Stop! Homer Time: The Iliad - Episodes 1 & 2 (Books 1-4)
For our latest show-within-a-show, we'll revisit Ancient Greece through Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's The Iliad. We'll be reading it a few books at a time and having a more in-depth chat about it than we do about most books. These two episodes cover Books 1-4.
Episode 1: The Iliad drops us right into the middle of the action, where "the middle" is 9 years into a 10 year conflict and "the action" is a couple of easily-affronted guys who instantly get mad at each other. Then we're treated to some maneuvering among the gods, some Odyssean trickery, the Catalog of Ships, and the less-impressive Catalog of Boys. (Books 1-2)
Episode 2: Just as the Trojans and Greeks seem on the brink of a giant clash, pretty boy Paris is shamed out of the crowd and cajoled into dueling Paris' former husband Menelaus. Surprise, surprise - the gods intervene! And after a brief interval, the gods spur the two sides into bloody action. (More like Aga-neg'em-on, amirite.) (Books 3-4)
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Ep 630 - Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson
Ep 629 - The Snow Queen, by Hans Christian Andersen
Time to celebrate winter with a chilly fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Also we're talking Disney's FROZEN!
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Ep 628 - The Witch Elm, by Tana French
The Witch Elm has Dublin, and it has murder, and it has a squad of detectives, but despite all that it is not a book in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. This riff on her classic crime novel formula focuses instead on some of the suspects, namely Toby Hennessey, who doesn’t know if he can’t remember things because of head trauma or because for most of his life he’s been able to get by without acknowledging the existence of systemic problems.
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Ep 627 - Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
Banned in many countries until the 1960s, David Herbert Lawrence's 1928 novel is both racier and tamer than you might imagine. What more would you expect from a book that uses both "the love experience" and [BLEEP] to describe, well, adult behavior? Caveat lictor: this episode features discussions of Adult Situations.
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Ep 626 - The House at Pooh Corner, by A.A. Milne
Happy 2024, and happy Public Domain day! Time finally caught up to US copyright law a few years ago, and the result has been a steady trickle of new creative work that’s available for anyone to modify and adapt. This year’s Big One is the earliest version of Mickey Mouse, but the new batch of PD stuff also includes this week’s Pooh book, as well as Tigger himself.
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Ep 625 - Her Night With Santa, by Adriana Herrera
You can't spell Horny without Ho(-Ho-Ho)! In this year's Happy Hornydays celebration, one of the people finding love during the holiday season is Santa herself. That's right, this is an F/F steamy short featuring a gender-swapped Kristina Kringle and the niece (???) of Melchior (????) the Magi (?????). Sadly, the extremely promising lore goes somewhat underexplored.
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Ep 624 - Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee
Ep 623 - Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
Despite being fairly well-versed in 20th-century fantasy, Mervyn Peake and his Gormenghast series has flown completely under our radar until now. It's a strange, florid, disjointed book with some fascinating character portraits, and also the most detailed description of a dude taking a bite of a pear that we have ever read.
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