Plain Reading

Hiker, podcaster, and professor of philosophy and religious studies Zach Simpson tells us about autobiography, the way we're shaped by reading, and the skilled misdirections of detective fiction.

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

Episode artwork: Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne (cropped). Public domain image courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and shows!—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!

4 Non Blondes

Al-Ghazali Deliverance from Error

Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy

Augustine of Hippo The Confessions

Marcus Aurelius

Averroes

Walter Benjamin

The Book of Judges Jorge Luis Borges Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail Roberto Calasso Literature and the Gods

Italo Calvino If On a Winter's Night a Traveler Car and Driver Lee Child Jack Reacher series Cicero Michael Connelly Harry Bosch series Michael ConnellyThe Lincoln Lawyer series

Gilles Deleuze Mark Fisher

Gustave Flaubert

Sigmund Freud

Gabriel García Márquez

Alasdair Gray Lanark: A Life in Four Books

The Greens and Blues 14er Podcast Frederic Gros A Philosophy of Walking

Barbara Guest Herself Defined: H. D. and Her World

Rob Harvilla Sixty Songs that Explain the Nineties

Václav Havel

Martin Heidegger

Hermann Hesse

Dave Hickey Homer Aldous Huxley Island

Isocrates

Samuel Johnson / James Boswell A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland / The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides John Kaag Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

Margery Kempe Lamentations

John Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Martin Luther Table Talk Robert Macfarlane The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Daniel Mendelsohn

Metallica "Enter Sandman"

Georg Misch A History of Autobiography in Antiquity Thomas More Utopia Maggie Nelson

Friedrich Nietzsche Ecce Homo Oprah's Book Club Eric Ellis OvermeyerBosch Reese's Book Club

Rick Riordan Percy Jackson and the Olympians

Gerry Roach

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau Origins of Inequality Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract Saturday Night Live "Thank You, Scott" William Shakespeare The Tempest William Shakespeare Henry IV Zachary Simpson The Paradoxes of Modernity

Sophocles Sports Illustrated

Taylor Swift

Ibn Tufayl Hayy ibn Yaqzan Article on the tale by Marwa Elshakry

Mark Twain Roughing It Emily Wilson

Nick Rossi, cofounder and editor of Sobotka Literary Magazine and Ursus Americanus Press, joins us to talk about why we write, the way art shapes community, and even those words we're never sure how to pronounce.

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

Episode artwork: Berenice Abbott, Two children at the Harlem Community Arts Center in 1939 (cropped). Public doman image courtesy New York Public Library and Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books 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!

Eric Benick CM Burroughs "Dear Incubator" Italo Calvino Emily Capers In Between My Bodies Fyodor Dostoevsky Forvo Christopher Gilbert Across the Mutual Landscape Christopher Gilbert "Listening to Monk's Misterioso" Featured in Roger Reeves, "The Uses of Memory" Nikolai Gogol Roy Jacobsen Borders Franz Kafka The Trial Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis Rupi Kaur Chris Kraus Long Day Press Plato Phaedrus Plato Symposium Daniel Pujol Sobotka Literary Magazine Sherry Turkle Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other Ursus Americanus Press Kurt Vonnegut William Carlos Williams

Join in on our conversation wtih religion and philosophy professor J. R. Hustwit—on sci-fi and wiki writing projects, horology, portals, and tons more.

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

Episode artwork: "Coming thru the portal" (cropped). CC BY 2.0 image courtesy ˆMissiˆ and Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books, films, and movies 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!

William Blake

Octavia E. Butler

Gotham Chapra Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story

Mark Z. Danielewski House of Leaves

Jacques Derrida

Kirby Dick / Amy Ziering Kofman Derrida: The Documentary

Joseph Fink/ Jeffrey Cranor Welcome to Night Vale

Michael Gondry/ Charlie Kaufman Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Brandon R. Grafius Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions That Haunt Us

Alasdair Gray Lanark: A Life in Four Books

Jürgen Habermas

Hall & Oates

Dave Hickey Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy LockPickingLawyer

H. P. Lovecraft "The Rats in the Walls"

Geoff Manaugh A Burglar's Guide to the City

Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian

Michael McDonald

Metallica "The Call of Ktulu"

Paul North The Problem of Distraction

Meredith Ann Pierce Birth of the Firebringer

Poe

Poison "Every Rose Has its Thorn" QNTM There Is No Antimimetics Division

Paul Ricoeur The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language

Paul Ricoeur The Symbolism of Evil

Kim Stanley Robinson The Ministry for the Future

SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect)

Kevin Smith Clerks

Kevin Smith Dogma

Kevin Smith Mallrats

Steely Dan The Music Swap "What Is Yacht Rock?"

