The Typing Lady
Welcome to the fifth installment of our summer short-story series, where we’re meeting up every other week over video to discuss a new collection. This week, we discuss The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki.
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AUG. 11, 2026
The Typing Lady
Andrew Womack: There we go. Hello, and welcome to episode 5 of our six-part series for the 2026 Summer Shorts. This week, we are going to be talking about The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki. Your host this week is Rosecrans Baldwin, who is just back from the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, and is here to tell us what he liked, what he didn’t like, about the book. Take it away, Rosecrans!
Rosecrans Baldwin: Thank you! I will share my thoughts. Took this book with me to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And then, as per usual, we’ll go around and everyone just share their thoughts about the book, too. And in the format that we’ve been doing, it seems like a way in is to talk about your favorite story, and so that’s where I’m gonna start. Ruth Ozeki, The Typing Lady. I’ll just come straight up clear and say I really admired this book, and I did not connect with it great. I did not love it. I certainly liked it. I thought it was sort of almost exquisitely written. I thought there was not a bad sentence in the bunch. A couple of stories that stood out for me: “Leaf Blower.” I wonder if it may be the longest story in the book. Here is a graduate student living with a couple who are older than her, in which there is some dementia going on, and though I could really connect with it—when I was a kid, one of my grandmothers had Alzheimer’s, and that’s unfortunately pretty much how I remember her. It was pretty severe, and I am a person in their late 40s now, which means that in my family, this is also something that’s just in conversation, it is also happening. So I could really appreciate a lot that was going on in “Leaf Blower,” and then, you know, it sort of just faded away for me. A couple other stories that stood out—“Ships in the Night.” I don’t know what this story is doing in this collection. It is clearly within Ruth Ozeki’s skill set to just be writing stories, but that was when I was like, what are you doing in this book? But my favorite was a story called “One Art.” And I will say, it’s an interesting collection to read. There’s a lot of motifs that weave in and out—just the typewriter itself that’s referenced on the cover and comes up in the very first story, and then typewriters appear again and again. There are a couple other things like that. And there’s a sense, sometimes, at least for me, that Ruth Ozeki might be writing about herself, and maybe isn’t writing about herself, I don’t know, but it just felt occasionally biographical. “One Art,” though, really worked for me. It was perhaps the least ironic, the least distanced. It’s just about love, I think, and a lot of complicating things that go along with that. Here’s a graduate student who is developing a crush, and then a love, and then a relationship with a professor, and vice versa. And it’s taking place, I believe, in the late 70s, obviously a very different academic climate than today. Anyway, I just thought it was so well drawn. I was connecting with both the student and the professor on an emotional level. And the idea that it would sort of follow their relationship through the immediacy of when they first meet, and then they are together, and then into later years—I just really was moved by it. I’ve thought about it since. I thought it was just a really well-made story. Yeah, and that’s my take on The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki. So then, if people want to share their takes, do the raise hand function, and we’ll just have a conversation. That’s The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki.
Andrew Womack: Alright, Kay, you are first in line.
Kay Nelson: I feel like I’m always first in line. I don’t know why.
Andrew Womack: You’re good at this!
Kay Nelson: I know how to raise my hand. I actually kind of feel like Rosecrans did, where—the book didn’t stay with me for very long, and I finished it two weeks ago, but I took fairly detailed notes. So, interestingly enough, I wrote down that my favorite story was the last one, “The Problem of the Body.” But then, today, I was like, I barely remember what this one’s about, and why did I like it, even. It’s just about the grandmother taking care of the granddaughter, and she sets up a profile and goes on dates and that kind of thing, and I don’t know. But the one, when I was reading through all my notes, “Leaf Blower” is the one that kind of then stood out for me. But I’m not sure if it’s because it was my favorite, or because it was so long, and you know, when something’s longer, you tend to remember it—it gets more into a bigger story, or whatever. So although I liked the story, I actually have some very bad feelings about leaf blowers, too, where—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yes.
Kay Nelson: I’m traumatized by them. I’ve been woken up too many times by people using their damn leaf blower. Oh, so one of the things I thought was interesting about the story was that Mel, the caregiver, in a way had some very unlikable qualities, and wasn’t necessarily the most upstanding of people—except she was quite decent when it came to them. I mean, she stole from them, but then she was kind of decent to them, too. And I thought that was interesting, confusing. I don’t know. But I remembered it. So the one I didn’t like was “Immortal,” where she eats the plastic.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, that was a funky one. I was sort of being like, okay, we’re gonna run with this conceit and see how we can play it out, and then it doesn’t really go anywhere. I don’t know, what rubbed you wrong, or what was your reaction to it?
