This week, Cyrus and Sarah are back in the danmei mines, this time with books three and four of Heaven Official's Blessing by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu and if you thought the last two books were complicated and convoluted, get ready for more characters, more extended flashbacks, and more messy interpersonal drama! Listen in awe as our intrepid readers struggle with character names, timelines, and how much these books have in common with zeitgeist-y movie Saltburn. 

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This week, Cyrus and Sarah dig into Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin, a horror novel that asks what if Invasion of the Body Snatchers was set at a conversion camp, and wouldn't that just be so super fucked up? Also on the table is a larger discussion of the extreme horror genre, the nightly abduction of our rooster Bubba, and PISS KINK (all caps). According to Cyrus, the only things a book really needs are the following: body horror, transgender stuff, and goo. Cuckoo has all three!

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Welcome to our first episode covering the Heaven Official's Blessing series by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu! And also the Saw franchise. A media match made in heaven that definitely makes complete sense to pair in one episode, because isn't Xie Lian's life just one long Saw trap, in a way? As Cyrus is reading the series for the first time and Sarah for the second, delicious dramatic irony ensues. Sarah and Cyrus discuss the budding character relationships, the MXTX of it all, and speculate on the meaning of BeefLeaf. 

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Greetings listeners, here it is - the chicken episode, featuring our five beautiful daughters. This week, Cyrus and Sarah dig into some books about chickens: their personalities, their care and keeping, and how to turn your beautiful backyard into a chicken paradise. If you're a patron, head on over to the Patreon to see our intrepid co-hosts desperately try to get these unruly birds to sit in their laps. It goes about as well as you'd expect. 

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Cyrus and Sarah are back at it again in the Animorphs mines, this time covering books thirty-three through thirty-seven, and things are getting....well, kind of mid, to be honest. Except for the torture. The torture is great. Dive in to hear our intrepid readers arguing about the Goo Goo Dolls for what seems like forever, a whole lot of talk about the SAW franchise, and, unfortunately, a load-bearing bit about Scurvy the cat's nether regions. Don't say I didn't warn you. 

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This week on Cracked Spines, Cyrus and Sarah dive into Sarah's latest obsession with Chinese history, cracking open several books by...mostly white authors in the 60's-80's. Okay, so it may not be an scholastically accurate or ethical deep dive, but it is fascinating. Listen as Sarah infodumps on Cyrus about the perils of learning the Chinese language, poetry translation, and gendered nouns. 

Content warning: humorous mentions of suicide and absolute butchering of French, Spanish, and Chinese languages. 

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Say "I do" to checking out this weeks episode on Marriage, A History by Stephanie Coontz! See, I did a wedding pun, this description writing stuff is easy. Cyrus and Sarah tackle nonfiction this episode, and have a rollicking discussion about marriage as a centrally organizing pillar of society, women's work, relationships as a capitalist construct, and the equitable division of labor in a platonic lifemate situation. Also how hot they are in Cyrus' bedroom, and how cute Scurvy's little snores are. 

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It's finally happening - Cyrus and Sarah have finally read The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson! Turns out they loved it, but isn't that always the way with books you've been putting off? Baru Cormorant is a twisty turny hard fantasy novel about the devastation of empire, with fabulous worldbuilding, fantastic characters, and also it's kinda gay. We love to see it. Topics of discussion include the belief structures behind imperialism, the joy of an unreliable narrator, and what the fuck a 'murre' is. 

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Did you know it's really hard to write jokes about books with central themes of racism? Cyrus and Sarah find this out while covering Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, an epic historical fiction novel about the the 20th century Korean experience of Japan. Our intrepid readers, who were sooo sleepy this week, cover personal experiences with identity, the Korean horror movie Exhuma (which totally whips), dead relatives, and the mythologizing of the family narrative. Did I mention they're sooo sleepy?

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Are we in the cultural zeitgeist yet? This week, Cyrus and Sarah cover Sunrise on the Reaping AND The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins, the two latest Hunger Games novels, both of which are prequels to the original trilogy. Did our intrepid readers kind of forget how brutal these books can get? Yeah a little bit. But if we've learned anything from the Animorphs episodes, Cyrus and Sarah love it when teenagers experience inconceivable horrors. Also discussed are the comings and goings of tiny animals in our house, the fallout of the book-reading challenge thunderdome, and Cyrus forgetting that marsupials are, in fact, mammals. May the odds be ever in your favor! Is this anything? 

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