Hi, all. Probably this won't come as a giant surprise, given our erratic schedule and limited output the past couple years, but the time has come to make it offical: We're ending the show. There's no beef, there's no stress, but there is some sadness, and we recorded an episode to announce the end of the show and talk through it a bit.

The goal is to keep the archive available, but the Patreon will be shutting down by the end of April, 2023, so download anything from there that you want to hold on to. It's been a lot of fun making this show for you all, and we encourage you all to ride the crab, keep reading crap, and try to make the world a little better any time you can.

Recommendations:

• Start your own fuckin' band!

Music:

• "No Regrets" by Dramarama
• "History Lesson, Part II" by the Minutemen

 

No, it's not a new made-up term for a sexual position—as far as we know!—it's the new Lucy Foley joint, The Paris Apartment! It's darker than a wine cellar, twistier than an alley in your favorite arrondissement, but, unfortunately, about as eventful as an afternoon sighing with ennui over a couple of Gauloises and a well-nursed café au lait in a Left Bank café.

Pat your new Karen O. fringe into an appealing dishevelment, make your best face to express that you have the darkest of dark secrets and make sure you've got a skeleton key for all your neighbors' places, because it's time to take a trip into what some people are calling ... la'part-a-ment Parisienne, but what we know to call The Paris Apartment.

Recommendations:

• Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearer's Club
• Jane Peck, The Verifiers
• Diane Duane, The Door into Fire plus The Worst Bestsellers Ep on it!

Mood Music:

• "Heads Will Roll" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• "Bastille Day" by Rush

With tramps like these, hoo boy, do things get real and stay there in a hurry as your humble hosts pop their clutches and tell Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon's Born to Run: A Novel of the SERRAted Edge to eat their dust! It's another novel of the urban fantastique, with an Irish pub described as "straight-edge", a couple battle scenes where you can really see the graph paper underneath the characters, and some of the most improbable radio playlists imaginable, and, as a novel of (sigh) the urban fantastique, one of us slides right off it and the other digs his eldritch fangs right into it. But not like that, the other way.

NOTE: This novel, while mostly lighthearted, does traffic in material related to child sexual abuse and exploitation, in way reminiscent of a particularly tawdry episode of SVU.

NOTE 2: Clsn now realizes he missed a good opportunity to pronounce it "elfs" throughout the episode and regrets the error.

Recommendations:

• Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Death Among the Undead, by Masahiro Imamura
• Seinfeld Bass Riff Variations

Music:

• "Guinnesses" by MF DOOM (feat. 4Ize & Angelika
• "Shamrocks and Shenanigans" by House of Pain
• "Jesus Built My Hotrod (Redline/Whiteline Version" by Ministry

Well, friends, it's surely time to put on your red shoes and dance the blues, this time along with us as we lace 'em up and see The Playmakers Series series of hockey romance novels, in this case Gauging the Player: A One-Night Stand Sorts Romance by G.K. Brady. Believe us, to see the Playmakers Series make a scoring rush, the bright colors of the prose flashing against the milky e-reader screen, is to see a work of art in motion.

As one character's beloved grandmother says, this is "No chickenshit crap, now, you hear?" It's a ton of fun to watch the will-they (again) / won't they (again) after they do, bigtime, and we invite you to drop your gloves, pick up your earbuds, and skate a shift with us as we watch two crazy kids try to escape the penalty box of life—together. It's the only book you'll ever read that nudges the entrance!

 

Recommendations:

• Elden Ring
• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Music:

• "Fuck the Pain Away" by Peaches
• "So Into You" by Climax Blues Band
• "work hard, play hard" by Palace Music

No know Jack? No, know Jack! Jack Reacher, that is, as we for some reason decide to experiment with CBS-grade Reacher-adjacency with Diane Capri's series-starting Don't Know Jack. This is a gaiden, in which the titular Jack is most present in his absence, as a wise-cracking pair of FBI Human Resources Detectives are looking to reconstruct a series of events more or less clearly laid out in a book available at any airport bookstore. NOTE: this is probably not a gaiden, but either way, absolutely do not @ us.

Anyway, if you want to hear some serious airport positivity, this is the episode for you! So grab your earbuds and make sure to leave early for your flight, because by the time this episode is over, you'll be saying "I Know 'Don't Know Jack'!".

 

Recommendations:

• "Nancy" comics by Olivia Jaimes
• "My Dark Vanessa" by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Music:

• "Happy Jack" by The Who
• "jack shit" by Teen Angels
• "Atom Jack" by Drive Like Jehu

We're off the dang map here, folks, because we don't know where we are, but we do know that here? there be monsters! Just in time for spooky season, we're taking on one of the giants of the bad-book genre, Hannibal by Thomas Harris.

This book is a big, corrosive bummer, with lots and lots of moments where the words on the page seem to rearrange themselves into concrete poetry of the author's middle finger extended, straight into the reader's face, and even more moments where the narrator is calling you "we" or being very, one might say scrupulously, careful to mention the race of every character (except the white ones) and the attractiveness levels of every lady-type character. Come for the shopping sprees, but STAY for the choppin—you know what, I don't even have the energy to finish this one. It's a direct sequel to Silence of the Lambs. You think you know what you're in for. You don't. That's why...you need us! Take our hands and join us through a whirlwind tour of hog farming and new love.

