Pod Review January 20

It seems that I’m suffering from a sort of book slump, and Goodreads really isn’t helping when the landing page announces that I’m 3 books behind schedule. I have started quite a number of books but I’m slow to progress. Luckily, I’m not suffering from any podcast slump (what a grey January that would be, if I was in no mood for books AND podcasts, what would I blog about?)

I’ve started 2 new podcasts this week, one that went quite well, and the other, well… You can guess.

I’ve listened for years, on and off, to The Mom Hour, a long-time podcast hosted by Meagan Francis and Sarah Powers. When I heard that Meagan Francis had branched out to another podcast for middle-aged mothers, I was happy to give it a try. The show is Mother of Reinvention. The target audience is really mothers of big / adults kids who are perimenopausal or menopaused and are looking for a new phase in life. I did listen to 2 episodes: That life changing moment you do something completely different and How to love who you are today while making positive change for tomorrow with Midlife nutrition and wellness coach Rachel Hugues. Both episodes were ok, but too vague to my taste. I was hoping for something more factual and relatable to my own experience, so your own mileage may vary.

The second show I tried is a complete 180 from the previous one. It is in the investigative / true crime genre, and all the more fascinating as it is set in Japan. The Evaporated, produced by Campside media (the same one from the mini-series Suspect), studies the phenomenon of people who willingly disappear in Japan, apparently tens of thousands of them each year. Those people might want to escape debt collectors, yakuza, but also domestic violence. I’m two episodes in, and it seems that the series is not complete yet, but I’m hooked already. Here’s some more info.

I’m slowly progressing into the Persona mini-series, about scams in France and Europe, instigated by a French-Israeli conman who wasn’t afraid to impersonate the French foreign ministry to make wealthy people willingly transfer money to his bank accounts. It’s funny to have an American journalist investigate this French case! French police doesn’t appear under a favorable light, I can tell you!

Lastly, if you have read short stories by Edgar Keret (I loved his collection Suddenly A Knock on the Door), you might be interested by a recent episode of This American Life: Half-Baked Stories about my Dead Mom. Keret’s stories are amazing on paper, but in audio form with some banter with Ira Glass it’s just as great!