A podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. Updates Mondays.
Overdue is a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. Join Andrew and Craig each week as they tackle a new title from their backlog. Classic literature, obscure plays, goofy murder mysteries: they'll read it all, one overdue book at a time.
Heinlein's sci-fi classic is rather different from the campy satire of Paul Verhoeven's 1997 adaptation. You can ask similar questions of both. Do they gleefully depict fascism? Do they glorify militarism and violence? Do they successfully subvert either? In our experience, both versions of Starship Troopers seem...complicated.
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For this show-within-a-show, Craig and Andrew learned about the world of Middle-Earth by reading J.R.R. Tolkien's posthumously published legendarium THE SILMARILLION. This episode posted first for our Patreon supporters in October 2025. If you want to hear our current longread project THE PRYDAINGER ZONE (and a bunch of other stuff besides), visit Patreon.com/overduepod.
Morgoth is back baby!!! He's got dragons, he's got balrogs, he's got orcs, and he's ready to make a mess of the meticulously described map that a bunch of the rest of this book is dedicated to setting up.
But he doesn't get everything he wants! Like when a man and his elf girlfriend defeat his most-trusted lieutenant, put his big dog to sleep, and come a-creeping to grab the Silmarils right from his crown! We still don't really know what they do, but people sure do seem to want those things!!
The reading list:
Ep 1 - Ainulindale, Valaquenta, Quenta Silmarillion Ch 1-3
Ep 2 - Quenta Silmarillion Ch 4-10
Ep 3 - Quenta Silmarillion Ch 11-16
Ep 4 - Quenta Silmarillion Ch 17-20
Ep 5 - Quenta Silmarillion Ch 21-24
Ep 6 - Alkallabeth, Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, Appendices
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They'll never write a time travel story that Andrew won't try! This week's riff on the formula includes megalomaniac tech billionaires, millennial malaise, and an astoundingly dangerous amusement park in northern New Jersey.
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Shhhh...this episode is confidential. The kitchen secrets divulged by bad boy chef Anthony "Tony" Bourdain will Rock Your World. Or will they? This breakout essay collection laid much of the foundation for modern popular understanding of American restaurant culture, but some of its lessons may not feel so fresh today. Instead, it may best be viewed in the context of Bourdain's larger media career, which could not have happened without the success of this book.
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This classic of twentieth-century Australian literature isn't a Whodunnit. It isn't a Howdunnit. It's barely a dunnit at all. It's a certifiable Whahappen??
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Do you like lesbian necromancer space operas but find all the grieving, brooding, and in-fighting a bit hard to sift through? Well then do I have the book for you! What began as Tamsyn Muir's concluding entry in her trilogy of The Locked Tomb evolved into a full novel of its own with the charming Nona at its center. Is it easier to understand than prior entries in the series? Of course not! But that might only add to its charms.
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For this new show-within-a-show, Andrew and Craig will learn all about The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. We'll read the five books in this classic children's fantasy series, then close out with an extra episode on the Disney adaptation The Black Cauldron.
In this episode, you'll hear us discuss Andrew's background with the series, how Alexander came to write Prydain, and the Welsh myths from which he took inspiration.
This is a preview of a series we’ll be running exclusively for our Patreon supporters over the next few months; we won’t release them on the main feed until the entire series has run. If you want to listen to them as they’re released, see patreon.com/overduepod for more! Episode 1 is already up!
Here's the full syllabus for The Prydainger Zone:
The Book of Three
The Black Cauldron
The Castle of Lyr
Taran Wanderer
The High King
Bonus: The Black Cauldron (1985)
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This is a book about what happens when a formerly tight-knight group of longtime friends rents a house in the woods for a week. Having to deal with your friends' significant others is one possible hazard; having to deal with a decade's worth of pent-up horniness and anxiety and yearning is another.
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This story is a giant bag of cotton candy, which we mean mostly as a compliment. It's a romance-adjacent found family story set in a cozy coffee shop set against a D&D-flavored backdrop, a place where almost no one is really a villain and the one person who comes close gets the ending they deserve.
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Is it a novel? A collection of stories? A story cycle? A monograph?? It doesn't matter. This one's an award-winner. Strout's a masterful episodic storyteller, diving quickly into the deep end with characters we've met just pages before. However, the titular Olive looms much larger than the others we meet, compelling us to wonder if the collectionovelcyclegraph isn't a bit uneven.
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