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This month’s selection was hand-picked from the curated list by Rebecca. She selected this novel because she is an ardent admirer of this author’s work and this work was one that she had not personally read. Her selection– The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster– proved to be an excellent choice. Not only did everyone involved here at Just In Case We Die really enjoy this book, but it is the first selection in our uploading history to have garnered feedback from our audience before the discussion episode dropped.

What makes this novel so special? Click “play” on the media player below to find out!

Aaron can hear just well enough to record if all three cast members are within a few feet of each other, so, at long last, Just In Case We Die presents the bonus material for June. This month, the discussion celebrates Pride Month with an exploration of some personal favorite writers in the LGBTQIA+ community. There are horror writers, journalists, science-fiction writers, Booker Prize winners, and a beloved American novelist close to the hearts of all three cast members.

To hear the discussion, just push “Play” on the media player below:

Today is June 5. It’s the first Wednesday of the month. This means, if we follow our normal posting schedule, we should be dropping our first of two episodes for the month today.

Ordinarily, the three of us get together on the first weekend of every month, record both episodes, and then drop them accordingly as the month progresses. This month, however, Rebecca and I had plans to attend a live recording of Small Town Murder (a true-crime comedy podcast that we both love) in Nashville. We made arrangements with Rodney to record on Sunday afternoon via Zoom– Rebecca and I in Tennessee, Rodney back home in Illinois. Easy enough, right?

For several days before my departure from Illinois, Rebecca and I questioned if I should even be making the trek to Tennessee. We wanted to see each other. We certainly wanted to see the show. I was not in good shape, though, having spent a couple of consecutive days suffering the symptoms of what appeared at the time to be a nasty sinus infection. I was congested. I had a low-grade fever and a headache that I could not assuage. It felt like someone had punched me in the face, and I was having difficulty finding the right cocktail of cold medicine remedies to feel any relief.

As the week progressed, my condition began to improve. By Friday, I was still congested, but I had no fever or headache, so we decided that I could still head south. It’s a not-quite eight-hour drive from my doorstep to hers. It was a fairly uneventful drive– traffic was light, the weather was nice– until I hit Kentucky. My excursion into the mountains, the change in elevation and pressure, began to make my ears pop. Like nobody’s business. It felt like I was in an airplane to Seattle with no chewing gum available. By the time I reached Maryville (the Tennessee town where Rebecca resides), I, once again, felt like I had been punched repeatedly in the face.

I got to Rebecca’s place late enough that there was little time for much more than eating dinner and going to bed. I slept like an infant after such a long drive until about 4:30 in the morning. It was this wee hour of the morning that my left ear decided to begin painfully pulsating and throbbing. It was a dull ache, nothing overly dramatic, but enough to prevent me from going back to sleep. I read The Book of Illusions on my Kindle in the dark until just before 6:00 am when I was the not-so-proud recipient of a sharp, albeit brief, stabbing pain to the left side of my head.

I made enough noise getting some Ibuprofen that I woke Rebecca up. It was while I was explaining the situation (and why I was rooting around in her medicine cabinet before dawn) that she realized that I had blood drizzling out of my left ear.

I officially finished The Book of Illusions while sitting in the waiting room of an urgent care facility in Maryville, Tennessee. Shortly thereafter, I was diagnosed with an otitis media with an unspecified perforation of the tympanic membrane. In layman’s terms: an ear infection and a ruptured eardrum.

Well, that’s just great.

Thankfully, the clinic in Tennessee accepted my Yankee insurance. The doctor (who, it should be added, looked more like Victoria Jackson playing a doctor on Saturday Night Live than an actual, you know, certified doctor) charged me $62, wrote me a prescription for amoxicillin to treat the infection, and told me that I should follow up when I get home to make sure that everything was healing properly. She made no restrictions other than requesting that I not submerge my head underwater and seemed optimistic that this injury was no big deal and would heal on its own.

Rebecca and I went ahead and did our day tour of some of Nashville’s sights (we visited Ryman Auditorium, toured Chief’s, the bar owned by my favorite country singer, and ate dinner in a neat restaurant that had ACTUAL STINGRAYS swimming in an aquarium near our table). We went ahead and redeemed our tickets for Small Town Murder. We also, however, found ourselves repeating everything over and over in casual conversation because I couldn’t hear a damn thing she was saying to me. She couldn’t hear most of what I was saying half the time either because my clogged-up ears were making my own voice rattle around in my skull like a handful of ball bearings in a coffee can, so I was speaking slowly and quietly to stave off another headache.

