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JANUARY 25, 2019

Hi friends, and welcome back to the Weekly Sound Off. We’ve had a wild week of fluctuating temps here in Newark, but we’re back to our regularly scheduled cold weather. Just in time for our great big list of Listens to Warm Up Your Winter, highlighting the new releases our editors plan to snuggle up with this season. Still need listening inspiration? Onward!

🎶Guess who’s back, back again? Shades is back, tell a friend 🎶

OK, so the series itself isn’t returning, but we can’t resist a good jingle. E. L. James’s ears must have been burning last week when various outlets (including yours truly!) noted that Michelle Obama’s Becoming was a Fifty Shades of Grey-level publishing phenomenon. Well, the blockbuster author still has plenty of sizzle up her sleeve, because James is publishing her first standalone novel since her erotic trilogy went globally viral. According to the publisher, The Mister is a contemporary romance about an aristocratic Englishman and a mysterious beauty who arrives in London with “little more than a dangerous and troublesome past.” The book arrives April 16—let the danger and trouble commence!

We love it when books make history.

There are life-changing books, and then there are *life-changing* books. Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove, which examines Thurgood Marshall’s crusade to clear four black men accused of rape in Jim Crow-era Florida, is one of the latter. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and an Audie, but its latest effect is perhaps its most poignant. This month, Florida’s Clemency Board voted to pardon all four of the accused, a process set in motion by King’s exhaustive research. His newest book is a fitting sequel, untangling another complicated case of racist corruption and “justice lost and found.”

Because Peach would have definitely swiped left on Joe.

Betches, a pop culture website dedicated to female friendships, relationships, and roasting The Bachelor franchise, launched their own dating app this week in conjunction with Match Group. Ship, as the app is called, allows your friends to check out profiles and swipe on potential matches for you, giving the dating app scene a much needed social shake-up. The concept got us book nerds thinking—if we’d had the chance, which literary love stories would we have swiped left on? Fellow fans of You (the beloved audiobook and Netflix phenomenon) will know that Peach could have saved Beck a whole mess of trouble with this app—see who else made the list.

Oh, baby.

Climate scientists are predicting that the rate of female births will also rise alongside sea levels. Historically, warmer climates have led to more boy births, but stressful and erratic weather patterns appear to flip that trend and researchers now expect more female births in coming years. While we wordsmiths find this data dump hard to get our heads around, we were reminded of Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power, in which a nerve in the female collarbone is “switched on” by environmental changes, and for lack for a better term, all hell breaks loose. We may not be able to predict the outcome of this latest news, but we’re sure there are some brilliant sci-fi minds on the case!

Meat cute?

It’s still January, which means we’ve been bombarded with fitness regimens of all stripes—from plant- and fish-based to nondairy, diets have taken virtually all forms. But one weight-loss trend took us by surprise. It’s called the Carnivore Diet and as the name indicates, it involves eating nothing but meat. It’s espoused by the likes of author Jordan Peterson, and folks who’ve sworn by its pound-shedding effect. We’ve yet to hear from Michael Pollan on the craze, but judging from the oft-quoted line in his book In Defense of Food—“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”—we have a feeling his January diet is a little less carnivorous.

And, he already had us at “the African GoT.”

As if we weren't already excited enough about the epic novel author Marlon James is calling “the African Game of Thrones,” a profile in The New Yorker just turned our excitement up to 11. James had been disappointed about the all-white cast of The Hobbit, which inspired him “to reclaim all the stuff I like—court intrigue, monsters, magic. I wanted black pageantry...so I decided I would write the novel I wanted to read.” He learned all he could about the mythologies of Ethiopia, Mali, South Africa, and more, so he could build a “vast playground of myth and history and legend...that’s as rich as Viking or Celtic lore.” (He’s also, apparently, well-versed in grudges and exorcisms; a writer after our own hearts.) We’re in!
Till Next Week!
—the audible editors