The Bookening

Merry Christmas everybody! From Nathan, Jake, Brandon, and all your friends at Warhorn Media. :) 

We start the New Year with Anna Karenina. Pay attention for some fun surprises before that though...

It's A Christmas Carol. Yay!_ _Merry Christmas from The Bookening!

Today our heroes discuss that odious old sinner, Ebeneezer Scrooge—and the sinner who created him, Mr. Charles Dickens. Unlike the socially conscious entertainers of today (say, George Clooney), Mr. Dickens knew how to make his points so charmingly that you sort of want to go along with him—even when he's hammering you over the head with them. Or do you?

Will Jacob Mentzel be more like Jacob Marley, and say "humbug" to this humble tale? Will Nathan obsess over the spooks and phantoms, or find a little Christmas cheer? Will Brandon join with his younger self in loving Dickens or give in to the more critical appraisals of modern scholarship?

You'll have to listen to find out. 

Click here to buy the book from Amazon. 

Coming next month, Leo Tolstoy's kinda mind-blowing Anna Karenina.

The epic conclusion of our series re: _Gilead _by Marilynne Robinson. Our heroes examine John Ames, Jack Boughton, the nature of true godliness, and cheap redemption versus earned redemption in storytelling. 

Also ... WILL THE MYSTERIOUS PHANTOM PREVAIL???????????

Click here to buy the book from Amazon. 

Coming in December,  _A Christmas Carol _by Charles Dickens. And, hey, _Anna Karenina _is a big book and a great one. Get reading now, so you can join our discussion come January. 

Our heroes discuss their first modern (as in, the author is still alive) novel: Mailynne Robinson's _Gilead. _Also they discuss the nature of best friendship, the first PG-13 movie they ever saw, and why Denny Elfman's _Batman _score was far superior to the music for the Christopher Nolan Batman movies. 

Complications ensue when they are accosted by the dreaded Mysterious Phantom.

Click here to buy the book from Amazon. 

Coming in December, a yuletide spectacular to close out the year, as our heroes discuss _A Christmas Carol _by Charles Dickens

It's another flesh-creeping festival of the uncanny, as our heroes discuss everything there is to discuss about Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Just for fun, here's some snippets from original reviews of _Dracula _back in 1897, some of them complimentary, some of them not so much:

The German man of science is particularly poor, and indulges, like a German, in much weak sentiment. Still, Mr. Stoker has got together a number of “horrid details,” and his object, assuming it to be ghastliness, is fairly well fulfilled. (The Athenaeum)

[T]he short way of dealing with vampires is to destroy them ... A shorter and more certain cure seems not to have occurred to the eminent men of science who figure in Mr. Stoker’s pages. The vampire depends  for his “peskiness” simply on his canines. Why not call in a dentist to play the part of the God from the Car? He could sterilise the fiercest vampire. But if the learned German Van Helsing had seen this obvious cure Mr. Stoker could not have written a grim, weird, and fascinating story, and that would have been a thousand pities. (Country Life)

One of the most curious and striking of recent productions is a revival of a mediaeval superstition, the old legend of the “were-wolf,” as illustrated and modernised by Mr. Bram Stoker, in the book which he entitles “Dracula.” (Hampshire Advertiser)

The recollections of this weird and ghostly tale will doubtless haunt us for some time to come ... Tribute must also be paid to the rich imagination of which Mr. Bram Stoker here gives liberal evidence. Persons of small courage and weak nerves should confine their reading of these gruesome pages strictly to the hours between dawn and sunset. (The Daily Mail)

We have been reminded how easy it was in the ages of credulity to avoid overstepping the boundaries of belief. But in Mr. Bram Stoker a writer has arisen who intrepidly assumes that mediaeval gullibility is in full survival. (The Argus)

Mr. Bram Stoker should have labelled his book “For Strong Men Only,” or words to that effect. Left lying carelessly around, it might get into the hands of your maiden aunt who believes devoutly in the man under the bed, or of the new parlourmaid with unsuspected hysterical tendencies. “Dracula” to such would be manslaughter. (Pall Mall Gazette)

Coming in November: our heroes will look deeply into their own souls as they discuss _Gilead _by Marilyn Robinson.

It's October, Nathan's favorite month of the year! And as good as excuse as any to make his friends read one of the hallmarks of weird fiction, Bram Stoker's _Dracula. _

But first, Nathan and Brandon team up to offer some flesh-crawling context for this creepy-crawly chronicle of cruel carnality! Brandon tells us all about 19th century invasion literature, and Freudian theories of sex and the subconscious_ _(which are kinda unavoidable for this particular work). Nathan gives us a quick overview of vampire tales from Assyrian pottery shards to Bela Lugosi. Then Jake does some pastoral pondering about just why the heck people like vampires stories anyway.

Somehow our heroes get from there to Jake's theory that that hack Professor Tolkien stole the entire plot for _Lord of the Rings _from Bram Stoker. At least Bram didn't have any deus eagles machina. But that's getting away from our larger point, which is that you should listen to this episode of The Bookening.

Trivia: by complete happenstance, our heroes ended up recording this episode at around midnight in a building that was completely dark and deserted besides the room where they were recording. In Part 2 (coming next week) you'll hear something happen which may or may not sound all that creepy, but actually was pretty creepy in the moment.

Next month, we'll be reading a novel with (we're just guessing here) 100% less horrible demonic bloodsucking Transylvanian monsters: _Gilead _by Marilyn Robinson.

So we'll get to Macbeth in a second, but first ... apparently Hillary Clinton is a Shakespeare truther. There's this article in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and if you read it you'll see that she, like, went out of her way to bring up the subject. Nobody asked her what she thought about Shakespeare. They just asked her what literary figure she'd like to have dinner with, and she decided to be cute and say "Shakespeare" because she'd like to see who really showed up. So yeah. If you needed another reason to believe that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare, there's that.

Anyway, this is another episode of The Bookening. In fact it's part 2 of our series about Macbeth. You'll hear lots of discussion about our friends the Macbeths, and what we think makes them tick. Our heroes also argue that the witches are just that—witches.

Next month we turn to the Prince of Darkness Himself: Dracula.

Yes, sir, this is an episode of The Bookening about _Macbeth. _In it our heroes discuss _Macbeth. _You should listen to it. It's good. You'll learn lots about Macbeth. Which is a surprisingly thorny play to discuss. After all, just what is so great about a play re: some thug and his castrating shrew of a wife murdering a bunch of people and then feeling bad about it and making a bunch of speeches? 

In this episode we discuss the monsters in Beowulf, Grendel, his mother, and the dragon. Why monsters? Why fight them? Is the modern urge to feel sympathy for Grendel justified?

Then we figure out What It All Means. Is Beowulf some kind of elaborate Christian apology? Or is it just a cool poem about a bro fighting some demons or whatev?

After that, Jake goes to battle with Brandon again, in an attempt to reclaim his Kenning Contest honor.

In today’s episode of The Bookening, we discuss how poems differ from novels, the character of Beowulf as a dudely dude, and the appropriate time to brag about how many sea monsters you’ve killed. Then Brandon and Jake go to war in an epic kenning-guessing context. It’s intense.