UNspoiled! Mixed Media Club

Hello, me hearties! Make yourself a nice cup of tea and mind the gap, because Miles and I are here to talk to you about Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman.
Art Credit: https://www.deviantart.com/algesiras/art/Neverwhere-Characters-373759105
I'm so glad that this book was fun to read, because after not liking a couple books in a row, I was a little worried when I saw that Neil Gaiman was the next author on the list. Not to say that I don't like his writing, but overall I haven't been quite as impressed with him as many other readers seem to be, and I was worried that I might get a lukewarm rehashing of some other mythology in this book. I'm happy to say that is not the case.
Neverwhere is super imaginative and strange and a little sad, and I love everyday things in the real world being given fantastical hidden aspects. I also thought that the handling of a secret world was handled really well, as it didn't portray the people who have "fallen through the cracks" as the lucky citizens of some gorgeous underground kingdom. Nope, these folks live with constant danger, various levels of filth, and the knowledge that they will go unseen, perhaps forever.
This was a really interesting book and it was a lot of fun to talk about. If you're interested in buying it to read, check it out here: https://amzn.to/2AT5F6D
Next month's books are Johnny Tremain and The Dead Zone, which you can buy here!
Johnny Tremain: https://amzn.to/2OVawXV
The Dead Zone: https://amzn.to/2OV9lrK
Thanks a million for listening, and I will see you in 2 weeks!

Hey there, lovely listeners! Welcome to the first installment in the Childhood Favorites sub-feed of the Book Club!
I'm super excited to be doing my first show with guest Rachel Rosing, who is one of the hilarious co-hosts of Beckett To The Future: A Quantum Leap Podcast. You can find out more about her show here! https://www.beckettfuturepod.com/
This was such a good book, you guys. There is some annoying stuff that we really noticed reading it as grown women, don't get me wrong. Charlotte and Fern and Fern's mom and Mrs. Zuckerman are the ones actually handling their shit while the men just sweep in and get all the credit. HOWEVER. It's still a really well-written and emotional story that is shockingly bittersweet and I'm frankly still sad about it.
Thanks so much to you all for listening, and I will see you in two weeks with Neverwhere, which you can pick up here to read along. https://amzn.to/2LJ1q1T
You can pick up Charlotte's Web here, if you haven't already got a copy: https://amzn.to/2LJr5qZ
And you can get the August Childhood Favorite, Johnny Tremain, here! https://amzn.to/2v35noH

Well this was the most lively Book Club episode in a while!

Eleanor & Park was a book that I fully expected to dislike, based on the tone of some reactions I got when I said I would be covering it, and on some random commentary here and there on social media. However (and maybe it's just because I was coming off a couple of books I really didn't like very much) I actually enjoyed this book!

Candace, my cohost, did not.

The episode actually turned out to be really interesting because Candace and I started off from such different places and gradually began to uncover where our perspectives were coming from and why we saw certain things the way that we did. In particular our discussion of domestic violence and the role it plays in this book evolved over the course of the episode and I think we both saw that there we were bringing some of our own baggage to the table on that, with vastly different results.

I would definitely be interested in hearing what you all thought of the book (if you read it) because I'm aware that there are further arguments to be made about some of the points that Candace brings up.

Thanks so much for listening, and I will see you in 2 weeks with Charlotte's Web!

Alright, Patrons, please tell me what I ever did to you? Because this is 2 books in a row now that I didn't really like at all, and the blame lies squarely with YOU, my "friends"!

Okay that's not entirely fair, because I didn't hate The Atrocity Archives the way that I hated most of A Dirty Job, but I'm not a huge fan. It's not something that I would pick up again, or recommend, and Krista (who generously agreed to cohost again after the disaster last month) liked it even less than I did.

Really when you step back and look at the whole thing, I had a lot of the same problems with this book as I did with A Dirty Job (minus the racial stereotyping). It was a hugely creative idea with a ton of potential, and took place in a world I found really entertaining and compelling. But sadly, this writer couldn't get out of his own way when it came to things like referencing super-nerdy inside jokes (specifically IT jokes) and going way too in-depth about the tech. Maybe the knowledge he brought to the book was meant to be impressive, but nowadays it's not only out-of-date but feels really superfluous to a population that can simultaneously be pretty adept at working with computers while knowing nothing about how they actually work.

I really loved the concept of a bunch of Nazis that literally ran away through a portal to another planet and hid there, then got jumped by their own monster. Huge fan of this idea. But really, they get lured there because he has to rescue his kind-of girlfriend? Who is one of only three (okay technically four) women in the entire book? Ugh. I GUESS.

Anyway, I would be interested to hear what you all thought of this book, so hit me up and let me know!

Hey everyone. Bad news is, we lost the episode due to some miscommunications on my part. On the plus side, I really didn't like this book and I feel no urge to make time to re-record it. So here's a short blurb on why I feel the way I do, and I will see you all next month with The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross, which you can buy here! https://amzn.to/2IpUSmU

I'm here with the next installment of the UNspoiled! Book Club, and this time it's Jaime Smith joining me to talk about The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. This is a book from a unique perspective, to say the least, and it's understandable why it's grown as acclaimed as it has.

However, I have to be honest. I didn't love this book. Don't get me wrong, it's a really captivating idea and overall I found the plot to be interesting, as well as the peeks at how ordinary Germans who weren't in danger of camps lived during the Second World War. All of that was compelling and frankly lined up with America in 2018 in ways that I found to be unnerving.

But the prose was simply not my cup of tea, and I found it really distracting. The term Jaime used was "purple prose" and I think that comes the closest to describing it. There are times when using words in unusual and unexpected ways can work for an author, and bring special attention to a certain moment, but in this book the wild phrasing and pulpy descriptions happened every other sentence. I would spend more time thinking about the previous sentence and whether that really worked than I would spend paying attention to the story.

But like I said, I didn't hate this book. It simply didn't wow me the way I had expected from the way in which people talked about it. I would be very interested to hear what you thought of it!

If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here: https://amzn.to/2qFzbVX

And if you're ready to move onto the May book, A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore, you can find that book here! https://amzn.to/2qFDC2h

My main takeaway after reading this book was a sense of surprise at how much of the book was virtually unchanged for the movie, and how much that worked on-screen, while being impressed at the detail of story aspects that wouldn't have been interesting on-screen at all. Basically, if you asked me whether the book or the movie was better, I wouldn't be able to answer because I feel that they were each perfectly suited to the medium in which the story was being told. For the movie, you can gloss over the logistics and the science and the backstory on all the characters, and just focus on the adventure and the danger of the dinosaurs, and that resulted in a classic film that holds up unbelievably well to this day. However, the logistics and science and backstory are really compelling to me (NERD ALERT!) and I deeply enjoyed reading about them.

Overall I was just really surprised at how much I enjoyed this, even though there are sections of the plot that Money and I realized didn't make much sense upon closer inspection. Or else there were plot threads that were entirely dropped. But that's okay, no book is perfect.

I hope you all enjoy listening, and if you haven't read this book and you'd like to, you can get it here: http://amzn.to/2FgdEss

For next month's The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, you can go here! http://amzn.to/2oRVDJE
Thanks again everyone, and have a great weekend!

In which RoShawn and I discuss white fragility and the realities of racism.

My apologies for the lateness on this post! I had some sound issues and then my site got hacked, so I had it posted to Patreon but forget to schedule it for release on iTunes! I hope you can forgive me. And I hope you enjoy the show!

In which Candace and Natasha discuss this delightful bit of fantasy wrapped in a ribbon of interesting ladies and overdramatic men.