Kay Nelson: It was just so weird, although I did kind of laugh when she said, “You are what you eat.” I thought that was very clever, and that made me laugh. So yeah, like you, this book was—I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it, I gave it three out of five stars. And going over my notes, nothing really is jumping out at me as being so, so exciting.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, well, let me ask, though—if we stay with “Leaf Blower” for a second, and as someone who lives in the enormous suburb that is Los Angeles, leaf blowers are a daily affliction. God, a friend of mine just bought one recently, he claims it’s his new favorite toy, and I was like, you are such a dickhead. Stop being that. Anyway, when you think back on “Leaf Blower,” what connected you? Was it her being, you know, stealing, but also being a good person? Was it the couple that she’s with? Was it the daughter, in her texting with all her emojis? Where did you connect to it?
Kay Nelson: Well, I have a mother who is in assisted living, and she’s actually been in hospice for almost three years now, so I think that’s kind of how I connected with it, and I certainly have a lot of conversations with caregivers and that kind of thing, and, you know, relying on someone to make sure my mom’s getting good care. So I think it connected from that perspective. Honestly, the leaf blower itself just made me, like, oh, how they went on and on, and she hated the leaf blower—I was like, I get that, I so get that. But yeah, I didn’t like how she stole from them. She got let go of her job because she was inappropriate. So she had her own issues, but I think in the end she was trying to do the right thing.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah. Okay, well, thanks, Kay, appreciate it.
Andrew Womack: Before we move on to Andrea, I did want to note that in the chat, Joanna mentioned, I think the last story is the only one that didn’t mention typewriters at all.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Hmm.
Andrew Womack: So that was an interesting point.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Interesting, too, because the last one is all about an author—who knows what Ruth Ozeki is projecting in there personally—trying to avoid a book tour, and also going on dates with 17-year-olds, which is another thing someone, I’m sure, will bring up. But anyway.
Andrea Cuene: Hi, everyone. Oh, yes?
Andrew Womack: Oh, go ahead, yes.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Hi, Andrea!
Andrew Womack: Hello. Okay.
Andrea Cuene: I really did connect with the book, and it’s fun to read different collections of short stories and observe how authors decide to tie them together or not. You know, sometimes you get a collection of short stories where you can tell the author just has a collection that is completely unrelated, and they shove it all together, and it works or it doesn’t. There’s some good stories or not. And I felt like Ruth really worked hard to make sure all of these stories had some common elements, but they weren’t really connected. Which I appreciated. It felt to me like she didn’t try too hard—maybe she tried just hard enough. It was entertaining to me, I really liked it. My favorite story—I liked them all. I really liked “Where Ambition Goes to Die,” and, as you might be able to see, there are two of me on screen. My husband’s on here, too, with my same name—raise your hand, Jim Keane. But after reading “Where Ambition Goes to Die,” I found myself driving to the health club today, looking at the gas station to see if maybe my husband’s ambition was getting gas at the gas station, or imagining what other types of emotions or personal characteristics I might have that might be out there that I didn’t even know about—especially thinking of how big all of our feelings felt during COVID, and thinking about, where’s my ego, where’s my fear, where’s my pride? Jim, where are all those things for you, and how do they all interact out in the world, and are they still there? Are they back in me? I thought it was just creative and fun to think about that, from her perspective—to think about ambition over the lifespan and how it ebbs and flows. I thought that was fun to think about.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Andrea, because what you’re sharing with us has somewhat to do with geography, can we just get an inside view? Is Jim in the same house right now, or is this—
Andrea Cuene: He’s down in the basement, yeah.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Down the—
Andrea Cuene: We are married, he’s down in the basement.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Hi, Jim, in the basement. Nice to meet you. Let me ask you a question, though. So when you’re talking about things that sort of tied the book together or connected through, was there—here’s an example—I noticed that memory kept coming up as a—
Andrea Cuene: We’re not busy.
Rosecrans Baldwin:—topic, indirectly, maybe. Is there anything that stood out for you as an idea or a theme in the book that you were responding to or just noticing as you went along?
Andrea Cuene: Yes, I think, well, typewriters are the most obvious answer to that question, of course. But also, I’m a speech-language pathologist, so I sometimes see the world from a very language-based place, and the way she talked about things that are language-based, and the way words are used, and alliteration—I thought it was interesting, the way she tied that in. So it was kind of typewriters, but also the language that’s produced by them, that kind of flowed through the whole book. I enjoyed that a lot.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, I remember thinking, during “Leaf Blower,” as our young poet is sort of scribbling down sentences, words, and I didn’t really know where she was going. I still am not really quite sure what was—I mean, she’s just sort of interpreting and taking in her new situation. I kind of was like, is she gonna stick us with a poem at the end of this? I don’t know.
Andrea Cuene: Yeah.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Thanks, Andrea!
Andrea Cuene: Sure!
