S14:Ep278 - You Are Now Old Enough To Hear This with Guest Aaron Starmer + Alien Book Recs 4/29/26

Our website - www.perksofbeingabooklover.com. Instagram - @perksofbeingabookloverpod Facebook - Perks of Being a Book Lover. To send us a message go to our website and click the Contact button.   You can find Aaron Starmer at www.aaronstarmer.com or on IG @aaron_starmer.   This week on the podcast we welcome middle grade and young adult novelist Aaron Starmer whose most recent book, You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This, is a quirky middle grade novel about a Toe Beast and a girl who travels with a pack of dogs and a boy named Roman who learns some family secrets.  That sounds like a lot so we are glad Aaron joins us to explain it all in a much more succinct way than we ever could. And his 2025 YA novel Night Swimming just came out in paperback this week. And our book recommendation segment of the show is about aliens because what pairs better with a quirky novel than some extraterrestrials? We have Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning titles, a book about alien garbage, a wacky buddy road trip adventure, literary fiction about a girl who doesn’t feel human, and a philosophical first contact story starring the Catholic Church.   Books Mentioned in this Episode:   1- You Are Old Enough To Hear This by Aaron Starmer 2- Night Swimming by Aaron Starmer  3- The Last Garden in England by Julia Kelly  4- Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman 5- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir  6- The Humans by Matt Haig  7- The Riverman by Aaron Starmer 8- The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler  9- Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy 10- The Art of Vanishing by Morgan Pager  11- A 5 Star Read by Fellow Book Lover Tess @books_andthebeach - Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers  12- The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1) by Becky Chambers  13- The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell  14- Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky  15- Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino  16- Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card  17- The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis  Media Mentioned in this Episode: 1- Whitehall Book Club - https://www.historicwhitehall.org/whitehall-book-club 2- Resident Alien - (2021-2025, Netflix) 3- Project Hail Mary (2026)