Book Club with Julia and Victoria

Julia makes her case of why the creature in Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is NOT really a vampire, and Victoria makes a counterargument that it is actually the MOST vampire. They are both generally infuriated with everyone in this novel except Mrs. Green. Content Warning: mentions of sexual violence.

Views expressed on Book Club with Julia and Victoria and bookclubwithjv.com are solely those of the hosts and not necessarily those of their employers, clients, guests, and collaborators. Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more.

Become a Member! Shop with us onBookshop.org! Follow the podcast on Instagram and hang out with Victoria onThe StoryGraph.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Grady Hendrix’s website

“Charleston native Grady Hendrix and best-selling horror author wants to terrify you, and you’ll never be more happily horrified” by Stephanie Hunt, Charleston Magazine 

Dirt Candy (book)

Dirt Candy (restaurant) 

Amanda Cohen, Iron Chef Canada

Grady Hendrix’s “The Great Stephen King Reread” series

Grady Hendrix’s vampire podcast: Super Scary Haunted Homeschool

The Strain (tv show)

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado

Recommendations

Unbelievable (tv show)

Spotlight (film)

Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry

Yellowjackets (tv show)

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Currently Obsessed

Interview With the Vampire season 2 (tv show)

Hacks season 3 (tv show)

Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding season 2 (podcast)

The Dragon Republic (Poppy Wars Trilogy Book 2) by R. F. Kuang

Through the Ages board game mobile app

Julia and Victoria read a pandemic book called The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller where the octopus is not the focus of the story, but is at the heart of the book’s major themes of captivity and embodiment. Victoria makes the ill-advised choice to revisit some of her early-pandemic journals.

Views expressed on Book Club with Julia and Victoria and bookclubwithjv.com are solely those of the hosts and not necessarily those of their employers, clients, guests, and collaborators. Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more.

Become a Member! Shop with us on Bookshop.org! Follow the podcast on Instagram and hang out with Victoria on The StoryGraph.

Mentioned in this episode:

The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

Staying in With Emily and Kumail

Recommendations:

Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller

Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Hartman

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Stroud

My Octopus Teacher on Netflix

Currently Obsessed:

Radical Optimism by Dua Lipa (album)

Jacob Collier’s existence

Hit Me Hard and Soft by Billie Eilish (album)

Interview With the Vampire season 2

Julia and Victoria get very hungry talking about the trope-flipping, contemporary vampire novel Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda.

Views expressed on Book Club with Julia and Victoria and bookclubwithjv.com are solely those of the hosts and not necessarily those of their employers, clients, guests, and collaborators. Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more.

Become a Member! Shop with us onBookshop.org! Follow the podcast on Instagram and hang out with Victoria on The StoryGraph.

Mentioned in this episode: 

Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe

Tár (film)

Claire Kohda: "I wouldn’t change being mixed-race for anything" by Isabella Silvers (Mixed Messages)

A Vampire Hungry for Blood and Intimacy by JR Ramakrishnan (Electric Lit)

Recommendations:

Carmilla by Joseph Le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen maria Machado

Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

“Close Cover Before Striking” by Silvia Moreno Garcia in F(r)iction No. 21 The Unseen Issue

Sea Change by Gina Chung

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ugly Delicious on Netflix

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show)

Currently Obsessed:

Shōgun on Hulu

Heartbreak High season 2 on Netflix

Monkey Man (film)

You Had Me At Hello by ZBI (album)

Boys Love/Ampliverse reaction to ZB1’s “Sweat” MV

The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang

The StoryGraph’s buddy read feature

Julia and Victoria discuss Sea Change by Gina Chung and how authors use the octopus to contemplate loneliness and change. They discover that life really is about the friends we made along the way in this first book of The Vampire & the Octopus series.

Views expressed on Book Club with Julia and Victoria and bookclubwithjv.com are solely those of the hosts and not necessarily those of their employers, clients, guests, and collaborators. Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more.

Become a Member! Shop with us on Bookshop.org! Follow the podcast on Instagram and hang out with Victoria on The StoryGraph.

Check out Julia’s bonus discussions of How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler and World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil on our Buy Me a Coffee!

