This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

Last year, SiriusXM launched a podcast subscription that gets you ad-free listening to 99PI plus special bonus episodes.

These bonus episodes have featured extended cuts, Q&As, peaks behind the scene of making 99PI and some more informal chats with the crew here.

Those are my favorites.

After we finished up the Powerbroker, a bunch of people on the Discord were asking us what other books we've been reading.

So a group of us got together on Zoom and presented some of our recent favorites.

And the choices were so good and surprising and everyone was so charming.

I felt like sharing this bonus episode with the wider 99PI audience.

Enjoy.

Hello to Series XM Podcast Plus subscribers.

This is Roman Mars here with a fun bonus episode for you.

The 99PI team reads a lot. We read for research,

we read for story ideas, and of course we read for fun. So we thought that this month it would be

fun to talk about the books that we're currently reading, and maybe we'll give you some gift

ideas for the beautiful nerds in your life. So we have a whole mix of producers on the Zoom call with me, and I'm going to start with Lash Medan.

Lash, what are you reading right now?

Hello, Roman.

So I, at any given moment, am always reading three to seven books at the same time.

Every morning I like to sit down with my coffee in my reading chair and sit down for

15, 20 minutes and pick a book from my stack of books in progress at random. That stack right now

has short fiction, poetry, a memoir. It has communist speculative oral history, all sorts of things. But I got

...