Overdue

'Tis the season to do seasonally-themed episodes, and so Andrew read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the short story that has been so widely adapted that you know it front-to-back even if you've never come within ten miles of the book itself. Also on the docket: our holiday plans, a brief aside that compares A Christmas Carol to Bill Murray vehicle Groundhog Day, and our un...

What do you do when your meth-cooking father goes missing in the Missouri Ozarks? Ask your relatives? Go to the cops? Dig for evidence yourself? These are the options facing Ree Dolly, protagonist of Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel Winter's Bone. Woodrell's described his Ozark-based work as "country noir" - a term we spend a minute or two attempting to define before launching into our discussion...

Sometimes an author's personality (or legend, even) grows to the point that it's just as interesting as the work they produced. This is certainly true in the case of JD Salinger—the stories that sprang up around the reclusive author threaten to overshadow many of the stories he actually wrote. It doesn't help that he stopped publishing new work 45 years before his death in 2010. Having already rea...

In 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "killed" Sherlock Holmes. Eight years later, the popular detective returned in The Hound of the Baskervilles, much to the delight of Doyle's mother. Why was Doyle unable to abandon his creation? Why have the zany detective and his Everyman sidekick Watson endured for over a century? Maybe we'll answer those questions. At the very least, we'll talk about how ner...

Andrew and Craig both come at P.F. Kluge's Eddie and the Cruisers from a unique perspective: Kluge was (and is) writer-in-residence at Kenyon College (their alma mater). They've both had him in class, and Kenyon College looms particularly large in many of Kluge's works. The book itself is part whodunit mystery, part love letter to New Jersey, and part tale of youth gone by. Join us for a discussio...

No plot, no characters, no setting. Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable sounds like it's about nothing, but it's more than just the Seinfeld of novels - or so Craig tries to convince Andrew. Beckett, a Nobel Laureate, is likely best known for Waiting for Godot, a play in which "nothing happens, twice." It stormed the theatre scene in Paris, London, and New York in the...

Another Hunger Games movie is right around the corner, but you just can't wait. You need to read a heartwarming tale about tweens and teens who are all dropped down on an island by a repressive government and forced to kill each other, and you need to do it now. That's why special guest Suzannah Rosenberg joins Andrew and Craig this week for a discussion of Koushun Takami's Battle Royale. Join us...

Hell is sheeple, hot cocoa, interventions, mannequins, French pronunciations, and gin.  Also, hell is other people. Or so wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his famous existentialist drama No Exit.  Join us this week as we travel to Hell to figure out what, exactly, the hell Sartre meant when he penned that infamous quote. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privac...

We tried something a little different this week—instead of reading a novel or play, Andrew read Kio Stark's crowdfunded handbook Don't Go Back to School. Stark interviews artists, writers, and entrepreneurs of various stripes who all have one thing in common: they've found success despite not having the credentials conferred by traditional educational institutions. What followed was a discussion n...

Did you know that Stephen King's The Stand isn't a taut legal thriller? It's just one of the many things that Andrew and Craig learned about the book this week!  Special guest Giaco Furino walks Andrew and Craig through the apocalyptic (and then post-apocalyptic), Lord of the Rings-inspired, vaguely supernatural "complete and uncut edition" of the book, which the author himself describes as "...

 Rock and roll, PowerPoint slides, African dictators: all succumb to the inexorable march of time in Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad.  Join us as we discuss the most recently published book we've read yet. Also: passive aggressive behavior, stories in the second person, and Craig admits to an unhealthy appreciation for Bryan Adams.  See Privac...

The relationship between interior evil and its effect of one's external appearance isn't new to the show, but it's explored pretty explicitly in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. A much darker affair than The Importance of Being Earnest, this book is the closest examination of morality in Victorian England that we've read since Jekyll and Hyde.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com...

