This month Aaron and Rodney learned a valuable lesson about not judging a book by its cover. They also learned to not judge a book by a one-sentence blurb on Google. They were expecting a dull, overly dramatic, and schmaltzy 19th-century romance novel, and what they got was a riveting portrait of one woman’s attempt to protect her child from the influence of a deplorable husband by defying the law and moral code.
They loved it.
So did Aaron’s girlfriend, Rebecca, who joins them for this discussion.
Just press “Play” on the player below to hear the newest episode!
Philip K. Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982)
We have made no secret in our discussions for this podcast that we are both tremendous fans of science-fiction. Our collective love for the genre is absolute and actually extends far beyond the authors we admire. It is reflected in the movies we love, the TV shows we DVR, and the obsessions we have carried since childhood. It is actually a source of lamentation for us that more writers and titles in the genre are not included in the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.
Because there is a dearth of our favorite genre included in our source material, we don’t get much opportunity to talk about it in our discussions. This is why we jumped at the chance to celebrate the birthday of Philip K. Dick for our bonus material this month. Regardless of the differences in our individual science-fiction tastes, we both agree that Phillip K. Dick (or PKD as he is oft-referenced) is a master of the genre.
Philip K. Dick was also, however, a deeply troubled man. In our discussion, we dive deep into his drug addiction, his mental illness, and his insistence that he was the recipient of divine inspiration from extra-terrestrial beings. We discuss his work and its influence on contemporary culture. We also discuss our own beginnings in the genre of science-fiction and explain why all our favorite science-fiction writers turned into dirty old men.
If Aaron were asked to make a top 10 list of his all-time favorite novels, William Gaddis’ The Recognitions would find a spot somewhere in the top 5. This 900+ page masterwork of the beginnings of the post-modern movement spoke to a college-age Aaron in ways that are often hard to articulate. A work that examines the relationship between the artist and his final product, the complicated reasons that the creative can be inspired, and the oft-tumultuous connections between fathers and sons, The Recognitions is a difficult novel that challenges readers with unattributed dialogue, murky character motivation, and long-winded sentences that often have double meaning.
As stated, Aaron adores this novel. Rodney fucking hates it.
Just press “Play” below to hear their discussion about this critically-acclaimed novel that took decades to find an audience.
For this month’s bonus episode, Aaron and Rodney are going to take a deep dive into the life and works of American novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Between his humanistic views, his uncanny knack for unintentional world-building, and his macabre sense of gallows humor, there are more than a few qualities that make Mr. Vonnegut’s body of work unique amongst his contemporaries. Our podcast seemed an appropriate place to dissect them as we’ve made no secret in our catalog of episodes that Kurt Vonnegut holds a special place in Aaron’s heart.
In a career spanning more than fifty years, Kurt Vonnegut published fourteen novels, five plays, and multiple collections of short stories and non-fiction essays. He passed away in 2007, but if he were still alive, he would be celebrating his 101st birthday on November 11.
Join us for this lively discussion of Aaron’s favorite novelist by pressing “Play” on the player below.
In 1898, Caterina Albert won the prize for literature in the Jocs Florals literary competition. This win sparked a considerable scandal when the jury learned that the author was actually a young girl. As a result, Caterina Albert refused to present her work or accept the award, and from then on she used the male (and snarkily patriotic) pseudonym of Víctor Català for her writings, taking the name from the protagonist of a novel she was planning but never finished.
Unfortunately, this intriguing tidbit of trivia is the most interesting thing about this novel for Aaron. Rodney and Ilsa are a little more generous in their critique. That’s right: this month’s discussion includes their inaugural guest.
A listener has kindly brought to my attention that a portion of the episode appears to be missing from the file we uploaded today. I listened to the episode myself and, sure enough: the audio jumps from “Let’s talk about this email” right to “and now it’s time for book ranking!” Listening even further revealed that it happens a second time toward the end… We jump right from the fourth books on our banned list right to a moment or two before the end of the recording. I checked the original file and the original file has the same flaw. Our only answer to this is that we might have inadvertently paused our recording somehow while taping.
This is an embarrassing blunder on our part, but the only way to address it is to apologize for it and move on or remove the episode entirely. We’re opting to just admit that we’re imbeciles and be extra careful to prevent this in the future.
