The Perfect Summary Podcast
Every summary, narrated: the GIST of great conversations and books in minutes, so you can decide if you want the REST.
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Pick as many as you like: any of them matches within a group.
A wandering artist and her daughter rent a house in rule-loving Shaker Heights, and a custody fight over a baby sets two mothers, and two ways of living, against each other.
A sixteen-year-old Indian boy survives a shipwreck and drifts across the Pacific in a lifeboat he must share with a Bengal tiger.
A blue-skinned packhorse librarian carries books through the Kentucky hills of 1936, loved by her readers and feared by nearly everyone else.
A Philadelphia patrol officer hunts for her missing, opioid-addicted sister while someone is strangling women on the streets she polices.
Two rival serial killers who prey only on other serial killers start an annual hunting contest, and somewhere between the crime scenes they fall in love.
Sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy is forced into the fiftieth Hunger Games and decides to fight the arena itself, in Suzanne Collins's prequel about propaganda and the cost of defiance.
On a Dorset sheep farm in 1968, a grieving wife's first love comes home with his young son, and a love triangle slides toward a killing and a murder trial.
An 1893 children's fantasy sends a big-brained boy baron and his brilliant dog down a Russian well into a hollow earth of transparent people, a blind city of silver and a kingdom of ice.
Violet Sorrengail leaves the war college behind for a dragon-back quest across unknown isles, racing to save her kingdom's defences and the man she loves from the darkness inside him.
Convicted as a small child of killing a baby, sixteen-year-old Mary finally has a reason to tell what really happened that night.
Violet Sorrengail returns to her dragon-rider war college for a second year, carrying a secret the leadership would kill to keep.
A grieving father is invited back to the cabin where his daughter was murdered and spends a weekend there talking with God in three unexpected forms.
An 1896 pamphlet by a New York lawyer imagines a populist outsider winning the White House and the republic coming apart, a Gilded Age warning that the internet rediscovered as prophecy.
Mel Robbins argues that two words, Let Them, free you from managing other people, and two more, Let Me, put your energy back into the only thing you control: yourself.
Sent to a grim Georgia reform school after a fire she cannot explain, seventeen-year-old Luce is drawn to a cold, beautiful boy she is certain she has met before.
In a state that watches everything and rewrites the past daily, one clerk risks his life to think for himself and to love.
A British warship wrecks off Patagonia in 1741, its starving crew splits into warring camps, and the survivors come home with rival stories that put an empire's honour on trial.
In Depression-era Alabama, a tomboy named Scout watches her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, defend a Black man falsely accused of rape while a hidden neighbor watches over her.
A young Boston florist falls for a brilliant surgeon, then finds herself inside the pattern she grew up watching, just as her first love walks back into her life.
A grieving prince is told by his father's ghost to avenge a murder, and cannot be sure what to believe or how to act.
In the late summer of 1985, a fifteen-year-old finds an abandoned cinema that screens films made by ghosts, for ghosts, in a bittersweet coming-of-age story about loss and the magic of movies.
Seven generations of the Buendía family rise and unravel in Macondo, a jungle town where ghosts, plagues of insomnia and civil wars are all equally ordinary.
Stop planning by the calendar year: treat every twelve weeks as a year of its own and let a near deadline, a weekly plan and an honest score do the work.
A clinical psychologist's twelve blunt, oddly named rules for carrying responsibility, telling the truth and finding meaning in a life that will include suffering.
In the winter of 1789 a Maine midwife examines a body pulled from the ice and sets out to win justice for a woman the town's judge would rather silence.
A coach and a psychologist argue that a tenfold goal is simpler than doubling, because it forces you to drop the 80 percent of your work that cannot come along.
The cunning king of Ithaca fights monsters, gods and his own pride for ten years to get home, while his wife and son hold off a house full of suitors.
Yuval Noah Harari turns from humanity's past and far future to the present, asking how AI, nationalism, fake news and the loss of old stories will test us right now.
Greg McKeown's method for finding the few things that truly matter, cutting the rest, and making the vital work almost effortless.
A twelve-year-old boy is the only survivor of a plane crash that kills his family, and must learn, slowly and with one fierce friend beside him, how to live afterward.