One of the best things about having a podcast is the chance to talk books with people that you might never meet in real life.
Today, I’m talking with Kara Infante of the Bookish Flights podcast. What started as a chance to talk about hyperlocal books from the Midwest to broaden my own reading life turned into another chance to talk about the power of books.
Together, we explore how we can use books as tools to take us places AND to prepare us for life moves to those places, too. We’ll uncover the themes present in Kara’s book flight, think about how they relate to our own life values and add even more books to our TBR stacks.
Here are the books mentioned in this episode. You’ll find links to my Amazon and Bookshop affiliate stores below. Thanks for your bookish support!
Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal (Amazon / Bookshop)
Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good: A Memoir of Food and Love from an American Midwest Family by Kathleen Flinn (Amazon / Bookshop)
The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal (Amazon / Bookshop)
Now, it’s your turn!
What books do you love that are set in the midwestern part of the United States?
Share all of your suggestions in the comments below so I can add them to my stack, too!
LOVED LOVED LOVED!
I am so glad you enjoyed it!
Hi, Stephanie,
I highly recommend two memoirs, both of which take place in northern Ohio. I used them in my AP Lang & Comp classes as outstanding examples of nonfiction writing:
1. An Open Book by former Washington Post book editor Michael Dirda, which takes place in Lorain, Ohio. According to one review: “All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book,” Michael Dirda’s steelworker father used to complain, worried about his son’s passion for reading. In An Open Book, one of the most delightful memoirs to emerge in years, the acclaimed literary journalist Michael Dirda re-creates his boyhood in rust-belt Ohio, first in the working-class town of Lorain, then at Oberlin College. In addition to his colorful family and friends, An Open Book also features the great writers and fictional characters who fueled Dirda’s imagination: from Green Lantern to Sherlock Holmes, from Candy to Proust. The result is an affectionate homage to small-town America―summer jobs, school fights, sweepstakes contests, and first dates―as well as a paean to what could arguably be called the last great age of reading. “Dirda is a superb literary essayist.”―Harold Bloom “Michael Dirda’s memoir―no surprise to me―is so good that I went up to the attic meaning to send him one of my antique Big Little books as a salute to excellence…A great job. I’ll be buying An Open Book for my children and grandchildren.”―Russell Baker, author of Growing Up “Here, in An Open Book, is the show and tell of a wonderful American story, everything coming together in the immemorial dance of literature and memory, of history and gossip, and of the deeply felt, bittersweet story (his own) of a young life. Read it and rejoice.”―George Garrett “A lovely, unapologetically
2. The second one is Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town, which takes place in Akron. According to Amazon, “ Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town tells the story of growing up in the rubber community of Firestone Park in Akron, Ohio”the former Rubber Capital of the World. The book begins with the rededication of the bronze Harvey Firestone statue on August 3, 2000, at the Centennial celebration for the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company. The statue”perched high on a hill at the entrance to Firestone Park, the residential community Harvey built for his workers in 1915”was sacred to the author, Joyce Coyne Dyer, and her father, Tom Coyne, during the fifties, a time when the Coynes worshipped the company and thought themselves members of the Firestone family.”
These two recommendations sound fantastic! I’d love to get lost in the bookish world of the first one and the interesting world of the second. I love learning the backstory of places, even if I never get to visit in real life because books are just as good. =) Thank you!