‘A challenge and a delight’: An editor’s notes from a bookish beat

Episode transcript

April Austin: Is the author being generous with the reader? Are they being generous to their characters? If it’s a tough piece of fiction about a difficult topic, have the characters grown over the course of the novel?

Clay Collins:  That’s April Austin, books editor and deputy Weekly editor at The Christian Science Monitor.  

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Collins:  Monitor readers love books. That’s been borne out by many a customer survey over the years and supported by brisk traffic in replies to the query “What are you reading?” – which is also the name of a franchise that lets our well-read readers peek over each other’s shoulders to get inspiration. 

April’s the latest in a long line of astute Monitor gatekeepers. Longtime readers will recall the names Tom D’Evelyn, who was on the job around the time April and I both started at the paper, Ron Charles, who went on to The Washington Post, and Yvonne Zipp and the late Marjorie Kehe, who each put a wonderful stamp on the section during their respective runs. 

This is “Why We Wrote This,” the podcast about how Monitor journalists do their work. I’m Clay Collins. April joins me today.

Welcome to the show, April!

Austin: Thanks for having me.

Collins:  So, yeah, Monitor readers love books, and I’m guessing that adds a lot of joy, but maybe also some pressure to your job. 

Austin: It is both. It is a challenge and a delight. The Monitor readers put me in the shade in terms of the quantity and the breadth of the books that they look at and read monthly. It’s just astonishing. And sometimes people get deep into the weeds on policy issues. Sometimes obscure things, sometimes poetry. And it’s hard to keep up with them. 

Collins:  So, that said, and that’s an incredible diversity, but is there any kind of through line in the books, maybe even one that crosses genres that you might think of as an “it” factor? 

Austin: The through line for me is: What is the redemptive factor that is involved here? If it’s a tough piece of fiction about a difficult topic, have the characters grown over the course of the novel? Is the author being generous with the reader? Are they being generous to their characters? Or if it’s a biography, are they being generous to the person that they are profiling? 

I think the best example, it’s actually from 2022, it’s Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.” It is so difficult to read in a lot of ways, because of the things that happen to this character, Demon Copperhead. I don’t know how she did it. I don’t know how Barbara Kingsolver got inside the head of a boy, and managed to write a character that is both funny and tragic, full of pathos, but he does have agency. And Barbara Kingsolver’s generosity is so evident in how she describes his life. The generosity that she shows both to the reader, to not talk down to the reader, to her characters, to not display them in all of their awfulness – she really gets at the heart of humanity. And so we had a really good review of it, I thought.  

Collins:  There are the writers of the books and then there are the writers of the reviews. So I wonder if you could talk a little about how you go about matching reviewers to books. 

Austin: So, I have a group of reviewers that I’m very familiar with. They will look at, say, 25 books a month, fiction and nonfiction. And they will come back to me. And I got a sense of their personalities and their proclivities, and sometimes I will push on them a little bit, like, you know: “You always review books about Irish fiction. Let’s have you try something with a Korean family example.” And so wherever they’re curious is where I want to take them with the assignments.  

Collins:  Ever been skeptical about a book you were pitched, and then been blown away by the review?

Austin: All the time. Yes, all the time. An example of that is a book that’s called, “The Cost of Free Land.” A woman who’s writing about her Jewish forebears who went out to the West and took over land that was taken from the Native Americans from the Lakota. And this was part of a government policy. I thought at first, why is a woman who’s not Native American writing about this particular topic? And then, I read the review, and I started looking at the book, and I thought: “This is amazing how many threads it draws together. You had a Jewish family coming, escaping the pogroms in Russia only to come and start farming land that had been taken from the Lakota by force. So it’s like it had all these interesting wrinkles to it. So that was a book that looked on paper, sort of like: “Well, would this work?” And it totally did. And the reviewer totally got it.

Collins:  Hmm. So much is about voice. There’s the voice of the book, the voice of the writer. Um, you’re speaking right now to an audio-receptive audience. So I wonder, what’s your take on audiobook reviews? Uh, The [New York] Times has been doing this since the summer. And they talk about the audio component as its own product with its own qualities. 

Austin: I love the idea of audiobooks. But I’ve had interesting conversations on the flip side of that, which is people who have said to me, I hear the voices in my head of the characters when I’m reading it myself from the book. And then other people who would very much like to have more involvement with literature, and they don’t have time, so they’re listening to a book while they’re doing something else.

Collins: Mm-hmm.

Austin: And so I think there’s value in both. But what you’re touching on is the artistry of the audio. And a really good example of one we’ve done, it’s about to come out, is the Barbra Streisand memoir, “My Name is Barbra.” And that’s where you want to hear her voice with her Brooklyn accent and her sometimes, I think, breaking into song. And so I think we’ll be looking more for those where the artistry of the audio and the match of the person who’s reading it to the material would really speak to readers.

Collins:  So, April, at the top I mentioned a bunch of Monitor books editors in succession, each with their own style. What would you say is your imprimatur as books editor. Beyond just knowing what Monitor readers like, how much of you ends up being in the work?

Austin: I think, because books are so personal, it’s hard not to have your own kind of stamp on it. And for me, it’s about history and nonfiction. I love fiction, don’t get me wrong, but I think that everything that we’re experiencing now has historic precedents, and we forget about those at our peril. I also really enjoy books about the arts, and I feel like the arts is an antidote to all of the confusion and the noise that takes place a lot of the time in the media and just in the world. There’s so much going on.  

Collins:  It strikes me too that, you know, what you do is give people a way to look at a huge flood of books coming out, both English language authors or ones that are translated. What is it that you want to set them up to do? Just sort of find comfort, to get out of their comfort zone, both, I mean…. 

Austin: It’s a both/and kind of thing. Especially during 2020 and [with] George Floyd’s murder, there was a lot of interest in broadening, both coming from the readers and coming from the editors and reviewers. And in the publishing world, things started to crack open a little bit. That’s a real opportunity to develop empathy and give people an opportunity to dive into books that they might not ordinarily think about.

Collins:  So, April, between this moment when we’re talking and when this podcast is available, you will have dropped your 2023 Books of the Year special. And I just wonder, for listeners and readers, are there just a handful that you’d like to call out as being really exemplary books? 

Austin: Yes. One of the things that I’m looking for, especially if we’re talking about politically oriented books, is understanding the thought process that leads people to make the kind of decisions that they make. And one book that’s on our list is called “Preparing for War,” and it’s by Bradley Onishi. He’s a former evangelical youth minister, and he broke away from that movement and became quite critical of it. Uh, he was looking at the Jan. 6 riots. He had an inside sensibility about what led people to do that. And it was kind of a cautionary tale. And I thought that was a tremendous book that got some coverage, but perhaps not as much as it might have. 

And, another one is a memoir, “How To Say Babylon,” which is by Safiya Sinclair, and this is a memoir of her growing up in a Rastafarian household in Jamaica, and her father was quite an autocrat. And she became a poet and had to break away from her family situation in order to establish herself. And the writing is just searing and poetic.

And there’s just tons of great fiction that came out last year as well. All of that is in our list that the reviewers compiled, so I hope people will check it out. 

Collins:  Well, thank you, April, for coming on, for talking about books and for upholding the long legacy of Monitor Books coverage.

Austin: Thanks, Clay. 

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Collins:  Thanks for listening. To find a transcript in our show notes with links to Monitor books coverage, including our best books of 2023 and more, visit CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Mackenzie Farkus is also a producer on this podcast. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt, produced by the Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.