372 Pages We'll Never Get Back

Sean Penn certainly has written a collective of words arranged into sentences! There’s a lot to discuss in our first episode diving into Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff. There’s the mysterious backstory Penn created for the book, the maddening alliteration, and the book’s strange ability to make you dislike stuff you previously thought you enjoyed. We’ll also play a round of &#...

Well, here is the new book we all get to read together! We apologize for nothing!! And hey, a bunch of listeners requested this one, so if you want someone to blame we will name names! But in all seriousness, this should be very fun, and will be a welcome change of pace from the last book, (though a binder of carpet samples would be a welcome change of pace from the last book.) If you were a Patre...

All good things must come to an end. On a completely unrelated note, this book also must come to an end. And what an ending it is! After pages and pages of repeated text and detailed descriptions of the families of characters who are never mentioned again, we get some actual, honest to god plot development. And when it finally happens, it’s more ludicrous than we could have ever hoped. 372 P...

Who is the Sheriff of 372 Pages? Sorry, just trying out our new catchphrase. Nobody better be laughing!! We have an absolutely jam packed episode this week, because despite maybe 40% of this week’s assigned reading being the same block of typo-ridden copy/paste text, there was a lot to talk about. Potential suspects! Power couples doing cool things! Multiple cases of treason, perpetrated wit...

Assemble your various financial certification acronyms and have Veronica Jackson clear your schedule, because we’ve got a doozy of an episode! So much to unpack here in our first discussion of The Forensic Certified Public Accountant and the Cremated 64-SQUARES Financial Statements. We’ve got kidnapped mascots, hi-tech spy gear, and world record fast marriage proposals. If you’ve...

Well, we’ve found a new book to read together, and it certainly appears to be something special. More in the vein of “Eye of Argon”, this is one that was never going to hit the best seller list. But based on early scans it seems like it will be a lot of fun to dive into. Or maybe it’ll be like The Ring and we’ll all be dead in seven days! Who knows! Looking forward to...

Well, the pace sure as hell was unrelenting, folks. We’ve reached the end of TekWar, and there both is and isn’t a lot to talk about. Chest-high walls, disdainful robot pimps, the brief and wondrous life of Sonny Hokori are all just the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to all who hitched their wagons to the Shatlart skytrain for this plasride! As announced in the episode, we’ll be taki...

If you’d told us way back in Episode 25 – Meetings About Sonny Hokori, if we’d still be having meetings about Sonny Hokori 150 pages later, we would have thrown the book across the room. And yet, here we are. We’re back after the holiday break (feeling kind of glum, guess we just miss Ogden Swires) with a thorough dive into the second to last section of TEKWAR. Time to ques...

Chapter 22 of Tekwar may be the second stupidest chapter we’ve read on this podcast. The first, of course, being the one in Armada where The Emissary just, you know, cures cancer and every other disease. But this one is close. We will explain why in great detail. We’ll also FINALLY meet one of the characters the other characters have been talking about. We’ll get to bask in prese...

Roll your cartoon wolf tongues back into your mouths, we’ve got a new episode! This week we finally get to meet the lusted after Beth Kittridge… Well, kind of… Mike also coins a new, revolting portmanteau for our favorite author duo: Shatlart, while Conor does his best to try to pronounce the name Ogden, which bafflingly is the name of more than one character in this stupid, stup...

Look, we all love Sonny Hokori and Bennet Sands and Dr. Kittridge’s insanely hot daughter. We love to hear Jake discuss those people in quirky alleys with people we’ve never met and probably will never hear from again. But for the love of god, do we need FOUR CONSECUTIVE CHAPTERS of these meetings???  In this episode we’ve got some diabolical fan fic, confusion about what co...

To the inattentive and brainless layman* it might appear that not much happened during this stretch of TekWar. Mostly Jake aka Jonatha and Juanito aka The Android(???) just sat and talked to people about other people we haven’t met yet. Somehow, we discussed this for nearly two hours. Folks stepped up their fanfic this time around, probably due to the new conditioner they’re using that...

Steeple your chrome fingers against your chrome nose and tell maw to cork it, here’s our first Tekwar episode! We’ve got a ton to cover here: the difference between Airvans and Skycabs. Coppery racism. Oddly specific and ever increasing intervals of time. And printing, my god the printing!   A hearty plasthanks to our Patreon supporters, who get early access to every episode and j...

