With this podcast I’m experimenting with a transcript option. Substack produces a good transcript that includes all the ums and ahs. You can read it by clicking the “Transcript” button. Riverside.fm, the service I use to record the podcast, also produces an excellent transcript, which it ties to its editing capabilities. It doesn’t include all the ums and ahs but does include some. Because it combines two separately recorded tracks, it also sometimes seems to have trouble with the sequence of remarks. And it loves time codes. I’ve given the Riverside transcript a light edit and pasted it below the Show Notes. (This makes the post too long to show up in email, but you can click at the bottom to see the whole thing.) Please give me feedback on podcast formats and transcripts by completing a three-question survey. If I get at least 300 responses, I’ll do a drawing to give away five books. There’s a fourth question that allows you to enter. Virginia's Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Show Notes: Miller’s Book Review The story of Joel’s current book-in-progress Joel's 2024 reading list of Classic Novels and Memoirs Review of Slaughterhouse Five Review of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Review of Their Eyes Were Watching God Joel’s books on Amazon Pilot erasable FriXion pens Virginia’s post on listening to Middlemarch and Moby Dick Obituary of Moby Dick narrator William Hootkins A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (audiobook) Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns (audiobook) aeon.co reason.com Arts and Letters Daily A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith The Fabric of Civilization backdrop a gift from Pure Country Weavers keywords: book publishing, audiobooks, author advice, reading goals, publishing process, Joel Miller, Virginia Postrel, literature, writing, book recommendations Transcript from Riverside.fm Virginia Postrel (00:03.118) Good morning, Joel. Joel (00:05.078) Yes, thank you for having me. Virginia Postrel (00:07.14) Well, thanks for being one of my early guinea pigs. Your Substack is called MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚. So I want to start with a question about the books that you write about. At the beginning of the year, you set out two challenges for yourself. One was every month to read and review a classic work and one was a memoir. How did you pick the books that you decided to do? Joel (00:46.274) I kind of have a running list of things that I feel I want to read or should read. And I'm almost philosophically committed to the idea that I'm only going to read books that I find interesting in some way or another. So I have to, the whim to read that book has to be there in the first place. So I keep this list and then I'm on Twitter and elsewhere and places where I just see wonderful book recommendations all the time. So I'm always adding to that list. And then at the end of the year, I look at that list and I usually share several suggestions with my readers and just say, here are 12 novels, classic novels that I'm thinking about reading. And in this case, this year I added 12 classic memoirs and I just said, you know, am I missing anything? You know, what would you recommend? And I take all that input together and you know, shake it up real good and out comes my list. Virginia Postrel (01:43.555) Right, we're three quarters through the year. What have you liked best that you've read? Joel (01:52.614) That's, it's so hard because there's so many great things. This might surprise, you know, anybody, I don't know, but everybody has read, I thought, Slaughterhouse Five. I somehow missed it in high school. I never read it, never read it in college. So I finally just said, this is the year I'm going to finally read some Kurt Vonnegut. And I put that down on the list and I was really