The Big Read Cast

Bill and Joel read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, and lay to rest forever the question of whether or not Franzen is a good novelist! What's their answer? Well, you'll just have to listen to find out!

Joel and Bill dig through Charles Taylor's monumental tome "A Secular Age," an exhaustive survey of the differences between our age's relationship with religion in the 2000s and that of societies in the 1500s. It's a dynamite book, but it's about, well, *everything.*

Joel and Bill read Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay! But first, given that it would have felt disingenuous not to, we talk a little bit about our Current Political Situation and both our hopes and fears about our growing reckoning with our system of policing, so the first 15 minutes or so of the podcast are about Politics, not the Book.

Bill and Joel read Phil Christman's new book Midwest Futures, which is about the history, self-conception, and future of the American Midwest, all in about 130 pages!

Bill and Joel start of Season Three with a book about nineteenth-century English magicians! Both of them loved this book to death!

Bill and Joel read a bunch of books in 2019, and here they are talking about some of their favorites, ranging wildly from short books on capitalism to meandering sci-fi tomes! Also: the next Big Read is revealed!

Joel and Bill finish their ad hoc "Russian Trilogy" with Leo Tolstoy's vast book War and Peace, sort of the ur-Big Read. Come hang out and listen to us try to make sense of this phenomenal book that is about, you know, all of human existence!

Joel, Bill, and special guest Jarrod read the 1991 uncut edition of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land! It's a messy book about politics, theology, sex, and language, and we try to talk about at least most of those things!

Bill and Joel read Whittaker Chambers's book Witness, about his life as a Soviet spy, his eventual flight from the Communist Party, and his part in the Alger Hiss trials.

Bill and Joel read Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, which is a trilogy of plays about mid-19th century Russian thinkers! The Broadway production still holds the record for the most Tony awards won by a play. Spoiler alert: one of us didn't like this one very much! Bill and Joel also read a big chunk of Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers, which is the book that helped inspire the Stoppard.

Bill and Joel read the third and final book in N.K. Jemisin's Hugo-winning Broken Earth trilogy! Also some discussion of endings in general, and how we felt about the meta-discourse surrounding Game of Thrones! There are no Game of Thrones spoilers, but we definitely spoil the heck out of The Stone Sky!

Bill and Joel read the second book in N.K. Jemisin's Hugo-winning Broken Earth trilogy! How do you talk about the second book in a trilogy? Do we like this one as much as we liked The Fifth Season? But first, a brief discussion of some Important Francis Spufford news. As always, we spoil the heck out of this book!

Bill and Joel start their read of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy! First, a discussion of genre fiction vs. literary fiction, the Eternal Conflict. Note: as always, we spoil the heck out of this book here, so don't get mad at us once we reveal all the twists and turns!

Joel and Bill start the new year with a GK Chesterton Double Feature! Tune in for our read of The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill!

Bill and Joel talk about a bunch of the books they read this year -- stay for some wide-ranging conversations about specific books and about literature as a medium! In no particular order: Francis Spufford! Jeff VanderMeer! Annie Dillard! Muriel Spark! John le Carre! Ted Chiang! PG Wodehouse! Fritz Leiber! Michael Moorcock! Ron Chernow! Douglas Adams! Denis Johnson! Adam Hochschild! Philip Roth! S...

Bill and Joel read Rebecca West's masterful tome Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, published in 1941. It's a life-changing bully of a book!

Bill and Joel read Shirley Jackson's knockout 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House! A little discussion of the Netflix TV show of the same name, which includes spoilers, so if you're worried about having the TV show spoiled for you, you should skip 63:20 through about 74:24!

Bill and Joel read the uncut edition of The Stand, and it's a 1200-page doozy!

Bill and Joel read Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Unconsoled, and it's a trip! Also: are we living in a computer simulation? Are Hellboy 2 and Pacific Rim good movies? Why do we tolerate misbehavior from people we think are geniuses? Also, the character's name is Sophie, not Sophia, but we're not gonna go back and edit all of that.

Bill and Joel read a small book in between their big books - Peter Moskos' "In Defense of Flogging," which is exactly what it says on the tin! Also features a small discussion about a key scene in Black Panther, because why bother having a podcast if you don't talk about Marvel movies on that podcast? The SMBC Comic that inspired this episode: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/justice The Mother Jones...

We somehow didn't say the word scurvy once in this episode and it's driving us crazy.