One Drink Book Club | 2023 Holiday Gift Guide

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Holiday Gift Guide edition of the One Drink Book Club. Tonight I'm joined by Suzy Wagner, President and Chief Problem Solver of Brand & Buzz and a friend. Suzy joined me for an earlier podcast about Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz and she

[00:00:23] looked me on Anthony Horowitz. I have read probably five books by him in the last couple of months. It's been terrific and she was kind enough to join me for this holiday episode. Welcome Suzy!

[00:00:37] Well thank you Jamey, I'm so excited to be here and I really like your hat. I don't know where you went shopping but I gotta go there myself. Clearly great minds think alike. We're both wearing adorable Santa hats in honor of the season. That's right.

[00:00:52] So out of the gate, this one was a little easier on the cocktail front because we had all of the holiday cocktails available to us. What did you choose? What was your cocktail for tonight? Like my book list, I went a little off-roading, a little off the rails.

[00:01:09] It's my favorite time of year and so on reflecting on all that was amazing this year, I made an Aperol Spritz which is not a holiday drink but it was the best thing we did this

[00:01:23] year was go to Italy with the kids and we discovered the Aperol Spritz there. And so in honor of my favorite time of this year, I made this drink. I think that totally falls within the confines of what we're trying to do.

[00:01:37] I looked at a lot of different cocktail recipes for the holidays and I narrowed it down to about three and I made my final choice based on the name. So what I made tonight was an Aunt Clara's Pink Bunny Pajamas. And so we'll see how this is.

[00:01:55] You definitely made that. Honestly, God, that's the name of the drink. I found it on the internet and it is Bourbon Cream, Gin, Cranberry Juice and a little simple syrup. So it kind of breaks some of my cocktail rules.

[00:02:13] I try to avoid cream and dairy in my cocktails. Yeah, but this time of year what are you going to do? Exactly. How is it? Try it. Do you like it? Oh, it's nice. It's definitely a dessert type of drink.

[00:02:26] It's got that heavy feel, but it's tasty for sure. I really thought you were going to go eggnog martini or something crazy avant garde that you would make on your own. You know, I thought about it, but eggnog is really heavy.

[00:02:40] I mean, Bourbon Cream is heavy, but eggnog is super heavy. Recently over Thanksgiving, I was visiting my parents in Indiana and my dad made eggnog pancakes. So instead of using milk, he used eggnog. It was actually amazing. It had the delicious. I highly recommend.

[00:02:56] It all made on top. Very good. Little cinnamon. All right. I think that in addition to this podcast, you're going to have to have a series of recipes that you add in because... Maybe. Maybe I won't.

[00:03:08] Serious options right now that I know people are going to try out. All right, let's get to it. So the rules of this are this is going to be a gift giving guide. This is also kind of late in the season.

[00:03:20] So this is your last minute gifts book lovers on your list. And what we'll do is Susie and I are both going to provide five different books that we liked in 2023. My list, I don't know about yours, but my list is books that I read in 2023.

[00:03:38] They weren't necessarily published in 2023. So some of mine are older. So being that I'm a gentleman, I will say ladies first. So what was your first gift giving guide book? So this was, like I said, this was really hard for me.

[00:03:54] And just like you opened the conversation, I discovered Anthony Horowitz this year. And then once I discovered him, I just dove in and read every single thing I could find that the man had written almost.

[00:04:07] And I deep into a soon to be five part series, which is the word is murder series. It's the Hawthorne Investigates series. And what's so cool about this book series, and you can pick up any single one of them, doesn't matter.

[00:04:20] You can start with the word is murder. You can go all the way up to the fourth one. The fifth is coming out this coming spring. But if you like mystery and you like police drama and you like characters that are real

[00:04:31] and believable and not necessarily likable, you would like this series. What makes it so compelling as a reader is that Anthony Horowitz breaks all the rules and he puts himself as a main character, which I really have never seen before.

[00:04:46] So I fell in love with this entire series and I just enjoyed it immensely. So that was my first pick. If you like mystery and police, the word is murder. Hawthorne Investigates series. Well, I. I completely agree with you.

[00:05:01] I just finished the fourth in the series probably a week ago. Did you like it? I did. And I did like it. And they really are good who done it. It is fun that Anthony Horowitz puts himself in the book so you're quite not

[00:05:13] quite sure what is real and what isn't is fiction, right? Because some of it follows his real life resume and things. I would say my only complaint is that on the audiobooks, Anthony Horowitz sounds a little bit like a whiny Hugh Grant.

[00:05:29] And that is my only slight criticism. He is British. I guess everybody in their fifties who is a writer is going to sound a little like Hugh Grant. If you're lucky. If you're lucky. What was your first?

[00:05:42] So my first one is for pretty much it could be anyone on your list is the Thursday Murder Club series. I could not recommend this more. It's delightful. The characters are just lovely. It is a bunch of pensioners in Britain at a retirement community called Cooper's

[00:06:01] Chase and it reminded me or it occurs to me that in our lives, there are few times that we're ready for new friends. And so like when you go off to college, like, oh, hey, I'm ready to find a bunch of new friends.

[00:06:14] Sometimes if you're having kids, you get a new influx of new friends because you find other people who are just pregnant or you know that kind of thing. And apparently when you're widowed or going to a retirement home is another time where you meet new friends.

[00:06:28] And so this group, it's also who who done it. But at this Cooper's Chase, they have Bridge Club and Frank Aphyle Club and Jigsaw Puzzle Club. But they also have the Thursday Murder Club and they bring up cold cases and solve murders and the characters are just wonderful.

[00:06:45] You laugh because it's really funny, but then it's really touching at different times in the fourth book in that series called The Last Devil to Die came out this year and it's by Richard Osman and it's wonderful.

[00:06:59] Well, it gives me some hope because someday when I am a widow, I fully expect to outlive Eric. I'm going to need some good friends who want to help me solve crimes in my old age.

[00:07:08] Well, it is made for a movie or a series or a Netflix series. And I can't wait to see who they cast and all those roles because they're just really fun characters. That's all right. What is your second suggestion?

[00:07:22] Second, again, I fell in love with this author named Ellie Griffiths. And she's so incredibly talented. She's written under two names. Her given name, which is Dominica de Rosa and the majority of her books are under Ellie Griffiths and she has written no fewer than four different

[00:07:40] series and I've loved all of them. But my favorite by far is the Ruth Galloway series and her 14th book came out this year, 14th book, Jamie. I discovered her on book 12. So I had a lot of reading through this year.

[00:07:56] It's a lot like the American TV show Bones except instead of Temperance Brennan being so glamorous and amazing and interesting. And this one has kind of a chubbier lady who is a forensic anthropologist and she gets paired with a chromaginie police detective named Harry Nelson.

[00:08:13] And they over this series of books, they become kind of Ponigan, Opig and Lovers and their relationship is as interesting as the murders that they investigate and solve and they find themselves to get pulled in almost like the ex files back in the day.

[00:08:28] Like they're always really become part of the mirror mystery or crime. God, I loved it. Like the 14th book came out this year and I think I may have actually cried when it ended because I didn't want to say goodbye to Ruth.

[00:08:40] I like lost a good friend, which is about as cheesy a thing I will ever say. Well, well, don't limit yourself. I know you. I feel like you have more in you. You're not wrong. I am always for a chubby hero. Just personally, I identify with them.

[00:08:57] Why not? That's great. All right, well that sounds terrific. I haven't read those so good. They're really, really, really good. Yeah. All right. So my next book is for the history lover on your list or a news junkie.

[00:09:11] And this was a recommendation from a co-worker and it's called The War Lovers by Evan Thomas and it covers it's a nonfiction and it covers the lead up to the Spanish American War in the late 1800s where you have

[00:09:26] Theodore Roosevelt, you have William Randolph Hearst and you have Henry Cabot Lodge, who was the majority leader in the Senate. And they cover things about how they went to war. And it really was these guys just wanted a war.

[00:09:41] And Teddy Roosevelt almost didn't even care who it was with. And we kind of felt like the country was becoming pansies and that people needed to be manly men and like we needed a war to kind of get everybody together.

[00:09:54] I mean, the Spanish never sunk the main, you know, the cry, you know, remember the main in Cuba and it turned out that that was actually like an internal explosion, like it was negligence. It wasn't the Spanish ball. I don't think I knew that.

[00:10:08] You're breaking news right here. Breaking news right here. But it was also somewhat helpful to see in this time right now where we have so much biased news all over the place that in people are just so

[00:10:21] disheartened by the news back in the late 1800s, William Randolph Hearst was making stuff up left and right. The news was even worse than it was today and they got us into a war. So and we survived that time.

[00:10:35] So in some ways it was depressing that they went to war on these kind of pretenses, but it was also encouraging that they were able to kind of overcome this. So it may seem awful now, but it's been awful before.

[00:10:49] So that was somewhat of a perspective thing that I thought was interesting. So if you have a history lover on your list, I thought the war lovers was a good read. I like it. That sounds good to me. Well, we haven't touched this genre before, but romance.

[00:11:03] To be honest, I don't do a lot of romance, but there are a lot of things that were stressful this year. Work was really busy. There was I mean all good, but there was just a lot of news, a lot

[00:11:14] of really terrible international news, things happening, tech news. It was bad. I just needed a little escapism. And I had the great good fortune of meeting Catherine Center and having dinner

[00:11:26] with her a few months ago, and I am embarrassed to say I had not known her books before. She writes these really beautiful, quirky, funny romance novels. And they're not like Harley Quinn with some goofy guy with a bare chest and a

[00:11:40] steed. It's really just adorably normal people who find and fumble their way into finding the life and the love that they're supposed to have. And she's written a series of books. I devoured all of them. Happiness is for Beginners is right now trending on Netflix.

[00:11:56] I actually prefer the book. Don't tell Catherine that, but the movie is getting a lot of acclaim on Netflix. But I think my favorite book that she wrote was something called The Bodyguard. And it's just a very playful kind of

[00:12:08] role reversal where a female bodyguard has to protect a male celebrity you know, heartthrob action guy and they end up sort of finding their way through a messy situation. And it's just adorable. But every book Catherine Center writes just like she herself is charming and

[00:12:25] reaffirming and there's a lot of great pearls in there to help you. I don't know, just change your attitude, find your positive and want to persevere. So Catherine Center books. I like The Bodyguard. Again, Happiness for Beginners is really out there right now too. Nice. All right.

[00:12:41] You know, the most recent romance novel I read was by accident. I was looking for a historical fiction and I saw this outlander had all these ratings on them. And I thought, oh, well, this, you know, it's rated so highly. Everybody likes this. I'll start reading it.

[00:12:59] And about halfway through, I went, wait a second, is this a romance novel? Like, wait. And by then I was too vested because it's a really long book too. And then it's really historical fiction. It's historical biography. It's, you know, sure. Yeah. It's totally romance.

[00:13:16] Yeah. Yeah. God, Jamie. But again, I liked it because the hunk in it was named Jamie. So I, you know, it's actually one of my 10th year folks also and a great series. It was good, although when I got to the end of it,

[00:13:29] I was like, all right, I can't do any more of this. You stopped after the first outlander? I stopped after the first. Wow. Did you watch the show on stars? I did not, but I probably need to check that out. Yeah, it's really good.

[00:13:42] All right. What's next on your list? So next on my list is for the music lover. I would say The Storyteller by Dave Grohl, the lead singer of The Food Fighters or the creator of The Food Fighters. Really good book.

[00:13:55] If you're from the Washington area, it's really fun because he talks about growing up in Springfield, Virginia, which is very close to DC. He is incredibly humble, incredibly curious. He has this kind of almost boyish charm. He's met almost all of his idols.

[00:14:13] He's friends with Paul McCartney and he really has the wherewithal to think I am the luckiest guy in the world, but he's great. He's so talented. And so the stories in there are great. If you listen to the audiobook, he does the narration. Just really a fun book.

[00:14:29] This year, I also read Bono's book, which was also interesting. But it was very heavy. Like it was a lot of Bono. You had to kind of take it in doses, whereas Dave Grohl, it was a little easier to read and enjoy. So people love Dave Grohl.

