Happy Spooky Season! For this October we read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and you should too. Recommendations: * The Sonja Blue vampire novels by Nancy A. Collins * The netflix series The Haunting of Hill House * We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson * Both Shirley Jackson biographies For November we'll be reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein ..read more

Off with their heads! This month we sympathized less with French aristocrats than author BARONESS Emmushka Orczy might wish. Blakeney is a himbo, Marguerite lives in the pretty people bubble, and Batman is fascist.  Recommendations: *  Lauren Willig, Secret history of the Pink Carnation * Paula Volsky, Illusion * Simon Schama, Citizens  * Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (L’ancien Regime et la Revolution) * Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety  ..read more

Once upon a time, Jane Austen was a snarky teenager who had met too many goths. Gothic heroines that is. We read Northanger Abbey and found it bonkers and delightful. We found Regency social norms bonkers and stifling, much like the rooms of Bath. Mentioned in this episode: * The Red Tree by Caitlin Kiernan * The Great, tv show * The Monk by Matthew Lewis For next time we will be reading The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emma Orczy ..read more

This month we took a break from bonkers books to read just a very solid novel, Kindred by Octavia Butler. Works mentioned include: * Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall * Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead * Harriet Tubman's Daring Raid:  https://thenib.com/harriet-tubman-s-daring-civil-war-raid/  * The Thirteenth film by Ava Duvernay * Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James * Gateway to Freedom by Eric Foner * The End of Policing by Alex Vitale * The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander * Texas Tough: The Rise of Americas Prison Empire by Robert Perkison ..read more

Should you read North and South without seeing Richard Armitage play Mr. Thornton first? Our hosts say: mmmmmmaybe not. But we still (mostly) enjoyed reading it, and giving a hearty middle finger to Charles Dickens, whose fault it is that the book ends so abruptly. Other works mentioned:  E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class;  Sven Beckert  Empire of Cotton: A Global History  Mary Brinker Post, Annie Jordan Blood Brothers musical. Death Comes to Pemberly miniseries Babylon Berlin https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unjustly-overlooked-victorian ..read more

We read one of the best books of modern fairy tale retellings: The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. Mentioned in this ep: Snow White, Blood Red edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling Movie: Apostle The Girl from Raw Blood and Little Eve by Catriona Ward The Blue Salt Road  and  A Pocketful of Crows by   M Joanne Harris   " Snow Glass Apples " by  Neil Gaiman The Perilous Gard  by  Elizabeth Marie Pope The romance novels of Elizabeth Hoyt ..read more

We drank some drinks, read some Shakespeare, became a little audience-hostile, while still loving every single one of you! Yes, it's Love's Labour's Lost, a lesser Shakespeare play with questionable pacing, but still some charming moments. Mentioned in this ep: Jessica is not sure if it’s aged well, but has fond memories of Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged. Movie: Stage Beauty Shakepeare After All by Majorie Garber Much Ado About Nothing, esp the Branagh version National Theater Live ..read more

Fanny Parkes was a middle class British woman who kept a diary of her years in India, and was one of the first white women ever allowed within a zenana (harem). We discussed her perceptions of Indian culture, the British East India company, sexy wrestling in Bollywood movies, and whether you should go for a hike with Fanny. Mentioned in this episode... Indian cinema: Mangal Pandey: The Uprising Asoka Manikarnika  Thugs of Hindustan Books: Incarnations: India in 50 Lives  by  Sunil Khilnani  From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty ..read more

CONTENT WARNING: Byron's poetry contains lots of Orientalist language. He may have experienced and perpetrated sexual abuse and we discuss that all in this episode.  We read "Mazeppa" by Lord Byron, along with some of his other poetry, and discussed him and the young and foolish second generation of English Romantic poets.  We're all extremely on-brand in this episode. Linnea is obsessed with the Romantics' obsession with incest. Manik is obsessed with Germans. Jessica has a novel idea, and Reidan discovers the genesis of horse-girls. Mentioned in this episode: * How Byron invented t ..read more

With giant cats, the Devil as a stage magician, and a lot of concern about Pontius Pilates' migraines, we've never read a book that fulfilled the brief of this show more than this Russian novel written in the 1930s but not published until the 60s. It's also Daniel Radcliffe' s favorite book! Recommendations: * The film The Death of Stalin * Sabriel and its sequels by Garth Nix * The current HBO miniseries about Catherine the Great starring Helen Mirren * The Heart of a Dog also by Mikhail Bulgakov ..read more