Anika Scott | Updates

Fave Fiction Podcasts

Anika Scott — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am an unashamed podcast junkie. I inhale them. I listen to them while driving, house cleaning, cooking, walking, crafting, drawing, knitting, playing games or just relaxing. It seems to me fiction has been having a renaissance in podcasts the past few years. Here are some of my faves.

The Mantawauk Caves is my all time favorite fiction podcast. A tortured man returns to his small Appalachian town to find the evidence to get his childhood friend off death row for a double murder committed when both were in high school. So many layers, so much character, grief and beauty. When I finished it, I immediately went back and listened to it a second time. That hardly ever happens with me. (genre: mystery-thriller)

The crew of a state-of-the-art submersible finds more than they bargained for when they descend the deepest trench ever found in the ocean. It was fun trying to figure out what was really happening to the crew, and what their corporate overlords really had planned for them — and whether they were even human. (genre: sci fi)

An airplane goes down in the Pacific Ocean, and a team sponsored by a mysterious gazillionaire is hired to retrieve it. This is another “small crew of a boat/plane/sub/spaceship gets more than it bargained for” trope, and I love it every time. (genre: speculative thriller)

For every Holmes fan that craves a fun, modern spin on the classic detective stories. I download the latest every Tuesday and listen to it with my daughter on her school run. Nothing much wakes us up at 7 a.m., but these fun stories do. (genre: humorous mystery)

Follow a journalist as she tries to uncover the mysteries behind a paranormal expert’s collection of creepy cases, tape by tape. This one got me hooked on fiction podcasts to begin with years ago. (genre: creepy)

In 1937, a poetry professor finds himself caught up in a storm that hurtles him to an adventure in. . .1977! Only six episodes, unfortunately. I would’ve loved more. Do not skip the vintage advertisements; they’re hilarious and part of the show.

(genre: comic old time radio timeslip)

Here’s the official blurb: “In 1768, the Fortitude, helmed by Lord Joseph Banks, sets sail to find a plant known to be the very source of pleasure in the world: Heaven’s Clover.” This is an older podcast, and I only listened to season 1 (the next parts were paywalled), but I remember laughing while mopping the floor, so it must’ve been good. (genre: British comedy)

Another one starring a professor, this time a folklore professor who penetrates the mysteries surrounding a creepy region where people disappear, and strange creatures and symbols keep popping up. This one was great for a long drive on vacation.

(genre: supernatural/fantasy)

Set up as a true crime story, it also follows a journalist as she explores what happened when 300 people disappeared from a small town in Tennessee a decade ago. I love fiction presented as nonfiction. It plays with the fact that stories *are* real to us as we experience them. There was apparently some kind of TV series of this; never saw it. (genre: true crime fiction)

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Classic Japanese Mysteries

Anika Scott — Mon, 9 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure when I started reading vintage mystery novels by Japanese authors. Maybe after I visited my brother in Japan in 2017. I hadn’t expected to love the country as much as I did, so I suspect that’s what got me looking for fiction that transported me back there from my home in Europe.

I love to learn about places via their history, and it’s no surprise I look to vintage novels, not contemporary ones. The first I read was The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo, which won Japan’s first big mystery prize in 1948. Since then, I’ve read all his books I could get my hands on in translation. They’re devious little stories of locked rooms and rotten families, starring the shabby, vagabond detective Kusoke Kindaichi. These are not Agatha Christies, of course, but I get a similar vibe in the quick pacing and ingenious plots. They’re just fun to read.

Last night, I finished The Noh Mask Murder by Akimitsu Takagi (from 1950), and I loved it. This was one where you can guess the murderer pretty early and stick with it to see how it all unfolds. And there’s a trope that could have gone horribly wrong – the author inserting himself directly into the story – and yet it worked! The writing is more sophisticated than the Yokomizo mysteries, but not at all hard to read. Despite some minor problems with the plot, the twists at the end satisfied in every way. I’m moving on to Takagi’s The Tattoo Murder.

I can also recommend Yukito Ayatsuji’s mysteries set in odd houses (the Bizarre house mysteries). These can definitely feel Christie-like; The Decagon House Murders (published in 1987) directly references her work.

The Black Swan Mystery by Tetsuya Ayukawa (published in 1960) stars the gentle and precise Inspector Onitsura, at least some of the time. It took some getting used to how the story was structured, and it was more complex than some of the others I’ve recommended here. It had a lot to do with alibis and train time tables, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

Here’s a good overview of some of the books out there (and a Black Swan review), and some background about what launched the wave of translating Japanese mysteries into English.

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Neuromancer or – what the heck

Anika Scott — Sat, 7 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t write sci fi, one of the reasons it’s relaxing to read. Usually. It’s not something I read often, so to me, every sci fi novel is going to sort of resemble Red Mars or something by Bradbury because those are still my favorites.

