Plain Reading

We're joined by owner of Chapter House Books Annie Clymer, who tells us all about running a bookstore, giving old titles another chance, and the weird workings of memory.

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: Trapani, libreria del Corso [cropped]. CC BY 4.0 image courtesy HaguardDuNord and Wikimedia Commons. Want to learn more about the books—and other media!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

Richard Ayoade The Unfinished Harauld Hughes Eve Babitz Ceren Beilin Blackfishing the IUD Ceren Beilin Revenge of the Scapegoat Ceren Beilin Sea, Poison Eula Biss On Immunity Brian Blanchfield Proxies: Essays Near Knowing Jorge Luis Borges Chapter House Books Chloë Clifton-Wright "Posterity Is Vulgar" Percival Everett Erasure Will Ferguson Hokkaido Highway Blues (now Hitching Rides with Buddha) Jonathan Franzen Frank Herbert Dune Dave Hickey Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy Rachel Ingalls Mrs. Caliban James Joyce Ulysses Stephen King Danse Macabre Stephen King On Writing Stanley Kubrick The Shining Dorothea Lasky Animal Norman Mailer The Naked and the Dead Ottessa Moshfegh Death in Her Hands Ottessa Moshfegh Eileen Ottessa Moshfegh My Year of Rest and Relaxation Doireann Ní Ghríofa A Ghost in the Throat Lauren Oyler Fake Accounts Lauren Oyler No Judgment Fernando Pessoa Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar Thomas Pynchon Shadow Ticket The New York Review of Books The New Yorker David Foster Wallace "Consider the Lobster" John Williams Augustus John Williams Butcher's Crossing John Williams Stoner Joy Williams The Quick and the Dead Rachel Yoder Nightbitch

Writer Lara Levitan joins us to talk about sticking to your craft, other authors' influence, and keeping the mystery alive.

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: Theda Bara, still from Madame Mystery [cropped]. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and other media!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

Wes Anderson Moonrise Kingdom Wes Anderson The French Dispatch Annie Baker Janet PlanetJen Beagin Big Swiss Jen Beagin Pretend I'm Dead Jen Beagin Vacuum in the Dark Hans Blumenberg Paradigms for a Metaphorology Svetlana Boym Mark Frost / David Lynch Twin Peaks G. W. F. Hegel Nick Hunt Where the Wild Winds Are: Walking Europe's Winds from the Pennines to Provence Miranda July All Fours Adam Kelly New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age Abbas Kiarostami Lara Levitan The Secret Sugar Daddies Madame Pamita Baba Yaga's Book of Witchcraft: Slavic Magic from the Witch of the Woods Simon Morley, ed. The Sublime Kornél Mundruczó White God Orhan Pamuk The Black Book Orhan Pamuk Snow Rainer Maria Rilke "Archaic Torso of Apollo" Rainer Maria Rilke Duino Elegies Salman Rushdie Christoph Rüter Hans Blumenberg—The Invisible Philosopher George Saunders Story Club with George Saunders Lowell Sheppard Chasing the Cherry Blossom: A Spiritual Journey Through Japan Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cynical Reason Peter Sloterdijk You Must Change Your Life David Foster Wallace A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again David Foster Wallace The Pale King Ludwig Wittgenstein Rachel Yoder Nightbitch

Classicist and reader extraordinaire JC Boyle tells us about the Greeks, Ezra Pound, Thomas Bernhard, lending out your books, and so much more!

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy [cropped]. Wm. S. Kimball & Co., 1889. CC0 1.0 image courtesy Wikimedia Commons and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Want to learn more about the books—and other media!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

V. C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic Aristophanes Peace Aristotle James Baldwin Honoré de Balzac The Unknown Masterpiece Roland Barthes Mythologies The Beatles Simone de Beauvoir The Mandarins Samuel Beckett Saul Bellow Andrei Bely Petersburg Ingmar Bergman Lauren Berlant Cruel Optimism Thomas Bernhard Concrete Thomas Bernhard Gathering Evidence & My Prizes John Berryman "Dream Song 14" John Berryman The Dream Songs Roberto Bolaño By Night in Chile Brockport Writers Forum John Berryman Interview William F. Buckley Ian Buruma "Who Did Not Collaborate?" (on Jean-Paul Sartre) Michael Cacoyannis The Trojan Women Julius Caesar Albert Camus Elias Canetti Auto-da-Fé Elias Canetti Crowds and Power Horacio Castellanos Moya Marcus Porcius Cato Catullus The Complete Poetry, translated by Frank O. Copley Louis-Ferdinand Céline Cicero Coffee House Press Criterion Collection Confucianism Dalkey Archive Gilles Deleuze Deborah Eisenberg Nawal El Saadawi The Nawal El Saadawi Reader Euripides Bacchae Euripides The Trojan Women Jon Fosse Septology William Gaddis Agapē Agape Maxim Gorky Stephen J. Gould

