You're listening to All the Backlist, a weekly show about books that are not new.

I'm your host for the week, Patricia Brown, and this is episode number 422.5.

Welcome back to all of you.

In the Northern Hemisphere, we are smack in the middle of summer, and it is miserable

in a lot of places, and because it is so miserable, we're not going to talk about that.

We're going to talk about books, old books, even older than usual books, at least even older

than usual for me.

I read a fair amount of Backlist, but I would say even the Backlist books that I read

usually have been published within the last decade or so, honestly, probably even more

often in the last five years, but lately I have been reading books that had me reaching

back a couple of decades or more.

Probably the older books I've been reading have been Romance or Romance Contemporary Fiction,

Romantic Contemporary Fiction, that kind of thing, and we'll talk about the wise of that

in a little bit, but no matter what kind of books you generally read, I think there's

something really interesting about the way popular fiction and genre fiction evolve over

time.

It's something you can trace if you read books published at different times, and I have

found that some of what is and is not different can add some dimension to the way that I think

about books as a reader, and we will get into that just a bit more in just a minute.

Hi, it's Bluey Robinson here, now all you dessert devotees will know there's nothing

better than tucking into a tub full of Ben and Jerry's, but what I didn't know until

recently is that they've only gone and taken it to the next level and created an ice cream

...