What to watch, read and listen to from MoCo creators

After Chevy Chase’s Dian Seidel returned from volunteering abroad with her husband, friends who’d enjoyed emails about the couple’s adventure suggested she should write a book. Seidel started with essays (one placing first in the 2022 Bethesda Magazine adult essay contest), and then she got to the book, Kindergarten at 60: A Memoir of Teaching in Thailand (Apprentice House Press, June 2023). “For older adults who have some energy, health, the ability to travel and want to do something useful, maybe this will inspire them to try something similar,” she says. 

In September, 10-year-old George Johnston IV will begin his third season as a sports correspondent for NFL Slimetime, a half-hour weekly TV show on Nickelodeon. He records “George Knows Football” segments in his Brookeville basement, veering off script at times to insert some personality with his energetic “G Four Out!” signature sign-off. “This is the perfect opportunity for me to throw myself into being a sports broadcaster and analyst when I get older,” says the sixth grader at Rosa Parks Middle School in Olney.

Caroline Hickey’s middle-grade novel, Ginny Off the Map (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, June 2023), is about a determined 11-year-old girl who starts a geography camp while her dad is deployed overseas. The Chevy Chase author says she likes to write for ages 8 through 12 because books had such an impact on her as a girl. “Reading has the ability to teach kids about the world in a different way,” Hickey says. “Books are so helpful at that age for trying to understand and be empathetic to other people.”

In October, another season of The DC Coaches Basketball Podcast launches with an all-star lineup including Potomac’s Gary Williams, the longtime University of Maryland coach who retired in 2011. The crew banters about college and professional basketball, which Williams says has become an international game and keeps getting better with more athletic players. “It’s guys shooting the breeze about basketball, and I think people like that,” he says. “We’re not solving the world’s problems. We’re just talking basketball.”

Fiction

•  Demon Copperhead | Barbara Kingsolver
•  A Very Typical Family | Sierra Godfrey
•  Lessons in Chemistry | Bonnie Garmus
•  Happy Place | Emily Henry
•  Remarkably Bright Creatures | Shelby Van Pelt
•  The Covenant of Water | Abraham Verghese
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow | Gabrielle Zevin
•  Our Missing Hearts | Celeste Ng
•  Mad Honey | Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan
•  Hello Beautiful | Ann Napolitano

Nonfiction

•  Spare | Prince Harry
•  The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder | David Grann
•  The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times | Michelle Obama
•  American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer | Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
• Crying in H Mart: A Memoir | Michelle Zauner
• Educated: A Memoir | Tara Westover
•  Poverty, by America | Matthew Desmond
• Solito: A Memoir | Javier Zamora
•  The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates |  Wes Moore 
• The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness |  Robert Waldinger, M.D., and Marc Schulz, Ph.D.