Andrew Womack: Up next, we have Bryn. Hello, Bryn.
Bryn Lerud: Hi! So, yeah, me too—I didn’t love this collection, but there were certain things about it that I really appreciated, like the humor. I thought she brought humor into several of the stories, one of them being the one about plastic—what’s it called? “Immortal.” I really loved that story. It was so just off the wall, and at the same time sort of making a point about how our lives are taken over by plastic—everything is made out of plastic, and it’s destroying the world. But it was a really enjoyable, humorous way to look at that. I liked that. And the other one that I liked, that had some humor, was “The Anthropologist’s Kid,” which nobody’s mentioned. I thought that was funny—it was about these white male anthropologists and their Asian wives, and all the kids of all these college professors would talk about how, oh, I’m half Indonesian, I’m half Japanese, I’m half Chinese, and—I don’t know why, it just really struck me as interesting and a little humorous.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, I liked it too! That was the one, because I remember either my grandparents or my parents referring to FBI agents as G-Men, and that story keeps going on about G-Men, and I think that phrase has kind of gotten lost to us. I remember also, with the plastic story, I really appreciated the precision of her descriptions of a ballpoint pen, of a plastic pen, breaking down the nib, and I definitely chewed on some pens in my day, not with the same passion, let’s say. And I kind of wanted almost that precision to show up elsewhere. I don’t know, did it read to you as—I don’t know, a sign of a sick mind? How do you step away from that story? Is it just a goof, or is it saying something more about the amount of plastics in the world? What do you take away from it?
Bryn Lerud: Almost a goof. I mean, it was definitely playful, and it was definitely a play on words. I liked where she ate the kitchen timer, and then—
Rosecrans Baldwin: She’s dead.
Bryn Lerud: That was super precise. So she’s really playing with words and concepts. Yeah.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, love it. Well—typewriter-esque. Thank you, Bryn.
Bryn Lerud: Sure.
Andrew Womack: Alright, step right up, Gwendolyn, you are next.
Gwendolyn Dawson: Hi, I have been reading along all of the collections, but this is the first Zoom call I’ve been able to make, so I’m thrilled to be here.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Welcome, Gwendolyn!
Gwendolyn Dawson: Thank you. This collection was one of my favorites of the summer so far. I haven’t read the next one yet, the Sigrid Nunez, and I imagine I’m going to love that one—she’s a favorite author of mine—but of all the other collections, I’ve maybe liked this one the best. The writing did have a preciseness to it that I loved, and a clarity—it just—the writing was just amazing. Now, I had a couple of things I didn’t love. The specific typewriter showing up in each story, to me, felt a little bit kitschy, or like a gimmick of some kind. Like her editor said, you need to have a through line in these stories, and she went back and put a specific typewriter into each one, I guess, except for the last story. That felt gimmicky to me, and I don’t think it was needed. But nonetheless, overall, I loved the collection. My favorite story—well, really two. I really loved the first story, “The Typing Lady,” because it struck me as experimental, almost. You don’t know the relationship between these two women—there’s the writer and the woman who’s watching her in the library. And I got this sense, as I was reading it, that Ozeki was really looking at two halves of her own self, maybe? It felt experimental to me in that way. There’s some auto-fictional component there. And there was also a line near the very end of the story that I absolutely loved, about how stories are collaborations between those who read and those who write—that it’s not complete just by the writer, or just by the reader, that it’s really in the space between that the story lives. I loved that idea, I believe that. So it was a great way to start off the collection, and it made me think, this is going to be an amazing collection, because she’s doing something kind of interesting, sort of a little bit experimental. The rest of it was much more conventional, except for maybe “Immortal.” The other stories were much more conventional—still good, but not as exciting as I thought “The Typing Lady” was leading us to.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, I mean, did that set you up for a sense of disappointment? You love the book, is what it—
Gwendolyn Dawson: I did. I loved it overall, but I had to readjust. When I read the first story, I was thinking, this is gonna be one of those where I’m thinking, oh, this is something new.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah.
Gwendolyn Dawson: That story, I think, was—but the others, they were good, and I enjoyed them immensely, but they were conventional.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I remember reading that first story and thinking, okay, you’re telling me—whether or not other readers see this, or think it, or it’s at all, maybe I’m just fantasizing—but you’re telling me that you’re in this book, but you’re not gonna tell me where, you know what I mean?
Gwendolyn Dawson: Right.
Rosecrans Baldwin: It’s a personal book, it’s autofiction, memoir, whatever genre you want to call it—Ruth Ozeki, whoever that person is, is in this book, somewhere. And then I felt a little bit cat-and-moused with that one later on, being like, is this, is this not—I didn’t mind it so much. I don’t know, did you—what did it set up for you? Did it feel like you’re setting up some kind of gambit? When you’re talking about getting your hopes up, what were you hoping for?
