The Big Read Cast

Jan 19 2025 42 ep. 111 mins 28

The Big Read Cast Podcast artwork

Reading too widely and talking too seriously.

Society & Culture

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Year in Reading: 2024

Jan 19 2025 95 mins

Joel and Bill go through most of the books they read in 2024!

Episode Twenty-Five: The Chronicles of Amber: The Corwin Cycle (October 2024)

Oct 21 2024 91 mins

Bill and Joel take a bunch of LSD and go to the Ren Faire. Or they read the first cycle in Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber. Same difference, really.

Guest Read Episode Four - Cahokia Jazz (July 2024)

Jul 09 2024 100 mins

Bill and Joel are joined once again by the great Phil Christman for a guest podcast, this one about Cahokia Jazz, the alternate-history noir written by the incomparable Francis Spufford!

Episode Twenty-Four: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (April 2024)

Apr 24 2024 87 mins

Joel and Bill wade through Laurence Sterne's wild and digressive masterpiece, and do their best not to get distracted throughout.

Year in Reading: 2023

Jan 29 2024 84 mins

Joel and Bill discuss the books they read in 2023 and some plans for 2024!

Episode Twenty-Three: Religio Medici & Urne-Buriall (November 2023)

Nov 01 2023 106 mins

Bill and Joel read a small but dense text: two essays by 17th-century doctor, philosopher, writer, and weirdo Sir Thomas Browne!

Episode Twenty-Two - A Fire Upon the Deep (August 2023)

Aug 28 2023 89 mins

Joel and Bill read Vernor Vinge's 1992 Hugo-award winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. It's the best book about group-mind dog packs either of them have ever read.

Episode Twenty-One - Life After Life (May 2023)

May 24 2023 97 mins

Joel and Bill return from their hiatus with a discussion of Kate Atkinson's novel Life After Life, which basically Groundhog Day but over the space of an entire life and in the first half of the 20th century.

Year in Reading: 2022

Jan 28 2023 118 mins

Bill and Joel go through some of the books they read in 2022!

Episode Twenty - The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (December 2022)

Dec 20 2022 150 mins

Bill and Joel read The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which covers his early life and his career in the Civil War, with extensive and excellent annotations by Elizabeth D. Samet, Bill only deploys a *few* Sherman memes.