I Don't Even Own a Television

The latest entry in the ever-popular "Actually, Focusing Exclusively on Yourself Is the Best Thing for Everybody" sweepstakes is Jordan Peterson's lengthy tome 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which doesn't promise to unlock the life-changing magic of tidying up, but does tell you what to do if you have snakes in your closet. (Not a joke. Actual quote. If you have snakes in your closet, maybe take a quick look at the tidying up one before you take on dosing rules to medicate against chaos...)

Come along as we pull our pants up—as doth the mighty lobster scuttling—and investigate this all-conquering best-seller and YouTube sensation. Disney movies, a lot of anxieties about infidelity, not nearly enough about dragons, and the most inexplicable references to Cain and Abel since Aerosmith's "Lord of the Thighs". J.'s mad, Clsn's taking some extremely long walks, and Peterson is flexing on chumps in the comments and welcoming them to his straw man slaughterhouse. So keep your head and arms inside the car at all times, sit up straight and OH MY GOD ARE YOU CHEWING GUM WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU YOU SPIT THAT OUT RIGHT NOW MISTER.

Note 1: Yes, the cold open is actually from the book. No, we don't know why it sounds like the first draft of the theme song from Friends.

Note 2: Yes, this is a self-help book. No, we didn't apply our usual rule for judging a self-help book: is this more helpful or less helpful than Ice-T's twitter account. Is this book more helpful than Ice-T's twitter account? LOL FOH

Recommendations:

• Prime Suspect
• "See America First", Ellen Willis
• The Rider

Music:

• "First Failure" by Gorilla Biscuits
• "Father Figure" by George Michael
• "Nothing Can Stop Me" by Heavens to Betsy

Watery but not quite grave, it's Steve Alten's Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror that we're sinking our rows of nine-inch teeth into this time around. Giant prehistoric sharks known as megalodons butt themselves into ships throughout, making them, we guess, megs of ram, and oh boy do our heroes have a hard drive escaping these mighty predators.

It's a classic monster story, with all the trimmings: sad hero, back-stabbing friends—and enemies!—things going wrong one after the other, and terrible threats gaining a taste for the best blood of all, human blood! In the finest tradition, it includes the phrase "gouts of gore" and more jawsplaining than anyone could have expected. Grab your spyglass and prepare to shout "Hark! It's a shark!" This shark week, it's time ... for the brine.

Recommendations:

• Mucca Pazza
• Trouble Every Day
• Raw
• How we found out about the book: this Deadspin article

Music:

• "Baseball" by Michael Franks
• "Moby Dick" by Led Zeppelin
• "My Name is Jonas" by Weezer

Straight out of 1979, with a cool glass of white wine and an extremely wide collar, comes Rona Jaffe's disturbingly fictionalized account of a disturbing apocryphal tale, Mazes and Monsters.

What promises to be a stirring exploration of the dangers of role-playing games quickly pivots into a fairly detailed account of ... divorce being hard. With a morality derived from TV for children and a sense of mental illness that would leave an X-Men comic shaking its head and muttering "Jeez, that ain't how that works", Mazes and Monsters brings the disappointment from some unusual angles. Even though it's extremely short, it's worth noting that we never talk about some parts of it, like the fact that after a while, they stop playing Dungeons and Dragons in a dorm room and start acting it all out in some nearby steam tunnels, because those parts literally don't matter. Finally, if you want to get up to speed on the book without having to read it, knowing that we strongly recommend you do not read it, you can do so by reading a Chick Tract (but please don't give them any money).

NOTE FROM J TO EX-BOY SCOUTS: Yes, I know it's actually called a "Totin' Chit" and not a "Woodsman's Chit". I was very tired. Please forgive me.

Recommendations:

• Shirley Jackson, FSG CLassics: The Lottery + Stories
• Joan Didion, South and West
• Frederic Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent

Music:

• "The Game (HHH Theme)" by Mötorhead
• "Maps" by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• "Renaissance Lute" - John Dowland

There's a few ways to get ready for The Bible Code, a giant hit from a bygone era that finally—finally!—solves the ancient puzzle: what if there were a conspiracy theory that was all Easter eggs but also absolutely no fun at all? Set the controls for the late 90s, just before the end of the world, and set your expectations to nodding politely while the crazy man tells you about the letters he wrote to a wide variety of world leaders.

Get ready to turn into Han Solo, because when this one is over, you will absolutely never want anybody to tell you the odds ever again. But you'll still have a good time exploring the book that turns the Old Testament into the BOLD Testament! Trust us, this is one episode you won't want to pass over.

Recommendations:

• Chris Leo, Feathers Like Leather
• Emily Wilson interview at the Chicago Review of Books

Music:

• "Channel Zero" by Canibus
• "End of All Things" by Nomeansno
• "Nuclear War" by Sun Ra and his Arkestra

For Part One of our Big Podcast Crossover Event, we bring in Kait and Renata from the Worst Bestsellers podcast to help us out with a bestseller that is, in fact, Just The Worst: James Patterson's The Angel Experiment: Maximum Ride.

It's supposed to be something like The X-Men crossed with Twilight with hints of Frankenstein and family drama, but it ends up much more like 1982's non-blockbuster film Six Pack with moderately less Kenny Rogers slash stock car racing and significantly less charm. Luckily, the Cheersome Foursome helping you come to terms with this eventful yet plotless morass deliver more charm than you can probably handle! If you're ready for six urchins, countless henchmen and somewhere between zero and one parents, you just might be ready to go on this wild slow minimum ... Maximum Ride.

