Episode 217: Fable's Recent Reads

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Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing our latest book reads conversation — this is part 2 of 2 featuring Fable’s reads!

Over the last few months instead of doing our typical bookclub episodes, we’ve started talking about some of the things we’ve recently read and enjoyed, connected with, or learned from. It’s been a great way to share what we’re consuming and loving lately and finding new recommendations.

In this episode, Fable covers a range of books, many with Spooky and fall vibes - a gothic dark academia with morally gray characters, a dark and haunting YA fantasy, several engaging books of poetry, and two spicy Halloweeny novellas.

We also talk a lot about these stories from a craft perspective, what the authors did that we found interesting. Things like:

  • Nocticadia: A Dark Academia Gothic Romance - Engaging empathy for characters that do very bad things by giving the reader clear motivations and the character sympathetic and difficult backstories.

  • The Luminaries - Using hard questions and soft questions to engage the reader and pull them into a series. Paying off the questions that are clearly being asked, but subtly hinting at broader questions that will be answered later on. Also, gently clueing the reader in that the MC may not be correctly interpreting things that are going on.  

  • Red Bird: Poems, When Angels Speak of Love, & What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems - Studying the overall flavor of the author’s work and soaking up the rich language, rhythm, imagery, and depth of meaning.

  • Hollow & Blood Orange - The author of these books chose to hold back many answers until the sequel, which Fable found both frustrating but also compelling enough to have her want to read book 2. The author also chose to set things up and not have them factor in or pay off as Fable anticipated. Though jarring, it was surprising which held her attention and taught her some things about what she expects as far as story scope in a dark academic book. 

She also talks about struggling to finish books and choosing to DNF ones that aren’t fully engaging her interest.

Towards the end of our conversation, we talk about how in Psychology random reward schedules lead to increased button pressing when compared with predictable reward schedules and how that relates to sticking with writing that surprises us or doesn’t go as we expect. In other words, all things being equal, as human beings we’re more likely to continue to engage with things that we can’t predict than one that we can. We thought this principle could definitely translate to the stories we engage with.

We hope you enjoy this episode! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

Books Mentioned:

Music from:https://filmmusic.io
 ‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

book clubBethany Stedman