Every week, The Thread checks in with booksellers around the country about their favorite books of the moment. This week, we spoke to Brandy O'Briant from Page 1 Books in Evanston, Ill.

Brandy O'Briant didn't choose to read this classic in college — she was assigned it.

"I took a class called Absurdity in Literature," she said. "It wasn't a class I was comfortable taking, or wanted to take. I really cared much more about 19th century heroines, but this is something I was required to take."

"We read a lot of interesting stuff. We read 'Gravity's Rainbow' and 'The Crying of Lot 49' and things that in hindsight I'm really glad I have read and experienced. But the one book that stuck with me, that I re-read regularly is 'The Master and Margarita.'"

"The basic premise is that the devil shows up in [Stalinist-era] Moscow, and he's a very well-dressed, dapper gentleman, who comes with this really motley crew of characters," O'Briant said. "The main thing I like about this book is that it's hilarious."

"There's a lot of sharp satire and commentary about the intellectual elite in Russia ... The first part of the book is set in modern Moscow, and the second part of the book is set in ancient Jerusalem, around the story of Pontius Pilate."

There's a writer, who has been sentenced to an asylum for his book about Pilate; and there's the writer's lover, Margarita, who attends a ball at the invitation of the devil.

"I know all of those sounds incredibly crazy and complicated, but it isn't when you're reading it. Part of it you're laughing so hard at how absurd the book is but also how right-on it is about the time in which it was written."

"You think about the idea of the devil coming to Russia during the Soviet Union, and you think: OK, could you hit me over the head any harder with symbolism? But he doesn't play it like that; it's not heavy handed at all. You leave the book with the feeling of, well, I think the line in the book is: If you can't cry, you might as well laugh."

O'Briant recommended this book while working in her brand-new bookstore, Page 1 Books, which just opened in Evanston, Ill. — the same place where she first read "The Master and Margarita."

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Today, he's the successful publisher of Forbes magazine. But Rich Karlgaard says it wasn't until his 30s and 40s that he found his stride. That's just one of the reasons he wrote the book "Late Bloomers." In it, he argues that we are "trapped by our cultural worship of the precociously talented and the youthfully ambitious," and he proves it with case studies of people who peaked later in life — and were happier and more successful for it.

"Blooming has no deadline," he writes. "Our future is written in pencil, not carved in stone."

He joined MPR News host Kerri Miller for a conversation about how most of us do better as we age.

Guest: Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine and author of the new book "Late Bloomers"

To listen to the full conversation you can use the audio player above.

Every week, The Thread checks in with booksellers around the country about their favorite books of the moment. This week, we spoke to Allison Punch from Old Town Books in Alexandria, Va.

When Nishta J. Mehra goes out with her family, people stare.

That's just one of the realities she addresses in her essay collection, "Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion."

Bookseller Allison Punch recommends the book and its "beautiful essays."

"[Mehra] is an first-generation Indian-American woman who is married to a white woman, and they are raising a black, gender-nonconforming child," Punch said. The essays discuss "her family and her growing up in Memphis, and everything that comes with living with a family with such various identities and lived experiences.

"It really resonated with me, because I am also in a queer, interracial relationship, and she talks so beautifully about both sides of the stares and looks they get, existing as a family and loving one another," Punch said. "She talks a lot about their visibility as a family.

"She does a good job of not really judging others, but helping folks be aware of the ways in which society's norms affect how we treat one another, in personal relationships but also strangers on the street.

"Because [Mehra] does hold such a variety of identities, really anyone can connect with this book ... She talks a lot about motherhood, she talks a lot about her relationship with her father, she talks a lot about growing up and just her relationship to race in general, as someone who is from a South Asian immigrant family. I feel like everyone can see themselves reflected in this book, but also learn from something completely new."

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