Mentioned in this episode:

“The Love Song of the Mexican Free-Tailed Bat” by Gina Chung in F(r)iction

Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung

"Losing My Octopus Best Friend is the Final Straw" interview with Gina Chung in Electric Literature 

Recommendations:

Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

Before the Ruins by Victoria Gosling

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Currently Obsessed

Djesse Vol. 4 by Jacob Collier (album)

Jacob Collier Unites the World - Switched on Pop

Beyoncé's Country - Switched on Pop

Found Heaven by Conan Gray

“Good Luck Babe” by Chappell Roan

Victoria teaches Julia all about the origins, tropes, and metaphors of vampire lore that create the undead monster we read about today. They discuss the origins of vampire stories in Slavic folklore, the Great Vampire Epidemic of the 18th century, the blood-sucking breakup novel Lord Byron’s “travel companion” wrote about him, and lament the loss of a key source for Victoria’s vampire-as-justice analysis that disappeared when she accidentally closed all her tabs.

(And don’t forget to check out the bonus content where Victoria shares all the thoughts on Twilight that didn’t make it into the episode!)

Views expressed on Book Club with Julia and Victoria and bookclubwithjv.com are solely those of the hosts and not necessarily those of their employers, clients, guests, and collaborators.

Become a Member! Shop with us on Bookshop.org! Follow the podcast on Instagram and hang out with Victoria on The StoryGraph:

Book Club with Julia & Victoria (Episodes 1-100) Reading Challenge

Book Club with Julia & Victoria (Episodes 101+) Reading Challenge

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more.

Mentioned in this episode:

Dracula by Bram Stoker

What We Do In the Shadows (tv show)

What We Do In the Shadows (film)

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

Interview With the Vampire (tv show)

Slayers and Their Vampires by Bruce McClelland

“Mothers, Daughters, and Vampires: The Female Sexual Dilemma in Eighteenth-Century Vampire Poetry” by Ashley M. Quinn

“Der Vampir” by Heinrich August Ossenfelder

“The Bride of Corinth” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Vampyre by John Polidori

"Two Species of Irish Vampire" (1831)

Olivia Rodrigo’s song “Vampire”

118 Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu — The One with the Lesbian Vampire

011 Dracula by Bram Stoker (archive)

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame Smith

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

Julia takes Victoria on a deep dive of octopus stories throughout time and space in this first episode of The Vampire & the Octopus series. We tackle questions like “Are octopus stories a form of colonizer horror?” and “What’s with all the octopus books coming out recently?” and “Why did the 19th century French think the octopus was the physical embodiment of hell?”

Views expressed on Book Club with Julia and Victoria and bookclubwithjv.com are solely those of the hosts and not necessarily those of their employers, clients, guests, and collaborators.

Become a Member! Shop with us on Bookshop.org! Follow the podcast on Instagram and hang out with Victoria on The StoryGraph.

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more.

Mentioned in this Episode:

The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

Finding Nemo (film)

Finding Dory (film)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (film)

Oceanic Mythology by Roland B Dixon

“The Great Wave Off Kanagawa” and “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” art by Hokusai

Devilfish Bay

“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” painting by Caspar David Friedrich

“The Kraken” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

“The Octopus or The Devilfish of Fiction and Fact” by Henry Lee

The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

The Sea Raiders by H. G. Wells

The Call of Cthulu by H. P. Lovecraft

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

It Came From Beneath the Sea (film)

Kraken by China Mieville

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (TV series)

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

My Octopus Teacher (film)

The Secrets of the Octopus by Sy Montgomery

Remarkably Bright Creaturesby Shelby Van Pelt

Julia discusses disability, comedy, creativity, and treating people like people with Steven Verdile, the founder of the disability satire publication The Squeaky Wheel.

Views expressed on Book Club with Julia and Victoria and bookclubwithjv.com are solely those of the hosts and not necessarily those of their employers, clients, guests, and collaborators.

Become a Member! Shop with us on Bookshop.org! Follow the podcast on Instagram and hang out with Victoria on The StoryGraph:

Book Club with Julia & Victoria (Episodes 1-100) Reading Challenge

Book Club with Julia & Victoria (Episodes 101+) Reading Challenge

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more.

