The Worst Bestsellers

Kait, Renata, and their guest Anna (of LCARS Librarian and Women Write About Comics ) read Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard.  It’s a confusing melange of everyone’s favorite YA dystopia tropes, like “love triangle,” “government-sponsored competition,” and “manic pixie blood girl.” Listen now for the return of Fucking, Marrying, Killing, and a discussion...

  Kait, Renata, and their guest Dolly ( @loather , Withdrawn ) read The Shack by William Paul Young . It’s about a man who meets God, but get this, God is a black woman who wants you to call her “Papa”! Did that blow your mind? Don’t worry, God turns back into a man when times get really tough. Please listen to this episode on your next drive out into the middle of now...

Kait, Renata, and their guest Margaret H. Willison ( Two Bossy Dames , Appointment Television ) read The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks for a special live episode recorded at Trident Booksellers & Cafe in Boston! If you’re familiar with the movie, you might be surprised at some of the book’s more upsetting twists and turns. If you’re a doctor, you might be surprised to hear that...

It’s our 69th episode, nice! Returning guest & hardcore lady buck Jennie read 2 Tinglers with us: Redacted in the Butt By Redacted Under the Tromp Administration and Taken By The Gay Unicorn Biker , both by the Hugo-nominated author Chuck Tingle. Please help us prove love by listening to this NSFW episode! Readers advisory : Here . Footnotes: ChuckTingle.com Proving Love: An Interview wi...

Storytime Underground Joint Chief Cory joined us to discuss the fact that writing picture books is way harder than most celebrities think it is! We read Cookie Meets Peanut by Real Housewife/Adult Skinnygirl Bethenny Frankel, illustrated by Daniel Roode . Let us tuck you into bed with the story of an extremely irresponsible pet owner! Readers advisory : Here. Footnotes: Bitch Sesh: A Real Housewiv...

Thanks to our Patreon sponsors, we recorded a bonus episode about Gossip Girl (the novel by Cecily von Ziegesar as well as the TV show) with special guest Renata’s mom, Susan. We have to say: we enjoyed this dive into the lives of hyper-privileged Manhattan youths more than we thought we would, despite the fact that almost nothing actually happens in this book. Download this episode to your...

Kait, Renata, and Jeanne ( @FangirlJeanne ) read Stephenie Meyer’s adult romantic thriller, The Chemist . It’s a love story that starts off with torture (but like the 24 kind, not the 50 Shades kind) and ends with a Food Network reality show. It made us truly miss the Cullens. We hope you enjoy listening to this podcast, whether it’s from inside your Volvo, Jaguar, Hummer, or oth...

Kait, Renata, and their guest Ryan Sandoval (author of The D.A.D.D.Y. Complex ) read Violets Are Blue, the 7th book in James Patterson’s Alex Cross series . Intrepid detective Alex Cross investigates vampire-themed murders, as well as the body of every female character in the book. Join us as we sort ourselves into the four fetish houses: leather, rubber, Goth, and Victorian. Readers advisor...

Tune in to our Bests & Worsts of 2016 episodes to hear us discuss these titles and read excerpts from our favorites and least favorites! Please note: We counted things that we read in 2016, regardless of publication year. We didn’t count anything that we read specifically for this podcast, so our worst books are aside from those. For that reason, we picked top 5 favorites and only 1 least favo...

Tune in to our Bests & Worsts of 2016 episodes to hear us discuss these titles and read excerpts from our favorites and least favorites! Please note: We counted things that we read in 2016, regardless of publication year. We didn’t count anything that we read specifically for this podcast, so our worst books are aside from those. For that reason, we picked top 5 favorites and only 1 least favo...

Thanks to our generous Patreon supporters , our editor Becca joined us to watch Christian Mingle The Movie for our first Patreon Goal bonus episode! Our longtime sponsor Christian Mingle inspired this romantic comedy; meanwhile, our Patreon patrons sponsored the Straw-Ber-Ritas we got drunk on while we watched it. If you don’t like it when we laugh at our own jokes, you are gonna hate this e...

The holidays are upon us, and that, unfortunately, means that Caitlin read The Immortal Nicholas by Glenn Beck with us. We have to admit–we liked it a lot better than we liked The Christmas Sweater by Glenn Beck (who has shocked us all by getting moderately woke since the publication of these books)! But The Christmas Sweater was the most soul-crushing book we’ve ever read, so that&#82...

