Season 8, Episode 23: Slow Reads + How And Why We Rate Our Books
The Currently Reading Podcast
Meredith Schwartz
4.6 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Currently Reading, Meredith and Kaytee are discussing:
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Bookish Moments: experimenting with our reading and taking on choker books
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Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately
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Deep Dive: answering the questions of how or why we rate our books
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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).
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2:39 - Our Bookish Moments of the Week
3:01- The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor
3:05 - Bookshelf Thomasville
3:07 - From the Front Porch podcast
3:31 - It by Stephen King
4:53 - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (#1 in the Cromwell series)
5:30 - Footnotes and Tangents on Instagram
6:45 - The Stand by Stephen King
6:47 - Laura Tremaine on Substack
8:52 - Our Current Reads
9:00 - Matched by Ally Condie (Kaytee)
9:32 - The Giver by Lois Lowry
11:26 - The Selection by Kiera Cass
11:30 - The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
13:04 - Turns of Fate by Anne Bishop (Meredith)
14:45 - The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
18:15 - Cultish by Amanda Montell (Kaytee)
18:21 - Wordslut by Amanda Montell
21:52 - Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain (Meredith)
23:00 - The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
23:35 - The Painted Porch
23:40 - The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holliday
26:05 - The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
27:37 - When the Tides Held the Moon by Vanessa Vida Kelley (Kaytee)
30:43 - CAWPILE
31:38 - The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark (Meredith)
35:51 - The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
36:28 - The Last Flight by Julie Clark
36:50 - Deep Dive: How And Why We Rate Our Reads
37:53 - A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
37:59 - Dante and Aristotle Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz
38:04 - Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes
38:14 - Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
49:41 - CAWPILE system
51:53 - Meet Us At The Fountain
52:41 - I wish that we would all pick one small way to challenge our reading this year. (Kaytee)
54:23 - I wish you would sign up for our newsletter! (Meredith)
54:25 - Sign up for the newsletter on our website
Support Us:
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Bookish Friends Receive:
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The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. January's IPL is our annual visit to Fabled Bookshop in Waco, Texas.
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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.
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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
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From the Editor's Desk with Kaytee and Bunmi Ishola - a quarterly peek behind the curtain at the publishing industry
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The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts
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The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna
Production and Editing: Megan Phouthavong Evans
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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 won't shy away |
| 0:22.0 | from having strong opinions, so get ready. We are light on the chit-chat, heavy on the book talk, |
| 0:27.7 | and our conversations will always be spoiler-free. Today we'll discuss our current reads, |
| 0:32.2 | a bookish deep dive, and then we'll visit The Fountain. I'm Meredith Monday Schwartz. I'm a mom |
| 0:36.8 | and a Mimi and a full-time CEO living in Austin, Texas. |
| 0:40.8 | And my word for the year is experiment. |
| 0:44.2 | And I'm Katie Cobb, a homeschooling mama for living in Arizona, |
| 0:47.6 | and I'm planning some 2026 reading projects. |
| 0:50.9 | This is episode number 23 of season 8, and we are so glad you're here. |
| 0:55.3 | Katie, you know what else this is? This is our first regular episode of 2026. So it feels like a new |
| 1:01.9 | beginning of its own. It does. You know, Meredith, I was thinking about that because a lot of |
| 1:06.1 | times we spend this first normal episode of the year talking about our goals for the year. And we didn't do that this |
| 1:12.8 | year, but it kind of works into what we're talking about anyway for me. Yeah, it's kind of all part and |
| 1:17.9 | parcel with it. Our deep dive today is going to be about a question that we got, which is about |
| 1:23.5 | star ratings. One of the most debatable issues in the readerly life. So we've talked about this |
| 1:32.2 | before. We have a lot of new listeners. Welcome in if you are new to us, and this is your first |
| 1:37.2 | regular episode of currently reading. We are happy to talk about star ratings and how we use |
| 1:42.7 | them, how we don't use them. Why, if you don't rate your |
| 1:46.4 | books with star ratings, you might want to or not. So we'll get into that later in the show. |
| 1:51.1 | One little piece of mischief right at the top of the show is that next week is going to be |
| 1:56.3 | its own kind of special episode, right? An episode that people love to hear. We are going to hear the top 10 |
| 2:02.2 | books of our guest hosts, Roxanna and Mary. They're going to come in next week. They're going to |
... |
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