Keenen Ivory Wayans Scary Movie

Ben Woodard Slime Dynamics

Our wide-ranging conversation with poet and library fan Ollie Shane covers European history, contemporary poetry, Somerset Maugham, and more!

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

Episode artwork: Student at the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1981 (cropped). Image with no known copyright restrictions courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and movies!—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!

Theodor Adorno et al. Aesthetics and Politics

Richard Aldrich Colonialism and Homosexuality

Joseph Barbera & William Hanna The Jetsons

Antony Beevor The Second World War

Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction"

Bertolt Brecht Love Poems

Bertolt Brecht Mother Courage and Her Children

Richard Burton "The Terminal Essay"

CAConrad While Standing in Line for Death

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Oscar Chan Nazi Titanic

Chris-Chan (Christine Weston Chandler)

Joseph Conrad

Guy Debord

Len Deighton Winter

Jacques Derrida Specters of Marx

Philip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle

Charles Dickens Caroline Elkins Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya Caroline Elkins Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire Tan Twan Eng The House of Doors

Bob Fosse Cabaret

Michel Foucault

Frankfurt School

Kurt Gödel

Veit Harlan Jud Süss

Stefano Harney & Fred Moten The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

Selina Hastings The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography

Fritz Hippler The Eternal Jew

Martin Jay Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure

François Jullien In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics

Philip Kerr Berlin Noir

Philip Kerr Hitler's Peace

Rudyard Kipling

Chris Kraus I Love Dick

Chris Kraus Where Art Belongs

Erik Larson In the Garden of Beasts

Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller Bad Gays podcast

Janna Levin A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Gabriel García Márquez Until August

Airea D. Matthews Bread and Circus

W. Somerset Maugham The Narrow Corner

W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage

Ted Morgan Maugham: A Biography

Maggie Nelson

Russell Nieli Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language

Friedrich Nietzsche

Luis Puenzo The Official Story

Assotto Saint Sacred Spells: Collected Works

Sam Sax

Diane Seuss Four-Legged Girl

Diane Seuss Frank: Sonnets

Diane Seuss Modern Poetry

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Ollie Shane I Do It So It Feels Like Hell

Ollie Shane Notes from the Void

Danez Smith Bluff

Frank Spotnitz (creator) The Man in the High Castle (series)

Torquato Tasso Jerusalem Delivered (esp. Anthony M. Esolen translation)

Alan Turing

Morten Tyldum The Imitation Game

Michael Verhoeven The Nasty Girl

Eric Voegelin

Wolfram von Eschenbach Parzifal

Michael Warner Publics and Counterpublics

Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbes

Oscar Wilde

Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Poet, publicist, and reading series host Carrie Olivia Adams joins us to talk about rereading, problematic literature, and bringing people together.

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

Episode artwork: Marcel Proust, by Otto Wegener, 1895 (cropped). Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books 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!

Bashō

Aase Berg Dark Matter

Joanna Biggs A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again

Black Ocean

Jacques Bouveresse Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious

Joseph Clayton Mills

Józef Czapski Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

Lydia Davis

Toi Derricotte The Undertaker's Daughter

Lucy Ellmann Ducks, Newburyport

Lucy Ellmann Things Are Against Us

William Faulkner

Nikky Finney

Sigmund Freud

Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought

Susan Howe

Kobayashi Issa

June Jordan

James Joyce Ulysses

Hubert McAlexander

Elsa Morante

Kelly Norman Ellis

Marjorie Perloff Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary

The Plagiarists

Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust The Prisoner

Marcel Proust Swann's Way

Mary Ruefle Madness, Rack, and Honey

Janaka Stucky

Frank X. Walker

Anna Wiener Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

Mary Wollstonecraft The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft

Andrew Zawacki

Our first episode of season 2 features violist Kalindi Bellach and alto Kay White, who let us in on perfectionism in performance, writing and reading about music, and the for-fun books that everyone needs.

