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This post used to be a page on my blog that I updated from time to time. But now I see the last time I updated it was three years ago. I used to listen to a lot of fiction podcasts, but now most of my podcast listening is in the realm of non-fiction with only 3 fiction podcasts in my regular rotation. So I’ve decided to retire this as a page and instead turn it into a post for archival purposes.


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Wretch by Eric LaRocca

“Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes, you’ll know you’re dead.”

Our narrator Simeon is a middle-aged man who is mourning the loss of his husband Jonathan. He’s also recently lost his job. He has an ex-wife and a 16-year-old son. We don’t see much of the son, but I often got the impression he was younger than 16 due to the way his parents treated him and talked about him. With references to chat rooms and webpages buffering before loading, I initially thought this took place in the 1990s, but it turns out it takes place in the present time.

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Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet by John G. Turner

I like that Turner puts Smith into context, telling us what his contemporaries thought of him and what else was going on at the time. You can’t really understand Joseph Smith without understanding early 1800s America. Turner isn’t a Mormon himself, but he’s writing with a Mormon audience in mind. He obviously admires and sympathizes with Joseph Smith Jr., but he also criticizes some of the things he does.

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Hospital by Han Song

The prolog reads like it belongs to a different book as it takes place in space in the future and the rest of the novel takes place in a satirical version of a hospital in present-day China.

There are a couple hilarious moments. Our narrator Yang Wei gets sick from drinking water. He’s taken to the hospital by hotel staff. One of them takes out his wallet and bribes the doctor on his behalf. They even offer to take his blood tests for him!

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Dollface by Lindy Ryan

Jill is a horror novelist, which made me suspect she’s an author stand-in, and the afterword pretty much confirms it. Her sister Kitty is a social media influencer, so both of them have jobs which are extremely difficult to make a living at.

For about the first fifth of the book, the only horror in Jill’s life, besides her tragic childhood, is PTA meetings, group texts, MLMs and a serious case of writer’s block. I like that the book debunks the razor blades in Halloween candy myth and other hoaxes.

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You Did Nothing Wrong by C.G. Drews

A recent transplant from Australia, Elodie has just moved to Virginia with her new husband Bren who is renovating his parent’s old house. As the story opens, they’re in the honeymoon phase of their relationship, madly in love with each other.

Elodie is only 22 and Bren is only 23, although they act older than this due to the weight of the world landing more heavily on them than most. (Bren’s parents died when he was 10 and Elodie’s brother died when she was 8.)

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