Gwendolyn Dawson: Right. Well, I was thinking it was going to be playful. The book that came to mind was If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler by Italo Calvino, if I’m remembering that correctly—the Italian author. That’s a book where these stories are told and then interrupted by the next one, sort of a story within a story within a story, and it’s playful and experimental and thought-provoking, and I was thinking we were on that kind of ride. And we really weren’t. We were in a more conventional space.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Cool.
Gwendolyn Dawson: So, slight disappointment about that, but her writing is so good, and there’s this precision and clarity that several people have mentioned that I do love. So I enjoyed it. I still enjoyed it, even though it wasn’t what I thought it would be.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Awesome. Well, thanks, Gwendolyn.
Andrew Womack: Thank you, Gwendolyn. Next, we have Peggy.
Peggy M: Hi, folks! Once again, I just read one story in the collection, and I chose “One Art,” because I have always liked the poem. So I thought it was fine, but it didn’t light up the page for me. And I thought, well, what is the missing story here? What would make it better? I would have loved to see her open up the point of view and give us scenes from the other relationship, you know, the professor’s side. That would have taken place in 1958, when a professor-student relationship maybe would have been less controversial, but a same-sex relationship would have been more controversial. And I would love to have seen that on the page. So, in the end, my feeling about the story was it suffers from the crime of not having been written by Louise Erdrich.
Rosecrans Baldwin: And even in—
Peggy M: In Minnesota, we have not yet made that a crime, so I can’t complain about it. It was a good story, it was well written, but I wanted something a little more.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Peggy, that is incredibly uncool of you. How dare you demand that Louise Erdrich goes around writing everyone else’s stories for them? I mean, can I ask—as an Elizabeth Bishop fan, since I first got to read her in college and was sort of like a poetry geek—did you see the Bishop poem in the story, or can we just talk about “One Art” and what you like about it, if that’s not putting you too much on the spot, or what you like about Elizabeth Bishop in general, assuming you’ve read more than “One Art”?
Peggy M: You know, “One Art” is the only poem of hers that I know. I have always liked it, despite—
Rosecrans Baldwin: You reading one thing by other people is an amazingly consistent conceit.
Peggy M: Yeah, I have always liked it, and it is coming to mean more to me now, when I have seen my parents sort of move into their 90s and begin to suffer from cognitive issues. But I love it, and with all poetry, it’s sort of, for me personally, it’s half the language and half what it’s saying.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah. Well, if anyone missed it or wants to read it later, it’s in the first couple pages of the collection. The art of losing is clearly a big part of this book. I don’t know, any further thoughts, Peggy?
Peggy M: One little one. So—again, I didn’t read the other stories—is there a character named Ruth in each of the stories?
Rosecrans Baldwin: A Ruth? I don’t think so.
Peggy M: Okay, so I believe the narrator in “One Art” was named Ruth. We’re never told her name, but the professor comments on the etymology of “rue,” so I think that’s the clue.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Okay. Okay, well, thank you, Peggy, appreciate it. We’ll see which story you read next week, or two weeks from now.
Andrew Womack: Alright, and now we have Kate! Kate.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Oh.
Andrew Womack: Oh, you’re on mute, Kate. Yes.
Kate M: Of course, I’m on mute. My favorite story was “Where Ambition Goes to Die.” I really enjoyed the twists and turns in that one, and just the whole concept that there was this other version of you who was ambitious, but sometimes ambition sort of gave up and died. The whole concept of ambition living its own life as a clone just struck me as delightful. The other one I liked was “Dead Beat Poet,” and that just had—something for me about this out-of-body person who could be seen by someone, and the effect that had on their lives. So those were my two favorites out of the collection. But I will say that, for me as a whole, I agree with everything people have said about Ozeki being a marvelous writer, and the opening of every story was absolutely gripping. But for me, the stories felt like the middle—we got sort of a prologue, and we got an epilogue to wrap the stories, and then the story itself was the middle of something, as opposed to a particular climactic moment. So if we compare it to Louise Erdrich’s collection—there, the endings really hit with a bang, and here, to me, the endings were neatly wrapped up with sort of the epilogue, this is what happened to the characters, this is how life is going on. So that was a bit unsettling for me in the collection as a whole.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Do you think that’s something you seek out, broadly speaking, when reading fiction or short fiction? Or is it because you’re reading this right after the Erdrich that it sort of stands out?
Kate M: I am more of a genre fiction reader, generally, than a literary fiction reader, so I think the beats that really resonate with me are somewhat different than for many of the people who are reading more literary fiction.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Hmm. And then can I ask, in terms of this poet, this ghost, becoming a bit of a possessive type—did you read it as Allen Ginsberg? Was it an instantaneous, like, oh, this is Allen Ginsberg?