What's there to enjoy about a 2400-year-old tragedy? Is it the ekkyklemas? The god-chariots? Or is it the protagonist so wounded by her husband's actions that she's driven to commit atrocities only Breaking Bad's willing to put on TV? What if there's nothing to enjoy? Maybe that's why Euripides received third prize out of three when he submitted Medea to the annual Athenian the...

Andrew wanted something short and funny for his selection this week, and he got it in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. It's up for debate whether Wilde actually meant to say anything with this farcical comedy, but if there's one thing to take away from it it's "stop taking everything so seriously all the time." We tried to wrap this one up early and then accidentally got into a sort-...

Ray Bradbury once described his first novel, The Martian Chronicles, as a collection of short stories "pretending to be a novel." In fact, many of the Martian stories were published individually, and it wasn't until 1950 that Bradbury stitched them all together. This patchwork storytelling made it hard for us to get a bead on Chronicles . Craig liked it, but we found it hard to...

It's rare that we read a book and just out-and-out dislike it, but that's what happened when Andrew read Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity! Eggers' tale of two young men who travel around the world and give away $32,000 may have resonated with reviewers, but Andrew had trouble getting into it. What follows is a discussion less about the book's plotting and themes, and more about Andrew's re...

Craig's never read Jane Austen. Yes, it's unbelievable. Yes, it's sort of shameful. But making up for that kind of thing is what this show's all about! Join us for a lively discussion about Jane Austen's last novel - a charming tale of love and marriage as well as a subversive satire of the system that encompasses both. (We also talk about historical fiction, bad days, and cool pizza.) See Privacy...

Intelligence is a wonderful thing, but as this week's book shows us it isn't the only thing. In Daniel Keyes' classic, developmentally disabled man Charlie Gordon is transformed into a genius basically overnight, but his emotional growth can't quite keep pace with his intellectual growth. It doesn't help matters that his transformation ultimately proves to be temporary. It's a deeply moving story,...

This week's show is all about revisiting past shows - the book Craig read, John Gardner's Grendel, is a modern prequel and/or retelling of the Beowulf myth. The book deals with monsters and the nature of good and evil, much like Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde. The book is all about the roles we play and the ways we try to impose order on chaos, much like Breakfast of Champions.  Anyway, this...

In the book's preface, Vonnegut called Breakfast of Champions an attempt to "clear his head of all the junk in there." He wasn't kidding. Breakfast is a melange of narrative, sketches, and character sketches - and Andrew totally dug it.  This week we discuss current events (specifically royal babies), Vonnegut's voice, and the benefits of self-insertion.  See Privacy...

What is Antony and Cleopatra ? Tragedy? Romance? History? Comedy ? The conventional wisdom is to pick tragedy, but this messy entry in the later chapters of Shakespeare's canon dances between the Bard's genres like a "high-coloured" Lepidus. This week we struggle with Shakespeare's portrayal of the titular heroine, get lost in the play's globe-trotting plot, and - for good meas...

One note for this one: while every episode has a general spoiler warning attached to it, we spoil Yann Martel's Life of Pi in a pretty big way in this show, so if you have the movie next in your Netflix queue or something you may want to hold off.  That said, if you don't care about spoilers, join us for a lively discussion of the current heat wave, swearing, religion, and tigers in boats!&nb...

Craig and Andrew team up with their evil selves this week to read Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Well, not really. But in honor of our 20th episode, we did both read the book this week, mixing up our usual format a bit. What follows is a discussion on the duality of man, abridged books, and that thing that happens when stories like this gloss over scientific explanations so...

We're back from our hiatus, and to kick the rust off we're diving right into a thorny discussion about race, sexuality, and poverty with Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Also, we have a brief discussion of the movie version of World War Z , our overdue book from a few weeks back. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-...

"You know Frankenstein's the name of the doctor, not the monster - right?" Despite decades of metal bolts and flat green foreheads muddying the waters, Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein has endured. So much so that it almost seems old hat to correct people for thinking that lumbering monstrosities in big heavy boots are called Frankensteins. Turns out there's still plenty to learn from She...