Books of Some Substance

🎃 You open your podcast feed and find a new episode released from The Books of Some Substance. It's rather late in the month, but what the hell. You look at the title, "Second Sight: Carlos Fuentes' Aura," and make a loose connection to the novel's creepy, devout Señora Consuelo. Later, after you listen to the entire episode, after you listen to David, Eric, and Nick discuss genre, substance, the...

  It is as cold in the new world as it is in the old.  And on this episode Nathan tries to work with Nick and David as they come to terms with just how cold James Baldwin's novel  Giovanni's Room has left them.  Can a character you neither love nor hate be compelling? Can an ending that resembles a bad music video from the 90's ruin a book? Can Nathan properly imitate the old-timey voice of a shoc...

Do you drink from the cup of trembling? Do you sup those dregs of hopelessness? Welcome back B.O.S.S. listeners. We continue our journey into the work of James Baldwin by reading the story "Sonny's Blues," a narrative about addiction, artistic creation, communion, destruction, existential dread, music's universal power, poetic prose, pragmatism, siblings, suffering, the trap of home, race, redempt...

With Nick out for a little R&R, David and Nathan are joined by B.O.S.S. Boocklub mainstay Eric Heiman for our inaugural supplemental episode.  On this episode, in preparation for further episodes on James Baldwin's literary work, we read one of his most famous essays "Notes of a Native Son" and discuss the recent documentary  I Am Not Your Negro .  We discuss Baldwin's struggle to shake off his fa...

你好 (Ni hao) Comrades! Join us,   kan-pu Nathan, Nick, and David, for another full length episode of Deep Cultural Propaganda from American Imperialists (aka The Books of Some Substance Podcast). Dystopian literature and discussions of authoritarianism abound, and few things were more dystopian than living under the slow-crushing boot of authoritarian Maoist China. On this episode, witness the tr...

Time to dust off your favorite  huqin  record. As the gramophone spins, the  huqin 's wail tells a story too desolate for words-oh! why go into it? Well, on this episode we explore Chang's desolate story "Love in a Fallen City" and parse why we think she bothers going into it. Join us as we discuss war, freedom, the deception of twice-over whoredom, sandflies, and the subtleties of love and Chang'...

A Chinese home built upon the structure of an Iron Maiden riff. Reincarnation unbound by Time. The ultimate truth of Hermann Hesse as the Tony Robbins of European symbolism.  The trio is back on this full length episode. Join us as we work through Hermann Hesse's often frustrating but certainly substantial masterwork  The Glass Bead Game . As always, give the novel a read and listen along.    Join...

Go forth into the dark corners of thyself! Hail doom!  With David out on a doctor's order to investigate an existential crises, Nathan and Nick explore Hermann Hesse, his place in contemporary readership, and his short work "Klingsor's Last Summer." On this short(ish) episode you will also hear Nick fail to hum a Steppenwolf tune, Nathan come close to admitting a dark secret, and some general disc...

Greetings and Salutations! Welcome to another full length episode of the Books of Some Substance Podcast. On this episode: Nathan finds in Babbitt a flapper-ite hipsterish cesspool of nihilism; David allows a groan (or seven) of tedium to escape him, as he finds "substance" to have escaped from the novel itself; and Nick, having enveloped himself in far more Lewis than Zenith's house-call doctor w...

Welcome back! The B.O.S.S. Podcast returns! As we gear up for Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt , we open up a forgotten time capsule to read about the rise of white collar work at the beginning of the 20th Century, a world looking to sell you on pep! vim! zip! and zing! but ultimately dreary. Nothing really changes.    On this shortened episode, and more so than usual, Nick guides Nathan and David through...

The mountain grumbles, Shingo mumbles. But it is hard to hear him over the sound of the dishes. On this full length episode we discuss Yasunari Kawabata's  The Sound of the Mountain  and try to come to terms with the dying patriarch's aimless drift towards the end. Is it apathetic existentialism? Good old-fashion failure? The culture of post-war Japan? Personal defeatism? Idiocy? Anger? Or an odd...

Memory as time travel. Enigmatic lovers. The comfort of objects. A ghostly romantic comedy. Each, one of Yasunari Kawabata's Palm of the Hand stories under discussion. Each description merely a scratch at the surface of meaning and depth found in these subtle, quiet works. On this shortened episode, as B.O.S.S. prepares for Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain , David, Nathan, and Nick look at fou...

From death and dying to life and living. On this full length episode, we examine the humor, the horror, the existential, the wonder, and even the disagreeable in the lost and found (and possibly changed) madcap protagonist Eugene Henderson of Saul Bellow's  Henderson the Rain King.  With Nathan out sick, Nick and David are joined by Eric Heiman, official B.O.S.S. Book Club member and unofficial Be...

It's an exceptionally smart man who isn't marked forever by the theories he reads in passing from books, and we aren't all that smart.  On this shortened episode, we discuss the Bellow short stories "Leaving the Yellow House" and "A Silver Dish." There's rugged individualism. There's death and dying. There's the spin from that great wheel of fortune we all eventually spin and the bright, shiny ele...

In this episode, we talk through the (beautiful?) mess of madness that is Mikhail Bulgakov's  The Master and Margarita.  Listen as Nick argues against the false binaried balance of Good and Evil, as David floats in the abeyance of cold medicine, and as Nathan grows into the role of curmudgeon and questions the punk-rockitude of Nick and David. 

David, Nathan, and Nick discuss Mikhail Bulgakov's satiric novel  Heart of a Dog and come to some conclusions on the difficulties of understanding and changing our natures, whether proletariat or bourgeoisie, man-dog or mad-scientist. 

The premier episode of the B.O.S.S. (Books of Some Substance) Podcast! Join Nick, David, and Nathan--three bearded white dudes--as they talk about Zora Neale Hurston's black, feminist novel  Their Eyes Were Watching God and try to figure it all out.