Cracked Spines

This week, things get heavy — heavy metal. Your hosts read Grady Hendrix's epic horror-ballad We Sold Our Souls, and honestly, it rocked. Featuring discussions of female anger, the power of music as an active influence, and the fact that Amelia had a crush on Durza from Eragon as a kid. You know, the evil ghost guy? Yeah, it was pretty niche.

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This week your hosts spend a good long while debating the differences between zombies and vampires, stake out their claim on the post-apocalyptic trope market, and stray into a discussion about how religion created the apocalyptic genre but technology created the post-apocalypse.

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Amelia and Sarah are back and more physically infirm than ever. This week, we discuss Scott Smith's travelogue gone wrong and offer good, constructive criticism on the name of both the book and the author. Amelia insists on going straight edge in emergency situations. Sarah's mostly just concerned about the time impact of all this plant murder on the local community.

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The best gift is the one you yank off your own bookshelf in a panic because you weren't expecting this cousin to turn up for Christmas morning. Amelia and Sarah talk about their go-to gift books, the unbearable burden of Christmas cookies, and the big dick move of gifting people classic literature. We're sorry we talk about video games for the first ten minutes, but considering Sarah's had a Nintendo Switch for a week and has already played it 80 hours, we should just be happy she contained herself as much as she did.

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Our latest pirate kick is halfway down the plank as we discuss the first two seasons of the epic television prequel to Treasure Island: Black Sails. Featuring Jack and Anne's jaeger name, Charles Vane as the Charlie Kelley of piracy, Alexander Hamilton's torrid pirate love affair 40 years before he was born, and the usual cursed takes. #GlintIsReal

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Back in the same physical location for the first time in half a year, your hosts watch the underrated Disney classic Treasure Planet and Sarah has a fun and not-awful take which definitely doesn't ruin the entire movie forever. Also, every single adaptation of Treasure Island is immediately enhanced by assuming Flint's character motivations are the same as in Black Sails.

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It’s a boy’s book for adventure boys! This week your hosts theoretically cover Treasure Island by Robert Louis "Bedroom Eyes" Stevenson, but not before they manage to botch the author’s nationality, the socio-political status of Ireland, and the main character’s literal actual name. We’re doing our best, guys. Let that both absolve and damn us. Also featuring fun facts about fo'c's'les, apoplexy, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s mustache. No spoiler zone this time around, except for the shocking revelation that this book, Treasure Island, does in fact contain treasure.

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Happy Halloween! Because it’s definitely still Halloween! Because we recorded and edited and posted the episode in a timely fashion because we’re diligent and good at things! And also, really, Halloween never has to end if you don’t want it to or are bad at deadlines. So here’s our Halloween special, on Halloween, about one of the scariest stories in English literature: The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, plus the all new TV adaptation. It’s spooky. ‘Cause it’s Halloween.

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This week, Sarah and Amelia finally wrap up this chapter of the “disastrous mountain expeditions” saga we’ve taken you on for the past month. This time we return to the infamous Donner Party from a nonfiction perspective, with The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown. It’s a fantastic read packed with tons of relevant information and sensitively drawn portraits of human suffering, and by this point we’re actually out of cannibalism jokes, so maybe we don’t even ruin it entirely. …Okay, mostly out of cannibalism jokes.

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This week on Cracked Spines, Amelia and Sarah fail to finish the actual book they were supposed to read for reasons of varying validity, so Sarah walks Amelia through the other unhappy time in the mountains book she's read lately--the tale of the tragic Dyatlov Pass incident where nine Russian hikers met mysterious ends on a freezing night. Spoiler: it probably wasn't yeti. But spoiler part two: I mean we can't rule it out.

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