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

Episode artwork: Photo Collage: Musician Playing Triangle, photo collage by Juan Pedro Chabalgoity (MET, 2017.68.15), cropped. CC0 1.0 image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and music!—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!

David Abram The Spell of the Sensuous

André Aciman

Woody Allen Midnight in Paris

American Museum of Natural History Sperm Whale and Giant Squid

Matthew Aucoin "Alone in Paradise"

W. H. Auden

Johann Sebastian Bach The Art of the Fugue

Muriel Barbery The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Neal Barnard

Steven Beller Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction

Wendell Berry

Benjamin Britten

Brené Brown The Gifts of Imperfection

Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay Vulnerability in Resistance

Camille T. Dungy Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

Epictetus How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life

Gabriel Fauré

Mark Fisher

George Frideric Handel Messiah

Harlem Renaissance

Paul Kingsnorth Alexandria

Paul Kingsnorth Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist

Paul Kingsnorth The Wake

Anne McCaffrey Dragonriders of Pern

Sarah J. Maas A Court of Thorn and Roses

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Olivier Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time

David Mitchell Cloud Atlas

Haruki Murakami Sputnik Sweetheart

The Onion "Mothership Accidentally Descends on Hootie Concert"

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi Stabat Mater

Meredith Ann Pierce The Firebringer Triolgy

Richard Powers Generosity: An Enhancement

Richard Powers The Gold Bug Variations Richard Powers Orfeo

Richard Powers The Overstory

Richard Powers The Time of Our Singing

Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time

Emily Raboteau "A New Environmental Canon"

Damien Rice

Alex Ross

Vikram Seth An Equal Music

Samantha Shannon The Priory of the Orange Tree

Gertrude Stein The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Donna Tartt The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt The Little Friend

Donna Tartt The Secret History

Donald Francis Tovey

Hanya Yanagihara A Little Life

Rebecca Yarros Iron Flame

Poet and educator L. S. McKee tells us about poetry and personas, the joys of secret venues, writing across science and art curricula, and even relics.

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

Episode artwork: Joan Crawford holding mask of herself (cropped). Photoplay, 1932. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and music!—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!

Elizabeth Arnold The Reef

Ingeborg Bachmann

Elizabeth Bishop

Anne Carson Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

Rachel Carson Silent Spring

Paul Celan "Death Fugue"

Tyler Childers

Julio Cortázar Blow-Up: And Other Stories

Julio Cortázar Hopscotch

Julio Cortázar The Winners

Kurt Gödel

Frédéric Gros The Security Principle: From Serenity to Regulation

Gruppe 47

Luke Harding "'It's the new normal': in Kiev's newest book store, readers fear how Ukraine's story will end"

Hugh Haughton, ed. Second World War Poems

Zbigniew Herbert "The Prayer of the Traveler Mr. Cogito"

Homer The Iliad (transl. Emily Wilson)

Homer The Odyssey

Hope Jahren Lab Girl: A Memoir

Hope Jahren The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

Brad J. Kallenberg By Design: Ethics, Theology, and the Practice of Engineering

Jack Kerouac

Yusef Komunyakaa

Benjamín Labatut When We Cease to Understand the World

T. E. Lawrence

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook

Primo Levi "The Molecule's Defiance" in A Tranquil Star: Stories

Primo Levi The Periodic Table

Janna Levin A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Christopher Logue War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad

Georg Lukács The Theory of the Novel

L. S. McKee "Alva Watches the Previous President Fly Away"

L. S. McKee Creature Wing Heart Machine

Haruki Murakami The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Maggie Nelson On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

George Oppen New Collected Poems

William Shakespeare

Jonathan Sumption The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God

Greta Thunberg The Climate Book

Alan Turing

Jesmyn Ward

James Wright

Isabel Zapata In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation

Join us as we talk to professor of musicology and religion Dirk von der Horst about time, religion, activism, and more.

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

Episode artwork: Aaron Willard, Banjo Clock MET (cropped). Public domain-dedicated image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and shows!—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!