In the English section of the Dussmann bookstore in Berlin, I came across the yellow SF Masterworks editions and picked up Neuromancer because. . .I don’t know. Maybe the Japanese setting on the cover. Or the pseudo-noir feel of the back cover blurb. A book about a petty hustler and hacker and a “razorgirl” doing a heist for a corporate overlord looked appealing.

Cyberpunk! I was excited to read one of the origin texts of the genre.

It took me weeks to get through that book because. . .what in the world was I reading? I read a lot, I came to it with an open mind, and I still couldn’t make sense of some of the style choices. This was Willliam Gibson’s debut novel, written in 1984 so it’s okay that I didn’t buy some of the slang (the “jive” struck me as quaint). I’m not into drug use so I wasn’t swept away by all the trippy language or the main character Case’s addiction. I just kept thinking, “you idiot.” Which is actually good, I sort of cared about him ruining himself. I really liked Molly, Case’s assassin girlfriend who was way out of his league – but that’s okay too; male fantasy is a thing. I love noir, and these were clearly noir archetypes at work. The best part about the book for me – besides the

Blade Runner-like Tokyo setting at the start — was picking up on words and phrases that I don’t think were common in the early 80s (it’s not like I can remember personally), but definitely are now. Cyberspace, microsofts, matrix and others terms felt pretty current, as well as avatar names like Lady3Jane. I recognize this book must have knocked the socks off of anybody reading it at the time it was published. For me, Neuromancer was a bit too messy in various ways, but who am I to judge a novel that won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards? I enjoyed it enough that I’ll be checking out the upcoming Apple tv series at the very least to see the near future setting brought to life.

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The Anxious Generation

Anika Scott — Wed, 4 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After listening to the really interesting interview Trevor Noah did with the author of The Anxious Generation, I did a bit of research to get the critical side of the argument that social media and screen time are harming young people. It wasn’t just my old journalist instincts kicking in. It’s because Jonathan Haidt’s arguments made a ton of sense for me, a mom with two teenage daughters. I’ve also had to reassess my social media usage for the sake of my own mental health. So I wanted to know if Haidt was just preaching to the choir, and if so, why his arguments resonated so much with me and millions of others. His book has been a NYT bestseller for a year or so.

In a nutshell, Haidt talks about two related things; the decline of free outdoor play and the rise in tech designed to keep kids indoors and dependent on that dopamine hit from social media and certain kinds of gaming. This has led to increasing rates of anxiety and depression, concentration problems, feelings of isolation or worthlessness, and an inability to tolerate what is uncertain, unknown, potentially risky, or different than what kids are used to. Haidt’s most scary argument was that kids are so dependent on adults monitoring every bit of their childhoods in real life, the US is raising a generation of kids dependent on authority figures. We all know where that leads.

Critics of his book have argued there’s no real science to back up the argument that the tech is responsible for some of these changes in kids. The 2000s has been a challenging century already, to put it mildly, and kids have to cope with a lot of new and scary situations just like adults do, but without our experience, maturity and (hopefully) wisdom. It’s incredibly hard to point to one factor – like smart phones or social media — and say that’s the smoking gun. Between wars, climate change, global recession, a pandemic, school shootings and the decline of democracies, there’s a lot to deal with. No wonder kids (and adults) are more anxious.

I get all that, but here’s the thing. I’m American, but I don’t live in the US. I’ve raised my kids in Europe, and there are now definite, quite large differences between how kids are raised here vs there. My kids played outside every day (until the pandemic stupidly forbade them from using playgrounds). First graders (age 6-7) go to school on their own, either walking, biking or taking the city bus. It’s common for kids to run an errand for the family, to the store or a bakery, or to get ice cream, or otherwise be out and about without adults around. My kids used to go play in the local forest, and my 15-year-old loves hiking there, even alone. Americans tell me this is possible because Germany is safer, which statistically, it is. But a lot of this has to do with how safe the parents feel and how stable their communities are.

Kids here are also very attached to their phones, moreso than they should be. A new study said about a quarter of German teens use social media at addictive levels, with anxiety, depression and hyperactivity not far behind. After the pandemic, schools made the questionable decision to give school tablets to all students from grade 7 on up. Kids spend a whole lot of time goofing off on those instead of listening in class. Ironically, this switch to screens in school has driven my Gen Alpha daughter away from screens in her free time. She limits her own screen time, has lots of analog hobbies, and neither of my teens care about social media at all. They have phones, they text friends, they look stuff up, play games, watch YouTube vids. But no Insta, no FB, no TikTok(!) and zero interest in them. I was the one in our house who used social media too much — and they probably saw what it did to me.

