I begun to get it through my head that he WAS most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, ME. I couldn't get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn't rest; I couldn't stay still in one place. It hadn't ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn't to blame, because I didn't run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn't no use, conscience up and says, every time, "But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody." That was so—I couldn't get around that noway. That was where it pinched.

Chris has been rereading Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain never intended that book (or the book it’s a sequel to, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) as books for children, but that is often how they are categorized today. Suzanne, meanwhile, has been rereading The Nine Tailors, a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, which is as much about campanology (the art of bell ringing in all its mathematical and combinatorical glory) as it is about the crime scene.

We talk about keeping up with the latest books (and movies), iconic scenes in novels, reworking classic literature, evoking a sense of time and place, and the literature that emerges after a pandemic.

Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Also available on Project Gutenberg.

Dorothy L. Sayers: The Nine Tailors.

Also by Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Also by Dorothy L. Sayers: The Divine Comedy. Gaudy Night. The Man Born to Be King. Murder Must Advertise. Whose Body?

Premee Mohamed: One Message Remains is the new book; The Annual Migration of Clouds is the one Chris read.

La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023).

Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024).

Peter Watson & Cecilia Todeschini: The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums.

Margareta von Oswald: Working through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin

Our episodes on children's books include Harriet the Spy and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The Ultimate Best Books of 2024 List over on LitHub.

Percival Everett: James and I Am Not Sidney Poitier.

Margaret Atwood: The Penelopiad.

Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea.

Madeline Miller: Circe.

A resource for learning more about campanology, if you’re so inclined.

Isaac Asimov wrote about The Nine Tailors in his essay Exclamation Point!, which can be found in his collections From Earth to Heaven or Asimov on Science.

Our episode on Boethius.

Jared Pechaček (of By-The-Bywater): The West Passage.

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997).

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