Most people familiar with C.S. Lewis' work will have come to him via the Chronicles of Narnia, a series of fantasy books that's defined for better or worse by its heavy-handed Biblical allegory.
Till We Have Faces, Lewis' last novel, certainly deals with some of the same themes. But it's also a retelling of the classic Cupid and Psyche myth that originally appeared in Apuleius' The Golden Ass in the late 2nd century.
Join us as we talk about the myth retold, Lewis' Christian roots, and what happens when Heaven and Hell host the Olympics.
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Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is a modernist classic. Rich in lyrical prose and unrelenting streams of conciousness, Lighthouse set a standard for peering into characters' heads and hearts and relaying the contents back to the reader.
It also closely mirrors portions of Woolf's life - particularly her summers in St. Ives and the devastating loss of her mother at a young age.
Discussion points this week include bag shoes, second helpings of soup, and the difficulties of conveying via podcast this book's lasting appeal.
YOU: An intrepid spaceboy, graduating at the top of your class at Space Academy.
YOUR MISSION: Find and destroy the evil space vampire at any cost!
Our fourth Choose Your Own Adventure outing takes us into deep space and beyond—join us as we hijack advanced spacecraft, evade arrest, and drift through the vast inky void of space. Will we catch that nefarious SPACE VAMPIRE? There's only one way to find out!
Harlan Ellison is a man whose reputation precedes him. His long and storied career as a sci-fi and speculative fiction writer is peppered with curmudgeonly diatribes and public incidents, many as interesting as the best of the thousand or so stories he churned out across books, television and film.
His classic story A Boy and His Dog takes quite a dim view of a post-WW3 apocalypse, so buckle up for another week spent discussing the depth's of humanity's depravity.
In an attempt to lighten the mood, we also talk about dog literacy and allow Andrew's cat Newman to make a cameo.
What would you do for a better life? Where would you go? Who would you leave behind? And what does "better" mean, anyway?
Reyna Grande poses these questions with great poise and power in her debut novel, Across a Hundred Mountains.
This week, we talk border crossings, panda bears, Chicana feminism, and the ingenuity of Days of Our Lives.
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Cormac McCarthy is a writer in the vein of Hemingway or Faulkner, a person whose prose you can spot from a mile away. That can be a good or a bad thing, as we discuss in our show on his 1985 book Blood Meridian.
Join us for a discussion of scalping, war, and the special Internet that only Cormac McCarthy knows about.
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What better way to discuss Diana Gabaldon's genre-straddling, time-traveling historical fiction novel Outlander than by confining ourselves to the same room?
Live (not really) from Craig's kitchen, we're happy to bring you an episode chockablock with bad Scottish accents, interdimensional romance, and plenty of Highland sex tips.
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Hey, jabronis!
This week we finally read our first Brontë book, thanks to one of our Patreon supporters! Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is considered to be "one of the first sustained feminist books," and though many of the sensibilities of early-to-mid-19th-century England are present here, we see the typical marriage and courtship rituals through a darker lens.
Contemporary readers were scandalized by the things this book depicted, including but not limited to (1) a woman leaving a man and (2) a man being a loutish alcoholic and cheating on his wife. Join us for a discussion of all that plus some tips on safe high-fiving.
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Craig tackles Jorge Luis Borges this week, and what results is a pile of conversations about fake novels and encyclopedias, WIkipedia hoaxes, the way that reviews work, and thoughts on which fast food franchises make the best (and worst) road trips.
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This is our first monthly bonus episode, brought to you by our supporters on Patreon! If you want these shows one week earlier than everyone else, visit patreon.com/overduepod for details.
It's Children's Book Week again, and just like last year we're using it as an excuse to read things that Lil' Craig and Lil' Andrew never got around to reading. Craig reads Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater, a story of a negligent husband and father who lets penguins into his house. Andrew read The Borrowers by Mary Norton, the tale of teeny tiny people who swipe things they don't think you'll miss when you aren't looking. Kids' books can take you to some weird places.
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Mr. Popper’s Penguins
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The Borrowers
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