As a new author, I was encouraged to connect with readers and other authors on social media, and for a while, this was a great thing. For a while, I could ignore the toxic aspects of social media to find people who’ve become my friends, sometimes even in real life. I’ve learned a lot from readers, from listening to people in the publishing industry, from sharing the publishing journey with my peers. But. . .with time, it became a problem. I grew more anxious, more obsessive about checking my channels. I doomscrolled. A lot. My moods swung with whatever I happened to see in my feeds. The increasing amount of negativity, bullying and attacks made social media feel more like a hostile environment than the half-way friendly one I used to know. I found myself spending so much time curating my feeds, blocking people, trying to figure out how to get *my* stuff seen by the right people, it became too much. What was the point? I couldn’t see the value anymore. I was losing the joy in being an author.

So I stopped. Almost cold turkey. The first week, I kept reaching for my phone before I remembered I’d deleted the apps. After that week, I was free. That was about a year ago. I don’t use my channels much anymore. I don’t miss them. I’ve been finding other ways to connect with the people I want to connect with. At home, I’m more present, more stable, and more interested in things and people in my real life – which is where life actually happens.

This one change — cutting out most social media — has done wonders for me. I can concentrate better. I’m not as anxious. My moods don’t swing nearly as much. I actually have time for hobbies! I still use my phone a lot; it’s where my music, audiobooks and my many, many podcasts are. So this was not about using my phone less, it was about what I used it for. It’s safe to say clearly something in social media specifically was bad for me. I now know to use it with great caution and very strict limits. A bit like alcohol.

Now we’re back to The Anxious Generation. When I hear a researcher say that certain kinds of screen time – for girls in particular, social media — is harmful, that rings a huge bell because it harmed me, and I’m an adult. I played outside as a kid, I was a latchkey kid, I had to do a lot on my own because my parents worked. I watched a lot of TV and at one point I think we had an Atari (!), but no smartphones, of course. I had the largely free, unmonitored childhood Haidt talks about. Unlike kids, I have a fully formed brain, and I was still damaged by social media use. It makes perfect sense that the tech *is* doing something to some if not many kids. It did something to me.

Limiting usage has helped me immensely. Australia has led the countries considering a minimum age for social media access, and I’m definitely inclined to agree with that. Sixteen might be an okay age for kids to start. At sixteen, you can drink beer and wine in Germany. Oops, here I go again, comparing social media to alcohol. .

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The Leopard

Anika Scott — Mon, 2 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first time I read The Leopard, the novel about the fall of a Sicilian noble family in the 19th century, I was dazzled. I was in Italy — on the Ligurian coast, not Sicily — one summer during the pandemic, and we had splurged on a historical villa overlooking the sea. For the first and probably only time in my life, I lived in a house with frescoed ceilings, stained glass panels and terraced gardens bursting with rosemary and bougainvillea. Lounging on an antique sofa, I read The Leopard (pub. 1958) feeling like I was right there with the Salina family.

So how did the TV series hold up?

First, the book: I couldn’t stand the prince Don Fabrizio! So full of himself, so hypocritical, so slimy. And yet I loved him. The book was mostly from his point of view, and the author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote it in such a humorous, self-deprecating way, it was a joy to read. Don Fabrizio was supposed to embody the social class of his day, and all of Sicily during the Risorgimento, Italy’s struggle to become one nation. The political intrigue between him and the scheming mayor Don Calogero was really entertaining and interesting. But it was the overall humor, shot with melancholy, that made The Leopard one of my favorite books.

That was what I missed in the TV series. If I had watched it without reading the book, I would have thought it a mildly interesting historical drama with a wonderful setting. The show concentrated so much on the prince’s daughter Concetta, I got bored. I wasn’t interested in her pining for Tancredi. I had expected a different story, one closer to the book, and I think the series was a missed opportunity. It could have leaned into the bigger story, the fate of the whole Salina family, its slide into decay during one of the most turbulent political eras in Italy’s modern history. The show reached for the epic feel of the novel and ended up wallowing in the smaller and less interesting story.

The series was absolutely beautiful to watch. I’ve been to Sicily a couple times and was immediately transported back. There’s nothing quite like Sicilian sunshine, the hills and mountains, the coastline, the streets of ancient towns and cities. It’s worth watching the show just for that. But I was disappointed in the story.

I figure The Leopard with its epic scale and intimate humor is a hard book to film just right. The 1963 Visconti film starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon might come the closest so far, but I do think a series format is better for the story. I’d love to see one that leans more into the special humor of the novel.

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The Power of Myth

Anika Scott — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lately, I’ve been rereading books that had a big effect on me when I was younger. We’re talking stuff I haven’t looked at in 20 years or more. Some of the books have sat on my shelves that long. The other day, I picked up The Power of Myth.