Ultimately, by Sunday, it was decided that there was no feasible way that we could record our podcast this weekend. I tend to lead the discussion and that is difficult to do when I can’t hear anything. Listeners would be burdened with two whole episodes of Rodney and Rebecca continually having to repeat themselves so that I could follow what was going on around me. We made plans to hold off recording until today, to, at the very least, record our bonus episode, even if we’d be dropping it a day late.

Today is the big day. I am four days into my ordeal and I still can’t hear anything. Change of plans, again. We’re going to give me another weekend to recuperate and then drop both of our normal episodes in the last two weeks of June. We hate doing it, but our discussion of Paul Auster will be a lot more palatable to the audience without repeated occurrences of me saying, either too loudly or too quietly, “What? Can you repeat that?” every ninety seconds or so. All three of us really enjoyed this novel and an author as elegant as Paul Auster deserves a much-more sophisticated approach.

To that end, yesterday, I did as the Great Smoky Mountain Barbie doctor instructed and went to a physician here for follow-up. The infection is cleared up. The burst ear drum is not, but appears to be healing as it should be. I am still contending with the symptoms of my nasty sinus infection, which is only exacerbating my inability to hear, and turns out to possibly have been more than just a sinus infection as Rebecca has started showing some of the same symptoms after I returned home to Illinois.

As near as we can tell, Rodney is not ill. He is being very gracious, though, in following my lead in knowing whether or not it is appropriate to record. This is information gleaned from text messages. I haven’t talked to him. I wouldn’t be able to hear him if I had.

The crew here at Just In Case We Die sincerely apologizes for this break in our normally-scheduled routine. If we could avoid it, we would. With that said, we do promise our normal two episodes for June and they will drop in the last two weeks of the month. We should be back to our normal schedule for July.

Thank you for your understanding. We’ll see you soon,
Aaron

Here’s what happened: Back in April, the random number generator drew “Unknown Soldiers” by Väinö Linna (this novel would be #1224 on our master list). Rodney and Aaron, in particular, were interested in this classic novel of WWII, but copies that weren’t going to cost a million kajillion dollars were appearing to be elusive. Aaron vetoed the book and used the random number generator again to get The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

Ray Bradbury’s 1950 collection of loosely-connected stories that chronicle the human colonization of Mars has long been a favorite of Aaron. Aaron is, in fact, a devoted acolyte of all of Ray Bradbury’s work and thinks it unfathomable that at least one work by this stalwart of the golden age of science-fiction isn’t included on the original list.

In this episode, the cast of Just In Case We Die reflect on the exclusion of a great American author, discuss the eloquence of sci-fi, and celebrate one of their own (Rebecca, natch) opening the gateway into the world of speculative fiction.

To hear this episode, push “Play”!

May is National Short Story Month and the cast of Just In Case We Die decided to celebrate by devoting an entire discussion to the craft and art of short stories. Aaron, Rodney, and Rebecca each selected two short stories for the others to read. In retrospect, this conceit may not have been the best option for listeners who have no context for the stories being discussed, but the discussion does go into great depth about the individual writers and their works. Perhaps you end this discussion with some suggestions for your own excursions into the world of short stories.

In this episode, the following writers and stories are discussed:
— “Chicxulub” by T. C. Boyle
— “MIles City, Montana” by Alice Munro
— “The Big Two-Hearted River” by Ernest Hemingway
— “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace
— “Two Houses” by Kelly Link
— “The Diamond As Big As The Ritz” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Press “Play” on the media player below to hear the latest discussion!

Full disclosure: I was initially disappointed when we got to The Lit. There were many discussions between management and I ahead of time about how loud it might be in their establishment during the brunch hours. I wasn’t too concerned about it– I’ve gotten adept enough with episode editing that I know how to isolate dialogue and adjust background sound levels. What we did not consider is how taken aback patrons of The Lit might be to have strangers approaching them while they’re trying to eat breakfast. I mean, it’s kind of rude.