Let’s not delay this any longer: We’ve got a new book picked out to read together, and by all accounts it’s gonna be a doozy. So let’s say goodbye to Norgolia and move on to… Well, you’ll have to listen to find out! We didn’t know the assignment for MYSTERY BOOK REDACTED when we recorded, but now we do: read thru Chapter 7, that’s page 54 in our vers...

It feels like we just started Grignr’s journey, but it’s already time to finish The Eye of Argon. Fortunately, the second half is just as amazing as the first half, with out of left field seizures, deadly rat pelvis bones, reeking maws, husking femmes, and iycks!   We’ll also take a look at how the book’s love scenes translate to the audio book format, read your emails...

Wow! The Eye of Argon more than surpassed our expectations. Our ovals widened rotundly with every additional sentence Theis crafted. My god, the first four (4.5, really) chapters were only like six thousand words and we spent nearly two hours discussing them! Obviously there’s a lot to cover here as Grignr makes his way through the Norgolian empire: wenches, sluts (not the same, evidently!),...

We teased it in our last episode, but we’re finally ready to reveal to you: our next book is called The Eye of Argon. We figured, what could possibly carry the torch of Ernest Cline’s terrible books, and decided: how about a typo-riddled fantasy novella written five decades ago by a sixteen year old who never published anything again? The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis is obscure, but it is...

We are back! Don’t worry, there is no new Ernest Cline book. But we’ve decided to launch back up to try to tackle some books which may be just as bad or even worse! DO NOT GET TOO EXCITED! There’s no real content in this episode. It is just A Crummy Commercial for our new  Patreon . We ran afoul of the International Podcast Council for A) not having a Patreon and B) not reading c...

Recorded live at Sisyphus Brewing in Minneapolis on April 11th, this is our first ever live show… Is how this post used to start before the recording of our live show was lost in an epic tech meltdown! But never fear, Mike and Conor have reunited to rediscuss the Ready Player One movie, in possibly more depth than even the original discussion! Did it live up to the expectations of the gunter...

When we last left Zack Lightman, he was submerged beneath the Antarctic Ocean, trying to retrieve his father and save the world. But then it was getting close to happy hour, so Ernest Cline decided to just wrap things up and hit publish on one of the most unsatisfying, unbelievably rushed endings we’ve ever seen. We’re talking about an ending where cancer is cured IN ONE SENTENCE, and...

As humanity’s potential end draws near, our heroes still have not been allowed to say goodbye to their loved ones back on Earth. So they all do what any normal person would do in that situation: bang the hell of out someone they just met a few hours ago. Mike and Conor’s faces contort as they try to make sense of this lovefest. They’ll also hurt a mixture of insults and encourage...

The Europan death armada is just  hours away, and mankind’s last defense force is behaving about how you’d expect: grinning, crushing hard, and making references to classic 80s horror anthologies. With only 100 pages left in the book, Mike and Conor are convinced that events that advance the plot forward may soon begin to actually occur. In the meantime, we’ll discuss the gamers&...

The calendars may say that it’s March, but to us it’s Clinetober! Here at 372 Pages we’re power-leaping into the month like a terrible Godzilla simile from the classic Toho kaiju flick Godzilla. This week’s reading may have broken the all-time record for most notes scrawled in the margins of our copies of Armada. Conor & Mike are here to examine all of the rich, complex...

Mike and Conor cover an absolutely thrilling stretch of Armada in this episode. Hold your breath because we’re about to discuss all of this: not one but TWO phone contact exchanging scenes, not one but TWO briefings in a large auditorium, and to cap it all off: an EULA acceptance scene!!! We’ll also explore some of the unintentional comedy in the book, fail miserably in identifying fan...

In this episode we meet Zack’s insanely hot TV addicted gamer mom. Turns out the Hot but Relateable Mom trope isn’t just a Clineian invention, and Conor reveals where he’s seen it turn up recently. Also, Mike was able to pull some strings and secure a scene from the movie version of Armada, a movie so secret, it hasn’t even been announced yet! Some of those actors sound fam...