Season 8, Episode 1: Deciding Once + What We Did On Our Summer Break

Currently Reading

Meredith Schwartz

Allthebooks, Books, Read, Arts, Bookpodcast, Reading, Whatshouldireadnext, Society & Culture

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this episode of Currently Reading, Meredith and Kaytee are discussing:

Bookish Moments: reading with a partner and making lazy genius decisions about your reading life
Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we’ve been reading lately
Deep Dive: we are reviewing our summer break
The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives

Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site)

1:53 - Ad For Ourselves

3:11 - Pounded by Produce by G.M. Fairy

3:14 - Hedging His Bets by Celia Kyle [Amazon link]

5:45 - Currently Reading Patreon

6:02 - Our Bookish Moments Of The Week

6:39 - The Bookshop by Evan Friss

7:24 - Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

10:05 - Our Current Reads

10:15 - Playground by Richard Powers (Kaytee)

13:04 - Bill from An Unlikely Story on Instagram (@AnUnlikelyStory)

13:55 - Bill Largent on Instagram (@TheWillToRead)

14:26 - Until August by Gabriel García Márquez (Meredith)

16:43 - Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

16:47 - One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

17:40 - The Council of Animals by Nick McDonell

19:06 - I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Kaytee)

19:12 - CR Season 5: Episode 48 (The Listener Press)

24:33 - The Game Is Murder by Hazell Ward (Meredith)

27:34 - The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

27:43 - Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

28:55 - The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett (Kaytee)

29:21 - CR Season 6: Episode 31

32:18 - The Examiner by Janice Hallett

32:19 - The Appeal by Janice Hallett

33:16 - So Far Gone by Jess Walter

38:30 - Deep Dive: What We Did On Our Summer Break

46:51 - Meet Us At The Fountain

47:15 - Travel to the bookstores a little outside your norm and make time for a bookish journey and bookstore extroversion (Kaytee)

49:24 - Listen to Ep. 272: Best Books of the Year (So Far) of 10 Things to Tell You with Laura Tremaine

50:34 - Laura Tremaine’s Secret Stuff on Substack

50:40 - The Shining by Stephen King

51:21 - A Journey to Three Pines

Support Us:

Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch

Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon

Bookish Friends Receive:

The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. August’s IPL comes to us from our founding Indie Press List store: Fabled Bookshop in Waco, TX!
Love and Chili Peppers with Kaytee and Rebekah - romance lovers get their due with this special episode focused entirely on the best selling genre fiction in the business.
All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the behind-the-scenes insights of an independent bookseller
From the Editor’s Desk with Kaytee and Bunmi Ishola - a quarterly peek behind the curtain at the publishing industry
The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts

Connect With Us:

The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads

The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna

Production and Editing: Megan Phouthavong Evans

Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey readers, welcome to the currently reading podcast. We are bookish best friends who spend time every week talking about the books that we've read recently. And as you know, we will not shy away from
0:21.5	having strong opinions. So get ready. We are light on the chit-chat, heavy on the book talk,
0:26.7	and our conversations will always be spoiler-free. Today we'll discuss our current reads,
0:31.2	a bookish deep dive, and then we'll visit The Fountain. I'm Meredith Monday Schwartz, a mom and a
0:36.3	Mimi, and full-time CEO living in Austin, Texas, and I am so glad to be back talking about books today.
0:43.3	And I'm Katie Cobb, a homeschooling mama for living in Arizona, and I have filled my extroverted cup.
0:49.4	This is episode number one of season eight, and we are so glad you're here.
0:56.0	Meredith, season eight, we are here so glad you're here. Maritaph. Season eight,
1:02.0	we are here. And your head flipped around. You heard my little new nuance. I did. I was like,
1:08.6	ooh. It's forever bothered me that I say I'm a mom of four, but I don't say anything about being a Mimi. I'm a Mimi, too. Of two? No, to three,
1:12.8	our oldest just had a brand new baby girl. Oh, you get a granddaughter now, too. I know. It is so,
1:22.5	so sweet. So we're so excited about that. Oh, this is thrilling. We are also excited about season eight.
1:28.3	In fact, we are so excited that our deep dive today is going to be, as usual, what we always do the first episode, what we did over our summer break, because we like the back-to-school element.
1:40.5	Yep, yep.
1:41.4	If I could get out in front of a blackboard and tell you all and use a slideshow to present about our summer break, I absolutely would.
1:48.2	You have a lot to talk about. You could put a whole deck together. Okay, before we do that, though, we are going to do a little bit of business. It is the first week of the month. As you guys know, all of currently reading is commercial
2:02.5	free, except we do one little ad at the beginning, which is an ad for ourselves, for our Patreon
2:08.9	content. After we do this, for an entire month, you get long episodes that have not a single
2:14.7	commercial break. The reason that can happen is because we have
2:18.3	3,000 Patreon subscribers who help keep this commercial free, which is one of the big reasons
2:24.4	people join us. But Katie, another reason that they join us is love and chili peppers. This is our
2:30.6	romance-focused show that you do with our favorite friend Rebecca Hoffer. You guys talk
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 3 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Meredith Schwartz, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Meredith Schwartz and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.