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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

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’s, A Place of Greater Safety 

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

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

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-novelist-elizabeth-gaskell

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

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

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

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 the wild horse trope:  https://lithub.com/how-lord-byron-invented-the-wild-horse/  * Spoken word Mazeppa  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Jc4-vjjcE  * Cats in black  https://i.pinimg.com/originals/46/69/26/4669262769189837a77de36fc26d1ea8.jpg  * Lizst's "Mazeppa" * Young Romantics by Daisy Hay *The Shadow of The Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón * Greta Gerwig's Little Women * Persuasion by Jane Austen * Puskin's "Poltava" and Eugene Onegin

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

This month we did something a little different. Linnea and Reidan read On Witchcraft by Cotton Mather, and Jessica and Manik read Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. We discussed Cotton Mather's interminable sentences (and sermons!), Malleus's more metal moments, including a tree full of dongs (I kid you not), and the surprising origins of inoculation in the American Colonies. Recommendations and stuff we mentioned: * The King Missile song Detachable Penis  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIUk08iYZKE  * The CW show Reign, now on Netflix * Brookland by Emily Barton * A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness *  The VVitch (A24 films) (2015)  * Season 1 of the Unobscured podcast Photos of an early printing of On Witchcraft are available at bonkersbook.com

Is it a classic? Yes. Is it well-written? Ehhhhhhhhh, not as such. Is it worth reading? If you are well-warned for homophobic language, fatophobia, ageism, and ableism. Valley of the Dolls was one of the first Trashy Novels, and like many trashy novels there's more to it than meets the eye. Join Linnea and Jessica as they talk about the dawn of the modern book tour, dolls (pills), Hollywood, shitty men, and wig-snatching scene for the ages. Recommendations and books mentioned: Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam Millenium Girl by Coerte Felske First Wives Club and others by Olivia Goldsmith Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

We love gender-bending protagonists around here, and Orlando is the mother of them all. We talk Bloomsbury, whether Orlando is a self-insert of Virginia Woolf or her lover Vita Sackville-West (Or Lobelia Sackville-Bagins), a new Cumberbatch-esque name, and frankly the best fanfic idea we've had yet.  Recommendations Read Orlando! The web comic Oglaf (very NSFW) Gentleman Jack on Netflix Big Little Lies on HBO

For July, Bastille Day, and in recognition of the tragic fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral, we read the architecture treatise with a little plot known as Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo. Along the way Linnea rants about Baroque (or maybe Rococo) decor, and we have a good healthy debate over who is worse, Phoebus or Frollo.  Recommendations: Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame The French rock opera of same The movie The Story of Adele H, about Victor Hugo's daughter

WARNING: This episode contains mentions of sexual assault right from the jump because there's a lot of it in this book. This month we discuss Candide by Voltaire. SPOILER ALERT: We hated it! Listen to find out more about the death of one-name superstar Voltaire, red sheep, and why we need Nick Cage for a project. Also, this is the first time we've tried editing in a musical cue ( Camille Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre, for reasons that will become evident) so apologies if it sounds sloppy. Recommendations:   Don't read Candide if you can avoid it  The Work of the Dead by Thomas Laquer This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hagglund Nancy Collins’s Sonja Blue novels The Good Place Pet Semetary by Stephen King (and the I Don’t Even Own a Television Podcast on the book)

We're back this month with the second half of Vanity Fair, rejoining Becky, Amelia, Dobbin, and some new faces, the Marquis of Steyne and some children being raised more and less well. We discuss shawls, colonialism, sex and shopping novels, how Becky has receipts, and Thackery: Secret Marxist? Recommendations: An 1865 review of Vanity Fair in Atlantic Magazine  https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/classrev/vanityfa.htm  The romance novels of Courtney Milan and Tessa Dare Millenium Girl by Coerte Felske (I cannot vouch for how well or not this has aged, but it is a sex and shopping novel) The Road to Vindaloo by David Burnett and Helen Saberi The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple, also this essay about the East India Company as the original corporate raiders  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders 

For April and May, we are reading William Makepeace Thackeray's doorstop of a serial novel, Vanity Fair. Part 1 follows Becky Sharp and her frenemies from the beginning of the novel to their time in Brussels (after that pesky Corsican dug his way out of jail, we're assuming with an early prototype of the Spork).  We discuss Thackeray's literary influences, the influence of the Regency period on romance novels today, and the historical impact of the Napoleonic era through to World War One. We also, importantly, dig into Thackeray's racist opinions and how they unfortunately come through in this novel and his other work.  There were some technical difficulties while recording, so we thank you for your patience, and we thank co-host Manik Hinchey for her deep dive into the Napoleonic Era. Fascinating stuff! Recommendations to come next month, but the BBC miniseries and the 2000s Reese Witherspoon adaptation are both good.

Beware the Ides of March! In this extra-adult episode we discuss 6 of the 12 Caesars, Roman superstitions and modern, HBO's Rome, and was Suetonius a scandal monger? (Yes.)Recommendations: The History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan BBC History Extra podcast, had an excellent recent episode about Agrppina the Younger Emma Southon book on Agrippina (Most biographies on Roman women are written by men, so this is neat)  Hardcore History podcast one off episode on Caesar’s war in Gaul titled “Celtic Holocaust”  Fiction: Augustus, by John Williams; Non-fiction: The Death of Caesar, by Barry Strauss (he has a very interesting theory on Caesar’s death) Mysteries writers Steven Saylor and Lindsey Davis

For February, we read Silence, a 13th century chivalric romance about crossdressing knights. We discussed medieval misogyny, other cross-dressing knights in fiction, like Brienne of Tarth, and King Evan, the d-bag.Recommendations:The Song of the Lioness by Tamora PierceThe Bone Doll's Twin by Lynn FlewellingPope Joan by Donna Woolfolk CrossTo celebrate the Ides of March, we will be reading Suetonius's Twelve Ceasars--well, 6 of them, up through Nero.

Coincidences abound in this wonderfully tart book of romance and wish-fulfillment. We discuss Valency's moral growth or lack thereof, Barney Snaith's filial duties, plot-convenient tuberculosis, and the most important question of all: did they bang?Recommendations: read this book if you haven't already, or read it again if it's been a while!Please support us on Patreon, rate and review. For next month we are reading the 13th century chivalric romance Silence.