Friends, I am a lover of podcasts and listen to them in the evenings, on the road, and in the mornings as I wake up. In my previous position as Young Adult Librarian at the Duxbury Free Library, I helped start a regular podcast and hosted a teen radio drama club as well. I think listening is the next Big Thing in the media world. I love a good interview, discussion, argument, and/or story-form narrative.
One of my pet peeves, however, is the dearth of interesting book-related podcasts. I have listened to many library-hosted ones that, truth be told, are boring and self-aggrandizing. (Sorry, NYPL, yours just doesn’t do it for me…)
Enter Anne Bogel, the writer of a well-known reading blog, “The Modern Mrs. Darcy,” as well as its podcast corollary, “What Should I Read Next?”
Download at https://modernmrsdarcy.com/what-should-i-read-next/ or subscribe with iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play.
What Anne does so well is structure the time, do a whole lot of preparation and choose interested guests. Anne invites people to apply to be a guest from her blogging fan-base, but also has a lot of contacts out in the publishing world to draw from. Hence, she gets a wide diversity of readers to interview. She asks them to tell her about three of their favorite books and one book they can’t stand. She then makes really inspired suggestions for what they might want to read next, and asks them which one they will start with.
It’s such a simple conceit, but it really makes for fascinating listening! I’ve read a bunch of books I would never have known about if not for this podcast. It’s fun to throw the net wider than simply the latest New York Times Best Seller.
