You're listening to Reading Glasses, the 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 ticking off the first box on the 26 Reading Glasses.

Glasses Challenge. Read a Queer Norm book. We're going to get into what that is. So stay tuned.

Plus, we give some advice on scheduling library holds and recommending queer hockey books,

which obviously, this is a popular subject. And Mallory has a lot of opinions.

It might be the only subject right now. But first, Brea, what are you reading?

I'm reading a book that you recommended, and I, I've been reading it for like six months on and off. It's been kind of my morning, like, nonfiction book that I pick up because, do you know my New Year's resolution was to not sleep next to my phone? Yeah. So because of that, I don't get up and look at my phone first thing, but I do wake up

usually before my alarm. So I'm like, what am I going to do? And then I, so I've been reading

this nonfiction book in the morning. I'm reading sick houses, haunted homes, and the architecture

of dread by Layla Taylor. Yes, it is so good. It's so good that I recommended one of my

writing partners. We're working on a horror movie, and I was like, you have to read this book.

Like, it's very, like, it has a lot to do with, like, what we're writing.

But it's, so she goes into, I mean, Mallory had talked about on the show, so I won't get into it too much.

But basically, it's a nonfiction book about haunted houses and architecture and the way we view fear and otherness and all sorts of things through architecture. Like the part that I, that really stood out for me is that she talked about the Winchester Mystery House. Oh, yeah. And how we view that as like a, oh, it's a woman who was trying to communicate with the dead and blah, blah, blah. Not true. And then, but really, yeah, the real story behind that is that she was actually a woman just really

interested in architecture.

You may have told the same story on the show.

So stuff like that, but then also going into like films and like, you know, like,

like, Honohouse is in films and what makes them scary versus like ones and like what people

do within the films to kind of play on our cultural

understandings of fear. It's just a really fascinating book and I'm I love it. I feel like I'm

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