I Don't Even Own a Television

We asked for it and you gave it to us, one fairly brutal paragraph at a time, and now here it is: your friends J. and Clsn reading more than 30 (!) entries for our First Ever National Novel Writing Month contest! No notes could do this one justice, so just slip into your favorite podcast-listening mask and don't forget that you've got that bowl of soup in the microwave, because it is time to hear what the minds of the IDEOTVPOD Community can come up with when asked to write bad paragraphs. This time, we're all winners!

The time has come, and it won't stand still: after a couple years, we finally go for the big money, put Rush into the limelight, and turn the camera eye to Clockwork Angels by Neil Peart and Kevin J. Anderson. Our first novelization of a concept album -- yes, you read that right -- this fly by night book-like object had us losing it. (Literarily, it's not exactly a high water mark. In fact, each time, it required substantial freewill to turn the page. Even if you're in the mood for something like this book, most of this book isn't working, man. If only we'd had some distant early warning that would have prevented us from making memories about this stupid thing.) Our grand designs to leverage our lifetimes of Rush fandom (one of many of our open secrets) to go on a witch hunt at Rush's expense end up revealing many lessons, and some tears.

Anyway, please enjoy this podcast that we made for you, no strings attached: it's something for nothing. Also please enjoy the two thousand, one hundred twelve hidden Rush references we packed in beneath, between and behind every available cranny and nook. In the end, it's our mission to inspire all of you to force ten of your friends to listen to this episode. But do it gently, with kid gloves, and don't rush things; observe life's mystic rhythms and subdivisions, and remember that getting smarter isn't a sprint, it's a marathon.

Recommendations:

• Blood Red Turns Dollar Green, Paul O'Brien
• Certain Women

Music:

• "Rush" by Big Audio Dynamite
• "Roll the Bones" by Rush
• "Meat Grinder" by Madlib
• "Rush, Rush" by Paula Abdul

This Halloween, put down your flying broom and pick up the pieces -- Piece by Piece, by Tori Amos and Ann K. Powers! With special guest and Tori Amos expert Lauren Parker, J. and Clsn take a magic carpet ride through a wonderful patchwork tapestry cauldron, bubbling with diversity, myths, magic, big business, the sacred feminine, Robert Plant, the circus, hair metal, football (which is what they call soccer in England, it turns out), and a whole heaping pile of goddesses.

Not your usual rock book, and definitely not the book version of a making-of DVD extra for a long-forgotten album, except exactly, precisely that, Piece by Piece just might rock you -- to sleep! Come: tune your piano; tend your moistest garden; and tour the seething volcano of Piece by Piece with us.

Recommendations:

• Love Is a Mixtape, Rob Sheffield
• Emma Ruth Rundle, Marked for Death
• Violet is the Color of Your Energy, Nadia Bulkin

Music:

• "My Piano Horror", a Youtube Video of a Piano Recital
• "Lush Life" by Stan Getz (with elements of "The Guys Get Shirts")
• "Witchy Woman" by The Eagels
• "White Girls" by The Mighty Casey

Stowing away in your earbuds, gnawing at your stores, and leaping from your dark corners at your tender ears, it's James Herbert's The Rats! A verminous return to the kind of bad book that's always the best: the kind where, every couple pages, somebody nearly has sex and absolutely gets eaten by giant rats.

If you ever wanted a book about mutant rats invading the slums of London, then The Rats is for you — and if you didn't, what are you doing listening to IDEOTVPOD, anyway? It's time. Grab your flashlight, pull on your heaviest gloves, and come with J. and Clsn on an exploration of two hundred of the rat-infestedest pages anyone has ever seen. It's time for ... The Rats.

Recommendations:

• Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
• Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods

Music:

• "Rats in the Cellar" by Aerosmith
• "Rats" by Clutch
• "Hot Rails to Hell" by Blue Oyster Cult
• "Rat Bait" by The Swimming Pool Q's

As voted on by our supporters on the IDEOTVPOD Patreon, this episode we're strapping on our pads and skating around the tough issues posed by Forever Pucked, by Helena Hunting. Ice-cool customer Rachel Millman fleshes out our team as she and J. and Collision try to score on this ribald tale of work, marriage, family, violence, hockey, and raunch. A lot of raunch. More raunch than we've ever confronted (or, in some cases, enjoyed) before.

Yes, this is a novel of romance — hockey romance — with a comedic bent. So, as the nights grow longer harder and the days trend colder, it's time for us all to cozy up to our best, longest, largest hockey sticks and start slapping ... shots.

Extra thanks to great friend of the show A. A. Freeman for bringing this raucous ride to our attention, and it's probably worth noting that this particular episode brings more than a soupçon of naughty from the first second, so, uh ... headphones? Headphones.

Recommendations:

• Slap Shot
• Atlanta
• The Goon

Music:

• "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate
• "Pony" by Ginuwine
• "Detroit" by Rancid
• "My Game" by Hanson Brothers

What lurks beneath the bottom of the barrel? Well, we checked. Turns out that beneath the barrel's bottom slithers Anthony Zuiker's Level 26: Dark Origins. This episode, we're sneaking into the villain's dungeon, conveniently located in 2009, when it, apparently, seemed like a good idea to let the guy who made up CSI get together with his buddies and make this exceptionally book-like object, supplemented with zero-budget video clips, high-school-notebook-level drawings, and an attitude towards sex and violence best described as HOLY CRAP THIS IS AWFUL WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE.

