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.

In this episode, we're starting a new reading glasses tradition.

We're picking our favorite

book covers of the year. Which was really fun to do. I had a great time doing this. Plus, we are

interviewing fellow Max Funster, Alonzo Duralde about his new Christmas movie book. And we're

recommending gifts for e-readers. I'm sorry. What are you reading? Mallory had, which is good. We should all laugh at me. But I have so much trouble.

I read so many books in other languages that I don't speak. So I'm so sorry if I butcher these

names. Well, I'll do our best here.

Anyway, I'm reading a book that I have not been able to put down. It's a very interesting book that I think was on our anticipated books episode.

It's called The Midnight Shift by Chun-Son-Ran.

Translator is Jean Ping.

And this book is wild.

It's a Korean book that I think was just recently translated into English.

I think it maybe came out in Korea a little while ago.

But basically there's a hospital and all of these elderly people keep jumping off the sixth story floor and committing suicide.

Yeah.

And no one seems to like be able figure out what's going on. And they're like, oh, it's just because they're lonely. Everyone's like, oh, it's because they're lonely. And the police is like not engaging. But then this main character has this friend, this woman who she calls Grandma, but wasn't Grandma, but was like a part of her life. And that woman, she's has dementia. And she's living on the sixth floor of this of this hospital where people are jumping off and so she's like I don't

want anything to happen to her so she starts to investigate on her own and she's she's also a police

officer and she meets this woman and the woman is like yeah vampires are doing this what it's

vampires and then there's this like there there's these, there's, I know, I know. Then there's these flashback chapters of, of this little girl who's meeting this strange woman. And that's about how far I am. So you get to see flashbacks of the same woman, of a woman meeting a girl. You're pretty sure might be a vampire. But yeah, so it is.

...