Read and follow the Squeaky Wheel:

Website: https://thesqueakywheel.org/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesqkywheel/ 

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thesqkywheel 

Merch: https://thesqueakywheel.org/shop/ 

Mentioned in this Episode:

Ramy (TV series)

Speechless (TV series)

Give Me Liberty (film)

The Squeaky Wheel: Canada (in production)

Special (TV series)

Recommendations:

Reductress

ClickHole

The Onion

Broadway Beat

The Hard Times

Steve Way

Tina Friml

Shane Burcaw

Ryan Haddad

Crip Camp (film)

Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong

Currently Obsessed:

How To With John Wilson (TV series)

The Curse (TV series)

504: The Musical

Julia and Victoria learn what the word “flannel” means in British English and formulate their own theories about what happened to a stranded deep-sea researcher in the devastatingly beautiful novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.

Views expressed on Book Club with Julia and Victoria and bookclubwithjv.com are solely those of the hosts and not necessarily those of their employers, clients, guests, and collaborators.

Become a Member! Shop with us on Bookshop.org! Follow the podcast on Instagram and hang out with Victoria on The StoryGraph:

Book Club with Julia & Victoria (Episodes 1-100) Reading Challenge

Book Club with Julia & Victoria (Episodes 101+) Reading Challenge

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more.

Resources for Supporting Palestine::

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions

Resource for calling representatives

Anera

Mentioned in this episode:

Apollo 13 (film)

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (film)

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Our Flag Means Death (TV show)

112 Babel by R. F. Kuang — “Boots on the Ground” Storytelling

Graham Norton Book Club episode with Julia Armfield

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

122 How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu — Throw the Baby 

Recommendations:

Arrival (film)

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang

This is How You Lose the Time War by El-Mohtar and Gladstone

Piranesi by Susanna Clark

F(r)iction Issue #20 - Bodies

Currently Obsessed:

The Bear Season 2

Home by Billy Strings (album)

Julia and Victoria conclude that How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is a very good book–Julia is just sad.

Become a Member! Shop with us on Bookshop.org! Follow the podcast on Instagram and hang out with Victoria on The StoryGraph:

Book Club with Julia & Victoria (Episodes 1-100) Reading Challenge

Book Club with Julia & Victoria (Episodes 101+) Reading Challenge

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more.

Mentioned in this episode:

How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

AWP Conference

Victoria’s StoryGraph: @victoriafrombookclub

Psychopomp magazine

Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone by Sequoia Nagamatsu

“How a fictional plague helped Sequoia Nagamatsu overcome grief” by Michael Berry 

Character map star chart by @bookographic

Recommendations:

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Lucy By The Sea by Elizabeth Strout

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Currently Obsessed:

Quiz Lady on Hulu

Samba Schutte’s Our Flag Means Death Behind the Scenes series

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

Julia and Victoria grapple with the grotesque narrative choices in Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan, translated by Chi-young Kim. Julia incorrectly uses the word “epigraph” when she means “epitaph” approximately 25 times.

Become a Member! Shop with us on Bookshop.org! Follow the podcast on Instagram and hang out with Victoria on The StoryGraph:

Book Club with Julia & Victoria (Episodes 1-100) Reading Challenge

Book Club with Julia & Victoria (Episodes 101+) Reading Challenge

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more

Mentioned in this episode:

Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan

Bonus: Weird Short Fiction with Evan James Sheldon

Minari (film)

Pachinko (TV series)

Modern Family by Cheon Myeong-kwan

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

International Booker Prize – Whale

Namjoon’s Bookshelf Twitter thread on Whale

Aschenputtel - Grimm Fairy Tale version of Cinderella

Bakhtin on The Grotesque

Recommendations:

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Children and Their Cages by Evan James Sheldon

Books that inspired Cheon Myeong-kwan's Whale 

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Currently Obsessed:

Handsome (podcast)

Guilty EP by Taemin

Marry My Dead Body (TV series)

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber

Madewell curvy jeans