Episode highlights include: A PATENTED DIGRESSION! Clsn failing repeatedly to learn how to pronounce "Zuiker"! A book that includes the description "sick son of a bitch"! Book highlights include: when civilization collapses (next Tuesday), you can probably cook a pigeon over it, if you can catch a pigeon. And start a fire. You know what? Nevermind. Eat a potato instead; much easier to catch than a pigeon.

NOTE: this book is truly bad, and contains a lot of material about violence, including sexual violence. If you are sensitive to material like this, you may want to avoid this episode. (We certainly wish we'd avoided this book.)

Recommendations:

• Shia Lebeouf in Interview Magazine
• The White Album, Joan Didion

Music:

• "New Level" by A$AP Ferg
• "Cut Self Not" by Faraquet
• "Cheesecake Truck" by King Missile
• Theme from "Law & Order"

As foretold in ancient scrolls, Clsn and J. fulfill the grim prophecies and embark on a quest most dire: get somehow through the dullest book we've seen in ages: Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragons of Autumn Twilight: DragonLance Chronicles Volume One.

Like listening to somebody misexplain the plot of a movie you've already seen, while pretending the plot is something they made up, getting through this book is a tall dang order, but we made it. And so will you. Brush up on your magic words and get ready to laugh at a book that purports to Chronicle DragonLances, but that actually contains somewhere south of a half-dozen dragons and literally zero actual lances. Grip tightly your ocarina and prepare to raise your voice in the songs of your people (particularly if your people, like our people, are partial to Pony). The roads are dusty, and your leathern saddle is no doubt cracked, but a few ales and some spicèd potatoes will soon have you ready for adventure with your friends.

Our party awaits! Come with us and we guarantee one thing: you're em fail your saving throw against having fun!

Recommendations:

• "The Door Into Fire" by Diane Duane
• "Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan" by Jake Adelstein

Music:

• "Roll the Dice" by PAC DIV
• "Rumpshaker" by WRECKX-N-EFFECT
• "Timorous Me" by Ted Leo & the Pharmacists
• "Scenario" by A Tribe Called Quest

Renowned author Dan Brown's renowned book The Da Vinci Code provides a renowned topic for renowned podcasters J. W. Friedman and Chris Collision, along with renowned guests Lauren O'Neal and Niko (from renowned podcast Sunday School Dropouts. An extremely popular book yields an extremely long episode, with enough jokes to make anyone enough of a believer to found a secret society devoted to hiding the truth about the show ... or maybe to hiding the truth about the show while pointing out that actually all of popular culture is about the show. It's all a little confused. Anyway, if your Grail is L A F F S, then this episode is for you!

Note: This is an extra-long episode because J. is not feeling well enough to edit it down to a shorter length. But it's very good and you will enjoy every minute, we promise.

Extra credit reading: Geoffrey Pullum's legendary eviscerations of Dan Brown's prose style.

Recommendations:

• National Treasure
• Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
• Complete Stories, Flannery O'Connor

Music:

• "The Rose" by Mudhoney
• "Les Invisibles" by Blue Oyster Cult
• "Catholic Dress" by Dahli Seed
• "Holy Grail" by Jay Z

If you like your sex scenes extremely long and your gunplay extremely every single chapter, then you just may be the target audience for Against the Mafia: The Executioner, Book 1, the legendary piece of action-trash that introduced Mack Bolan to an extremely unsuspecting world.

From chapters like "A Master's Stroke" and "God-Damn Iron-Man Bolan" (not kidding) to "The Goof", "Forecast: Warmer Tonight and Tomorrow", and "Execution Hill", J. and Collision dance madly backwards through the raging river of fear that powered the writing of this book, a terrified look at a completely unrecognizable 1969 America, a cringing fantasy of one tall-ass man with lots of long-ass long guns (and knives) standing up for families and righteousness and shooting people who get in your way and banging one whole lot of ladies.

New segments! Bizarre word choices! Some of the mannest manning any book ever manned! Philosophy lectures! Incredibly angry diary entires! EXPLOSIONS AND FUCK YOUR HELICOPTERS! If you ever caught yourself wishing "I wish somebody had written Scruples, but for dudes", step right up.

We do need to mention explicitly: this book is a very aggressive ode to a sniper; it also contains a lot of bizarre speculations about sex work. If that sounds like something you'd have a hard time with (at this point in history, or just at all), we definitely understand and understand if you want to give this episode a pass.

Recommendations:

• Rosa Lyster, The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižek
• Jensen Karp, Kanye West Owes Me $300: And Other True Stories from a White Rapper Who Almost Made It Big

Music:

• "Violent School" by Dead Milkmen
• "Mayor" by Pharoahe Monch
• "Sexecutioner" by GWAR
• "No Way Back" by Adonis

In the quest for the weirdest and worst artifacts available, J. and Collision welcome K. Thor Jensen to the show to discuss Sass Girls X, by Imari Imarea. You're gonna need a safe, well-padded environment for this, because this book's ridiculous levels are matched only by its levels of terribleness. A failed attempt at bringing the energy and conventions of anime to the page, Sass Girls X is more or less what you'd get if an internet forum came to life and instantly got a bad fever.

This book is an incredible rarity, which is why we're breaking some of our rules to bring it to you. You have NOT read anything like it, and it's unlikely you would ever would have had the ... pleasure of this book's prose, so get ready. Get ready to taste an unholy mix of obscure sexual fetish(es), videogame obsessiveness, slapstick humor, "fuck it" plotting, and more appropriations than Earnest Cline could pull off after an espresso enema. And get ready to update your list of things that have made you say "holy shit", because this is DEFINITELY going on it.

Recommendations:

• The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
• The Shaggs' Own Thing, The Shaggs

Music:

• All music this episode is from the CD "SGX", which comes with this book.