Kate M: No, I did not affiliate it with any particular person, just sort of as the meta muse.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, yeah, awesome.
Bryn Lerud: I have a question about that story. Is it “Deadbeat Poet,” or “Dead Beat Poet”?
Rosecrans Baldwin: I mean, there’s no hyphen, and “dead beat” is put off as two words, so—I think the idea is both. It’s gotta be.
Bryn Lerud: Both? Okay, I like that answer.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I mean, at least I hope so. There’s even a mention of a typewriter. Yeah.
Andrew Womack: It’s like PetSmart, or Pet—anyway. Just sayin’. Okay, over to Bretnie.
Bretnie Eschenbach: Hey! I really liked this collection, a lot—maybe my favorite of the three total that I’ve read. I think mostly because it has so much humor in it, and I love a book, or a story, or anything I’m reading that tries to tackle some difficult subjects with some humor, because that’s the way I cope with things, personally. I love the humor. My favorites were “Leaf Blower,” which I thought was great, and the last one, “The Problem of the Body”—probably because they’re longer, so you get a little more time exploring the characters, and they have a little more growth. Those also had a lot of humor and tackling of difficult stuff. Let’s see, what else was I gonna say? I really liked the titles—we were talking about, is it “Deadbeat Poets” or “Dead Beat Poets”? I feel like so many of the titles had multiple meanings, or something that was kind of clever—like, the dead white guys were actually chickens, or the last white male—can’t remember the name of it. And the problem with the body being about how she’s gonna fake her own death. And “The Typing Lady” having, you know, these multiple meanings. So I just thought they were really clever, and there were a lot of clever things in the writing that I thought were kind of fun to catch. That didn’t feel gimmicky to me—that felt kind of genuine, but also clever.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Can I ask, Bretnie—one of the first things you mentioned was about the length of those two stories you sort of singled out. Two-part question. One, are you a reader regularly of short story collections? And, yes or no, two, what has this summer been like for you, reading these story collections, as compared to, say, longer ones?
Bretnie Eschenbach: Personally—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Holds fiction—
Bretnie Eschenbach: Yeah, I mostly like novels, but I do like short stories—mostly short stories by authors that I like who mostly write novels. But I also read another Tournament of Books author—hang on—the Idaho author. I just read her new one, Nightjar.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Oh, shit.
Bretnie Eschenbach: I’ve read four short story books, which is more than I normally read, and it’s good—I like it, I like it, and I should read more of them. I should seek them out more, and not just pick them because they’re authors I like.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I like that. I remember there was someone, early in one of our Camp TOB conversations, we were talking about the niceness, the pleasantry, of taking a book like this to a pool or to the beach—you read one story, and then you go do your thing, and then you read one story, you go do your thing. I’ve now done that twice, at a pool and a beach. Yeah, it’s highly functional.
Bretnie Eschenbach: Yeah. And I like that if you don’t like one, you’re just like, next—whereas I chronically finish most books, so I will stick with it even if I’m suffering, just so I can have a good conversation with people about it. Where the short stories are like, oh, I didn’t like that, but it’s okay, because I might like the next one better, and you can move on quicker.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, for sure.
Bretnie Eschenbach: No.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Awesome. Well, thank you, Bretnie.
Bretnie Eschenbach: Thanks!
Andrew Womack: Okay, and finally, in our queue, we have Judy.
Judy Morris: Hi. Well, this—I think this is my favorite of all of them that we’ve read so far. And I’ve read A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth, and I can’t remember anything about it, mostly, except that the lunchbox that goes from the water—they communicate—but it was a beautiful book, and I think that’s it. Her writing is just beautiful, and I don’t expect as much—I don’t know. I’ve been listening to everybody and sort of wondering, wow, I didn’t quite get that impression. But the thing that’s going to stay with me, and I think it’s in the first one—it’s about the dream, where she’s taking apart the typewriters until they find the beating heart, and then she eats the beating heart, which is the stories. Does anybody remember where that was?
Rosecrans Baldwin: That little nib that she eats?
Judy Morris: Yes, the little—
Rosecrans Baldwin: I remember that very well, I don’t remember which story that’s in, I’m sorry, I regret it.
Judy Morris: It just stays.
Rosecrans Baldwin: “The Anthropologist’s Kid,” I think. Sorry, go ahead, it escaped you.
Judy Morris: Well, I don’t know, it just stayed with me that the center of all the stories, you know, is the typewriter. If you go deep enough into the typewriter, it’s where everybody has put their thoughts and their dreams and what have you, and then you take the typewriter apart, and I don’t know, the whole symbolism was just really—and I’m not into symbolism, but that sort of stayed with me. But my favorite story is the last one, because I thought that was particularly sad, and I thought it was just really moving.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah. Can I ask, Judy—there’s something that comes up often when we’ve been talking all these weeks, and I’m just keying off your point about it feeling, or being, sad to you—sometimes, and I know I personally experience this, you like a character, you don’t like a character, you like a story, you don’t like a story, and it can be about likability, it can be about the emotions it evokes. If you’re going through a sad story, does it ever—do you ever want to sort of put it away and be like, I don’t want to feel that right now, get out of my head, get out of my mind? Do you ever find yourself looking for a story to feel one way or the other, or find yourself judging it because you prefer one emotional reaction to a different one?
Judy Morris: I know, I want to cry. I want a book to make me cry. I mean, it’s nice if it makes me laugh, but—if it can tear my heart out, then that makes it all the better. Sounds pretty sad on my part, but I don’t read books to laugh, I don’t think. I think I read them to sort of capture what we go through every day. And it’s good that we laugh—obviously, we all want to laugh, laughter is really important. But we’re hit with sadness, too, and it’s sort of like, you can cry, and then you can walk away and feel more whole, I guess.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Cathartic, yeah.
Judy Morris: Yep.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Awesome. Thanks for sharing, Judy.
Andrew Womack: We’ve got a lot going—thank you, Judy. Yeah, we have a lot going on in the chat right now, and Judy—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Wait, Judy just raised her hand again. Oh, no, I thought I—
Judy Morris: I thought I took it down. Sorry.
Andrew Womack: Didn’t mean to cut you off. Okay. But we do have a lot going on in the chat. Sean has a story about typewriters. I hate to draft you, Sean, but did you want to tell that story? Or not. Sorry, Sean, if you didn’t want to be drafted. Oh, there—hello.
Ceane Willis: Okay, sorry!
Andrew Womack: No, no.
Ceane Willis: A different device, and I couldn’t find the unmute button. I saw her speak at an event, like a book launch, in the beginning of the summer, and she talked about how she actually does have a vintage typewriter collection in her house, and coincidentally she’d actually purchased it at a store that was right up the street from where the event was held. It’s gone out of business in the past year or so. That’s all.
Andrew Womack: So she is a typewriter enthusiast.
Ceane Willis: Yeah.
Andrew Womack: No, maybe—
Rosecrans Baldwin: I know from a friend of mine inside the New York Times that one of their biggest traffic stories last year was about a gentleman who left behind his career in tech and became a typewriter repair person. It was a good story. So who knows, typewriters, maybe people are rediscovering them. I know Tom Hanks has a huge collection of them, not that that’s of interest to anyone. I don’t know, does anyone use a typewriter? I do not use a typewriter.
Andrew Womack: They don’t have AI on them, right? ’Cause I’m just saying—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Probably, at this point, yeah.
Andrew Womack: Now I’m interested—let’s get something that’s stripped down. I used a typewriter for last year’s t-shirts or something—I got a typewriter, I don’t know, did anybody see that? That was a real typewriter. It was painful. Never make ASCII art with a real typewriter.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Andrew does all of the merch for the Tournament of Books. Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt somebody.
Kay Nelson: The American Writers Museum in Chicago has a collection of typewriters on display, and they let you type on certain of them, if you want to play around with them.
Andrew Womack: After working on it, I never want to touch a typewriter again, after doing the ASCII art.
Rosecrans Baldwin: It’s pretty bad.
Andrew Womack: Something else that’s coming up in the chat—who is a must-finish-the-book person versus who fast-forwards? We got some must-finish? I’m a completist, I gotta go through even if I hate it. Yeah? Some of us, yeah. What about you—Rosecrans, you’re a fast-forward, right?
Rosecrans Baldwin: I don’t know about fast-forward, I just—I give it 50 to 100 pages, and then I drop it. I have too many books, there’s too much to read. If it doesn’t grab me in 50 to 100 pages, I’m out. Listen, Middlemarch can do it, so why can’t your book do it? You know what I mean? That’s—not to be an asshole, but you know.
Andrew Womack: But short stories—will you abandon? Will you move on?
Rosecrans Baldwin: Oh, like an individual story, or a collection?
Andrew Womack: Yeah, yeah.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Oh yeah, if it’s not holding—I think the main thing that usually gets me to drop something, whether it’s a novel or a story or anything, is if the person doesn’t seem to have a firm hand on what they’re writing. Sometimes you just—like, in the Ozeki, there’s no question that the author, or the speaker—I’m not sure how to describe this necessarily—but this story knows where it’s going, so, even if I’m not captivated by it, I will go along for the ride, because it’s so well written. Stories or essays or books that seem to be plotting around and haven’t figured out what they’re all about, I let go very fast. Yeah, I remember I was once in a youth hostel in Paris, France, and I was reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and I threw that out the window. Zadie Smith, probably our greatest living nonfiction author, but her fiction sometimes—it’s like, man, figure your shit out, you know? This is not worth my time. Anyway, if Zadie Smith’s on the call, that would be extraordinary—we would love to have you as a judge next year, by the way, Zadie. I don’t think she’s on the call, for what it’s worth. Yeah.
Andrew Womack: Yeah, I stuck with—I’m reading the Sigrid Nunez for two weeks from now, and I just finished a story that I personally found absolutely repulsive. It was awful. I made it through, and I regret every page. Anyway, anyone who’s reading it, maybe you can guess which one it was. It was about the—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Andrew, there’s an interesting question from Bretnie in the chat, I think.
Andrew Womack: Oh wait, that’s my job, right?
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, I do want to hear what this horrible story is, but—
Andrew Womack: Bretnie, would you like to talk to us?
Bretnie Eschenbach: Do you want me to say it out loud?
Andrew Womack: Yes.
Bretnie Eschenbach: For some reason, the last story in the book—Ruth Ozeki auto-fictioning herself into that story—she’s in a coffee shop, catfishing the guy, and he eventually figures out how he knows her, and says, oh, you wrote that book about the boy with autism, and—I was like, oh, it’s so cool, I want to meet my favorite authors in a coffee shop, but I would never—I don’t know what they look like. I look at the picture in the back, and then it’s gone in two seconds, faster than the story itself, so I don’t know—do people know what their favorite authors look like? Would you recognize them?
Andrew Womack: From their 20-year-old author photo.
Gwendolyn Dawson: I might recognize the ones I’ve seen in person. We have a wonderful reading series where I’m from in Houston, and we get some great authors who come through and read. If I’ve seen them in person like that, I think I might recognize them, but otherwise you can’t tell much from those author photos. So many of them are staged in a way where half the face is in shadow, or they’re looking off to the side, or there’s a hat pulled low, or something, so it can be mysterious.
Rosecrans Baldwin: The author-photo genre, I find fascinating. I was joking around with someone about “DeLilloface,” and how it sort of became the default, particularly for men, to be very serious in your photos. Don DeLillo has talked about this—how he refuses to smile for photographs, but he understands that means everyone thinks he’s never smiled in his life. And there’s a great YouTube video of Geoff Dyer introducing James Coates at a conference, either in Australia or South Africa, where he makes fun of James Coates for never smiling, and James Coates just stares at him with the most scorn he could give him. I don’t know, it’s fun.
Andrew Womack: And I just saw Kay’s hand, but it disappeared. Did you have something you wanted to add, Kay?
Kay Nelson: Well, I can add on two things now. Some of my favorite authors—I don’t know why I took my video off, I don’t know how that happened, oh, there we go—I think I would recognize, because if I’ve read all their books, you’ve seen their pictures a million times, you kind of seek them out on Instagram now, you follow your favorite authors, so you start to know who they are. But I was going to go back to not finishing books. I will not finish a book for a couple reasons. One is if, for some reason, the writing style makes it difficult for me to read—I haven’t really pinpointed why some authors I find their writing so difficult—and so I will stop, because it makes me stop reading. I’m like, oh, I gotta get this book, but I don’t want to read that. And the other reason, which I know is an awful reason, is if I don’t like the characters. I actually only had about 50 or 60 pages left in a book—I don’t remember which one—and I realized I do not care what happens to these people. So with 50 or 60 pages left, I closed it and put it aside. So, yeah.
Erin Cooper: What if you don’t like them, but you want to see what happens, right? Like, what if they’re so bad that you want to see them get their comeuppance in the end, or the plot is—I mean, I don’t have to like the characters to want to know what is going to happen in the story, I think.
Kay Nelson: Yeah. Well, in this particular case, and I wish I could go back and figure out what book it is—in this particular case, I really didn’t care what happened at all. I dislike them to that extent. But yes, sometimes I do dislike characters, and I finish it for various reasons, because the plot is interesting to me. In this particular case, I just did not care.
Rosecrans Baldwin: If I can ask—and maybe this is a question for Erin—I’m sorry to interrupt you, go ahead.
Erin Cooper: Oh, I was just gonna say, for me, the crime is a character’s banality, not being unlikable. The character who’s just, like, I don’t care—that’s when I put it down. But I can dislike a character and still want to go on with them.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I mean, I was gonna ask—the most recent example, question for both Kay and Erin—did you read the book Rejection that we had in the Tournament of Books? Short story collection, or anyone else?
Erin Cooper: Oh, who was the author of that?
Rosecrans Baldwin: Tony, last name—
Erin Cooper: Such as the—
Rosecrans Baldwin: W—
Gwendolyn Dawson: It’s one of the more notorious—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Notorious examples of contemporary fiction that had some unlikable characters.
Bryn Lerud: I really hated that book.
Gwendolyn Dawson: I did, too. But I finished it, because I have to finish everything. It was tough.
Erin Cooper: I thought it was a tough read, but I also was really intrigued and kind of hooked. There were parts I definitely sped through faster than others, but overall I thought it was a super interesting book, and I do not know who I could ever recommend it to.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I was talking to a bookseller recently, and they said that’s one of her top choices for someone who comes into the shop and says, I haven’t read anything new in a while, what should I try?
Erin Cooper: That’s bold.
Bryn Lerud: That’s just mean.
Kay Nelson: I mean, it’s—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, go ahead, Kay.
Kay Nelson: I did not finish Rejection. And this is what I wrote in my notes: I did not finish, as I just didn’t care about all the self-loathing each rejected person wallowed in. It just, like, ugh—I couldn’t get into it at all. So I gave it two stars. I must have read quite a bit of it before I abandoned it.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Well, I’ve heard people refer to recommending—when it’s been recommended to them—that it was literally one of the meanest things people have done to them, which is recommending A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara to them. And the idea that that’s just a crime you can commit against someone is hilarious to me. But I’m not gonna—Andrew, I’m taking this way off track.
Andrew Womack: Oh, there you are, yeah. Oh, I was trying to actually find the story that I didn’t like in the book we’re gonna discuss next time. But we don’t have anything else—no other hands are raised. I didn’t see any—I might have missed something in the chat if there were other topics anybody wanted to bring up.
Gwendolyn Dawson: Bryn had her hand raised, her actual hand. Bryn.
Bryn Lerud: I was just—yeah, I did, thank you.
Andrew Womack: Oh. A real hand.
Bryn Lerud: There was one book that—my review of it was, I almost threw this book across the room, and it was A Study in Obedience. I had no clue what was going on in that book, but I still finished it. Not a clue. Did anybody love that book?
Gwendolyn Dawson: I know I read it, but I can’t remember it.
Bryn Lerud: Well, I can’t tell you very much about it. I mean, it had a lot of World War II Nazi references, Eastern European references—that’s all I can say.
Gwendolyn Dawson: It doesn’t explain the dirt.
Kate M: Director?
Bryn Lerud: Oh, I liked the director, who just said that.
Kate M: Kate.
Bryn Lerud: Oh.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Well, I don’t know, Bryn, there is a grand tradition in the history of the Tournament of Books of, when you dislike a book, throwing it. Some people have thrown them off porches, I don’t know.
Bryn Lerud: Yeah.
Rosecrans Baldwin: You gotta give yourself grace.
Bryn Lerud: Hey, any hint about the long list?
Rosecrans Baldwin: Jesus Christ, give us a second to take a nap. I mean, we have a lot of contenders, I’ll tell you that, and in the five minutes before Andrew opened up the Zoom, we were having a production meeting, so—tournament of books, tournament of books, the real deal, the March deal is around the corner, and the long list is—yeah, it’s being developed, how about that?
Andrew Womack: There will—
Erin Cooper: Two more weeks left in the summer, tick-tock, tick-tock.
Rosecrans Baldwin: No, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah—good call, Erin, good call. Agreed, agreed.
Andrew Womack: It’d probably be done if I didn’t keep coming up with stuff like this. Let’s do Zooms all summer long.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I know, but the trouble is, Andrew, we have the Tournament of Books—obviously there are other people at play—but it’s between you suggesting doing Zooms, and me suggesting we just do a tournament of books about the calculation of volume, because I’m such a freak for it. So I don’t know, we’ll find something in the middle.
Andrew Womack: Let’s mix it up.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Let’s mix it up.
Erin Cooper: Well, I appreciate all of it. I know it’s a lot of work to put everything together, and I have really enjoyed the Tournament of Books for many years now, and it’s been really fun to do the Zoom calls—the few that I’ve been able to join this summer have been great, so thank you so much.
Andrew Womack: Thank you, and because all of you joined, you get to decide whether or not we’re gonna keep using the Discuss commenting system, or if it’s injecting too much malware onto people’s systems.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Oh, God.
Andrew Womack: So that may change—that may change. We may not use Discuss anymore, because there are problems with code injection, which maybe nobody likes, but there will be comments of some kind. But anyway, that’s the thing I was looking at. Otherwise, yes, thank you, Kay, I agree, the Zooms have been great, this has been a lot of fun. I think we’re almost at time. Rosecrans, any parting words?
Rosecrans Baldwin: Only parting words would be to take what Erin said and throw it back at everybody else—this is about the entire community, it’s about everybody. Thank you very much for playing along, and I guess we will see everybody in two weeks. Yeah.
Andrew Womack: Alright, great. Well, thank you, everybody. Take care. We’ll see you soon.
Rosecrans Baldwin: See you soon!