In this episode of Fireside Lit Book Club, we slow down with Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful to examine the fine line between devotion and enmeshment. Through the story of the Padavano sisters, we explore how love can become control, how self-sacrifice can disguise itself as care, and how breaking away from family bonds can feel like both freedom and loss.

Join us by the fire as we unpack the beauty and the ache of this novel — the way it asks us to look honestly at our own families, the roles we play, and the boundaries we fear setting.

There’s something about autumn that invites us to slow down, pour a warm drink, and slip into a good book. In this special seasonal episode of Fireside Lit Book Club, I’m sharing ten books that capture the spirit of fall — stories full of atmosphere, reflection, and depth.

Whether you’re looking for gothic classics, heartwarming tales, or thought-provoking reads to pair with crisp evenings and candlelight, you’ll find inspiration here for your autumn reading list.

✨ Curl up, listen in, and let’s celebrate the season together. 🍂

Join us as we step into George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo—a work that blends history, grief, and the supernatural into an unforgettable meditation on love, loss, and what lingers after death. Together, we explore how Saunders captures Abraham Lincoln’s private mourning, the chorus of ghostly voices that shape the novel’s unique form, and the larger questions it raises about mortality, compassion, and the human longing for connection beyond the grave.

Pull up a chair by the fire as we reflect on how Lincoln in the Bardo illuminates both the intimacy of personal sorrow and the universality of what comes after.

In this episode, slow down, light a candle, and rediscover reading as a ritual rather than a race. Together, we’ll explore how to select books that truly matter to you, create seasonal or personal TBR lists, and even curate your own “personal canon” of works to return to over the years.

You’ll also hear practical ideas for deepening your relationship with books—through marginalia, reading journals, or simply carving out intentional spaces and rhythms in your daily life. From “working copies” and “trophy editions” to playful ways of choosing your next read, this episode is full of inspiration for weaving literature into the fabric of who you are.

If you’ve ever wanted to move from occasional reading to a steady, meaningful practice, this is your invitation to let words shape you—one ritual, one page, one season at a time.

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is more than a tale of shipwreck and survival — it’s a meditation on faith, truth, and the mysteries that don’t fit neatly into either/or categories. In this episode, we explore Pi Patel’s choice to embrace Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam all at once, his refusal to limit God to one tradition, and the novel’s famous ending with two stories of survival. What does it mean to live with both/and — both religion and reason, both fact and myth, both brutal reality and transcendent meaning? Join us as we unpack the spiritual invitation of Life of Pi: to see truth not as a single box to check, but as a vast, layered mystery that gives life.

In this episode, we step into the luminous world of Virginia Woolf to explore how she dismantles fixed notions of gender, identity, and truth. Through a close look at "Orlando" and "A Room of One’s Own," we unravel Woolf’s radical vision of selfhood—not as something static, but as something shifting, performative, and deeply entangled with power, illusion, and creative freedom. What does it mean to live beyond the binary? To write without a fixed form? And how do illusions shape—and liberate—our sense of who we are? Join us for a journey through Woolf’s timeless questions and the bold, beautiful answers she offers.

In this opening episode of Fireside Lit, I invite you to settle in and reflect on the power of stories -- not just the ones we read, but the ones that shape us. This is my personal love letter to literature, and the ways it helps us make sense of life, identity, and emotion.

Join me as we explore what draws us to books in the first place, why reading is never as solitary as it seems, and how this podcast hopes to become a cozy gathering place for lovers of both timeless classics and contemporary fiction -- by the firelight.