The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club.

My name is Katie Waldman. I'm a staff writer at Slate, and I'm joined today in the DC studio by the writer and critic Jacob Brogan.

Hi, Katie.

Jacob is the host of our podcast working, so check him out there. And all the way from

Paris, France, we are also joined by the audiobook club's founder, another writer and critic,

Megan O'Rourke. Hi, Megan. Nice to talk to you again. Hi, so good to be here with you, virtually.

Today we're going to be talking about too much and not the mood, a collection of lyrical essays by Durga Chubos.

It is her debut book, although she has made a name for herself as an internet writer, a writer of internet essays.

And just want to say up front that our next selection for July will be Miley Molloy's

do not become alarmed.

Okay.

Too much and not the mood.

I have a sense from talking to both of you a little bit before we started recording that you have strong feelings about this.

Jacob, will you share just one strong feeling?

I think that, to me, the best way I can describe reading this book is that it's a little like opening oysters in search of pearls.

You don't always find a pearl, but there's still this wonderful strange meat inside, and you have

the strange sense that it might go well with a gin cocktail. I don't know. For the most part,

I found it delightful and engaging and even when it was

frustrating, exciting. Yeah. Do you feel like you have a strong sense of who this writer is?

That's a good question because there's a sort of structurally evasive quality to her style of writing. We learn a lot about her, but we're not always getting her. And that, when I said that sometimes frustrating, it's you want more, you want the clearer contours of the

person sometimes, but it's the things that crop up on the margins of her prose, of her

...