Welcome to a new episode of The Book Report! This week Mike and Janet talk about six literary villains they liked even though they weren’t supposed to.
Discussed in this episode: Jurassic World; Jeffrey Eugenides’s burn book; Janet in high school, again; crooked politicians; and what possibly could have been so bad about the tsarist regime.
The Book Report The Book Report is everyone's favorite weekly, literary show. Hosted by Janet Potter and Michael Schaub.
Welcome to a new episode of The Book Report presented by The Millions! This week, Janet and Mike are going Back 2 School. (They have 2 go Back 2 School because they think “to” is spelled “2.”) Each month, they’ll be reading books they never got around to reading in high school. This time, Janet picks up A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, and Mike trudges through A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.
Discussed in this episode: Jurassic World (dir. Colin Trevorrow), Southern Gothic fiction, fatalism, gentility, poverty, Catholic literature, linking verbs, World War I, love, Ron Swanson from Parks & Recreation, fireworks.
Not discussed in this episode: That scene in Evil Dead 2 (dir. Sam Raimi) when Ash traps his possessed hand under a can and weighs it down with a copy of A Farewell to Arms. Man, that was sweet.
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Welcome to a new episode of The Book Report presented by The Millions! This week, Janet and Mike get inspired by Harper Lee’s new Go Kill a Watchbird, and talk about sequels to classic books they’d like to discover.
Discussed in this episode: Go Set a Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, racist Atticus Finch, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Christmas Story by Charles Dickens, Scarface (dir. Brian De Palma), Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, The Family Stone (dir. Thomas Bezucha), Dermot Mulroney, Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes, Animal Farm by George Orwell, middle school plays, old-timey editorial cartoons, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, Scarlett O’Hara’s nonsense, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden Caulfield’s stupid cap, selling out, the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, the forgotten students of Hogwarts, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean Valjean.
Cut for time from this episode but likely to be included as an extra on the eventual DVD: 2 Naked 2 Dead by Norman Mailer.
Welcome to a new episode of The Book Report presented by The Millions! This week, Janet and Mike discuss political apathy and spooky teenagers. Like they do every week. But this time, we captured it on video!
Discussed in this episode: Get in Trouble by Kelly Link, On the Abolition of All Political Parties by Simone Weil (translated by Simon Leys), ghosts, vampires, werewolves, robots, holograms, teenagers, Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, National Public Radio, listeners like you, civil wars on planets with red water, socialism, Republicans, taxes, Democrats, the Free France movement, Charles De Gaulle.
Not discussed in this episode: California baseball, Starkweather homicide, children of Thalidomide, [guitar solo], Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur (dir. William Wyler), space monkey, Mafia, hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go.
Say what?! The Marriage Plot is about DFW, JE, and Mary Karr? I really need to go back and reared it. Really like this series. — reaching for the Beowulf directly.
Great episode! I had heard about the Wallace character in The Marriage Plot (and it was pretty obvious when I read it), but didn’t know about the triangle with Mr. Eugenides. Loved the book. Bold choice of Nixon as likable villain. He did like bowling. So he’s got that going for him.
Janet scores empathy points for Frankenstein & the Romanovs.
Mike makes an inspired choice with Nixon who, coincidentally, played a helluva piano.
But nobody picks Raskolnikov? Come on! DFW but no RRR? He’s like a 3rd-year MFA’er going into debt and…murder!
Re: Grendel–Mike should check out hot-shot 70s author John Gardner’s “Grendel,” which is an examination of 12 big ideas of civilization from the perspective of the “monster” who channels J. P. Sartre. Gardner was a short-lived literary lion back then, sort of a cross between John Irving, Robert Pirsig and Robert James Waller (!)
He died young (late 40s) in a motorcycle accident, which may have kept him from being as well-remembered as he deserves to be.
How about Count Fosco in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. He is so charming, witty and enlivens every page he is on, as opposed to the cardboard hero and heroines. And speaking of Counts, there is another I can think of who also brightens up the story he is in by his rare but very entertaining presence.