This week we are thrilled to bring you Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland . It’s about a guy who gets tricked by a ventriloquist into murdering his family and—we can’t stress this enough—not anybody else. Not another soul was present. There was absolutely no other character involved in this situation. Even to suggest it would be ridiculous. And that’s final. Also, the ventriloquist is a clown who shows up at a stranger’s house demanding milk. There is spontaneous human combustion. Pleas...
Aug 08, 2021•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 79
After devoting much of this podcast to the pressing topic of Dads Who Are A**holes (and have failsons), here’s our second back-to-back episode on Moms Who Are A**holes (this time with a success daughter). We love Jamaica Kincaid, and we especially love her 1990 novella Lucy about a young West Indian woman who comes to work as an au pair for clueless bourgie white people in the United States. We’re talking race and colonialism, capital, gender and sexuality, and, yes, mothers. We also plunge into...
Aug 01, 2021•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 78
It’s a drizzly day in Seattle in John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), and we’re feeling the mood. No-No Boy is about Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese-American man who refused military service after being drafted from an internment camp and was imprisoned for it. He careens around Seattle and Portland, turning down jobs (always a good instinct) and connecting and disconnecting from his friends and family (including his rather… conspiratorially-minded mother.) We discuss war-era masculinity, citizenship, and r...
Jul 18, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 77
The Bible says something somewhere about children who are worth their weight in gold. Well, George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) explores what would happen if we took that proverb super literally! (Or figuratively? Mythically! That’s it. Or is this more of a fable? Wait, it’s a realist novel???) Silas Marner is about a linen weaver in the Midlands countryside whom the village folk assume is Gandalf (natch) and who adopts a daughter who mysteriously appears at his door. But, as with everything Elio...
Jul 11, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 76
If you’re one of those try-hards who read this for the AP Lit test (and we are), you’ll be pleased to see us finally take this one on. This week we have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby , which is about extremely non-embarrassing things like throwing enormous parties so your ex-girlfriend will notice you. We talk about Fitzgerald’s accounts of sex and money, gender and sexuality, and Long Island guys who are really transplants so they go particularly hard. We read the Scribner e...
Jul 04, 2021•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 75
It is time to ride the worm and ask the eternal question “what’s in the box?” This week we have Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic about a future where drugs have replaced computers, the nuns are magic and scary, money is worm [redacted], and the East India Company rules space. We chat about this book’s politics, and we get into religion, time, and environmentalism. You simply must try the spice. Everything will make sense. Even the terrifying toddlers in grim reaper robes. Fear is the mind kil...
Jun 27, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 74
If you like feckless boobs who are also giant crysacks (Megan does not), do we have a book for you! Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is a classic sentimental novel with all the trimmings -- a useless protagonist who thinks crying is hot and who can’t stop getting conned by every sharp, coxcomb, and failson in London. It’s a delightfully ridiculous book, one we suspect is very much in on the joke, and we talk discourses of feeling, sentimental critiques of empire and capital, and the f...
Jun 20, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 73
We close up our discussion of Lolita and try not to reflect too much on what has brought us to this point. We consider what sort of people would read this as a morality play, and what in the actual eff is wrong with them (everything). We talk about the road novel as a genre, the doppelgänger (doing a Freud while simultaneously hating the Good Doctor), what reading “with” a character is like, and why this book makes it so difficult not to talk about word objects as though they’re “people.” Also, ...
Jun 13, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 72
Our Season Four two-parter is on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and there’s some truly gruesome material here. If you’ve ever wondered where a Vulgar Marxist and an As*hole with Fussy Modernist Aesthetics might diverge in opinion, it’s over this one. We talk about noveliness, comedy, being a reader (bad and good), and the book’s review genealogy. We roll our eyes over blunt commentary (Blanche Schwartzman, really) and nonstop Edgar Allen Poe references. We read the Alfred Appel, Jr. Annotated...
Jun 06, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 71
Friend of the pod, cultural critic, and Northwestern University professor of African American literature Lauren Michele Jackson joins us for our discussion of George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931). If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to read a wacky-ass novel written by a socialist-turned-right-wing nut, have we got the one for you. Schuyler’s novel takes up the story of what might happen if there were a machine that turned black people white (extra-white, in fact) and how various social and...
May 30, 2021•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 70
Got a sister? Are you SURE you don’t have a sister? Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902-1903) explores this important question along with mesmerism, race, the legacy of American slavery, colonialism and imperialism in Africa, and--somehow--much more. In this episode we simply marvel at the adventures of our protagonist, doctor, anti-colonialist Indiana Jones, enemy of big cats, and king of the ancient Ethopian secret city of Telassar. This novel blew our minds, knocked our socks off, while keep...
May 23, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 69
Are you on the bus or off it, man? The book commies, dear listener, are decidedly off it. Or rather, we’re punching, clawing, screaming, and fighting our way out of this goddamn thing, past balls-trippin’ Ken Kesey, speed-addled Neal Cassady, the rest of the Merry Pranksters, and the 400+ freaking pages Tom Wolfe decided to write about them. It’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) this week, and we’re wrapping up our convo on the New Journalism and talking the counterculture’s reactionary si...
May 16, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 68
Friend of the pod Sebastian Stockman joins us for the second episode in our three-part series on The New Journalism. Sub is a teaching professor in English at Northeastern University, and a journalist and essayist. We discuss Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), a book about another book -- Joe McGinniss’s Fatal Vision , for which the subject (convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald) sued McGinniss for fraud. We take up the whole idea of the “nonfiction novel,” Malcolm’s interest...
May 09, 2021•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 67
DID YOU MISS US? Reading with Reds returns for Season Four, and we’re talking about Joan Didion’s The White Album as the first of a three-part series on The New Journalism. We discuss Didion’s recording and perception of the 1960s, non-fiction writing and style, reactionary politics, and why you have to take a bottle of bourbon on all your travels. Remember to email us with suggestions for institutions that we should for real abolish, like for real for real. We read the Farrar, Strauss, and Giro...
May 02, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 66
Join us as we revisit some of our favorite fail-lords of the season and conduct a highly scientific and professional grading meeting! We discuss the dastardly deeds of professors and shrubbery as we take a look back at Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) to determine final grades for “Evil STEM 207.” Then we get into Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) to find out whether "blood dad" or "tall nephew" is at the top of the fail-class in “Spooky Real Estate 305.” We...
Jan 17, 2021•52 min•Ep. 65
If you’ve been listening to Better Read for a bit, you’re probably aware that Megan’s favorite genre of novel is "brother hearts sister but in a distressing sex way." In that vein, we present one of the absolute classics of the genre, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! , which is 300 pages but feels longer. A lot longer. The novel features an upwardly-downwardly mobile Scots-Irish bigamist and his children, both “legitimate” and “illegitimate,” and the problem of racial panic in the 19th-centu...
Jan 10, 2021•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 64
In keeping with Better Read than Dead’s mission of bringing you literature’s greatest failsons -- and Tristan’s favorite genre of novel, “feckless boob goes on a trip” -- may we present Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and its hero, Horatio M. (We assume he just forgot the rest of his last name.) Horatio is an English aristocrat whose dad exiles him to Ireland in penance for his failsonery, but he soon becomes quite horny for both a harp-playing Irish princess and for Ireland itself, ...
Jan 03, 2021•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 63
If you need some salty tears in your fruitcake, have we got the one for you. We’re talking about Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” originally published in Mademoiselle in 1956. It’s his semi-autobiographical short story about a young boy’s friendship with his way-older cousin in 1930s Alabama and their alienation from the rest of the adults in the family, something that most of us can relate to. We talk about writing childhood, outsiderness, and the troubles with reading autobiography. We re...
Dec 27, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 62
Ho ho ho! Or in Welsh, cywnwn cywnwn cywnwn! (Probably. Or definitely not, we don’t speak Welsh). For the first of two Christmas episodes this year, we’re getting all poetic-like -- or rather, prose fiction that follows TONS of poetic conventions -- with Dylan Thomas’s 1952 A Child’s Christmas in Wales . Whether you love Christmas or hate it, this is a beautiful and hilarious piece, and a lot more complex than its surface nostalgia would indicate. We talk mythic vs. historical time, the nation, ...
Dec 20, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 61
This week we descend into the bowels of hell to bring you C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (1942), a Christian epistolary novel about what happens when your demon uncle is also your boss and you’re both very concerned with meeting the Dark Lord’s soul quota for professional reasons. We talk about religion, Anglicanism, Lewis’s politics (confusing!), and Eton’s satellite campus in the underworld. We also discuss the two surest paths to damnation: saying “after you, my dear” too much and complai...