Recommendations:

• S. E. Hinton
• Judy Blume, Superfudge
• Hercule Poirot stories first published in Sketch, by Agatha Christie
• Ghost Quartet, Dave Malloy
• Animorphs
• Runaways, Brian K. Vaughn & Rainbow Rowell

Music:

• "Fly Like an Eagle" by The Steve Miller Band
• "Call Me Mother" by Rupaul
• "Scatman" by Scatman John

Our first episode to be scored entirely by harp, harpsichord, and ocarina, it's the oft-requested short side story The Slow Regard of Silent Things, a book that would describe itself as "twee as twee" and that features a character who "smiles" twice, "grins" every third paragraph, and once sweeps a staircase...up. It's a fun read, like hanging out with a friendly goth who's happy to share their cloves and lots of handy tips about getting red wine stains out of velvet cloaks.

Snatch up your gathersack, because this episode is brimming with amiable whimsy that you won't want to leave behind, make sure you've got your best copy of The Crow soundtrack with you, and prepare yourself for ... a quick glance at noisemakers? No, silly! It's time for a rhyme that's quiet as a mime with a twist of lime: it's time ... for The Slow Regard of Silent Things.

Recommendations:

• Line Hollis, "Line On Sierra"
• Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Music:

• Joanna Newsom, "monkey & bear"
• Clutch, "the soapmakers"
• Radiohead, "Everything in Its Right Place"
• A YouTube Genius, "Seinfeld/Bizkit Mashup"

It's episode one hundred (!) so we knew we had to go big, and it certainly doesn't get much bigger than six hundred pages of New York Times best-seller (nor do podcast episodes get much longer than this one). As the saying goes, "If the tome's got girth, IDEOTVPod brings the mirth!"

PowerBooks, rooms that are locked (until they aren't), repetition, google searches, a dodgy translation of a likely unedited text, repetition, sex-positive male feminism, superpowers based on not-great understandings of people on the spectrum -- we know, we know, it's hard to believe six hundred short pages could contain all of this, but...these pages contain those things. Also other things. Some good things (probably) and a tall mess of bad ones. Slap a little sunscreen on your tattoos, watch out for snipers when you go jogging, and try really hard to avoid offending any vengeful hackers.

Recommendations:

• Kurt Wallander mysteries, Henning Mankell
• "To Be, Or Not to Be", Masha Gessen
• "An Off Pursuit", Joan Murray

Music:

• "Seek 2.0" by Information Society
• "Computer Love" by Zapp & Roger
• "Kill Your Television" by Ned's Atomic Dustbin
• "Puff the Magic Dragon" by Peter, Paul & Mary

Enjoy or anyway endure the bucolic splendor of Andrew Mayne's ... The Naturalist. Crisp, clean Montana air. Stars so clear and sharp they perforate your frontal lobes. The faintest tang of pine needles, the subtle rustle of a deer in a stand of trees, a tow-truck driver dressed as a bear strapping claws on to kill people ... Wait. Come again?

If you're ready to get your science on, then tuck your everyday carry into your lumbar satchel and get ready for the woods -- they're bloody, dark, and deep, and there are killers to catch before you sleep.

Recommendations:

• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
• Jean Merrill, Pushcart War

Music:

• "Raging River of Fear" by Captain Beyond
• "I Wanna Be a Bear" by The Descendents
• "Night Moves" by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band

If the Six Million Dollar Man partnered with a Navy SEAL in a CIA / DEA / Etc. partnership to go around the world assaulting drug-cartel compounds, the results might be a little (a LOT) like ... Robert Cain's Cybernarc. Enticed? Other comparisons await you deep in the bowels caverns of this episode! HINT: if it involves a robot with a human face, we probably talk about it this time around. Our first friend-submitted book in a WHILE, so, uh, Jeremy Fakelastname from Portland ... thanks? for bringing the blood and thunder.

This one is fairly bonkers, as a whole lot of well-described violence butts up against ... not a lot else, if we're being totally honest. Lots of lists of guns, lots of paranoia about the drug epidemic corroding our cities and corrupting our government, lots of meetings with elderly white men talking tough at one another, taking no guff, and preparing to get rough.

If you think you're ready, if you think you can handle it, then get to the chopper and experience the white-knuckle thrills of a narc, except ... cyber.

BONUS BEST LINE WE DIDN'T GET TO IN THE EPISODE*: "Christ, man!" ejaculated the general. "You've created some kind of ... robot hacker!"

*From memory.

Recommendations:

• Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters
• Anne Carson, Short Talks

Music:

• "White Lines" by Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel
• "Casey Jones" by The Grateful Dead
• "Ballad of the Green Beret" by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler

What, what exactly is Dean Koontz' novel Watchers? A touching love story between ex-Navy-SEAL (and realtor) and hyperintelligent Golden Retriever? A thrilling adventure where an ordinary man (who was in Delta Force) gets caught between the military industrial complex and organized crime -- oh, and a ravenous murdering hellbeast? A sumptuous coming-of-age tale where a sheltered, abused young woman flowers into her full power and beauty? A lengthy catalog of one man's interests, from yardwork to proper roadtrip routing to home furnishing to optimal tunage for tender lovemaking? Well, you're in luck, because Dean Koontz' Watchers is in fact all of these things and more!

Yes, IDEOTVPOD has finally gone ... to the dogs! We take this puppy out for a walk around the block, and if you want to see if it's hard to clean up after it, you'll have to mash that DOWNLOAD button and unleash us!

Recommendations:

• Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz
• The Book of Men by Dorianne Laux

Music:

• "Somebody's Watching Me" by Rockwell
• "longing / love" by George Winston
• "Talking to the Dog" by the Obits