Overdue

What better way to discuss Diana Gabaldon's genre-straddling, time-traveling historical fiction novel Outlander than by confining ourselves to the same room? Live (not really) from Craig's kitchen, we're happy to bring you an episode chockablock with bad Scottish accents, interdimensional romance, and plenty of Highland sex tips. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California...

Hey, jabronis! This week we finally read our first Brontë book, thanks to one of our Patreon supporters!  Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is considered to be "one of the first sustained feminist books," and though many of the sensibilities of early-to-mid-19th-century England are present here, we see the typical marriage and courtship rituals through a darker lens. Contemp...

Craig tackles Jorge Luis Borges this week, and what results is a pile of conversations about fake novels and encyclopedias, WIkipedia hoaxes, the way that reviews work, and thoughts on which fast food franchises make the best (and worst) road trips. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

This is our first monthly bonus episode, brought to you by our supporters on Patreon! If you want these shows one week earlier than everyone else, visit patreon.com/overduepod  for details. It's Children's Book Week again, and just like last year we're using it as an excuse to read things that Lil' Craig and Lil' Andrew never got around to reading. Craig reads Mr. Popper's Penguins by Ri...

Why do we let the messy implications of our beliefs keep us from shouting them the rooftops? Why is it difficult for a movement like feminism to be both strong and inclusive? Why don't chickens feature more prominently in the Nativity? Friend of the show Katherine Fritz joins us this week to answer these questions and discuss Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist. This 2014 bestseller features selected e...

At this point we've read a lot of novels, but we haven't tried to write our own just yet. Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman's 2008 anti-guidebook How Not To Write A Novel has shown us a lot of the stuff we should try to avoid if we ever decide to put pen to paper. We also devote a substantial chunk of this week's episode to listener mail from our Looking for Alaska episode, s...

Garth Nix may sound like the name of a country music superstar, but he's actually just the humble, award-winning author behind several fantasy series. This week's book, Sabriel, debuted in 1995 as the first entry in Nix's Old Kingdom series, and the novel remains notable for its lead character, its unique take on magic, and the small (for a fantasy novel) cast of char...

John Green's Looking for Alaska is another young adult coming-of-age novel in a long tradition of young adult coming-of-age novels. A young man goes away to school and becomes close with a small group of friends. They smoke, they drink, they have sexual experiences, they lose, they mourn. It's nothing that hasn't been done, but Green's light tone and deeper thematic questions make A...

Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door is not for the faint of heart. The story is based on the grisly murder of Sylvia Likens by her de facto guardian in the 1960s. What preceded her death is too reprehensible to print here, but Ketchum dives headlong into the awful, determined to suss out the causes (and bounds) of human evil. Suffice to say, this makes for a difficult discus...

One of the reasons we read is because books can give us perspective—good ones can fully transport us to times and places where we've never been and, in some cases, could never go. That's the case with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, stories she wrote about her childhood on the American frontier. These books aren't without their problems (there are fairly significant questions...

Ernest Hemingway is celebrated for the economy of his prose. This week we read A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Rejected a world record 121 times before finally finding a publisher and going on to sell millions of copies, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the most widely read philosophy texts of the 20th-century. Robert Pirsig's semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional account of a motorcycle road trip with his son covers a lot of ground. America's psyche in the fifties and six...

We're back to sci-fi this week, but we take a break from the politics-heavy universe of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow instead uses science fiction to discuss anthropology, colonialism, and theology. There's some genuinely funny and warm stuff in this book, but there's a shadow hanging over the proceedings from the outset: eight people set out to explo...

John Ford's 1620s revenge drama 'Tis Pity She's A Whore has everything: friars, murder, bawdy jokes, bawdy suitors, incest -- incest?! What's that doing there?, you might say. And such has been the reaction from nigh on four centuries of critics and audiences confused by how romantically (and tragically) Ford depicted a brother and sister's love. Never ones to stay wholly on topic,...

Celebrated science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a lot in the 20th century: short stories, screenplays, books on pop science, books on hard science, essays on Shakespeare, essays on history and physics -- name a medium, he dabbled in it. But among all of Asimov's bibliography, the Foundation stands apart. This trilogy (later a quintet and then a septet) examined hard sci-fi...

Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most widely-read books in American literature. It's so entrenched in the modern canon that it's hard to believe Hurston fell into obscurity later in her career. But thanks to writer Alice Walker, Hurston's work was revived in the 1970s, and with good reason. Their Eyes is a fascinating portrait of a black woman's life at th...

Our odometer has rolled over, but the show's the same: this week we take you through the alternate history presented by Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. The basic question: what would happen if the Axis powers had won World War II? The sub-questions: what is real? Is it our reality, or the reality in this book, or the reality in the book in this book? We tackle those questions, our caf...

100 episodes! That means we've read and talked about 100 books, which isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things but it sure feels like a lot for our little podcast. For our last milestone episode, we read EL James' Fifty Shades of Grey. Now that we've done another 50 shows (and since the major motion picture is in theaters now), we've gone back to the sexy, sexy well to read Fifty Shades...

Luigi Pirandello's most notable contribution to the Western canon is a play about six characters come to life, intruding on a theater rehearsal in search of - get this - an author. Please join us as we grapple with the metaphysical implications of Six Characters in Search of An Author, recycle Seinfeld jokes, compose a musical extempore, and take a lesson from Craig's acting cl...

We dip back into the Choose Your Own Adventure well this week to read Jay Leibold's Secret of the Ninja, a harrowing tale about dojo and time travel and enchanted swords. Or something. So jump on in the passenger seat! Come for the adventures, stay for the ridiculous voices. $5.99 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell...

Set in the early years of Bruce Wayne's Batmanhood, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Batman: The Long Halloween chronicles a murderous year in Gotham City. The mysterious Holiday killer is instigating and exacerbating an all-out mob war, and the criminals controlling Batman's town unleash a rogue's gallery of costumed "freaks" in response. This week we talk about the best ways to dive...

It's not October anymore, but we've gone back to the spooky story well this week to read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. Unlike The Martian Chronicles, the Bradbury book we read back in Episode 28, Wicked is a single coherent story, and it's about what happens when a mysterious and vaguely menacing carnival rolls into town. Join us for a discussion of aging, father-s...

At last, we've caught our White Whale! Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, a Leviathan of the American literary canon, chronicles the journey of the Pequod, a whaling ship helmed by the fanatical Captain Ahab. Narrated by Ishmael (of the infamous "Call me" opening line), Moby-Dick straddles the lines between fact and fiction, adventure and essay -- all the while never abandoning...

Donna Tartt, a recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Goldfinch, broke onto the literary scene over twenty years ago with her debut novel The Secret History. Set at a small Vermont college not unlike Tartt's alma mater, The Secret History explores how a singular tragedy forever defines the lives of six Classics students. Tune in as we discuss Bacchanalian...

Usually books try to make you root for the protagonist. Even if he or she is flawed in some crucial way, most stories try to make you feel something for the person whose mind you're inhabiting. That is not the case in Vladmir Nabokov's Lolita. This week we share with you an uncomfortable discussion about how it feels to read a book told from the perspective of an unrepentant pedophile—how do...