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.

Guest Read Episode Two - The Thing Itself (July 2021)

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.

Episode Fifteen - Working (November 2021)

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.

Episode Sixteen - Kristin Lavransdatter (December 2021)

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

Episode Seventeen - Always Coming Home (April 2022)

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.

Episode Eighteen - The Wizard Knight (June 2022)

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

Year in Reading: 2022

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.

Episode Twenty-One - Life After Life (May 2023)

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.

Episode Twenty-Two - A Fire Upon the Deep (August 2023)

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

Episode Twenty-Three: Religio Medici & Urne-Buriall (November 2023)

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

Year in Reading: 2023

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

Episode Twenty-Four: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (April 2024)

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!

Guest Read Episode Four - Cahokia Jazz (July 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.

Episode Twenty-Five: The Chronicles of Amber: The Corwin Cycle (October 2024)

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

Year in Reading: 2024

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

Episode Twenty-Six: The Enchantments of Mammon (February 2025)

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!

Episode Twenty-Seven: An Instance of the Fingerpost (June 2025)

Episode Twenty-Eight: Mason & Dixon (November 2025)

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

Episode One - The Worst Journey in the World (Jan 2018)

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 article about private prisons: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer/3/

Small Read Episode One - In Defense of Flogging (March 2018)

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.

Episode Two - The Unconsoled (May 2018)

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!

Episode Four - Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (December 2018)

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!

Small Read Episode Three - The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Jan. 2019)

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!

Episode Five Part One - The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season (March 2019)

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!

Episode Five Part Three - The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Stone Sky (May 2019)

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.

Episode Six - The Coast of Utopia (July 2019)

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.

Episode Seven - Witness (September 2019)

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!

Episode Eight - War and Peace (December 2019)

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!

Year in Reading: 2019

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

Episode Nine - Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (April 2020)

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!

Small Read Episode Four - Midwest Futures (May 2020)

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.

Episode Ten - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (July 2020)

Reading too widely and talking too seriously.

The Big Read Cast

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