In honour of Remembrance Day, Paul looks at some of the philosophical passages in the great World War 1 novel All Quiet on the Western Front by  Remarque.

Remarque, Erich Marie. All Quiet on the Western Front. Toronto: Balantine Books, 1982

"In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae, read by Leonard Cohen. Courtesy Legion Magazine's YouTube channel. 

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien is a great book and a nerd's delight, but the first two books of it--which comprise Fellowship--really are a sequel that shouldn't have worked. A short children's fantasy gets followed by a thousand pages that essentially retcons your memories and makes them something else.

As a sequel to The Hobbit, Fellowship is a mess. Fortunately, it was so much more than just a sequel. 

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. London: Harper Collins. 2010. 

Paul--an agnostic at best--talks the importance of writing the faithful honestly and credibly in fiction, especially in a world that looks down upon faith. 

Paul's first true step into the deep and muddy pool of historical fiction. He reads Robert Grave's masterpiece I, Claudius, a book about those crazy Roman emperors and the women who killed them, plus the little boys who killed them. Depravity! Politics! Statecraft! And asides to talk about possessive apostrophe usage!

Paul talks audiobooks. 
And why Moby Dick sucks. 

Why do we read Shakespeare? Why does a poet and dramatist from London 400 years ago still play such and important part in our life? Answer: because we have to have the best.

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999.
Branagh, Kenneth. Hamlet. USA/UK: Columbia Pictures, 1996
McTiernan, John. Last Action Hero. USA: Columbia Pictures, 1993.
Shakespears Sister. "Stay." Hormonally Yours. London: London Records, 1992.  

Discussing the greatest comic book ever and one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century: Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Why is this such a great book? Why does it stick around despite being such a product of the mid-80s Cold War? It's been adapted (semi-successfully) as a film and sequeled (semi-bizarrely) as an HBO series, but it remains a comic book's comic book, and a work of art.   

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, DC Comics 2005
"Boneyard Tree" by The Watchmen. In the Trees, MCA Records 1994. 

Paul discusses what IS home and how characters can go home again, in a sense.

"Hell Broke Luce" by Tom Waits
"The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell (incorrectly referred to as "The Hero's Journey" in the podcast but Paul is too lazy to fix it)
"Home For a Rest" by Spirit of the West

Delving into one of Paul's favorite earths: Middle!

Texts:
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit by Corey Olsen
The Annotated Hobbit by Douglas A. Anderson. 

Discussing the major ideas in Plato's dialogues, especially his major work The Republic. What was this Socrates' guy's deal, anyway? Exploring the foundations of Western Civilization.