Pastor and author Ben Dueholm drops by to talk about the value of bleak reading, the intrigue of magic, and even Lou Reed!

Episode artwork: Magician Paul LePaul, 1937. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay

Want to learn more about the books, authors—and films!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

Adonis Concerto al-Quds

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Letters and Papers from Prison

Louis Paul Boon My Little War

Joe Brainard The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard

John Bunyan The Pilgrim's Progress

Tara Isabella Burton Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from da Vinci to the Kardashians

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

David Chase The Sopranos

Hélène Cixous Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang

Robertson Davies The Cornish Trilogy

Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy

Fredrik deBoer How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

Joan Didion "Self-Respect: Its Source, Its Power"

Louise Fitzhugh Harriet the Spy

David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest

Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge

Thomas Hardy Tess of the D'urbervilles

Will Hermes Lou Reed: The King of New York

Andrew Hineraker The Magic Play

Norton Juster The Phantom Tollbooth

John LeCarré A Perfect Spy

John LeCarré A Private Spy

John LeCarré Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Cormac McCarthy All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy The Border Trilogy

Cormac McCarthy Cities of the Plain

Cormac McCarthy The Crossing

Cormac McCarthy No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy The Passenger

Cormac McCarthy The Road

Cormac McCarthy Stella Maris

Herman Melville Moby Dick

Toni Morrison Sula

Toni Morrison Song of Solomon

Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire

George Orwell " "Politics and the English Language"

Marilynne Robinson Gilead

Marilynne Robinson Reading Genesis

Salman Rushdie Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie The Satanic Verses

David Simon The Wire

Jonathan D. Spence The Death of Woman Wang

Sam Tanenhouse Whitaker Chambers: A Biography

Christian Wiman He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

Christian Wiman My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

Christian Wiman "The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians"