BookLovers: A Podcast from Spartanburg County Public Libraries

Happy 2022! We’re taking a break from full episodes this month, but we still wanted to share what we’re rabbit holing through right now. Enjoy!

As 2021 wraps up, readers often reflect on the books they’ve read. How many? What were they? What did we like the most or the least? We run a podcast explicitly about books (mostly), so you know what we’re reading. But what about the act of reading itself? On this episode, we’re looking at the habit of reading itself and not really what we read, but how we read it. Included are unsponsored plugs for old e-readers, audiobooks, and the library’s best friend, Libby!

We live in a context where the boundaries of reality are constantly tested by scientific discoveries, new technologies, and attempts to describe our world. Weird fiction is a genre-spanning tendency with a long history that attests to this shifting sense of the real. On this episode, we survey weird fiction from Lovecraft and Kafka to the present, focusing on contemporary innovators and trends in speculative writing that keep our minds focused on the weird. Along the way, we consider talking animals, how cockroaches might inspire dancing, and the pervasive weirdness in TV, movies, and video games.

Hopefully, by the time you’re reading this, James Bond superfan Jess is tucked into her seat in the theater with a bucket of popcorn the same size as her head, ready to watch No Time to Die. The vaunted 25th (or 27th, if you’re feisty) film in the Bond franchise has seen its release rescheduled four times now due to rehires and the COVID-19 pandemic; it was originally meant to hit the big screen in November 2019, but here we are, two years later, hoping for the best. But even while the film limps toward the finish line, there’s still plenty of Bond to go around. In this episode, Jess is taking Carmanita and Joseph on a deep dive into the world of Bond, not just in movies but also in books, graphic novels, and even video games.

As a film franchise, James Bond is among the oldest, starting in 1963 with Dr. No. But the books predate the first film by over a decade, and the first time the world is introduced to Mr. Bond is in 1953, with the release of Casino Royale. And ever since, the world has been subject to the charms of the Walther PPK-wielding, martini-sipping, tux-donning spy with a license to kill. But what is it about Bond that keeps us coming back for more? Does 2021 still have room for a character like James Bond, and how do these stories stay relevant into the future? So to celebrate what is hopefully the release of No Time to Die, we’re digging in.

We’re here with our first official mini-episode! And what better place to start than with a format that is near and dear to all of our hearts? Celebrating annual and lifelong achievements in the comics industry, the Eisner Awards have been presented since 1988 at San Diego Comic-Con (or at least as long as there isn’t a global pandemic they are). We’ve taken a good hard look at this year’s winners and nominees, and we’re here with a rundown of the big stories from the Eisners, plus some of our favorites from both this year’s pool of winners and pools from years past.

Fall is in the air and Halloween is only two months away, so that means it's the perfect time to talk about horror fiction and horror movies. While we start with a general discussion of the scary stuff we love (or appreciate at a safe distance), we then turn to the author Stephen Graham Jones and discuss his award-winning novel "The Only Good Indians" and his latest book, "My Heart is a Chainsaw." We're huge fans and we hope you will pick both of them up.

If you liked this episode and you want to hear Jones read from and discuss his work, join us at SCPL for “A Nightmare on Church Street,” our virtual event with the author on September 17th at 7:00 PM. Go to spartanburglibraries.org and click on the event banner at the top of the page to sign up!

One of the things all three of us have noticed over time is that a lot of readers have a question about audiobooks:

Is it really reading if I’m only listening to it?

Audiobooks are a format that tends to have its own stigma—that listening to a book instead of reading it with your eyeballs is somehow a lesser effort, one that takes something away. But we’re here to say that is patently untrue: for some readers, by audio is the optimal format, and there’s no reason to believe that listening to a story is any less of a concentrated effort than seeing it on the page. Audiobooks have their own history, including multiple types of awards like the Audie Awards, which are celebrated annually by the Audio Publishers Association. We don’t think about it much, but audiobooks actually add a new dimension, which is the voice of the narrator, to sometimes bring new depth to a story.

On this episode we’re talking about our experiences with audiobooks and Audie Award winners, and why the format is so loved—and so stigmatized—by many. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re already prepared to try an audiobook, so we’re also recommending some of our faves and suggestions for a good place to start listening to audiobooks.

In the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, Westerns proliferated across film, television and books. Oh, the books, with their staunch brown covers, gunslingers and paint ponies, staring down the reader as though they were coming directly for us. But since then, the Western—especially the Western novel—has taken a backseat to other genres of exploration, especially other types of historical fiction and science fiction. So what is a Western, exactly? And who is still reading them? And how, exactly, does the Western genre diversify while still staying true to its historical definitions?

In this episode, we’re delving into these questions, with John Larison’s recent novel Whiskey When We’re Dry as the vehicle for the discussion. The novel, which takes place in the 1880s in Missouri, follows young Jess, who is left on the family ranch to fend for herself after her brother runs off and her father dies. Hedging her bets, Jess decides to disguise herself as a man and sets off in search of her brother, falling in with the staff of the dangerous Governor as a prized gunslinger. What follows is an adventurous, emotional story told through Jess’s indelible voice. The old West still has a lot to teach its readers, especially as it shifts and incorporates more diverse stories of the early Chinese, American Indian, and Black explorers whose stories were often shunned in Western storytelling for those of white men. We also talk about identity and Jess’s quest to understand where she comes from, which is hard enough to define in the early days of a nation, but even harder when you don’t know your own family.

If you listened to our previous episode, during which we discussed Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House, then you’ve heard us talk about the importance of preserving stories, both good and bad, especially about the LGBTQ+ community. And The Prettiest Star holds a similar place in queer literature, telling the uncomfortable but important story of a young man who returns home to his small town in Ohio after contracting HIV in New York City. In 1986, Brian’s return, which would under normal circumstances be a joyous occasion for any family, is instead fraught and stressful for his parents and his younger sister, who learned to live without him. As Brian chronicles his final summer alive, the family grapples with love, loss, and what community and family truly mean, especially for gay men.

After extricating herself from a psychologically abusive relationship that lasted over a year, Carmen Maria Machado went in search of the kind of book we talk about a lot on this podcast: one that would help her process what she had experienced. But instead of finding a sea of options, as there would be for the loss of a parent, joining a new community, or raising a child as a single parent, she found nothing that would help her deal with the destructive whirlwind that had cut a path through her life. So Machado did what so many queer women before her have done: she carved out a space to tell the untold story of abuse in lesbian relationships. The result, In the Dream House, is a highly experimental memoir that pulls elements of horror, psychological thriller, academic study, and even folklore together to reveal a deep, devastating, and surprisingly funny story of the relationship’s rise and fall.

In this episode, we’re attempting to pull apart the many, many aspects of In the Dream House that make it so unique and creative, especially Machado’s monumental ability to design a unique memoir and the essential need to document untold stories, particularly those in the queer community.

In July of 2020, we were all struck by Bryan Washington’s short story collection Lot, which takes readers deep into the Hispanic and Black neighborhoods of Houston, describing the lives of apartment complexes and storefronts via the people who occupy and care for them. So to prepare for Summer Reading and our kickoff event with the man himself, we’re reading and discussing Washington’s novel Memorial. Memorial returns to Houston via couple Benson and Mike, who are pretty much definitely at the end of their relationship. A wrench is thrown into their lives when Mike finds out his dad is dying of cancer, and he leaves for Japan just as his mother arrives to visit. Mitsuko and Benson are left together in a thumbprint-sized apartment, despite never having met each other, while Mike lands in Osaka to take care of his father, Eiju, who abandoned the family when Mike was young.

Memorial has so many layers that it’s hard to pull them into one cohesive podcast episode. But we think we’ve done it with this one! We’re digging into the concept of home, the essence of change, and most importantly, how weird it is to cook in someone else’s kitchen. We also take a look the characters Washington creates for both of the “hometowns” in Memorial: Houston and Osaka.

What does it mean to be a person? What does personhood mean? What about humanity? You might think you know, but Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Borne and its titular character are here to test what you think you believe. After finding a small pulsating blob on the side of a tremendous sleeping bear, scavenger Rachel brings it home in hopes that her partner Wick will be able to make use of it. But when the blob begins to grow, take shape and ultimately talk, Wick realizes that Rachel is in for more than she bargained for, but Rachel protects her charge as best she can. How Rachel does so and the decisions she makes for herself, for Borne and for Wick, all in the shadows of a giant bear, a half-destroyed Company and a mostly destroyed City run by a drug dealer named the Magician, will change her life forever.

As we discussed in our episode on The Left Hand of Darkness, science fiction’s goal is to push a situation to its logical limit, then let the story fully unfold from there. In Borne, VanderMeer has created a world not so far from our own, both in terms of modern society and in terms of Spartanburg; lean too close to the Company and you might catch the whiff of the crumbling abandoned textile mills that dot the Upstate. The City is all the more chilling and relatable due to its rough references that put it somewhere in the American south, kind of far from the ocean, but not too far from the mountains. In addition to discussing the relationship between Borne and the upstate (be it real or imagined), we’re talking about the way we relate to the non-human beings in our lives and who should read Borne in the first place—and much more importantly, why it should be read.

In 2013, SCPL’s Downtown book club, Booklovers, read George Saunders’ short story collection Tenth of December, which was considered one of the best books of the year by a number of outlets, including the New York Times, and was widely heralded as a masterwork of the format. Saunders is considered one of our greatest living American writers, and his talent as a writer and creative thinker seems to know no limits. So when Booklovers met to discuss Tenth of December, we were shocked at what we heard:

The group hated it.

So in 2021, Jess decided to return to the short story collection that caused such strife in the group (they don’t usually hate anything!) and analyze it with Joseph and Carmanita to see how Tenth of December has aged, if it’s still controversial, and what Saunders may have about the world we’re living in today. As it turns out, George Saunders is out here working in 3013, trying his hardest to catch us all up to his sense of humanity, of kindness, and of self-awareness, all conveyed through a light toe-dip into the world of speculative fiction, especially science fiction and horror. The ten stories in the collection range in length and scope, from “Puppy”, a vignette about two mothers coming together over the sale of a puppy, to “Home”, a Stoker Award nominee about a veteran who can’t figure out where he fits now that he’s back in America.

When Thomas Hardy wrote his final novel, Jude the Obscure, a reader wonders what may have been going through his head. After writing Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which shocked the Victorian England countryside, Hardy released Jude in 1895 in a serialized format. While Jude was a hit, it was also breathtakingly scandalous, earning the nickname “Jude the Obscene” and causing some booksellers to sell copies of certain sections in brown paper bags. Hardy, dismayed by the reception of his novels, turned to poetry and never wrote fiction again.

As local kid Jude Fawley grows into a young adult, he is endlessly troubled by the out-of-reach world of academic and pastoral splendor that he can never truly attain, due to a lack of ability, privilege, and knowledge (it is, after all, a rare accident to learn the wrong kind of Latin, even in the 1800s, but Jude manages to mess up even that). As Jude moves through his life, he is haunted and taunted by his first wife, Arabella, who is a true mismatch for Jude, and his beloved cousin Sue, who has Jude’s heart. When Sue announces her marriage to local schoolmaster Phillotson, Jude takes things into his own hands, with utterly disastrous results.

In Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy describes a world on the brink of change; he skewers the Victorian noble institutions of marriage, religion, parenthood, feminism, sexuality and family, but it’s his youngest named character, Young Father Time (or as Jess calls him, “Creepy Baby Man Child”), who pushes Jude—both the character and the book—over the deep end and into the melodramatic, scandalous, messy abyss.

Even in 2021, Hardy’s themes are still revolutionary, including his portrayal of Sue, who is perhaps the earliest fictional character to reflect a type of asexuality, an unexpected and in some cases radical acceptance of divorce, and the shocking act of familicide. As the end of the Victorian era licked at Hardy’s heels, he described a new world where things don’t have to be exactly what they’ve always been—and maybe that’s not a completely bad thing. The people weren’t ready for Hardy, and even now there’s plenty to find scandalous about Jude the Obscure, but it’s also a deeply influential, powerfully told story, and in this episode, we’re breaking down Hardy’s lasting power, the rapture with which we obsess over serialized stories, and what we hope you’ll read next.

Music is the oldest type of media we have, both in terms of when it was probably created (40,000 years ago) and when it was first recorded (the late 1800s). Music is in the background of our lives from beginning to end: from birdsongs and train whistles to lullabies and symphonies. And as tricky as it may be to write about music, that hasn’t stopped critics, analysts, theorists, biographers, and fans from trying their hardest anyway. In this episode, we look at our relationships with music and music writing, and how what we know about music informed what we read for this episode. Music is a deeply personal medium in a way that television, film, and even books are not: music is essentially built to access our emotions directly, which means that comfort zones, even in reading about what we like, can be very isolated. We also discuss the future of music, which is speeding rapidly away from a physical medium at a rate we’ve never seen before. How that impacts music writing is anyone’s guess, but we share a few ideas of what we expect to see over the next ten years.

To say that true crime is popular is to say that ice cream is popular. Sure, it’s true, but that doesn’t really cover the scope of its popularity: there are different flavors and styles that broaden its reach to just about anyone who wants a taste. In this episode, we’re discussing true crime and why readers, listeners and watchers love it so much. We discuss how true crime came to be, and Jess stumps for nonviolent true crime as a solid alternative for readers who think true crime isn’t for them because it’s too graphic. We also dig into why, exactly, true crime keeps readers coming back for more, and why we all read three true crime books when each of us only meant to read one. What does this say about true crime’s appeal? A lot, we think.

The topic of this episode, James McBride’s stellar novel Deacon King Kong, explores a rara avis among book club reads: it’s funny. Not just amusing or humorous, but laugh-out-loud, tears-in-your-eyes kind of funny, and thanks to McBride’s skills as an author, Deacon King Kong is also full of heart and hope. Following the misadventures of neighborhood drunk Sportcoat after he shoots the community drug dealer, Deacon King Kong explores the lives and livelihoods of the residents of the Cause Houses, a large housing project on the banks of the East River in Brooklyn in 1969. McBride’s ability to use humor to engage readers allows him to dig deeper into hard topics like the early introduction of heroin, alcoholism, and the generational trauma of slavery. But shining brightly through the darkness are things like the relationships and celebrations shared among charming characters, the legendary exploits of Sportcoat and his best friend Hot Sausage, and most importantly: Cheese Day. We dig into McBride’s latest, the winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and talk about everything from urban biodiversity to the Brooklyn Dodgers. And as usual, we share our suggestions for what to read, watch and listen to after you’ve finished reading Deacon King Kong.

We’re shaking things up with this episode: rather than highlight a specific title or genre, we’re taking a closer look at one of very few literary awards given with the reader in mind. Every January, the American Library Association holds its Youth Media Awards, which include eighteen individual awards: fifteen awards for excellence in writing for youth, two for lifetime achievement in writing and supporting children’s literature, and lastly, one special award that considers the readers of books and what works for them, rather than awarding the merit of the creator.

The Alex Awards, which were first handed out in 1998, celebrate novels written for adults but that have “special appeal” for readers ages 12-18. The Alex Awards are named annually by a committee of the Young Adult Library Services Association, and the 2021 winners were recently announced. So why do the Alex Awards matter? What is their purpose, and how can we as librarians and as readers use these winners (and nominees) to navigate the immense amount of books published every year? In addition to discussing the history of the Alex Awards and their use in librarianship, we talk about our favorite winners and nominees, and we throw out some suggestions (just in case YALSA is listening!) of possible retrospective Alex Award winners.

In 1993, Octavia Butler published Parable of the Sower, a work of speculative fiction that takes place in 2024. The main character, Lauren, lives in California in carefully cultivated safety with her family in a walled-in cul-de-sac while the ravages of climate change, severe poverty, robbery and drug addiction rage outside. After a major tragedy forces Lauren and the rest of the neighborhood outside the walls of the cul-de-sac, she hits the road and heads for higher ground, hoping to find a new safety in northern California. As she travels, Lauren gains followers, both physically and spiritually, as she fleshes out the belief system of Earthseed, which aims to harmonize humanity and change. In this episode we dive into Parable of the Sower, which today is almost unnervingly accurate, and we discuss aspects of adventure fiction and survival that appeal to us as readers, even during a pandemic.

Lord of the Flies is considered one of the most well-loved titles assigned in school, according to a survey done in the United Kingdom in 2016. William Golding’s classic novel of deserted island survival, first published in 1954, is a striking tale of young boys left to their own devices on an island with only nature and each other to keep them company—or to tear them apart. Expanding on the theme of children surviving in a world that wasn’t meant for them is A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet, which was published in 2020. A Children’s Bible traces the steps of a young narrator and her band of friends as they flee their parents and the lakeside cabin for safety after a massive hurricane destroys most of the house and renders the adults physically and psychologically useless. In this episode, we examine both novels, which consider humans versus nature and humans versus each other, and we discuss why survivalist fiction holds such appeal, especially now.

2020 was hard, but it had some bright spots. Among those was the release of Brit Bennett’s widely anticipated second novel, The Vanishing Half, which explores the inner lives and decisions of light-skinned Black twin sisters who grow up in a small town in Louisiana where marrying light is marrying right. After both sisters flee the town for New Orleans, seeking new lives for themselves, one disappears completely, only to reappear as a white woman in California. As the sisters reckon with the decisions they’ve made and how they’ve impacted their daughters, they’re pulled back together in a way they never expected. Since its release in June, The Vanishing Half has been what feels like everywhere: atop the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers List, across dozens of Best of 2020 lists, and even on Barack Obama’s favorite reads of last year. For this episode, the team discusses highlights from the novel and what struck them most, plus recommend titles that help readers decide where to go next.

Spy novels are driven by a set of interrelated questions: Who or what is really in charge? What is the true mission? And how will they get out of this one? On this episode, we discuss two novels with entertaining responses to these questions. Both Who is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht and This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone offer surprising twists on the spy novel formula and allow us a way in to talk about the appeal of spy fiction and what we as readers want out of our books.

Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse digs into one family in one place over a span of two very different days, a decade apart. As the Ramsay family spends its day at the blustery northern shore of Scotland, family friend Lily Briscoe attempts to capture the family via painting. Ten years later, what remains of the family returns to the same place, and Lily attempts to complete her painting, although the Ramsays seem to remain just out of reach. But to describe the plot of this novel is to miss the depth and creativity of Woolf’s writing and perspective, which bounces from inner mind to inner mind, visiting everyone from the family matriarch Mrs. Ramsay to the insufferable “brilliant” student Charles Tansley. The team digs into Woolf’s third novel and contrasts it with Céline Sciamma’s beautiful film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which also explores the inner lives of women, with art as a vehicle.

51 years after its publication, Ursula K. LeGuin’s masterwork, The Left Hand of Darkness, continues to inspire and open minds across the globe for its frank explorations of gender, friendship, loyalty and patriotism. If you didn’t think all that could happen in a science fiction-adventure novel, then it’s time to pick up The Left Hand of Darkness yourself, then listen to this episode. We discuss Left Hand and its obvious impact on science fiction released since, and we dig into the novel’s structure and style, what books we’d like to see redesigned as dossiers, and how LeGuin continues to blow our minds, even half a century later.

There’s no questioning the tremendous impact that Kurt Vonnegut has had on writing. The inimitable author penned dozens of novels, short stories, essays and more over his life, and none is better known than Slaughterhouse-Five, the rare beloved school-assigned novel once described to Jess as “World War II, but with aliens”. At 51 years old, Slaughterhouse-Five is still as relevant, biting and comical as ever, but to deepen its legend, a graphic novel adaptation was released in September 2020. The source material is clearly handled with kid gloves by Ryan North and Albert Monteys, who do their best to bring Dresden, time travel, and Tralfamadorians to life. In this episode, we discuss our varied relationships with Slaughterhouse-Five, the story and world that Vonnegut builds, and that time Ryan North got stuck in a skate pit with his dog.

In this episode, we’re looking at two stories of Vietnamese families who immigrate to America, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. While the families are pressed into change by the Vietnam War and its impact on the country, the war itself lingers at the very edges of both books, which are centered primarily around relationships between children who carve their own paths and parents who want an American experience for their kids (whatever that means). While On EarthWe’re Briefly Gorgeous is an autobiographical novel and The Best We Could Do is a graphic memoir, both tackle the ultimately universal themes of belonging and the need for understanding, along with generational trauma and the search for identity.

It’s our tenth episode! We’re celebrating by discussing Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. We focus on the in-over-their-heads heroes of both novels, Lionel Essrog and Oedipa Maas, as they try to do right by people who had past impact on them. Despite seeming disparate at the outset, both novels feature mysteries and seedy underbellies, big city semi-noir vibes, and plenty of conspiracy to go around.

Sometimes a book comes along that defies comparison. On the podcast we often discuss two books in tandem, but in this episode, the Booklovers team discusses the singular experience of reading Dan Chaon’s 2017 novel Ill Will. In Ill Will, the Tillman family, primarily family patriarch Dustin, grapples with the release of Dustin’s stepbrother Rusty from prison after his exoneration from guilt for murdering Dustin’s parents, along with their aunt and uncle, 30 years before. Dustin also balances the collapse of his nuclear family as his wife succumbs to a terminal illness, one son estranges himself, and another embraces his opioid addiction, while one of the patients at his therapy practice convinces him to dig into the possibly interconnected suspicious deaths of a dozen young men over the last twelve years.

Ill Will manages to combine aspects of horror, psychological thriller, literary fiction and murder mystery. In addition to the broad range of the plot, Chaon also touches on a number of themes, from loss and grief to the fear of the unknown, drug addiction, and the trappings of memory. We delve into what makes Ill Will such a unique novel, and why its unique method of storytelling makes it a modern classic.

Romance as a genre of pleasure reading has always been looked down upon as lesser when compared to lofty genres like literary fiction and classics, but make no mistake: romance is the bestselling pleasure reading genre in publishing, and in times of crisis—from the Great Depression to the COVID-19 pandemic—book sales overall may drop, but romance sales go through the roof. Why is this? What makes romance so appealing to readers, even when so many people hold such a negative view of it? On this episode, we discuss romance’s role in publishing, in pleasure reading, and in representation, using two smash hit titles from 2018 as a vehicle: Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient, featuring two Asian leads, one of whom lives with high-functioning autism, and Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Date, which opens with a meet-cute in an elevator between a white man and a Black woman. Come for the popcorn, stay for the comfort food.

On this episode we discuss Trust Exercise by Susan Choi and New Waves by Kevin Nguyen. This pair of seemingly disparate titles—one about a performing arts high school, the other about a tech startup—seem like they have little in common, but beyond having striking covers, they both explore what it means for the reader to be able to trust a narrator in contemporary reading. We also talk about our online lives and how they differ from our in person lives.

On this episode, Carmanita officially joins Booklovers as a cohost! To celebrate, we discuss two short story collections by award-winning master speculative fiction authors N.K. Jemisin and Ted Chiang. We open with an attempt at defining speculative fiction and then shift to discuss both collections in a general way before finding threads of commonality and contrast across pairs of stories. We close with a discussion of some of our favorite stories from both collections. Come for the dialogue and comity, stay for the publishing awards hot takes and a hilarious anecdote about Tamagotchi.

In this episode, Jess & Joseph tackle The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2012 novel about humanity and survival in North Korea. As with many stories about North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son is grim, violent, and disturbing, but as with many works of fiction, it is also funny, hopeful, and sprinkled with small scenes of joy. We consider the role of a novel like The Orphan Master’s Son as a guide to the harsh realities of life in North Korea, and how fiction can offer readers broader educational scope for serious topics than reading only nonfiction for education.

On this episode, Jess and Joseph are joined by Carmanita Turner, the media selector for Spartanburg County Public Libraries, to discuss two recent titles that focus on Black life in urban settings: Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington, which takes place in Houston, and Sports Is Hell by Ben Passmore, which takes place in Philadelphia.

To cap off Pride Month virtual programming at SCPL, Jess and Joseph review seven recent LGBTQ+ graphic novels, which range from romance and noir to urban fantasy and philosophical nonfiction. Along the way, we talk about the varying styles of the different titles and suggested similar books for interested readers. Time travel, necromancy, smartphone apps that grow mushrooms from your phone, and graduate school are also discussed and general hilarity ensues.

In this episode, Jess and Joseph discuss unreliable narration in psychological thrillers by focusing on two big titles from the last decade: Gone Girl, the smash bestseller by Gillian Flynn, which details the disappearance of a woman on her fifth anniversary, and My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, which is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about. Although these novels were written over six years apart, they share some big traits regarding narrative style and trust, how family helps define main characters and their motives, and control.