David Graeber / David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Grove Atlantic Tomás Gutiérrez Alea Memories of Underdevelopment Mark Haber Lesser Ruins Mark Haber Saint Sebastian's Abyss John Haffenden The Life of John Berryman Byung-Chul Han The Burnout Society Heinrich Heine "Die Lorelei" Abbie Hoffman Steal This Book Homer Gitta Honegger Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian Gary Indiana James Joyce Dubliners Miranda July John Maynard Keynes Eugene Lim Fog & Car Literary Hub Nicole Loraux The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City Nicole Loraux / Laura M. Slatkin / Gregory Nagy Antiquities: Postwar French Thought vol. 3 Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain Gaius Marius Karl Marx Søren Mau A Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital Menander Henry Miller Black Spring Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer John Mullen Great Poets in Their Own Words Iris Murdoch The Sea, The Sea Mark Neocleous Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police New Directions NYRB Classics John O'Brien Kenneth Patchen Pamela Paul Raoul Peck Lumumba Bob Perelman The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky Plato Plutarch Lives Chad W. Post "Remembering John O'Brien" Ezra Pound "Canto LXXXI" Hannah Proctor Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat Marcel Proust

Gerard Reve The Evenings Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Ellen Rutten Sincerity After Communism: A Cultural History J. D. Salinger Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction Sallust Arno Schmidt Ousmane Sembène Xala Socrates Solon Sophocles Antigone Scott Spillman Making Sense of Slavery: America's Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today Benedict de Spinoza Heiny Srour The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived Gertrude Stein Bret Stephens Rabrindrinath Tagore Hunter S. Thompson Thucydides Leo Tolstoy Leon Trostsky The History of the Russian Revolution Jean-Pierre Vernant Pierre Vidal-Nauet Gregor von Rezzori Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories David Foster Wallace Émile Zola Louis Zukofsky

Tim Mather tells us about bringing Aristotle into contemporary life, and about keeping a famous family tree alive.

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: Jabril ibn Bukhtishu. Aristotle instructing Alexander the Great [cropped]. CC BY-SA 4.0 image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and other media!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

Wes Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics Robert Caro The Passage of Power Anton Chekhov "The Boor" Winston Churchill "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last." John Cotton / Richard Mather The Bay Psalm Book Sebastian De Grazia Machiavelli in Hell Charles Dickens David Copperfield Anthony Doerr Cloud Cuckoo Land Jonathan Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" Benjamin Franklin Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Finding Your Roots Jessica Hagy Indexed Michael Haneke The White Ribbon Samantha Harvey Orbital David Hume Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities Immanuel Kant The Critique of JudgmentSøren Kierkegaard The Sickness Unto Death John Landis An American Werewolf in London John Locke Ludacris Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory Abijah P. Marvin The Life and Times of Cotton Mather Cotton Mather On Witchcraft David McCullough

Morrissey Autobiography Mihkel Mutt The Inner Immigrant Mike Myers "Sprockets" Nextdoor Plato POYKPAC Comedy "Hipster Olympics" Vidkun Quisling Richard P. Rumelt The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists Douglas Rushkoff Get Back in the Box Sons of the American Revolution The Smiths "Ask" Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment Leo Tolstoy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth Leo Tolstoy "The Death of Ivan Ilych" Leo Tolstoy "The Kreuzer Sonata" Leo Tolstoy "Where There Is Love, There God Is Also" Stefan Zweig The World of Yesterday

Biologist Caroline Turner joins us to talk about the challenges and rewards of reading outside your own culture.

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: World map produced in Amsterdam, 1689 [cropped]. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and other media!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

J. J. Abrams / Jeffrey Liebfer / Damon Lindelof Lost Svetlana Alexievich The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II Svetlana Alexievich Voices from Chernobyl Jokha Alharthi Celestial Bodies Poul Anderson "Kyrie" Hannah Arendt Isaac Asimov Short stories list Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice Rick BassIn My Home There Is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda Beaufort Wind Scale Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March Charlotte Beradt The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a NationDan Brown The Da Vinci Code Margaret Wise Brown Goodnight Moon Robyn Creswell "Bewildered Rhapsodies" (on translating the Qur'an) Roald Dahl Jana Damabrogio / Daniel Starza Smith "Emily Dickinson's Playful Letterlocking" Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene Stuart Dybek The Coast of Chicago Julia Fine The Upstairs House Louise Fitzhugh Harriet the Spy Jonathan Gottschall The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Stephen Jay Gould Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History Jean Hatzfeld The Antelope's Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide Bong Joon Ho Parasite Bong Joon Ho Snowpiercer Marion Holland The Secret Horse Scott Huler Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry Andrey Kurkov Death and the Penguin Erik Larson The Devil in the White City Robert McCloskey Make Way for Ducklings Dominic A. Pacyga Chicago: A Biography Grace Paley Orhan Pamuk Alexander Pushkin Eugene Onegin Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons Jean Paul Richter Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Christopher Robbins Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared Kristen Roupenian "Cat Person" Karen Russell "Orange World" Masaoka Shiki "Haiku on Shit" Murasaki Shikibu The Tale of Genji Robin Sloan Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore John Steinbeck Cannery Row Amos Tutuola My Life in the Bush of Ghosts P. G. Wodehouse Leave It to PSmith

Nature writer and podcaster Matt Stansberry tells us about the challenges of conservation and management—and the supernatural goings-on that come with it.

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: The Squonk, illustrated by Coert Du Bois and William T. Cox [cropped]. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and other media!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

A. R. Ammons The Snow Poems Rudolfo Anaya Bless Me, Ultima Ted Andrews Animal-Speak: Understanding Animal Messengers, Totems, and Signs Aristotle John Baglow Hugh MacDiarmid: The Poetry of Self Frank Black "Los Angeles" James Cameron True Lies Mike Clelland The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee Mark Z. Danielewski House of Leaves Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker CreekDan Flores Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History Dan Flores Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in AmericaNell Greenfieldboyce Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life Lyanda Lynn Haupt Václav Havel Tom Hennen Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems Hub City Writers Project Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants Robin Wall Kimmerer Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses Robin Wall Kimmerer The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World John Lane Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems Dave Lucas Weather Hugh MacDiarmid James Merrill The Changing Light at Sandover Alice Oswald / Paul Keegan Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology Rachel Pollack Tom Putnam The Dark Divide Robert Michael Pyle Rider Waite Smith Tarot Mary Ruefle Madness, Rack, and Honey Trevor Shikaze / WAWI Terrible, Glorious, & Useful Matt Stansberry "Rootless: Byrology as a Cure for Loneliness in the Landscape" Matt Stansberry Rustbelt Arcana: Tarot and Natural History in the Exurban Wilds Matt Stansberry / Sarah Rose The Campfire's Edge Matt Stansberry / David Wilson Rust Belt Arcana Tarot Deck Gavin Van Horn Paula Whyman Bad Naturalist: One Woman's Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop Virginia Woolf William Butler Yeats A Vision

Chaplain, podcaster, and religion scholar George Schmidt joins us to talk William Blake, the support found in reading, and Star Wars galore!

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: Manny Warman, Columbia University Bicentennial panel exhibition on banned books [cropped]. Public domain image courtesy Columbia University Archives and Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and other media!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

Saul D. Alinsky Rules for Radicals Richard Attenborough Shadowlands Augustine of Hippo James Baldwin / Nikki Giovanni Soul! Interview Lynne Reid Banks The Indian in the Cupboard Jean-Michel Basquiat Gregory Bassham The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy William Blake Murray Bookchin Lenny Bruce How to Talk Dirty and Influence People Charles Bukowski "The Crunch" Edward T. Chambers Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice The Charlie Daniels Band "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" Cyberpunk Rodney Dangerfield Gilles Deleuze "Postrscript on the Societies of Control" The Doors Dungeons and Dragons Warren Ellis et al. Transmetropolitan Allen Ginsberg Wayne Glausser Rod Hilton "The Star Wars Saga: Introducing Machete Order" Aldous Huxley The Doors of Perception Nicholas Hytner The History Boys Vasily Kandinsky John Keats Elias L. Khalil "Making Sense of Self-Deception" Emmanuel Levinas C. S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity George Lucas et al. Star Wars George R. R. Martin A Song of Ice and Fire series Julie E. Maybee "Hegel's Dialectics" China Miéville John Milton John Cameron Mitchell Hedwig and the Angry Inch Alan Moore Jerusalem José Esteban Muñoz Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics Jean-Luc Nancy New Criticism Reinhold Niebuhr Friedrich Nietzsche Marjorie Perloff Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media Marjorie Perloff Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century Marjorie Perloff Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary Jordan Peterson Todd Phillips Joker Plato The Republic Religion & Justice podcast Bruce Rogers-Vaughn Barb Rosenstock / Mary GrandPré The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky's Abstract Art J. R. R. Tolkien The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series J. R. R. Tolkien The SilmarillionWendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice Ludwig Wittgenstein Sheldon S. Wolin Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism William Wordsworth

Vahid Friedrich, advisor to financial advisors, is talking to us about storytelling—in sci-fi, video games, religion, and more!

