POLL: What Novel Should We Pair Wines with Next?

Vote by Wednesday, July 31st!

Our Current Novel

We’re about to record an episode covering THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM by Cixin Liu, the science fiction sensation that took China by storm. It even got a pull quote from Barrack freakin’ Obama and has since resulted in a Chinese-language tv show in 2023 (titled just “Three-Body”) and an English-language tv show produced by Netflix in 2024 (titled “3 Body Problem”).

I am still fretting over what best pair with such a complex book, BUT…that isn’t what this post is about.

Instead this post is about - WHICH BOOK SHOULD WE IMMEDIATELY START READING AFTER THIS WEEK?!?

Please vote on the following four:

Glow: The Autobiography of Rick James

By Rick James w/ David Ritz

Best known for his 1980s hit songs “Super Freak,” “Give it to Me Baby,” and “Mary Jane,” the late singer and funk music pioneer Rick James collaborated with acclaimed music biographer David Ritz in this posthumously published, no-holds-barred memoir of a rock star’s life and soul.

Breasts and Eggs

by Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett (Translator), David Boyd (Translator)

Challenging every preconception about storytelling and prose style, mixing wry humor and riveting emotional depth, Kawakami is today one of Japan’s most important and best-selling writers. She exploded onto the cultural scene first as a musician, then as a poet and popular blogger, and is now an award-winning novelist.

Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own.

The City We Became

by N.K. Jemisin

Five New Yorkers must come together in order to defend their city.

Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got five.

But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.

The Water Dancer

by Ta Nehisi-Coates

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.