Mark is enthusiastic about Brendan Kerner's skyjacking nonfiction The Skies Belong to Us.  It's our first live show! Mark and Jon record in the same room for the first time ever. (We'd fooled you, hadn't we?) This episode we also talk about our most notable takeaways from the unplanned 'hiatus year', and--and!--we fulfill our long ago promise to each read a book  recommended by the other that is outside our comfort zones. Oh, they were.

Derek Landy's Skullduggery Pleasant series

Jon's original recommendation of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The beep you hear around this point is Jon's phone letting him know how things are going in Clash of Clans; they're going well, thanksEnthusiasticast Episode 88Christopher Priest's The Adjacent and The Prestige

The movie version of The Prestige

Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men

Brad Stone's The Everything Store

Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919, The War That Ended Peace

Ian Buruma's Year Zero

Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl

Jeannette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper

Our discussion of Never Let Me Go

Our discussion of Jodi Picoult, re: Franzenfreude

Jodi Picoult's book about a school shooting is Nineteen Minutes

Brendan Kerner's The Skies Belong To Us

Howard Marks believes that he is Mr. Nice

Mark is enthusiastic about Neil Gaiman's latest The Ocean at the End of the Lane. We also discuss whether Brad Pitt is entitled to a victory lap for his adaptation of a show-favourite novel, Max Brooks' World War Z. We cover:

Our initial discussion of WWZ

Brad Pitt eating

The Vanity Fair article 'Brad's War'

J. Michael Straczynski

Matthew Michael Carnahan

Damon Lindelof

The details of the film's original third act

The ultimately futile buffness of Matthew Fox

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion

Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The Graveyard Book

Coraline

Miracleman

Sandman - Gaiman writing his way out of the series remit, not least of which includes the series' setting in the mainstream DC Comics shared fictional universe

Good Omens

Violent Cases

Jon endorses Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken.

We also mention:

Military Scifi

Ender's Game and Movie

John Scalzi's Old Man's War

John Steakley's Armor

Hiroshi Sakurazaka's All You Need Is Kill

Joe Haldeman's The Forever War

Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers

Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars

Louis Zamperini

Ben MacIntrye

Wilbert Rideau

Jack O'Connell

Mark feels the love for the godfather of soul behavioural economic theory.

We mention:

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow; his Wikipedia page; his TED talk.

Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper

Franzenfreude

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook

Zadie Smith

Jilly Cooper (Jodhpurs! Or are they breeches? Equestrians, debate amongst yourselves. Either way, homes is getting fresh.)

Fifty Shades of Grey

Diana Gabaldon's Outlander

Ursula K. Le Guin

Richard Wiseman

Malcolm Gladwell

David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart

Dan Ariely's The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Nobody actually reads A Brief History of Time

Richard Thaler's Nudge

Anchor pricing

Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling On Happiness

Denmark is the happiest place on Earth

Nassim Taleb

Jon endorses Jens Lapidus’ Easy Money

We also mention:

Daniel Suarez's Kill Decision

Tom McCarthy's Remainder, Men in Space, and C

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York

Dan Chaon's Stay Awake

Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker and booktrailer

Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins

Dan Ariely's The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow

James Sallis Driven

Emily St. John Mandel The Lola Quartet

Jim Thompson

Donald Westlake

Simon Lelic's Rapture/A Thousand Cuts and A Child Who

A.J. Jacobs Drop Dead Healthy

Ben Marcus Notable American Women and The Flame Alphabet

NBC's Chuck

Tom King's A Once Crowded Sky

Tom Fowler's Calvin and Hobbes homage

Peter Bergen Manhunt

Steve Coll's Private Empire, Ghost Wars and The Taking of Getty Oil

Nell Freudenberger's The Newlyweds

Martin Amis's Lionel Asbo

John Irving

Swedish Noir

Millennium Trilogy

American Psycho and Fight Club

Mark Haddon paints

Zac Efron's Snabba Cash Remake

Warrior

The Grey

Mark is enthusiastic about the Stephanie Plum novels.

There was a (gasp!) delay between recording and posting this episode, so a lot of the books that we talk about as 'coming soon' are now, in fact, 'out recently' and in some cases 'out quite a while ago'. We're still excited about them, though.

We talk about:

Janet Evanovich

Kristen Cashore's Bitterblue

Dan Chaon's short story collection Stay Awake. The episode where Mark is enthusiastic about his novel Await Your Reply is here, and Jon weighs in here.

Mark Haddon's The Red House. His prize-winning art.

