The Bookening

We're talkin' Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, y'all, and the life of its author. And solving some mysteries about Jane Austen along the way. Or, at least, we create some mysteries for ourselves and then solve them. 

What did we LIKE about The Brothers Karamazov? Can our heroes mount a defense of the novel? Or will they just pat it and the head and say "well, not everybody can be Tolstoy"? LISTEN TO FIND OUT!

Dostoevsky has ruined souls. Or at the very least, he's the sort of writer that ruined souls are attracted to. That's the contention of this episode, one of our more hardcore eps in a while. Will The Bookening say anything nice about The Brothers Karamazov? Listen to find out. 

The word "broken" gets tossed around a lot these days, but Dostoevsky was truly a broken man. Our contextual Texan tells the story of his life, among other things, as The Bookening provides some much needed context on The Brothers Karamazov and its author.

This is an important update on the show. We're announcing our next Patreon goal, which is one very near and dear to our hearts, and one that we hope you'll help us make happen ASAP.

2020. It was such a great year that our show is still remembering it, talking about the best scenes, biggest surprises and best books they read in 2020. WILL BRANDON FINALLY CONFESS HIS LOVE FOR DUNE??????

Who was the best hero of the year? Who was the best heroine? Who was the best supporting character? Probably one of the sandworms from Dune, right? Probably all the answers come from Dune. In any case, our heroes are looking back on every book they read in 2020 and singling out the best of the best. Gandalf, Natasha, Atticus Finch, and others are all in the running. YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS IT! 

What is the best Christmas passage in literature? Nathan attempts to determine this crucial piece of information, in discussion with famed Irish poet, Brandon. 

2020 was a pretty great year here at The Bookening. We haven't been paying a ton of attention to what's going on in the outside world, but we assume everyone else loved 2020 just as much as we did.

In any case here's a short episode with the list of books we'll be reading in 2021, and a bit of discussion about them. Yay!

Oh, fine, here's the list in written form:

January: The Brothers Karamazov 

February: Northhanger Abbey 

March: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 

April: Invisible Man (Ellison) 

May: Watership Down 

June: Howl’s Moving Castle + Ready Player 2 

July: Rebecca  

August: Hamlet 

September: A Room With a View or A Passage to India 

October: Spoooooky Stories 

November: Ender’s Game 

December: Fathers and Sons 

January: A Tale of Two Cities 

Brandon provides some much-needed context on Frank Herbert and Dune, and Nathan and Jake make their arguments for why this novel is pretty okay, if you like that sort of thing. With a very special emergency guest appearance by Brandon's young daughter, who knows exactly what the fox says.