Shows
The Big Read CastEpisode Twenty-Seven: An Instance of the Fingerpost (June 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!2025-06-101h 29The Big Read CastEpisode Twenty-Six: The Enchantments of Mammon (February 2025)Bill and Joel read through Eugene McCarraher's anti-capitalist tome The Enchantments of Mammon, and only end up preaching a little bit!2025-02-181h 28The Big Read CastYear in Reading: 2024Joel and Bill go through most of the books they read in 2024!2025-01-201h 35The Big Read CastEpisode Twenty-Five: The Chronicles of Amber: The Corwin Cycle (October 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.2024-10-221h 31The Big Read CastGuest Read Episode Four - Cahokia Jazz (July 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!2024-07-091h 40The Big Read CastEpisode Twenty-Four: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (April 2024)Joel and Bill wade through Laurence Sterne's wild and digressive masterpiece, and do their best not to get distracted throughout.2024-04-241h 27The Big Read CastYear in Reading: 2023Joel and Bill discuss the books they read in 2023 and some plans for 2024!2024-01-291h 24The Big Read CastEpisode Twenty-Three: Religio Medici & Urne-Buriall (November 2023)Bill and Joel read a small but dense text: two essays by 17th-century doctor, philosopher, writer, and weirdo Sir Thomas Browne!2023-11-011h 46The Big Read CastEpisode Twenty-Two - A Fire Upon the Deep (August 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.2023-08-291h 29The Big Read CastEpisode Twenty-One - Life After Life (May 2023)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.2023-05-241h 37The Big Read CastYear in Reading: 2022Bill and Joel go through some of the books they read in 2022!2023-01-281h 58The Big Read CastEpisode Twenty - The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (December 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.2022-12-202h 30The Big Read CastEpisode Nineteen - The Long Ships (October 2022)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!2022-10-311h 59The Big Read CastGuest Read Episode Three - The This (August 2022)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.2022-08-292h 09The Big Read CastEpisode Eighteen - The Wizard Knight (June 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.2022-06-201h 59The Big Read CastEpisode Seventeen - Always Coming Home (April 2022)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-kesh2022-04-052h 00The Big Read CastYear in Reading: 2021Bill 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!2022-01-242h 32The Big Read CastEpisode Sixteen - Kristin Lavransdatter (December 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.2021-12-302h 02The Big Read CastEpisode Fifteen - Working (November 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.2021-11-012h 02The Big Read CastGuest Read Episode Two - The Thing Itself (July 2021)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.2021-07-292h 29The Big Read CastEpisode Fourteen - Doomsday Book (June 2021)Bill, Joel, and Special Guest Christy go through Connie Willis's masterful and award-winning novel Doomsday Book!2021-06-301h 47The Big Read CastEpisode Thirteen - Americanah (March 2021)Joel and Bill read Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie!2021-03-231h 44The Big Read CastYear in Reading: 2020Joel 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.2020-12-302h 00The Big Read CastEpisode Twelve - Freedom (December 2020)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!2020-12-181h 45The Big Read CastEpisode Eleven - A Secular Age (October 2020)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.*2020-10-132h 14The Big Read CastEpisode Ten - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (July 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.2020-07-091h 29The Big Read CastSmall Read Episode Four - Midwest Futures (May 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!2020-05-041h 11The Big Read CastEpisode Nine - Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (April 2020)Bill and Joel start of Season Three with a book about nineteenth-century English magicians! Both of them loved this book to death!2020-04-101h 53The Big Read CastYear in Reading: 2019Bill 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!2020-02-041h 31The Big Read CastEpisode Eight - War and Peace (December 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!2019-12-262h 04The Big Read CastGuest Read Episode One - Stranger in a Strange Land (October 2019)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!2019-10-251h 51The Big Read CastEpisode Seven - Witness (September 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.2019-09-161h 50The Big Read CastEpisode Six - The Coast of Utopia (July 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.2019-07-081h 48The Big Read CastEpisode Five Part Three - The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Stone Sky (May 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!2019-05-241h 25The Big Read CastEpisode Five Part Two - The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Obelisk Gate (April 2019)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!2019-04-301h 35The Big Read CastEpisode Five Part One - The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season (March 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!2019-03-201h 49The Big Read CastSmall Read Episode Three - The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Jan. 2019)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!2019-01-281h 45The Big Read CastYear in Reading: 2018Bill 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! Shirley Jackson! Mr. Rogers! And, of course, more Rebecca West, because Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has taken over our lives!2018-12-312h 03The Big Read CastEpisode Four - Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (December 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!2018-12-172h 12The Big Read CastSmall Read Episode Two - The Haunting of Hill House (October 2018)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!2018-10-221h 42The Big Read CastEpisode Three - The Stand (August 2018)Bill and Joel read the uncut edition of The Stand, and it's a 1200-page doozy!2018-08-132h 23The Big Read CastEpisode Two - The Unconsoled (May 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.2018-05-141h 54The Big Read CastSmall Read Episode One - In Defense of Flogging (March 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/3/2018-03-261h 24The Big Read CastEpisode One - The Worst Journey in the World (Jan 2018)We somehow didn't say the word scurvy once in this episode and it's driving us crazy.2018-01-292h 10