Mark Leyner's The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack

Veronica Roth's Insurgent. Jon is enthusiastic about Divergent here.

Greg Rucka's Alpha. Rucka talks about writing female characters here.

John Scalzi's Redshirts

Darwyn Cooke's graphic novel adaptation of Richard Stark's (Donald Westlake's) The Score.

Jonathan Tropper's One Last Thing Before I Go. Jon is enthusiastic about This Is Where I Leave You here.

Paolo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities. Jon is enthusiastic about Ship Breaker here.

The over-the-top press release for Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her. Jon is enthusiastic about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in the prehistoric days of the podcast here.

Mark Helprin's In Sunlight and in Shadow.

Neal Stephenson and co.'s The Mongoliad.

Daniel Suarez' Kill Decision. Mark is enthusiastic about Daemon (another one from the early days) here. Jon jumps on the bandwagon here.

Mark discovers Lee Child's Reacher books.

One for the Money (film) on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

Christa Faust's Money Shot.

The House to Astonish podcast. (The 'two Scottish guys' are Paul O'Brien and Al Kennedy, and they're genius. We don't know why Jon kept referring to them like that, as if they were the podcasting equivalent of Macbeth.)

John endorses Rainbow Rowell's Attachments

We also chat about:

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad

Interactive character map by Flip Zembowicz 

Paul Haggis

Steve Jobs Biography

Don Delillo's White Noise

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

William Gibson's Zero History

Perry Moore's Hero

Jay Asher's 13 Reasons Why

Jonathan Tropper, Mill Millington, and Nick Hornby

David Nicholl's One Day

Matt Beaumont's e

Mark endorses Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

(A note on pronunciation: Mark and I are both Canadian and so pronounce the letter 'Z' as 'zed', however, that completely ruins the wordplay of the title of Brooks' book, so we played along and used the American pronunciation.)

We also discussed:

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (book)

Moneyball (movie)

Nate Silver

Quants

Bill James

Boomerang by Michael Lewis

Margin Call

Brad Pitt eating

Michael Lewis on Moneyball and Boomerang on The Daily Show

District 9

Strictly Ballroom

Errol Morris

George Romero

Milla Jovovich

Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide

Special guest Taylor Stevens endorses Deborah Feldman's Unorthodox.

There is a story behind this episode.

It was recorded right before Christmas in 2011. I really dug The Informationist. I was super keen to chat with Taylor. The second Vanessa Munroe book was on the way. I emailed her and she graciously agreed to come on the show. Jon and I both read The Innocent. The day came. We called Taylor. The phone connection was horrible. WE made her change phones. Twice. The connection still wasn't great. Jon and I fumbled some questions. You can hear the motor in my fridge turn on at one point. We talked anyway. As you can hear from the recording she's great -- an absolute pleasure to interview -- and so modest about her meteoric blast to the top of the bestseller list. It was so good we talked for a while after I stopped recording.

So the conversation was a big high. The quality of the show was embarrassingly low.

I fussed with it a bit. I was hoping that I could clean up the audio somehow. When nothing worked I gave up in despair. The files stayed on my system in a shambles. The show went on an unplanned hiatus. The worst of it is I then did nothing. I deeply regret not at least emailing Taylor to let her know what a disaster it all was. I was too ashamed so if you read this Taylor I am so sorry.

With that said, Taylor's new book The Doll, landed this summer, and she has a fourth on the way next year. She clearly hasn't missed a beat.

The show, edited to my best ability, is attached.

Follow Taylor Stevens on Twitter.

Friend Taylor Stevens on Facebook.

On Goodreads.

Special guest Kevin Chong endorses David McGimpsey's Li'l Bastard.

We also mention:

Kevin Chong's Baroque-a-nova (French Cover)

Kevin Chong's Neil Young Nation

Kevin Chong's Beauty + Pity (trailers)

Kevin Chong's My Year of the Racehorse: Falling in Love with the Sport of Kings

Kevin Chong on Wikipedia, cited as an accomplished show dog handle, and for an appearance in Blood Sport 2

Steven Galloway

Zoolander

David McGimpsey's CoachHouse page

David McGimpsey's Enroute column on sandwiches

Justin Bieber

Barnaby Jones

ee cummings

A Night Without Armor : Poems by Jewel

Dennis Johnson's Train Dreams

Dennis Johnson's Tree of Smoke

Dennis Johnson's Jesus' Son

Martin Scorsese

Colson Whitehead's Zone One

@kevinchong1975