Book Club with Julia and Victoria

Jan 11 2025 104 ep. 56 mins 9

Book Club with Julia and Victoria Podcast artwork

Welcome to Book Club With Julia and Victoria, the podcast for book friends!

If you just finished a book and HAVE to talk about it with someone, if you’re a casual reader looking for book recs, or if you’re the type of deep thinker who has formative memories of their high school English teacher, you’re in the right place.

We believe a good book can come from anywhere, so we read classics and recent releases, bestsellers and little-known gems. But ultimately, this podcast is for the books we just can’t shut up about.

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V&O: Fledgling by Octavia Butler – Ethical Vampirism

Julia and Victoria discuss the last vampire book of The Vampire & the Octopus series and then get very excited about two questions: Are there any ethical choices under vampirism? And, if so, are ethical vampires even interesting?

V&O: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor — Octopus Novels of the Future

Julia and Victoria read The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor, a book about an island that is possibly mountainous and may be either in or on the sea, TBD. There are also incredible octopuses and monk robots and workers revolts and lots of long, cynical speeches about the supposed nature of humanity.

V&O: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Julia makes her case of why the creature in Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is NOT really a vampire, and Victoria makes a counterargument that it is actually the MOST vampire. They are both generally infuriated with everyone in this novel except Mrs. Green. Content Warning: mentions of sexual violence.

V&O: The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller — The Octopus in Captivity

Julia and Victoria read a pandemic book called The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller where the octopus is not the focus of the story, but is at the heart of the book’s major themes of captivity and embodiment. Victoria makes the ill-advised choice to revisit some of her early-pandemic journals.

V&O: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda — Parenting Your Inner Baba Yaga

Julia and Victoria get very hungry talking about the trope-flipping, contemporary vampire novel Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda.

V&O: Sea Change by Gina Chung — Loneliness & Adaptation

Julia and Victoria discuss Sea Change by Gina Chung and how authors use the octopus to contemplate loneliness and change. They discover that life really is about the friends we made along the way in this first book of The Vampire & the Octopus series.

V&O: The Vampire in Storytelling, a Bite-Sized History

Victoria teaches Julia all about the origins, tropes, and metaphors of vampire lore that create the undead monster we read about today. They discuss the origins of vampire stories in Slavic folklore, the Great Vampire Epidemic of the 18th century, the blood-sucking breakup novel Lord Byron’s “travel companion” wrote about him, and lament the loss of a key source for Victoria�

V&O: The Octopus in Literature, an Equal, Intelligent Other

Julia takes Victoria on a deep dive of octopus stories throughout time and space in this first episode of The Vampire & the Octopus series. We tackle questions like “Are octopus stories a form of colonizer horror?” and “What’s with all the octopus books coming out recently?” and “Why did the 19th century French think the octopus was the physical embodiment of hell?”

Bonus: Disability Humor & Creating in Community with Steven Verdile

Julia discusses disability, comedy, creativity, and treating people like people with Steven Verdile, the founder of the disability satire publication The Squeaky Wheel.

123 Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield — Monsters of the Deep Subconscious

Julia and Victoria learn what the word “flannel” means in British English and formulate their own theories about what happened to a stranded deep-sea researcher in the devastatingly beautiful novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. Views expressed on Book Club with Julia and Victoria and bookclubwithjv.com are solely those of the hosts and not necessarily those of the