With American Thanksgiving approaching, we wanted to make sure we had enough #herbs on hand, so we had Lucky Peach cookbook reviewer Paula Forbes read Outlander Kitchen: The Official Outlander Companion Cookbook by Theresa Carle-Sanders with us! Based on a blog based on the book series based on Doctor Who fanfiction, the cookbook actually made more sense to us than the first Outlander book did . P...

Kait, Renata, and their guest Lyette read the Fifty Shades of Grey of the 90s, The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller . Like Fifty Shades , this book reminded us that women need men (or lizard people) to teach them about their sexualities, and also that men are garbage. Listen now to learn about bridges, antique cameras, and the worst possible inheritance your mom could leave you! Re...

We’re not alone…we sense a presence…oh, it’s podcast editor Becca and supernatural aficionado Wren , who joined us to discuss Dark World: Into the Shadows With the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew by Zak Bagans and Kelly Crigger ! Like the reality show that inspired this book, the ghost broventures of Zak and the rest of the Ed Hardy Boys documented here are a...

Our friend Sarah came back to discuss A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton ! A turns out to be for an Adequate mystery, an Awkward romance, and an Awful way to learn the alphabet, all wrapped up into one series. This episode is perfect for listening to on long stake-outs or drives to seedy motels. Listen now to hear us struggle to discuss something we didn’t hate! Readers advisory : Here. Footnotes...

It’s been two years since our very first episode , when Caroline of Fantastic Fangirls read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer with us! (And one year since we read New Moon !) And now we’ve added Danielle to our crew to play the Worst Bestsellers drinking game discuss the third book in the saga, Eclipse . Even though not that much happens in this book, and there are barely any Civil War vampire sce...

  Kait, Renata, and their guest Sophi received special hand-delivered invitations to discuss The Selection by Kiera Cass . Imagine a combination of The Bachelor and The Hunger Games , but then throw that combination in the trash and read a J. Crew catalog instead, and that’s The Selection. The worldbuilding and characters make no sense, and yet somehow…we loved it even more than Prince...

Out of the sadness cave and into the pediatric hospital, Renata has returned to join Kait and Eryn for the final book of Flashback Summer, Angels Watching Over Me by Lurlene McDaniel. We went back to a time before WebMD and The Fault in Our Stars , back when tweens had to cry over a romance between an English girl who doesn’t know she has cancer and an Amish boy who doesn’t know what c...

    Kait, Becca, and their guests Anna  of Bellwether Friends and Holly  of TopatoCo continue Flashback Summer by trying to solve the mystery of the missing entertainment after slogging through  Nancy Drew and the Ghost of Craven Cove and  The Hardy Boys and the Secret of Sigma Seven . Will they discover why they read so many of these books as kids? Will they uncover the secret to why these s...

  With Renata still in her Sadness Cave, Kait, Becca, and their guest Sarah  took advantage of her absence to talk about Goosebumps and  Fear Street . Join us on a trip back to Scholastic Book Fairs past, which is much more fun than taking a trip back to a torture chamber in vaguely medieval times. Just be careful not to DIE!!!! Chapter Two: …of boredom, because it turns out not much happens...

Flashback Summer continues! While Renata is off in the wilderness, settling into her Sadness Cave, Kait, our editor Becca, and our guest Jennifer said hello to their friends–the Baby-sitters Club! Kait, Becca, and Jen revisited the BSC franchise as a whole with Baby-sitters Club #56: Keep Out, Claudia! , Baby-sitters Club Super Special #4: Baby-sitters’ Island Adventure , and Californi...

Kait, Renata, and their guest Priscilla ( @Priscellie ) read Animorphs #1: The Invasion by K. A. Applegate . As the first entry in our Flashback Summer, we revisited our favorite teens who can turn into animals, and also the one teen who is a bird. Renata and Priscilla reminisced fondly about reading the series as youths, while Kait found the entire premise of human children turning into animals t...

Kait, Renata, and their guests Malia and Meagan read Lone Wolf by the mistress of twist endings, Jodi Picoult! This episode starts with the revelation that “Picoult” is pronounced like “pekoe” and only gets more shocking from there. Actually, a lot of the twists aren’t really that surprising, but we are still reeling from the revelation that the man who left his famil...

It’s our 50th episode! We celebrated with our favorite thing: talking about X-Men with Caroline from Fantastic Fangirls and Panels . Unfortunately, this means we had to read the novelization of our least favorite X-Men movie: X-Men: The Last Stand by Chris Claremont . It’s a movie whose convoluted plot was not aided by having been novelized in the style of a very long 80s comic speech...