Dec 13, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 60
Have you ever wondered how to take some pointless old rich men for a ride? Have you ever wanted to learn to do close-up magic with a diamond tiara? Join us for a discussion of Anita Loos’s 1924 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and hear all about diamonds, silly hats, funny brunette best friends, and remarkably dumb aristocrats. We talk about money, sexuality, and gender, and living the dream of having a rich husband and a fun boyfriend at the same time. We also ponder the timeless question, “what do gen...
Dec 06, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 59
Under no circumstances should you stop and smell the flowers. We learned this lesson and had many more plant-based epiphanies chatting about Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1844 short story, “Rappaccini's Daughter.” This tale is set in a sinister garden in Padua, Italy, and we find out some similarly sinister facts about Megan's loving embrace of shrubs. We chat about science and medicine in the olden days, the gothic, monks who probably should have just peed their pants, scary Catholics, and (most import...
Nov 29, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 58
The book commies get into one of our favorite topics this week -- liberal imperialism (well, *dunking on* liberal imperialism is one of our favorite topics, because it is very, very bad). We’re conflicted about E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), a novel with some great writing (you know, Forster) that tries to think seriously about empire’s many incoherences and oppressive structures… but that also tends to reproduce those incoherences and structures. And that does plenty of its own “ori...
Nov 22, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 57
Wrench those eyeballs wide open for our discussion of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), a novel about a teenage droog and his rehabilitation by a dystopian police state. We have a very hard time with the politics of this one, given that they’re wildly incoherent, but we discuss the language games, ultraviolence, the police state, and the conditions of Kids These Days. We get into the “angry young man” genre and how this novel does a pretty shitty job with what is actually a cool momen...
Nov 15, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 56
Friend of the pod David Diamond visits us to talk about Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and join in Tristan and Katie’s nefarious plot to turn Megan into an eighteenth-centuryist. David is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, a scholar of religion and literature, and a Fielding expert. We discuss the relationship between Calvinist thought and novelistic character, how Joseph Andrews has pretty good class AND gender politics (especially for the tim...
Nov 08, 2020•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 55
We conclude our 2020 Halloween spectacular with the scariest one yet, Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” That’s right, we read an EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SERMON voluntarily. If that’s not chilling enough, to wrap things up we take a very special journey to H-E-double hockey sticks ourselves. We get into Calvinist theology, Enlightenment thought, demon babies, the First Great Awakening and Edwards’s status as a skinny legend—and the surprising location where you can...
Nov 01, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 54
We continue Halloween 2020 with Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House ! We talk about Women Who Are A Problem, sexuality, what the f*ck a pompous spiritualist is doing just showing up for no reason, space and home, and the haunted house genre. Basically, everybody who wrote a horror novel in the second half of the 20th century loves the shit out of this novel, so thanks Shirley Jackson, now we have Ira Levin who also rules. For more on the haunted house, we recommend William Gl...
Oct 25, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 53
Welcome to our second annual Halloween spooktacular! We begin our frightfest with W. W. Jacobs’s 1902 short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” We talk about the historical and political implications of this story, from the racist legacy of imperialism and the insurance industry to hazardous labor conditions and mortgages. On a lighter note, we get into the overvaluation of Herberts and learn a very important lesson: the only thing scarier than wishing on a cursed monkey's paw is what bonobos do with thei...
Oct 18, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 52
We are talking about Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903), a book about a dog named Buck, his manly adventures on the frontier, and his tragic love affair with a guy named John Thornton whose hand he likes to chew on. Because he is a dog. Fortunately, that didn’t stop Jack London from narrating this tale entirely from Buck's point of view! We talk about how violent, erotic, and racist this novel is and then engage in some sport of our own to determine who will be crowned the Big Dog of the ...
Oct 11, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 51
Comrades! It’s our 50th episode!! And what better way to celebrate than wrapping up our discussion of one of the raddest books of all time, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67)? Fear not, we are *far* from exhausting the staggering number of dick jokes you find in these spry nine volumes. But we also talk about the politics and philosophy behind the sentimental novel, how Sterne simultaneously loved that genre and thought it was a prime target for satir...
Oct 04, 2020•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 50