[00:14:44] I mean, they just hard not to. Yeah, yeah, cool guy. It was the next of mine is everyone who's going home to see family members. Maybe sometimes wants to, you know, not really, but thinks about maybe murdering them. I say Sally Hepworth is your author.

[00:15:01] Not only has she become a good personal friend, but she is. I think she's the second highest bestselling author in Australia. She's based in Melbourne. Her eighth book is coming out this coming spring. It's called Darling Girls. It's already out in Australia, but not in the US.

[00:15:15] That'll be in April. But her newest book. I think I have it. Oh, it's called The Soulmate. This was last year's book and she just keeps getting better. I've read every single one of her books and you can't go wrong with any of them,

[00:15:28] but they just keep getting better. They're page turning twisty family dramas, sometimes murder. This one, The Soulmate is about a family that lives you can kind of tell by the cover. They live across the street from a cliff overlooking the ocean. And it happens to be a place

[00:15:45] exclusively based on real life where people have gone to kill themselves. And she imagines what that must have been like because this is really happening in Australia. There is a family that sort of saves people lives. This book is fiction, obviously.

[00:15:59] It's a couple, Gabe and Pippa, and Gabe is this adorable guy who can talk to anybody and he frequently rescues people off the edge of the cliff and brings them back home for tea and story and changes their mind until one day he doesn't rescue

[00:16:14] the person. And when his wife finds out that he had a history with them, the question becomes, did he push him? And so it's really I mean, before this, she wrote a book called The Mother-in-law. She's written about Alzheimer's, abduction, families.

[00:16:30] You can find something to thrill yourself or anyone on your list if you just take a look at the books that she's written. So there you go. Great. Oh, that sounds really good. OK, my next one is for the sports lover. And if you liked the movie Hoosiers,

[00:16:46] you love Who Didn't? Exactly. Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West. And it is, to me, a Montana based version of Hoosiers. It's about a kind of a damaged school teacher who moves to Montana to get out

[00:17:05] of the rat race. He is the default basketball coach for this very tiny high school and he's thinking about quitting, but he gets a couple more players and they try to put together a season. And it's really a cute story.

[00:17:19] It's I call it Hoosiers plus Friday Night Lights because there's some really great characters, the kids and their families. Really heartwarming book. I really recommend it. So well, that's based on Montana, which is also a character, right? I mean, there's no better place.

[00:17:36] I actually had drinks earlier this week with a friend who did the same thing. He was a prominent journalist. He's an editor. He recently moved to Montana and he was talking about the culture there

[00:17:46] and how people in Montana, because the elements can kill you, really look up for each other and that they have just this tight knit community that you don't always find anywhere. So that sounds great. Yeah, really good. What's your next one? OK, my next one.

[00:18:03] I feel like I've done too much drama. I will do a nonfiction historical biography again, going back to Netflix pics if you are aware that this is the last season of The Crown.

[00:18:14] And if you've been interested in following it at all, then you have to read Tina Brown's The Palace Papers. It is so compelling. Page turning. You feel like you are working inside the palace and seeing the Queen and Phillips

[00:18:31] interactions and Camilla and Charles and Will and Kate and Harry and Megan. And Tina Brown, she's a digger investigative journalist. She comes with receipts. So this story is like so juicy and so page turning. And it really shed some different perspective on the fallout of William and Harry

[00:18:51] this year, and so it was perfect time to read this tell all biography series. Well, that sounds interesting. There's definitely people on my list who would enjoy that. Love following the intrigue, the palace intrigue of Buckingham Palace. So that sounds really interesting. OK, good. Good suggestion.

[00:19:09] A follow up book after this one would be Endgame and I haven't read it yet, but it's on my bedside table right now. And it's the very last of the kind of dive in series. So there you go. Endgame and the Palace Papers.

[00:19:19] All right. What do you got next? All right. This is my last on the list. And this is for people who like historical fiction and or live in Florida. And so. Is that is that possible? Does anyone in Florida like historical fiction? Well, I don't know.