The book is a condensed version of journalist Bill Moyers’ televised discussion with mythology professor Joseph Campbell about life, stories, religion, society and so many other things. The talks took place at George Lucas’ Skywalker ranch in 1985/6 and were televised on PBS.

I didn’t see the PBS series, and I didn’t read the book until the mid-90s, I think. When I picked up my copy recently, I was surprised to see the Younger Me had written notes in the margins and underlined phrases, something I hardly ever do on the sacred pages of books! But that shows how much this book fired up my thinking about the fundamental importance of story/myth-telling for humanity.

My second reading hit me just as hard as the first, but in a totally different way. Now I’m a middle aged married mother, a professional author living abroad, and I’ve had a lot of life experience since I was in college. I need to step out of my daily life and ask the big questions: What does this all mean? What am I passing down to my kids? Have I been living life the way I intended? And the even bigger questions: Where do I find the rapture of being alive? What is the “cathedral consciousness,” the feeling of awe you get in a historic place or natural setting? What mysteries are in everyday things? What do the old stories from all over the world have in common, and what can they tell us today?

Campbell was talking in the 1980s, and he was an old man by then. He could look back on the entire 20th century and interpret the changes happening in the US and the world. Forty years later, one of his observations made me stop and think. He talked about how mythology helps people figure out how to be human in their time and place. When mythologies break down, people lose their orientation, their sense of community, rights of passage, or their touch with the spiritual in themselves and their world. Campbell believed this break down had happened in the US by the 1980s. What was needed, he said, was a new mythology. Not one based on nationalism or tribal, ethnic and religious boundaries; those are too narrow for global societies. It must be a mythology of the planet, stories that help us figure out how to relate to eachother and our world on the big scale we are now functioning on.

I think that’s the moment we’re now in. Things are volatile in the world right now partly because we’re all looking for orientation on a scale we as humans haven’t had to deal with before. Our old mythologies aren’t serving their purpose in the way they used to. But we humans need stories to learn and survive. What will our new stories be? Campbell said artists have always been the ones to risk telling new stories; writers, poets and other artists can be the shamans of our age if we dare to be.

Whatever people may think of Joseph Campbell’s thoughts today, he was hands down one of the most fascinating American thinkers of the 20th century. He refused to specialize, embraced the virtue of being a generalist, of learning from experts and noticing what connects all of us in the world, what makes all of us human. In a world splintering more and more every day, I loved reading the thoughts of someone who would have refused to play that game if he was alive today.

The Power of Myth is still a profound book, well worth studying.

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Revisiting The German Heiress

Anika Scott — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My first novel The German Heiress debuted near the start of the pandemic in 2020 — what’s changed since then? About me as an author, about how I write? Do I still love this book that was my secret little baby for almost 8 years?

That’s all too much for one post. I’d have to first write about how devastating it was to be on the terrifying high of releasing my first novel into the world only to have the world shut down all around me. In the US, The German Heiress was stocked at airports while airports were closed. In the UK, where I was scheduled to do publicity events, all my publisher’s plans went up in smoke. I will never forget the phone call from my agent which I took pulled over on the side of the road as I was picking up my daughter from school – the first day of the first lockdown. Of course I cried. Everything was up in flames and my career was over before it started.

Except that a combination of luck and perseverance proved this wasn’t true. In the US and Canada, The German Heiress was stocked at big box grocery stores, the only place still open and selling books in the pandemic. It hit some bestseller lists, to my total surprise. Two years later, my second novel The Soviet Sisters was published. Great, right? Yes. . .and I had to cancel my US launch party because I came down with covid. And the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to cancellations of publicity and discussions about how to angle a book that starred Russians, even if it was highly critical of the Soviet system. But then, a year later, my sparkling third novel was published, Sinners of Starlight City. My pandemic novel, the one I wrote during lockdowns, the one set in Chicago, my last home in the US, was my fun escape.

Now it’s nearly six years after my debut, and I’m putting the finishing touches on my 4th novel. I’ve had some massive ups and downs since my debut, and I’m still doing what I love – telling stories. I write what entertains and intrigues me, and I pretty much ignore the trends. Life is too short to run after everybody else. I’m proud of my novels. Each one is the best book I’ve ever written.

But there’s a special place in my heart for my debut. The German Heiress took me the longest to write, years of research and revisions and then more revisions. It helped me discover what kind of writer I am, how I like to write stories, what my strengths are. I’ve come a long way since it was published, and I intend to keep going. My debut taught me persistence, probably the single most crucial skill for authors in traditional publishing, or any kind of publishing for that matter. So here I am, working hard, having fun (most of the time), excited to see what comes next.

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