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.
Did you know that the classic 1997 slasher film I Know What You Did Last Summer was actually based on a propulsive young adult thriller from 1973? Lois Duncan's original novel isn't too interested in bloody kills, however. It's more focused on how young people build their identities: around their regrets, around their parents, and around tragedies.
Support the show! Buy the book on Bookshop.org.
Fresh off their victory over the Baby-Sitters Agency, the girls of the BSC turn on each other in this month's entry. Quiet Mary Anne has to get the group back together, negotiate with her well-meaning but strict single father, make and repair a new friendship, and engineer an unlikely meet-cute. And, of course, she needs to tend to some babysitting, including one job that will prove to be her toughest yet!
Here's the full Sit Me Baby One More Time reading list:
Kristy's Great Idea
Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls
The Truth about Stacey
Mary Anne Saves the Day
Dawn and the Impossible Three
Hello, Mallory
Jessi's Secret Language
Welcome to the BSC, Abby
These episodes posted first for our Patreon supporters. To hear our long-read project episodes when they first come out (or hear the rest of Sit Me Baby... right now), visit patreon.com/overduepod.
Support the show! Buy the book on Bookshop.org.
An official offshoot of the classic Choose Your Own Adventure series, the Choose Your Own Nightmare books cropped up for a couple of years in the mid-90s, an (alleged) response to the popularity of our old friend RL Stine’s Goosebumps series. Stine’s somewhat longer-lived Give Yourself Goosebumps sub-series would launch just months after the first Choose Your Own Nightmare book, but it’s fun to read CYOA originator Edward Packard take a stab at something more explicitly spooky than the original series.
Support the show! Buy the book on Bookshop.org.
Everybody loves our old friend Ray Bradbury! This time we’re taking a spin with his first short story collection Dark Carnival, a smattering of spooky tales that wound up scattered across a number of other collections throughout Bradbury’s career.
Stories discussed in this episode include:
The Small Assassin
The Dead Man
Skeleton
The Scythe
The Emissary
The Homecoming
Uncle Einar
The Lake
The Jar
Support the show! Buy the book on Bookshop.org.
A buzzy title that came to life thanks to BookTok but came to our attention because of a good-old bookstore shelf display, this week’s book (and the kickoff to Spooktober 2025) is what it says on the cover: it’s about monsters and also computers. If you didn’t associate either of these things with “found family,” then it’s also here to challenge some of your preconceived notions.
Support the show! Buy the book on Bookshop.org.
Rudyard Kipling's classic story collection The Jungle Book doesn't have a jazz orangutan named Louie, but it does have the bare necessities of imperialist fiction. The stories about Mowgli and other trailblazing animals all contain a whiff of "But what about the rigid hierarchy of nature?" And when every animal is personified...well...those simple bare necessities begin to reveal themselves.
Support the show! Buy the book on Bookshop.org.
The Club has encountered (gasp) competition! How will they manage to beat their new rivals, the Baby-sitters Agency? Also, Stacey's ready to spill her truth: her parents need to chill out. She's successfully managing her diabetes AND making friends AND crushing it as a baby-sitter, but their plan to see a new doctor in New York could ruin everything.
Here's the full Sit Me Baby One More Time reading list:
Kristy's Great Idea
Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls
The Truth about Stacey
Mary Anne Saves the Day
Dawn and the Impossible Three
Hello, Mallory
Jessi's Secret Language
Welcome to the BSC, Abby
These episodes posted first for our Patreon supporters. To hear our long-read project episodes when they first come out (or hear the rest of Sit Me Baby... right now), visit patreon.com/overduepod.
Support the show! Buy the book on Bookshop.org.
Some of us read a book. Some of us research the author and the historical context. Some of us sit in front of our microphones and record a podcast. Some of us edit it together and upload it to the website. Some of us write the description that goes up with it. Boy I hope this bit works!
Support the show! Buy the book on Bookshop.org.
Perhaps Elizabeth Gaskell’s best-known work, Cranford chronicles the lives of some Victorian era LMMs (Ladies of Modest Means). Their customs and relevance may be waning as Industrialization advances, but that doesn’t mean they won’t find ways to entertain us with their wit, their foibles, and their heart.
Support the show! Buy the book on Bookshop.org.
For anyone who’s ever loved a movie or TV show where people in silly outfits pretend to be giant city-crushing lizards and/or robots, this week’s book plays around in a pretty entertaining space. If the references to the mid-to-late-2020 stretch of the COVID pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election date it a little, and if every single named character talks exactly the same, it’s still got neat ideas and a part where the evil billionaire antagonist is implied to have his face eaten off by a parasite from another dimension.
Support the show! Buy the book on Bookshop.org.
