Nerdette Book Club: 'Trust,' discussed!

Nerdette Recaps With Peter Sagal

WBEZ

Tv & Film, Books, Self, Improvement, Pop, Tv, Wbez, Culture, Technology, Society & Culture, Nerds, Nerd, Nerdette

4.6 • 924 Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nerdette Book Club’s December selection, Hernan Diaz’s critically-acclaimed ‘Trust,’ is a novel that invites readers to question the very act of reading. The historical novel is actually four different pieces of writing — a novella, an unfinished autobiography, a memoir and an excerpt from a personal diary. Each section changes the meaning of the preceding piece, creating what critic Hillary Kelly called a “puzzle box” in her review for LA Times. Kelly joined Lupita Aquino, who you can find on Instagram as @LupitaReads, to unpack the elements of this multi-layered story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still
0:06.1	watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,
0:12.7	soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,
0:18.0	Stories Without End from WB EZ Chicago.
0:25.7	Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.
0:28.3	Listen wherever you get your podcast.
0:38.9	From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is The Nerdat Book Club.
0:42.8	It's just like a regular book club, except you don't have to share your snacks.
0:49.2	It is December, and our book selection this month is Ernan Diaz's excellent historical novel trust.
0:50.2	It's a puzzle of a story about wealth, capital, and who gets to tell their stories. That is all I'm
0:55.7	going to say for now. Here is your spoiler warning. If you haven't read this book and you don't want
1:00.9	to know what happens, this is not the conversation for you. Go check out my interview with
1:04.7	Arnan in the feed. If you haven't read the book and you do want to know what happens, you can hang, or of course, if you've read the book, we are very glad to have you. I'm also very excited to introduce you to this month's guests here to discuss the novel. We have the delightful bookstagramer, Lupita Aquino, who's on Instagram as Lupita reads. Lupita, hello. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to talk about this book with you guys. Yay. Thanks for coming on. I think
1:28.2	it's going to be super fun. We also have the wonderful book critic Hillary Kelly, who writes a lot for
1:33.0	New York Magazine and reviewed Trust for the LA Times. Hillary, hello. Hello. So trust is, I'm going to
1:39.9	try to explain this as succinctly as I possibly can. This book is in four parts. There is the novel
1:44.7	within the novel, which it turns out isn't actually very novelty at all. It's based very
1:48.4	heavily on the real life of what's in the novel. There is a draft of a ghost-written autobiography.
1:54.8	There's also a memoir, and then there are journal entries. The story spans about 60 years.
2:00.7	It centers around Andrew Bevel,
2:02.3	who is one of the richest men in the world, and he made part of his fortune by manipulating the stock market,
2:07.8	which ultimately ended up helping bring on the crash of 1929. We meet his wife, Mildred,
	...

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