Bill and Joel read Studs Terkel's oral history "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do" which is about just that. Also a few tangents about other things.

Joel, Bill, and special guest star Martyn Wendell Jones dig through Adam Roberts's The Thing Itself: a nearly indescribable novel about Immanuel Kant, AI, time travel, James Joyce, literary experimentation, and many more things.

Bill, Joel, and Special Guest Christy go through Connie Willis's masterful and award-winning novel Doomsday Book!

Joel and Bill read Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie!

Joel and Bill read a bunch of books in 2020! They talk about what it's like to be reading in a pandemic, and how the many events of 2020 shaped their reading this year. Also, how good is Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, you guys? So good.

Bill and Joel read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, and lay to rest forever the question of whether or not Franzen is a good novelist! What's their answer? Well, you'll just have to listen to find out!

Joel and Bill dig through Charles Taylor's monumental tome "A Secular Age," an exhaustive survey of the differences between our age's relationship with religion in the 2000s and that of societies in the 1500s. It's a dynamite book, but it's about, well, *everything.*

Joel and Bill read Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay!

But first, given that it would have felt disingenuous not to, we talk a little bit about our Current Political Situation and both our hopes and fears about our growing reckoning with our system of policing, so the first 15 minutes or so of the podcast are about Politics, not the Book.

Bill and Joel read Phil Christman's new book Midwest Futures, which is about the history, self-conception, and future of the American Midwest, all in about 130 pages!

Bill and Joel start of Season Three with a book about nineteenth-century English magicians! Both of them loved this book to death!