[00:19:35] But if you like historical fiction, you would like this book. And if you live in Florida and may not like historical fiction, you might like it. All right. And it's called A Land Remembered. It's by Patrick Smith and it follows three generations of a family that

[00:19:51] basically moved to Florida, lived in the swamp, really carved out a farm, a business and through each generation got more wealth, more power. So some of it's about greed, some of it's about the relationships.

[00:20:06] But a lot of it covers what it was like to live in Florida in the 1800s. Oh, 1900s. And I had no idea like there was wild cattle that they were trying to catch and domesticate. There was the orange groves. There was all sorts of storms.

[00:20:24] So it was really interesting. And it gave me a new perspective about Florida. I mean, I've never lived in Florida and I think about landscape Florida. I've been to the Everglades, but this really talked about how tough it was.

[00:20:36] I mean, this was really the frontier in the 1800s. And so the characters are good and Florida is a character in this book. It was it was really interesting. So did it make you like Florida better?

[00:20:48] Yeah, well, it gave me, you know, if you think about Disney-fied Florida, in my mind, Florida kind of existed 1950 plus. You know, I don't think about Florida before that. And this made me kind of appreciate that Florida had pioneers that were trying

[00:21:05] to tame the land and carve out a new life. So it was very interesting. I learned a lot about Florida and about the time in this one. I like it. Well, my last book, I think I've already gone over by one, but I would be remiss

[00:21:20] not to mention Sarah Peckinin's Gone Tonight. I like to call her international bestselling author, Sarah Peckinin. And a lot like Sally Hepworth and Ellie Griffiths and Katherine Center and Anthony Horowitz, everything she writes, I read. And I love it.

[00:21:37] I fell in love with her books with The Wife Between Us, which was just such a crazy twisty thriller where you didn't see things coming, but Cullen Hoover, you know, America's international sweetheart of an author said about Sarah Peckinin's book. I fell in love with Sarah's books.

[00:21:53] I'm a huge fan of her books and Gone Tonight is her best yet. And so this one is about a mother who's always tried to be very protective of her daughter and her daughter is now 24 years old and she's ready to kind of spread

[00:22:04] her wings and she's a nurse and she finds out that her mother has been deceptive. And there's a lot she doesn't know about her mother or her own background. And so you wonder, is her mom a good guy or a bad guy?

[00:22:16] And it's really edge your seat kind of roller coaster. And you don't know what's going to happen until the very, very end. And even then you're not sure. So if you have somebody who I don't know, maybe they don't trust their mom, maybe they don't like their mom.

[00:22:28] Maybe maybe they just want to go on a roll because of your recommendation. I did read Gone Tonight and I really enjoyed it. Oh, yeah. So at some point, if we can get Sarah Peckinin on the show, that would be super

[00:22:40] fun because I have many questions about Gone Tonight that I wanted to ask her. Well, she's a brand new book coming out this spring. She just came back yesterday from India where she has been working with a dog

[00:22:53] rescue charity, saving dogs, animals, all kinds of animals on the streets of India and getting them fostered and taken care of. And she's just doing amazing things. So if you have a chance, check her out on Instagram and learn more about her side

[00:23:08] projects because she's just so cool. That sounds awesome. Very nice. Well, what are your plans for Christmas, Jamie? Staying here for the holidays. And I think after New Year's, a little trip to the Caribbean. So that might be kind of fun. So yeah, how about you?

[00:23:26] I love it. We are hosting a big kind of Christmas Eve with the same family and friends we've been doing it with for years. And then I think we are going to be going up to New York because two of my kids

[00:23:38] have not seen the oldest kids' apartment yet. So we are planning to go to New York and see a show and check out the big city while the lights are still bright. Oh, fun.

[00:23:46] I was there two weekends ago and it was fun to walk around and walk up Fifth Avenue and see all the lights and the tree and everything. It was great. Such a cool city. Well, I hope this helps people get some last minute holiday shopping done

[00:24:01] and hope people discover some new offers. Yes, I thank you for coming on and having such great suggestions. I think we have everybody covered. Music lovers, history lovers, sports lovers. So there's a little something for everybody. Romance lovers. So yes.

[00:24:19] So I think it will be great and I wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Happy holidays and a happy new year.