Read This Instead

Join us for the conclusion of The Worst Book We've Ever Read and hear our recommendations of what to read instead!

Reader, we hated it.

If you listened to part 1 slowly, you could try listening to part 2 all at once! In this episode, we'll talk about Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch vs. The Fault in Our Stars and why it's a privilege to have our hearts broken by Theo, Boris, and Popchik. Also featuring the debut of our newest podcast segment, Read This Instead Writing Challenges!

Our opinions are stars we tried to fathom into this podcast. Join us for Part 1 where we do a deep dive into John Green's era-defining YA novel The Fault in Our Stars , then for Part 2 where we'll compare and contrast Green's work with Donna Tartt's absolute masterpiece The Goldfinch! After all, some books are better than other books.

What if Will Scarlet was actually a disguise for...someone really obnoxious? Join us this week for a discussion of A.C. Gaughen's Robin Hood retelling, Scarlet ! See the book trailer for Scarlet here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e87UkdqDUek

Last week we talked about everything we love about Donna Tartt's The Secret History . Join us this week to hear our thoughts on four much lesser imitations of this modern classic - Bunny, The Cloisters, If We Were Villians, and The Maidens ! Are we letting these titles in our exclusive Greek study club, or are we pitching them over the cliff in the woods?

Slap on your billowing cape and old-fashioned spectacles, brush up on your ancient Greek, carefully place a few of The Right Books behind you as props, and join us for Part 1 of a mega-round-up of dark academia books. In Part 1, we'll be discussing Queen Donna's masterpiece The Secret History , the OG Dark Academia novel that launched a thousand rip-offs, and in Part 2 we'll be evaluating the meri...

Join us for a (only slightly late!) Valentine's-themed Espresso Shot to chat about rom-coms, favorite literary OTPs, classic romances, and more!

Join us for the insane fever dream that is Caitlin Starling's The Death of Jane Lawrence! An alternate-history-Gothic-fantasy-romance set in a universe where you can literally divide by zero to do math/magic!

We return to the scene of the crime to finish up our thoughts on Veronica Roth's Divergent! Join us to hear more about Four/Tobias, Hunger Games rip-offs you might not have ever noticed before, and best of all, several dystopian books of past and present that you can Read Instead. (btw, still getting the hang of this podcasting thing and that's why we keep talking about getting ready for Christmas...

Come join us as we discuss our hopes, goals, resolutions, and bookish dreams for 2023!

Join us for a super-fun episode all about our Ten Book Commandments: the Thou Shalt Nots of fiction! Number 10 will surprise you. Doctors hate it!

Come join us as Sarah gazes into the serial killer eyes of Sally Thorne's The Hating Game !

Top 5 Reasons You Should Listen to this Episode: 1. Love or hate the book, we'll give you lots of food for thought! 2. We have great recommendations for other books at the end 3. We'll make you laugh 4. You can hear my horrible attempt at a British accent 5. You can come continue the discussion on our Instagram! @read.this.instead Book Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/285092.High_Fidelity

Come sip that espresso with us as we talk about Maria Tatar's new book, The Heroine with 1001 Faces! We hope your brain is hungry because this episode is jam-packed with food for thought! Link to info about the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56769530-the-heroine-with-1001-faces  Links to other interesting things from this episode: https://venngage.com/blog/heros-journey/ https://ww...

We're diving into a real classic this week with our look at One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest! Love this book or hate it, come hear our thoughts and recommendations for books we think tackle these themes better. 

Come join us for another Espresso Shot of bookish content!

Hop in your rowboat and cruise down the swamp to hear our thoughts on Delia Owen's Where the Crawdads Sing! Full disclosure, we know this book was super popular, but it honestly didn't butter our Southern-fried biscuits. Love it or hate it, come join us!

Welcome to Espresso Shots, where we give you a quick jolt of content to tide you over until the full-bodied roast of our fortnightly book review episodes! On today's Shot we're talking about some of our favorite book tropes, what books we'd like to see become movies, who we'd cast in them, prose v. story, childhood books, how we find new books, favorite (and least favorite) classics, and more! Tim...

OK people...we thought about what you would like to hear, used our smarts to create an episode, were (mostly) nice to each other throughout, told the truth about what we thought, and believe it or not, we were continuously jumping on and off moving trains while recording. That can only mean one thing...we're DIVERGENT!!! Fortunately for the rest of you one-trait losers, you can check out this epis...

It's good form to come hang out with us as we take a slight detour at the second star to the right! We'll be talking about all things Peter Pan and setting the stage for some future episodes on contemporary retellings of classic tales. The Disneyland Peter Pans are counting on you to tune in!

It's Sarah Penner's The Lost Apothecary vs. Laura Hankin's A Special Place for Women and Greer Hendricks' & Sarah Pekkanen's You Are Not Alone ! A fog-free historical London, self-poisoning via essential oil, and the world's fastest college admissions department await!

Welcome to Read this Instead, an original podcast!