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: Cover of Science Fiction Quarterly, Nov. 1952 [cropped]. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and other media!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

Archive of Our Own Richard Bachman

James Baldwin / Nikki Giovanni Soul! Interview Iain (M.) Banks John Banville Bashō The Beatles Benjamin Black Yosa Buson Johnny Cash "Hurt"

Noam Chomsky Charles Dickens Dungeons & Dragons Percival Everett James Mark Ford W. Mark Ford Natalie Goldberg Three Simple Lines Natalie Goldberg Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within Frank Herbert Dune William J. Higginson The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku Isekai: "A Beginner's Guide to Isekai" (Introductory article on the genre by Amanda Pagan) Kobayashi Issa

Stephen King

John Landis An American Werewolf in London

Larian Studios Baldur's Gate 3

Ursula K. Le Guin The Books of Earthsea

David Lynch Dune

Vladimir Nabokov Speak, Memory

Nine Inch Nails "Hurt"

Larry Niven "Flash Crowd"

nobody103 Mother of Learning

Terry Pratchett Royal Road Hiroaki Sato On Haiku Screen Actors Guild Settlers of Catan Peter Singer Practical Ethics

Sleyca Super Supportive Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace

Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn

Denis Villeneuve Dune

David F. Walker / Mark Kwame Anderson Big Jim and the White Boy D. D. Webb The Gods Are Bastards William Carlos Williams Paterson Gene Wolfe

Art historian and writer Donato Loia joins us today to talk about the interplay of language, music, art and more!

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: Three Girls in Yellow Straw Hats [cropped], August Macke. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Ryan Adams GoldAphex Twin

Dore Ashton A Joseph Cornell Album Ingmar Bergman The Silence David Brooks Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got ThereB-Side Editions John Constable The Cure John D'Agata About a Mountain Leonardo da Vinci James Elkins Pictures and Tears James Elkins The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing James Elkins Weak in Comparison to Dreams Gustave Flaubert Granta The New Nature Writing Peter Heehs Spirituality Without God: A Global History of Thought and Practice Hungry BrainNicolas Jaar Karl Ove Knausgaard In the Land of the Cyclops Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle Donato Loia 1095 Short Sentences Barry Lopez Arctic Dreams New Wave Friedrich Nietzsche Ecce Homo Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of MoralityGerhard Richter Lisa Robertson "The Weather: A Report on Sincerity" Lisa Robertson The Weather Edoardo Sanguinetti Deborah Shapiro Leslie Stevens Incubus Wallace Stevens Henry David Thoreau Walden; Or, LIfe in the Woods Sarah Thornton Seven Days in the Art World Helen Vendler The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry Alejandro Zambra Chilean Poet

We're talking to fundraising and development maven Wendy Hustwit about the books that changed your life, where to find recommendations, and reading versus application.

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: Poster for the 1918 film Tengerparti álom [cropped]. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Arts & Letters Daily

Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale Jean M. Auel The Clan of the Cave Bear Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex Simone Biles Judy Blume Forever Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American Michael Crichton Robert Day The Great American Beauty Contest Brian De Palma Carrie Nawal El Saadawi The Nawal El Saadawi Reader George Eliot Middlemarch Natalie Goldberg Three Simple Lines Natalie Goldberg Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within Nikole Hannah-Jones The 1619 Project Liam Heneghan Through Pleated Light: Confessions and Translations Zbigniew Herbert The King of the Ants: Mythological Essays Homer The Odyssey Søren Kierkegaard Daily Readings with Søren Kierkegaard Stephen King Carrie London Review of Books Judith McNaught Whitney, My Love Henry Miller Black Spring Madeline Miller Circe Madeline Miller The Song of Achilles José Esteban Muñoz Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics New York Review of Books Scott O'Dell Island of the Blue Dolphins Oprah's Book Club Nina Paley Sita Sings the Blues Robert D. Putnam Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Reese's Book Club Taylor Jenkins Reid Carrie Soto Is Back Taylor Jenkins Reid The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo Scott Rosenfield "Eschaton: The World's Most Complicated Game?" (Article on the tennis game invented by David Foster Wallace) Hiroaki Sato On Haiku Deborah Shapiro Silent Book Club Miriam Toews A Complicated Kindness Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy War and PeaceValmiki The Ramayana

Sandy Welch Jane Eyre (BBC/PBS series) Edith Wharton Marion Zimmer Bradley The Mists of Avalon