For those who can’t handle the accidental cliffhanger, we’re going to reprint our banned books list here. The books we discussed and mentioned were as follows:
The Kite Runner
Slaughterhouse-Five
A Prayer For Owen Meany
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Satanic Verses
Fahrenheit 451
The Sun Also Rises
The Catcher In The Rye
We also made special mention of The Call of the Wild and Les Miserables. The two books we discussed that somehow got excised from the recording were To Kill A Mockingbird (Rodney) and Maus (Aaron).
We’ll address the email that got purged in a future episode.
We apologize sincerely for this mishap on our part.
The episode with our discussion on Solitude will drop on October 18.
The episode of Just In Case We Die is the first installment in an experiment of sorts. This experiment was prompted by a discussion I had with a regular listener. This listener had very kind things to say about the content of our programming. They made a recommendation for a book that we should read and discuss, a novel by a beloved American writer that appears nowhere in the original list. This listener also said that they enjoy our program so much that they wish we could drop episodes more frequently.
That got us thinking: Is there a logical reason that we couldn’t do two episodes per month instead of just one? We obviously can’t discuss two books per month– ain’t nobody got time for that— but we could devote airtime to book-related content. There is truly no shortage of ideas for material: we could discuss the works of writers that do not appear on the list, discuss the movie adaptations of books we really enjoyed or read for our program, respond to listener emails, discuss books suggested by our audience, etc. There are also things that we would like to discuss that we don’t necessarily have time for without making our regular episode become a two-and-a-half hour time commitment for fans.
For example . . . The American Library Association has designated the week of October 1 through October 7, 2023 as Banned Books Week. Both Rodney and I are in passionate and adamant opposition of book censorship in any form. We both also have many books that have meant a great deal to us over the years that have somehow managed to find themselves on the overgrowing list of novels that have been challenged or censored. We wanted to take some time to have a conversation about these works of literature, about the nature of banning in general, and whether, in some cases, the complaints about some of these books are warranted. We recorded this special episode with the intention of dropping it during Banned Books Week.
Unfortunately for people who came here today to download our discussion of Solitude by Victor Català, Banned Books Week fell during the week of the month that we normally post new discussions. To drop a discussion of banned books when it wasn’t actually Banned Books Week anymore seemed a pointless undertaking, so we agreed that this month was an excellent time to begin the experiment.
Our first bonus episode, in which we discuss a listener email, make a personal ranking of the books we’ve read so far, and each offer and recommend five novels that have been banned or challenged can be accessed by pushing “Play” on the audio player below. Our discussion of Solitude, which features our friend, Ilsa– our inaugural guest!– will drop two weeks from today.
We do thank all of you for listening to our podcast. We especially thank those of you who have engaged us with us through our various social media outlets. We started this podcast for us, and it means a lot that it actually means something to others as well.
Of the six books we’ve read for this podcast, only one of them so far has not featured a fictionalized version of a real historical figure. This month’s novel even ups the ante on that conceit by presenting a fictionalized account of a historical event. E. L. Doctorow changes the names and some of the details, but this novel is very much about the trial and eventual execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an American married couple convicted (and subsequently executed) in 1951 of spying for the Russian government, despite the prosecution presenting no hard evidence of their treason. It’s a dark moment in the history of our nation, and Doctorow utilizes fiction, memoir, and academic thesis to examine the repercussions of this historic event on not only the participants but the nation.
This month, we decided to take a break from our normal routine of using a random number generator on Google to pick our book. Instead, Aaron hand selected a title from the list to honor the passing of one of his favorite novelists.
Cormac McCarthy began publishing novels in 1965. In the fifty-eight years that have lapsed since his initial book, he has published twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories in addition to non-fiction essays. He is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award, and a James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is one of Aaron’s favorite novelists of all time.
Blood Meridian, our selection for this month’s discussion (and #139 on our alphabetized list) is Cormac McCarthy’s fifth published novel. It is an epic historical novel, set in the American frontier. It is rightly considered one of the “great American novels”, but it is not for the faint of heart. It is unrelenting in its brutality, unapologetic in its violence, and cryptic in its ultimate message. Please don’t judge Aaron too harshly for loving this novel as much as he does.
This novel– one of the more unique coming-of-age novels that either Rodney or Aaron have read in years– follows the residents of a boardinghouse for pre-adolescent children over the course of several years. Is it really a boardinghouse, though? Exactly what are “the guardians” of this facility preparing its residents for?
Aaron and Rodney both really loved this heartbreaking novel about loss, friendship, the need for identity, and the very nature of what it means to be a human being. How did the elegant prose of this Nobel Peace Prize-winning author manage to skip under their radar for so long?
Just In Case We Die 