Theodor Adorno

Dante Alighieri

Arne Arnbom (dir.) Aniara (TV opera version)

Naim Stifan Ateek Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation

St. Augustine

Karl-Birger Blomdahl Aniara (opera)

Adam Conover "Why You Don't Actually Want to Live on Mars"

Simon Critchley

Jacques Ellul The Technological Society

David Graeber/David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Ernst-August Gutt Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context

Conner Habib Hawk Mountain

Václav Havel

Carter Heyward

Wolfgang Hilbig The Interim

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson/Katharine K. Wilkinson, eds. All We Can Save: Truth ,Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

Pella Kagerman/Hugo Lilja Aniara (film)

Adam Kotsko Neoliberalism's Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital

Adam Kotsko What Is Theology? Christian Thought and Contemporary Life

Robert Jay Lifton Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

Harry Martinson Aniara

Adam McKay, dir. Don't Look Up

Thomas Merton

Marcel Ophuls The Sorrow and the Pity

Marianna Ritchey Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era

Herman J. and Rosemary Radford Ruether The Wrath of Jonah: Crisis of Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Edward Said The Question of Palestine

Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins

Dorothee Sölle

Greta Thunberg The Climate Book

Greta Thunberg "Our House is on Fire"

Dirk von der Horst Jonathan's Loves, David's Laments: Gay Theology, Musical Desires, and Historical Difference

Dirk von der Horst The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness ("From Queer Musicology to Indecent Theology")

Dirk von der Horst "A Music Theologian Engages with Pope Francis' Favorite Music: An Interview with Dirk von der Horst"

Dirk von der Horst, et al, ed. Voices of Feminist Liberation: Writings in Celebration of Rosemary Radford Ruether

Amy Webb The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

Anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing

Poet and teacher Lisa Dordal joins us to talk about memory, the imagination, clearing up misconceptions about poetry, and so much more!

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

Episode artwork: Leon Kowalsi, Nostalgia (cropped). Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commmons.

Want to learn more about the books—and shows!—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!

Claire-Louise Bennett Pond

Joe Brainard I Remember

Oliver Burkeman Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Willa Cather Lucy Gayheart

Gaius Valerius Catullus Catullus: The Complete Poetry, transl. Frank. O. Copley

Leonard Cohen "Anthem"

Julio Cortázar Hopscotch

Simon Critchley The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology

Simon Critchley Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance

Emily Dickinson

Lisa Dordal Mosaic of the Dark

Lisa Dordal Next Time You Come Home

Lisa Dordal Water Lessons

T. S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Vilém Flusser Gestures

Robert Frost

Ross Gay

David Guterson Snow Falling on Cedars

Kent Haruf

Václav Havel

Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought

John Keats

Claire Keegan

Jack Kerouac On the Road

Maxine Kumin "Woodchucks"

Alice McDermott

Julie Otsuka When the Emperor Was Divine

Per Petterson

Poets & Writers

Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time series

Patrick Radden Keefe Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Rumi "A Great Wagon"

W. G. Sebald

William Shakespeare

Percy Bysshe Shelley "Ozymandias"

Clint Smith Above Ground

Clint Smith How the Word Is Passed

Dorothee Sölle

Elizabeth Strout

Thao Thai Banyan Moon

Natasha Trethewy

William Wordsworth

The Writer's Chronicle

Antonio Zadra/Robert Stickgold When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

Artist, designer, and author Tiffany Gholar joins us to delve into the nature of art and creative production, fashion dolls, and even game show appearances.

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

Episode artwork: Mopsy Modes, from Mopsy, 1(1), 1948 (cropped). Public domain image by Gladys Parker, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and shows!—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!

Julie Aigner-Clark Baby Einstein

Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life and Others

David X. Cohen/Matt Groening Futurama

Kristin Kobes Du Mez Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Tiffany Gholar The Unforeseeable Future

Tiffany Gholar A Bitter Pill to Swallow

Tiffany Gholar The Doll Project

Tiffany Gholar Post-Consumerism

Tiffany Gholar Imperfect Things

Stephen King The Stand

Mario Levrero Empty Words

Mario Levrero The Luminous Novel

Judith McNaught

Daniel Myrick Eduardo Sánchez The Blair Witch Project

Anne Helen Petersen Culture Study newsletter

David Quammen Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

David Quammen Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

David Quammen The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest

Elizabeth Rush Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

Elizabeth Rush The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

Rebekah Weatherspoon Cowboys of California series