You're listening to Reading Glasses, a show about book culture and literary life designed to help you read better.

I'm author and book devour, Mallory O'Mara.

And I'm Brea Grant filmmaker and e-reader.

This episode, we're talking about what goes into making a best-of book list because

you're probably reading a lot of best-of book lists. You're probably making your own, checking it twice, whatever. We're going to talk about what goes into ours, and we interview Meredith Borders from Fangoria about their new book, which we love Meredith Borders. Yes, we do. And we're recommending immersive books.

But first, Brea, what are you reading?

The way I said that sounded like it sounded, it sounded, was like, in about their new book, which we love Meredith Borders. Yes, we do. And we're recommending immersive books.

But first, Brea, what are you reading? The way I said that sounded like it sounded like an E, like an e-mercive. Emersive. But what I meant was immersive. I don't know what an emersive is like, it's like online. Yeah, you're immersing your e-self. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The immersive books. But first, Brea, what are you reading?

I just finished literally yesterday, the, the immersive books. But first, Priya, what are you reading? I just finished literally yesterday the book for our other podcast reading smut that you picked out

because you read it a couple years ago.

And it's called A Merry Little Meat Cute by Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone, who we also

have read one of Sierra Simone's books.

And it is so cute, Mallory.

I'm so glad you picked out this book. It is a Christmas smut. And it's one of my favorite holiday romance books. It's so much fun. It's so well written. It's so steamy. It's so well written for like, I mean, so because I just haven't read that many romance books, I don't have that much to compare it to you,

but I think I texted you.

It reminded me a lot of an Emily Henry book.

It's very clever.

It's very smart. Kimberly Lemming as well, like very clever, quippy. But it's about the making of like a Hallmark type Christmas movie. Yeah. It's funny because I forgot that it's about filmmaking. And I was like, oh, Grea is going to like this even more. Yeah, I actually really did. I did. And I thought it got a lot of it right. I was very impressed.

But basically, this producer is like, he normally makes porn and he's like getting into like the Hallmark World, which actually there is a lot of like horror hallmark crossover. So I thought it was interesting that they, that there was this. And they lose their main actress and they accidentally cast an adult film star who does like porn but also has essentially like an only fan.

She's very popular online.

And they accidentally cast her because her like headshot gets put into like the list of people they have to cast at the last minute. And then she's cast across from a guy who used to be in like a boy man a la in sync.

And funnily enough, B, who's the woman, has a huge crush on him from when he was in the

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