The Big Read Cast

Bill and Joel read a lot of books in 2025! They talked about them while drinking beer and bourbon the other day, and you can listen to that conversation here!

Episode Twenty-Eight: Mason & Dixon (November 2025) by Joel Cuthbertson and Bill Coberly

Joel and Bill read Iain Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost, a Rashomon-like murder mystery set in late 17th century Oxford that goes some very fun places!

Bill and Joel read through Eugene McCarraher's anti-capitalist tome The Enchantments of Mammon, and only end up preaching a little bit!

Joel and Bill go through most of the books they read in 2024!

Bill and Joel take a bunch of LSD and go to the Ren Faire. Or they read the first cycle in Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber. Same difference, really.

Bill and Joel are joined once again by the great Phil Christman for a guest podcast, this one about Cahokia Jazz, the alternate-history noir written by the incomparable Francis Spufford!

Joel and Bill wade through Laurence Sterne's wild and digressive masterpiece, and do their best not to get distracted throughout.

Joel and Bill discuss the books they read in 2023 and some plans for 2024!

Bill and Joel read a small but dense text: two essays by 17th-century doctor, philosopher, writer, and weirdo Sir Thomas Browne!

Joel and Bill read Vernor Vinge's 1992 Hugo-award winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. It's the best book about group-mind dog packs either of them have ever read.

Joel and Bill return from their hiatus with a discussion of Kate Atkinson's novel Life After Life, which basically Groundhog Day but over the space of an entire life and in the first half of the 20th century.

Bill and Joel go through some of the books they read in 2022!

Bill and Joel read The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which covers his early life and his career in the Civil War, with extensive and excellent annotations by Elizabeth D. Samet, Bill only deploys a *few* Sherman memes.

Joel and Bill read Frans G. Bengtsson's "The Long Ships," an excellent romp throughout 10th and 11th-century Scandinavia, Britain, and Spain. Join us as we go a-Viking, friends!

Bill and Joel are joined by one of the best essayists in America, Phil Christman, to talk about Adam Roberts's barnstorming novel The This, which is about hive minds, social media, Coleridge and, most importantly, GWF Hegel.

Bill and Joel read Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight, a sublime tale of a young man in an adult's body who has a series of adventures throughout a seven-tiered world of knights, dragons, and wizards.

Is it a novel? Is it an anthropology textbook? Is it, possibly, both? Joel and Bill read Ursula K. Le Guin's 1985 text Always Coming Home, about a possible future people living in what is now the Napa Valley. Also here's the bandcamp: https://ursulakleguintoddbarton.bandcamp.com/album/music-and-poetry-of-the-kesh

Bill and Joel read a lot of books in 2021! Bill, specifically, read 104 of them, a fact he's certainly not going to be repeating ad nauseum throughout this podcast!

Joel and Bill read Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, a three-volume novel about life in 14th century Norway. It's a profound tale of love, lust, stabbings, and, at one point, licking a child's eyes.

Bill and Joel read Studs Terkel's oral history "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do" which is about just that. Also a few tangents about other things.

Joel, Bill, and special guest star Martyn Wendell Jones dig through Adam Roberts's The Thing Itself: a nearly indescribable novel about Immanuel Kant, AI, time travel, James Joyce, literary experimentation, and many more things.

Bill, Joel, and Special Guest Christy go through Connie Willis's masterful and award-winning novel Doomsday Book!

Joel and Bill read Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie!

Joel and Bill read a bunch of books in 2020! They talk about what it's like to be reading in a pandemic, and how the many events of 2020 shaped their reading this year. Also, how good is Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, you guys? So good.