. And one of his methods of processing is to write letters to Martin Luther King Jr. And so Stone does some really innovative things with the structure of the book and

[00:24:53] has some just conversations that she includes in the text that Justice is having with teachers and students at his school. You see the way he is trying to wrestle with the different reactions that other people have had to what happens to him, some of which are not as sympathetic as they should be, and yeah, I just think you see a teenager

[00:25:20] really trying to contend with how he fits into society. So that is Nic Stone's Dear Martin, our very first Unabridgedpod Buddy Read, and yeah, the thing that started it all.

[00:25:33] Ashley: Yeah. I love that. Such a great book and yeah, this was a big change for us when we added the buddy reads, so very cool.

[00:25:41] Jen: All right, well, if you have been doing any buddy reading with us and you want to highlight some books, we'd love to hear some of the books that you have loved. You can find us on Instagram at Unabridgedpod, and again, we invite you to try one, and there's no pressure. It's a very low key part of our podcast

[00:25:59] community. But you know, it's just a way to read new books together and experience them together. And sometimes it's more about the reading than even the discussion. I think just having books that you know, someone else is reading with you can be really empowering. So.

[00:26:14] Ashley: Yeah.

[00:26:15] Jen: Alright, well we are going to round out with the lip chat game, so I'm pulling out the cards. I will say this… Every card has two questions. So the first one I think you will all know is a given. It's, do you ever listen to audio books? Why or why not? So if there's anything you want to say about audio books. The second one is, who would you choose to narrate your favorite book? So

[00:26:38] Ashley: Oh, okay. Okay. Yes, I listen to audiobooks. If you listen to the podcast, you know that, but I do listen to audiobooks a lot. I will say though, that I. Prior to the podcast, listen to them very little, and if you have not started listening to audiobooks or you feel like it just doesn't work for you? I do really encourage you, these days,

[00:27:02] there are just a million ways to listen, and so if you haven't tried Libra fm, their app is amazing. They have really great just ease of use opportunities. So they're a good choice. And then also Spotify, if you have certain accounts, you're able to listen on there or I think that you can buy credits.

[00:27:22] but they, that's been a recent development with Spotify. And then of course, the library, like if you have a Libby app or Hoopla or some of the other apps, you can definitely listen. And so I just would recommend it if you haven't tried it, because you haven't, it hasn't worked for you. Giving it a try again if you did it quite a while ago, like just the ease of access has really changed a lot in the last few years.

[00:27:44] So absolutely. I listen to them all the time. I have to like. Encourage myself these days to read print books, which younger Ashley would be very judgmental of. But these days that is what really helps my reading life. So yay, I love them. If I had to pick somebody, Bonnie Turpen would probably be my pick.

[00:28:00] I think she is a phenomenal, talented, and versatile narrator, and I would listen to pretty much anything she reads. What about you, Jen?

[00:28:09] Jen: So yes, I also listen to audio books, and I will say I was really resistant at first because I have always been someone who processed more with her eyes and her ears, and it was hard for me for a long time to take information listening. But I got started listening to podcasts and then I thought, well, if that's working for me, let's try audio books.

[00:28:30] And so I started very slowly listening to everything at One X Speed. And I have, since I'm nowhere near Ashley's listening speed. But I do listen regularly at 1.5 x and that's not judgmental. That's just, I feel like I can process more. Now. There are still certain books that do not work for me on audio, so I'm still someone who has to be selective about what I'm listening to on audio.

[00:28:55] But yeah, it is a regular part of my reading every month, and so Bonnie Turpen popped into my head as well. I also think there are sometimes that the pairing of the audiobook narrator and a book or a book series is just perfect and enhances the book itself. And so Jane Entwistle's narration of the Flavia de Luce series just makes those books even more magical than they already are.

[00:29:24] I've read those both in print and on audio, and they're ones that I actually prefer the audio because I think Jane Entwistle just embodies the main character, flavia, who is a. Yeah, like a middle school aged chemist who's obsessed with poison perfectly, and so that's one where I think Alan Bradley could not have asked for a better narrator of his words.

[00:29:47] So yeah.

[00:29:47] Ashley: Yeah, I love that. Jen, I love your thoughts about audio books, and that was me too, that I really felt resistant, especially I worried that I could not hear an audio book and internalize it in the way that I, I mean, both of us are like trained readers, right? I mean, we did literature and we studied all that, and so I think there is this idea

[00:30:09] that we have to, I mean, I had resistance when I switched to digital, right? I mean, it was that same thing of like, I have to hold the print in my hand. That is what it means to be a reader. And so I think freeing ourselves up to try different things is like so powerful and that there are these mental obstacles that come up when we're navigating that.

[00:30:29] And so I'm sure some people are listening, like, of course I listen to audio books all the time. But I think that, again, if you're somebody who doesn't, of course it's fine If you choose to not, that's fine. But I think that some of the things that got in my way early on have just gotten easier and easier as time has passed.

[00:30:45] And yeah, I do listen to them very fast. And so, and I mean, I absorb them like it's not, I'm not going so fast that I can't understand what's happening or keep up. But I've just learned to listen to them really quickly and that is helpful because that is something that I cannot read. I can't, I can't double and triple my reading speed in the same way that I can with listening.

[00:31:06] And so it is helpful for me because in a world where we have a bazillion deadlines for things, it makes a big difference if I can fit something in and still have the joy of experiencing the book, but in a way that I can fit into my time. So that's nice.

[00:31:19] Jen: Yeah. I love what you said about the way we've been trained as readers. I think over the years, as a teacher too, I've just become a lot less precious about what reading is and anything that invites students into reading I'm a fan of. So audio books, absolutely. Calvin's reading, and I regularly now when we're reading books, recommend the best audiobook edition to students because if that is what is going to get them to read,

[00:31:43] then I want them to do it. And yeah, I still want them to be able to read on the page or the digital reader or whatever it is, but you have to hook them first. And then a lot of times that's an entree into reading print on the page and diving in that way. So yeah. Alright everyone, well thank you so much for listening.

[00:32:04] We hope you'll consider joining us in a Buddy Reed on Instagram. And yeah, we'd love to hear your thoughts about some of your favorite Unabridgedpod Buddy Reed. Thanks so much.

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