Recommendations:

• "Ayoade on Top by Richard Ayoade
• Werewolf (2016)

Music:

• "I Slammed my Penis in the Car Door" by Sol Scribbles
• "Jazz Fart" by The Best Show
• "Lookin' for Love" by Johnny Lee

Homefolks, we came to party, and your eyes were looking at ... Nöthin' but a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion by Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock and it is well and truly time to push the opening acts off the stage and get ready for the *looks down at padded codpiece under spandex trousers* main event, if you know what our book's subjects are talking about AND I THINK THAT YOU DO.

That's right: we're heading to the Sunset Strip of Los Angeles, California, USA, circa 1985, and we're just investigating the plain HECK out of the local flora and fauna. Or at least asking the local flora and fauna to tell us what was on their minds 'way back when. And when it gets boring we set off flash pots and / or whang the switch that makes the drum kit start chugging down a long set of railroad tracks it's attached to—it'll all make sense by the end, we promis, so please! put your lighters in the air and get ready for two hard-rocking slabs of hard-rocking rock, followed by one semi-explicably emotional slice of ballad action, because it's time for us ALL to tease our hairs and enjoy (?) the power and passion of rock and roll, '80s style!

Recommendations:

• No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
• Shit, who knows, read a classic or two, IDK, Wuthering Heights and My Antonia both ruled...

Music Pairings:

• "Nothin'" by N.O.R.E.
• "I Wanna Rock" by Snoop Dogg

Since it's been a while, and we're currently slogging through a very long book for the next episode, we decided to give ALL of our listeners a chance to hear the new episode we just released for our patreon donors. It's not about a book. Most of our bonuses episodes aren't, really. But it is a lot of fun! This isn't going to be a common occurrence, but we missed you. And we hope you missed us, so here it is -- We ease back into the podcasting game with the early-aughtsiest slice of cinema we could find, the unexpectedly successful film Resident Evil!  But is it merely a box-office success, or is there artistic success there as well?  MASH THAT PLAY BUTTON AND FIND OUT, WHY DO YOU NOT?

A movie so early-2000s you expect it to have stories about Woodstock '99, Resident Evil is a serious-faced attempt to honor the, ah, let's call it a "mythos" of the games, with plenty of atmosphere, some not entirely expected pacing, and some brutal moments, some of which it turns out we've seen before. So hitch up your JNCOs and grab some nü-metal off of Limewire, because it's time to see what lies beneath the surface ... of human skin ... of that spooky mansion outside Raccoon City ... and, best of all ... of the business practices of the strangely popular Umbrella Corporation! (if you enjoyed this episode, and would like to hear an extra episode per month about books (rarely) and other media products (more frequently), check us out at http://patreon.com/ideovpod

It's time to get what an old boss of Clsn's used to call "choiceful" in these all-too-choice-free times, so we break format a little bit (and break out laughing a lot) with a "Which Way" book, in which we try and mostly fail to become the titular Champ of TV Wrestling.

Do the elegant diversions of a more innocent age hold up in today's bustling, hugger-mugger world of screens and Tik-Tok and whatnot? We invite you and all your friends to choose to find out! Click on in and try your luck with the champs of ... The Champ The Champ of TV Wrestling, that is!

Recommendations:

• The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells
• Enjoy the things that make you happy!

Music:

• "Theme to Greatest American Hero" by Mike Post
• "Theme to Rock and Wrestling"
• "Freewill" by Rush

We live in a world that has hippos, and those hippos have to be ridden by people with weapons. Who's gonna do it? You? These people have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for victims of hippos, and you curse the hippo riders. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know. That hippos eat people, but that probably saves lives. And our existence as a podcast, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves time. You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want us reading these books, you need us reading these books. We use segments like "High Points, Low Points", "Dramatic Readings", "What Would They Do". We use these segments as the backbone of lives spent reading stuff and talking about it. You use them as a way to kill some time between other activities, or during them. We have neither the time nor the inclination to explain ourselves to listeners who rise and grind under the blanket of the very entertainment that we provide, and then questions the manner in which we provide it. We would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, we suggest you hop up on top of your OWN hippopotamus and ride!

Anyway, yeah: what we have here is an (apparently well-regarded!) alternate history answering the question "What if a Western but hippos not horses?" It also asks—and answers!—"What do we need a white boy for, anyway?" so you can probably tell already that it rules, and we definitely had a hell of a lot of fun reading it, so grab your traveling clothes and get ready to get seriously amphibious with us and our hippo pals.

Recommendations:

• A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
• Normal People by Sally Rooney

Music:

• "Wide Wide River" by the Fugs
• "Tusk" by Fleetwood Mac

For SO many reasons, it's time to get out of town, and so we're hitting the road to check out some of those hot Atlanta Nights we've been hearing so much about! Atlanta Nights is a truly bizarre artifact, so strange that it forces us to break our own rules and stretch our own format, as we take a deep dive into the churned-up waters of "bad on purpose" and find ... well, okay. Look. You know that one friend of yours, here, deep into 2020, who still thinks "my pants are suddenly tighter" is still a funny way to describe an erection? (In local podcast terms, we call that one friend "The Clsn".) This book has probably five of those jokes.

Accompany us, won't you, as we step into restaurant after restaurant to indulge our ... appetites—but ONLY after dark, because this is not a daytime affair, friends, no, no, no. This is an affair of ... Atlanta Nights.

Want to check out Atlanta Nights for yourself? You can do it so at HERE. We love you!

Recommendations:

• Sun Don't Shine movie
• The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
• Pen15 show

Music:

• "Oh Atlanta" by Little Feat
• "Sex and Dying in High Society" by Japandroids
• "Warm Leatherette" by The Normal