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 happyashholidays.com. We'll also have a link in the show notes.

Hello and welcome back to the Terrible Reading Club. A little series within our podcast that

I like to think of as great books for terrible times or about terrible things. The books

themselves are not terrible. They are actually the opposite. So, for a lot of people, including

myself, one of the terrible times of life is adolescence, being a teenager. And I think

this is true for the vast majority of people. It just kind of sucks. It doesn't matter

really where you live or there's just kind of nothing to do and everything to do. That's

what you always see. It just groups of teenagers just standing around. I was at the mall recently.

There were teenagers just standing around at the mall. And all I could think of was, huh,

it's been two decades since I was a teenager. And we were just standing around at the mall.

This is a generational thing just standing around at the mall. They did not have an orange

Julius, which is how I knew that I was not in a time warp because also these kids were

wearing the same clothes that we wore in 1999 or 2001. Bizarre. Anyways, being a teenager,

but reading about teenagers is not terrible. And I am a lover of young adult fiction,

which is strange in some ways because when I was an actual young adult, there wasn't

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