Transcript / LoLT: The 'Order Up' Word Game and a Bunch of New Books — 07 March 2025

This is a transcription of LoLT: The ‘Order Up’ Word Game and a Bunch of New Books — 07 March 2025

[cheerful music]

Melissa: Coming up, a slice-of-life look at 20th-century Vienna.

David: Eerie fiction set in the near-future and a fae fantasy.

Melissa: Plus, our Distraction of the Week. I’m Mel.

David: I’m Dave. This is The Library of Lost Time.

Melissa: Prior to this week, I wasn’t familiar with the novels of Austrian author Robert Seethaler, and now I want to read all of his books. He seems to specialize in short novels — around 200 pages or so — that capture the tender, painful beauty of life through quiet stories. His first book ‘The Tobacconist’ is set in Vienna during the Nazi occupation and tells the story of a teenage apprentice at a tobacco shop and his friendship with Sigmund Freud. He followed that with ‘The Field,’ which tells the story of a small town through the voices of the souls in its cemetery.

Melissa: His new novel is called ‘The Café with No Name. It’s set in 1966 Vienna when the city is still recovering emotionally from WWII. At the heart of the story is 31-year-old Robert. He was raised in a home for war orphans and now makes his living doing odd jobs in the market. One day, the café in the corner of the market is put up for rent. This is not an art nouveau café with crystal chandeliers, stained glass, and waiters in black tie. It’s a ramshackle sort of place that serves beer, lemonade, and pickles, rather than layer cakes and fancy coffees. But Robert signs the lease to, quote, ‘do something which would give his life a positive affirmation. To one day stand behind the bar of his own establishment.’

Melissa: The novel traces the story of the café and the characters that become regulars: girls who work in the yarn factory, the local butcher, a bill collector with a glass eye, a cheesemonger. One review said, ‘While the premise of lost souls drifting together in a scruffy cafe may not be wildly original, the funny/sad characters are finely drawn and remarkably vivid.’ Vienna also plays a part in the story with famous landmarks like Demel’s pastry shop, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the Reisenrad Ferris wheel, and the Danube River making appearances.

Melissa: This sounds to me like a spiritual cousin to Still Life by Sarah Winman — which tells the story of found family in post-war Florence, Italy — and I’m 100% here for that. This is ‘The Café with No Name’ by Robert Seethaler and translated by Katy Derbyshire.

David: This week, I couldn’t decide on just one new release to tell you about, so I’m going with two. They’re very different from one another, but both grabbed my attention because of the authors.

David: The first is a literary science fiction novel. It’s is by Laila Lalami. You might know her from ‘The Moor’s Account.’ That book imagined the trip of the first African man to explore the Americas, a real-life historical figure. We know almost nothing about him. Lalami took a tiny fragment of history and built a vivid, moving story around it. ‘The Moor’s Account’was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014.

David: Lalami’s latest is out. It’s called ‘The Dream Hotel.’ It’s a very different story. It’s set in the near future. A woman who is detained at LAX while she’s returning from a conference. She’s arrested – not for anything she did, but for something an agency believes she might do. She’s taken to a mysterious detention center, and joins a group of woman fighting to prove their innocence for crimes they have not committed. It sounds unsettling and timely.

David: On the far other side of fantasy, the second book is from Amal El-Mohtar. You might know her as the co-author of ‘This is How You Lose the Time War.’ That book is a beloved story about two soldiers and their relationship across multiple timelines. It won the all the awards back in 2018: Nebula, Hugo, Locus.

David: Now El-Mohtar’s is back with ‘The River Has Roots.’ It’s about two sisters — Esther and Ysabel — who live on the edge of the fae lands. The sisters are bound together, even in death. This is a modern faerie tale. One blurb calls it ‘half delicious murder ballad, half beguiling love story.’ Another writer on Goodreads just said, ‘I want to live wrapped in this book.’

David: I can’t decide which of these I’ll pick up first, but they’re both on the list. The first is ‘The Dream Hotel’ by Laila Lalami. The second is ‘The River Has Roots’ by Amal El-Mohtar.

David: And now our Distraction of the Week.

Melissa: When the online word game Wordle took over the internet in 2021, I started playing every day with my friend Ellen, and we’ve never stopped. We take turns each day picking out a new starting word [DAVE]. Then we share our results. Sometimes, we pick a theme for a while: We did a run of bird names and cooking terms. Now, we often choose words that describe our lives at the moment: SNOWY when it storms, or TIRED. Sometimes, we just pick words we like the sound of: BLURT or CAPER. She lives in the US, so it’s a nice way to check in every day.

Melissa: Then in 2023, The New York Times released Connections. In that game, you figure out the hidden associations among a set of words and sort them into four categories. This one, Dave and I play together every morning.

Melissa: A few weeks ago, I was introduced to a new online word game that I’ve added to my morning mix. It’s called Order Up, and it was created by a copywriter and puzzle maker named Adam Wagner. He’s a crossword constructor for ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The New Yorker.’ I also learned by snooping around his LinkedIn that he graduated from Brown University and was in showbiz for a while. He did stuff for Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the Late Show with David Letterman, the movie Moonrise Kingdom. He seems clever! He says he loves words, and he loves themes, so he made a game about them.

Melissa: That free online game is Order Up. The object of the game is to put a list of items in order based on a theme, like arranging foods by the color of the rainbow or animals by their number of limbs. You get five chances to put the list in the correct order, and the feedback is pretty good — it’s clear where you’ve gone wrong so you can move things around to find the solution.

Melissa: I like this game for three reasons: First, it’s quick, it’s fun, and for me, it’s the right level of challenging. The themes aren’t always immediately apparent, but if you get too frustrated trying to guess the theme, you can click on a hint.

Melissa: Second, sometimes, the themes make me laugh — it’s all pretty lighthearted. A recent theme was called Cup Up, and the list of phrases included shell game, bra, one gallon, and Starbucks’ cup sizes. So you had to figure out how many cups were in each item and then put them in ascending or descending order. Another one was a puzzle with layers, and the terms were rainbow cake, red onion, cheapest toilet paper option, and Earth’s atmosphere.

Melissa: Third, the game gives you the complete solution at the end, so I sometimes learn interesting, random facts. For example: A recent puzzle was about the world’s deepest depths, and I learned about the Kola Superdeep Borehole. Do you know this? It’s the deepest human-made hole on Earth. It’s in Russia, near the Norwegian border. This hole is 7.6 miles deep — or 12.2 kilometers. According to local lore, it’s so deep you can hear the screams of souls tortured in hell. In reality, the drill got only about one-third of the way through the Earth’s crust before the project was halted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it was commemorated on a stamp! And it made its way into Order Up and my brain.

Melissa: If you, too, were obsessed with The Guinness Book of World Records and have your own ritual around daily word games, you might like Order Up, too.

Melissa: Visit strongsenseofplace.com/library for more on the books we talked about today and links to all the word games I recommended.

David: Thanks for joining us on the library of last time. Remember to visit your local library and your independent bookstore to lose some time yourself.

Melissa: Stay curious. We’ll talk to you soon.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of Orion Magazine.