The English Club Podcast

It's time for the flood! The most baffling YA "Fantasy" "Speculative Fiction" trilogy is finally over.

Everyone and their mother (in my social circle, literally) is reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. But like, why? It seems like yesterday when litrpg as a genre was an obscure chimera isolated to certain Internet subcultures. A trancelike world untouched by the Freytag Pyramid bepopulate with a self-insert main character and a list of monsters from DnD. How did Dungeon Crawler Carl—which to an outsider’s eye is part and parcel with the works that preceded it—achieve this outplaced virality? Entrance into the closely-guarded annals of modern literary canon? Does Dungeon Crawler Carl, like a certain species of lobe-finned fish which hundreds of millions of years ago stepped warily onto land, represent the adolescent stage of a slow but determined evolution of its kind? Or have the gatekeepers of literary canon, those silent unknowable communicants whose whims determine the intellectual vector of our species, grown soft? Weary? Desperate to welcome in a novitiate born not of greed, but creative frenzy?Idrk. But we had fun talking about it hope u enjoy!!!

I wanted more Sopranos. I compromised. I googled “mafia romance books like the sopranos” and picked up Ruthless People by J.J. McAvoy. I wanted to talk about the Sopranos. All I have is a booktube channel. I compromised. I talked about this book instead. You see where I’m goin’?The sacred and the propane meet in a mafia romance deep dive! Join Andrew and his friend Evin (an exchange student from Boca) as they waste an hour trying to talk about a book that promised much and gave us… something. Will we manuj to get the drop on this book, or will we remain loyle to our capo? Is it fair to compare a market romance book to what’s considered to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time? NOPE! I wish the lord would take me now. Anyway, $4 a pound.

It's SBU’s first movie! And last Rich Shapero review. I think for real. Like, abstractly these books are interesting to talk about, but they're all just... so much. So this time we have our normal book review and deep dive stuff, but we also have a (semi) found-footage horror movie to frame it to keep things interesting. Why? What does this add? Will this do anything but create a bad review and a poorly-paced movie? *SFX: RIDICULOUSLY LOUD PIG SQUEAL* I hope you guys enjoy!

ROLLER COASTER ROLLER COASTER ROLLER COASTER

Lightlark is back, baybeee! We've met Alex Aster, we've shaken her hand in diplomatic friendship, and now she either betrays or rewards us with what is quite literally Lightlark: In Space!! Stop me if you've heard this before: a big scary extraterrestrial wants to conquer the universe and gain possession of GEMs which are INFINITE.Aster-al adventures await on this historic episode of the English Club Podcast--now with video!ABOUT US:English Club Podcast is a joint venture between two critique partners at "Saint Balasar University". The goal of each episode is to give notoriously "bad" fiction a chance for fair critique, as if the authors were members of a writing group themselves.

Modelland by Tyra Banks is a fantasmagorical nightmare dreamworld where anything can happen! Join the SBU English Club as they recount the misadventures of Tookie de la Creme, who doesn't really do much. But her mom, Creamy de la Creme, is pretty interesting I guess. I don't know. I'm just writing something so I can make this video more searchable. Literary analysis, literary deep dives, critique group, Tyra Banks, Tyra Banks Rabies, book podcast, booktube. Stuff like that. I don't really know how this stuff works. But we're really glad you're here!

It may be the one thing The SBU English Club categorically is not—writing advice. Top 10 Easy Ways to Plot a Scene! Top 3 Things to NEVER put in Dialogue! As much as we joke, there’s no such thing as writing points. The answer to any writing question is always “it depends”.So when you’re an authortuber, say iWriterly, and you build a brand of laws about writing and a fanbase who knows your maxims by heart, it can be hard to write a book of your own. Sometimes, you break writing rules on purpose, and at other times you do it by accident. The end result is the same.The Cyborg Tinkerer is not a good book, in our opinion. But COULD it have been? Was the outplaced hate for this book the result of a mismatch between Meg LaTorre’s YouTube audience and the kind of people that would like a book of this… caliber???Andrew (he/him) and Jay (they/them) travel to a magical place untouched by booktok, and unravel the steamy steampunk snarky whatever the heck else secrets within!

It's not a secret, and we're not about to be contrarians: reviews for The Age of Scorpius are not very good. There's no question that this is not the ideal version of this story. Only one single question is left: what does Audra Winter do now?She says she's rewriting this book, hiring editors and all kinds of artists to realize the world of Gardian. Which is all well and good, especially if you're hiring human artists. The world is, despite what the LLC might tell you, not very well-developed, the characters are awkward, and the plot seems very convenient and by the numbers. But does any of that matter when your prose is littered with misused words?Here at SBU, we're real life critique partners at a fictional university. Our hosts J (they/them) and Andrew (he/him) focus on elevating panned and/or controversial books by offering actionable advice, and leaving out booktok drama as much as possible. But when your entire existence is predicated on booktok fame, is there any avoiding it? Are unpleasant Internet figures truly our enemy, when so many forces are set against the continued existence of books as we know them? All this and more is... not really answered, but definitely discussed, in another action-packed episode of the SBU English Club Podcast!Music by Benjamin Davis

Long before booktok was an even worse place known as SomethingAwful. A squalid, terrible place, it nonetheless gave birth to many characters that have become Internet darlings--such as Nick "ulillillia" Smith.Ulillillia is one of the coolest people ever; despite a hard childhood of video game-induced phobias, he mastered the art of self-improvement by conceiving of his perceived faults as EXP bars in an RPG. Unfortunately, however, his debut novel The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters is a bit of a mess. Join Andrew and J in another book deep dive and analysis through the sands of time, and see just what the adventures of Knuckles and Speed can offer writers--particularly those interested in LitRPG and adjacent genres.