Read This Instead

Join us for the conclusion of The Worst Book We've Ever Read and hear our recommendations of what to read instead!

Reader, we hated it.

If you listened to part 1 slowly, you could try listening to part 2 all at once! In this episode, we'll talk about Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch vs. The Fault in Our Stars and why it's a privilege to have our hearts broken by Theo, Boris, and Popchik. Also featuring the debut of our newest podcast segment, Read This Instead Writing Challenges!

Our opinions are stars we tried to fathom into this podcast. Join us for Part 1 where we do a deep dive into John Green's era-defining YA novel The Fault in Our Stars, then for Part 2 where we'll compare and contrast Green's work with Donna Tartt's absolute masterpiece The Goldfinch! After all, some books are better than other books.

What if Will Scarlet was actually a disguise for...someone really obnoxious? Join us this week for a discussion of A.C. Gaughen's Robin Hood retelling, Scarlet!

See the book trailer for Scarlet here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e87UkdqDUek

Last week we talked about everything we love about Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Join us this week to hear our thoughts on four much lesser imitations of this modern classic - Bunny, The Cloisters, If We Were Villians, and The Maidens! Are we letting these titles in our exclusive Greek study club, or are we pitching them over the cliff in the woods?

Slap on your billowing cape and old-fashioned spectacles, brush up on your ancient Greek, carefully place a few of The Right Books behind you as props, and join us for Part 1 of a mega-round-up of dark academia books. In Part 1, we'll be discussing Queen Donna's masterpiece The Secret History, the OG Dark Academia novel that launched a thousand rip-offs, and in Part 2 we'll be evaluating the merits of four of those rip-offs (Mona Awad's Bunny, Alex Michaelides' The Maidens, M.L. Rio's If We Were Villains, and Katy Hays' The Cloisters)!

Join us for a (only slightly late!) Valentine's-themed Espresso Shot to chat about rom-coms, favorite literary OTPs, classic romances, and more!

Join us for the insane fever dream that is Caitlin Starling's The Death of Jane Lawrence! An alternate-history-Gothic-fantasy-romance set in a universe where you can literally divide by zero to do math/magic!

We return to the scene of the crime to finish up our thoughts on Veronica Roth's Divergent! Join us to hear more about Four/Tobias, Hunger Games rip-offs you might not have ever noticed before, and best of all, several dystopian books of past and present that you can Read Instead.

(btw, still getting the hang of this podcasting thing and that's why we keep talking about getting ready for Christmas in this episode - pretend you're in a time machine!)