We are very pleased at the response we’ve gotten from the public at the announcement of our new podcast. It seems that many people in our collective circle are actually excited that we decided to sally forth on this new project. We had no idea until a week ago that there was actual interest in our thoughts and pondering on the books that we might be reading, and this knowledge has only served to excite us more for this endeavor.

Conversations over the past seven days about this new podcast have almost all included some wording of the same question: How the hell are you going to read 1,316 books?

The answer to this question is simple: We’re not.

We mean, come on! We’re not really going to be able to read 1,316 books. We’re certainly not going to be able to do a podcast episode for every single one of them. Both of us have real lives and real responsibilities, and neither one of us is getting any younger.

For our first episode, we wanted to explain exactly how we’re going to approach this massive new addition to our to-be-read piles. We also wanted an opportunity to properly introduce ourselves, to familiarize our audience with our individual tastes, and to give listeners a taste of the rapport they can expect in episodes to come. What you are about to hear is, honestly, little more than a conversation between two literature-loving friends. It’s the kind of thing we do frequently, only, this time, it’s on tape.

At the end of the episode, we randomly select the first book. The book selected will be the focus of our episode in March. Holy crap, it’s a doozy!

The RSS feed for our inaugural episode can be found here: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2119153.rss.

You can also find and follow us on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2i3LahCbz0ZRb03LZt5wuC?si=u2wfDvz7TjWWR4UZCcNtZw

“Just In Case We Die” is a new podcast hosted by two book nerds. On this show, we will read and discuss randomly-selected titles from the 1,316 novels that comprise the full list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, a list originally published in 2006 and edited by Peter Boxall.

Our first episode, in which we introduce ourselves, our mission, and our individual tastes will drop on February 8, 2023. At the end of that episode, we will select our first novel for discussion.

In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of the old Cincinnati Public Library before it was demolished in 1955. It is the closest visual representation we could find of how daunting it is to look at a list of 1,316 novels.