It's that time of year again. I'm talking about time to get back to our terrible holiday

tradition. I'm talking about happy-ish holidays. Yes, it is a podcast episode, but it is also

a live show, a party for anybody who has a complicated relationship with the holiday

season. This year, there's two ways to join in the fun. You can join us in person at the

Parkway Theatre in Minneapolis on Tuesday, December 6th at 7.30pm Central Standard Time,

or online via live stream, same time, same time, same time, different place because you

can watch it wherever you are. Again, that's Tuesday, December 6th at 7.30 Central Standard

Time, get your tickets at happyasholidays.com. We'll also have a link in the show notes.

Hello my readers. It's Nora McNeerney here with another episode of the Terrible Reading

Club. I like to think of this as great books for terrible times, or about terrible times,

maybe, and one of the most terrible things that I can imagine. And I have a particularly

terrible imagination, a terribly good imagination. Maybe I should say, truly, I can just think

of anything awful at any time, is something happening to my brain.

My husband Aaron, and stop me if you've heard this one before, he died of brain cancer,

and as far as luck goes, he was basically the un luckiest. Lucky man, I've ever met

or the luckiest un lucky man I've ever met. His tumor was in a part of his brain that

didn't affect his personality or his speech or his memory, I guess, basically. Maybe

just a blank spot, a part of his brain he didn't need. But I know a lot of people who weren't

that lucky whose brain tumors just kept sniffing away at who they were until they weren't

themselves at all. And it's obviously not just brain cancer that does this. It's dementia

or a brain injury, or, and this is one of those things like quicksand that I thought

in my childhood was much more common than it is. Amnesia. Who gets amnesia? I thought,

...