We decided that it was best to just situate ourselves and let people come to us. This didn’t lend itself to the number of interviews we planned on doing, but it did mean that the people we did actually end up interviewing were excited about it. This, in turn, led to some lively discussions from a wide range of people with a wide range of interests. We talked fantasy with Maya, non-fiction with Alex, and the beauty of book clubs breaking us out of our comfort zones with Abri. A personal highlight for me was an interview with Jenny Shima, the owner of The Lit. She’s energetic and delightful– and just wait until you hear one of her book recommendations 😉

We definitely have to thank The Lit for not only hosting us for this endeavor but for filling a much-needed void in our community. The atmosphere of this bookstore is so friendly and cozy. We urge you to check out their store and patronize them frequently.

Before we urge you to press “Play” on the media player below to hear the fruits of our Independent Bookstore Day labors, please take a moment to peruse the attached list of books, writers, and independent bookstores that are recommended within our various conversations:

Bobzbay Books (419 N. Main St in Bloomington, IL)
Leigh Bardugo
Marlon James
Ordinary Monsters by J. M. Miro
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Isabel Allende
Elena Ferrante
Jane Addams Book Shop (208 N. Neil St in Champaign, IL)
The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney
The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
Holly Jackson
Lee Child
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Booked (506 Main St in Evanston, IL)
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
Travis Baldree
R. F. Kuang
The Big Nate series by Lincoln Pierce
Strange Planet by Nathan Pyle
Hello, Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post by Allison Pataki
T. C. Boyle

. . . and lastly– but certainly not least in the eyes of my twin boys– Just Hamburgers (214 Ottawa Road in Paxton, IL

Did you know that the C.I.A. seized an opportunity to embarrass the Soviet Union by publishing a special edition of Doctor Zhivago in 1958? The cast of Just In Case We Die didn’t know this either. As far as they’re concerned, this is the only reason why anybody should have ever cared about this pointless, plotless, horribly-written novel by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Boris Pasternak in the first place.

To hear the latest discussion, just push “Play” below!

Aaron was introduced to Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and J. M. Barrie in third grade. Rebecca spent her childhood devouring Nancy Drew. Rodney has had an obsessive need to reread The Chronicles of Narnia in its entirety throughout his life. All three members of this podcast’s crew became avid readers at a very young age.

This month, to celebrate International Children’s Book Day, the cast of Just In Case We Die participate in a round table discussion about their favorite authors when they were youths, the children’s books they keep returning to, and how a love for the written word has been ingrained in them for as long as they have known to read. Rebecca joins Rodney and Aaron from Tennessee via Zoom for a very lively conversation.

To listen to this discussion, just press “Play” on the media player below!

Remember last month when Aaron, Rodney, and Rebecca discussed Disappearance by David Dabydeen? Do you recall that Aaron and Rebecca didn’t like it very much? Remember how Rodney tried to build a case that Dabydeen’s slight tome spoke to him because one of its recurring themes was about the narrator’s quest to discover who he was and how he fit into the world around him?

On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s 1954 bible for the beatnik generation, could not have been a more fitting follow-up to that discussion. To put it simply: On the Road is one of the greatest novels about “identity chasing” to have ever been published. All three cast members of this podcast loved it.

To hear the discussion, press “Play” on the media player below.

The conversation you are about to listen to was prompted by a TikTok snippet from Dietrich Stogner that Rodney sent to his co-hosts. The video in question was the creator’s response to a fan query about why he doesn’t recommend Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card when making sci-fi recommendations to viewers. The reasoning is simple (and obvious if you know anything about Orson Scott Card): the author’s problematic stance on homosexuals.

This video struck a nerve for the cast of Just In Case We Die. Almost every book that has been featured on this show in the first year of broadcast has been problematic in some way, either for the personal life and politics of the author or because of the content of the book involved. Rodney’s favorite novel is written by a man notorious for a volatile stance against homosexuality. Aaron’s favorite novelist is pretty obviously homophobic despite the overarching message in his works that the human race should be kinder to another. One of Rebecca’s favorite writers revealed himself in word and action to be an elitist snob that doesn’t want you to read his books because he doesn’t believe that you are smart enough to understand them.

How do Aaron, Rodney, and Rebecca reconcile problematic content in the books they recommend? What are their responsibilities as podcasters in this regard? It’s an interesting discussion that lays some groundwork for what listeners can expect in the upcoming year of episodes.