HeyJaredThe Novel Tea Newsletter
Book reviews, thematic literary analysis, and cultural commentary to help you thoughtfully engage with the world.
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- Sep 30, 2026
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Latest issues
Pygmalion and Galatea through the Ages (opens the original)
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Last week on the podcast, Neha and I discussed Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers, a not-so-famous book by a famous author. We had lots to discuss: the function of autofiction, AI and its overlap with writing, language and communication, and much more. The title of the book is a reference to the ancient myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who falls in love with his own creation and begs the goddess Venus to bring her to life. Galatea is the name of the woman who is born of the statue, and whom Pygmalion go
Spill the Novel Tea #18: Booker Nominees and Cyclical Mood Reading (opens the original)
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Ah, fall. Our favorite reading season — we finally feel free to embrace the weird, the dark, and the moody. Neha: When the Booker longlist came out, there were a few books that immediately stood out to me. This year’s list looked quite different from last year’s, and I was intrigued by the rather strange and ecclectic selections from the judges. Over the last few weeks, I dove into the ones that I was most excited to read. It ended up being a mixed bag (or a mixed black bag, shall I say?), but f
The Right to Be Unknown: Concepts of Privacy In Literature (opens the original)
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Last week on The Novel Tea podcast, we read The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. Egan imagines a world where Bix Bouton’s technology lets people record and share their memories. You can revisit moments exactly as they happened, experience pieces of other people’s lives, and perhaps finally understand the people around you in a way memory would never allow. The ultimate form of connection. But the more complete that access becomes, the more I started to wonder whether knowing everything about everyo
10 Novels that Explore Technology and its Impact on Society (opens the original)
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Last week, Neha and I introduced Season 8 of The Novel Tea podcast: Technology. We got into our thoughts on technology, what we’re excited to explore this season, and touched on some of the nuances missing from the online discourse about AI. As we look ahead to this upcoming season, I wanted to share some books we’ve read that focus on technology and the way it impacts our lives.When we think about technology in novels, the first books that come to mind are probably 1984 by George Orwell, or Ald
Spill the Novel Tea #17: Nihilism and Attempts at Escape (opens the original)
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The dilemma that we always face at the end of August is: do we start reading spookier, more atmospheric books as fall approaches? Or do we lean in to the last month of warmth with more summer reading?Shruti: My reading this month was, unintentionally, much darker than many of the books I usually gravitate towards. There was a thread of existentialism, and, in some cases, frank nihilism, that ran through each of the stories — even though one was a Russian classic of morality, another was a horror
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