Overdue

What makes a good ghost story? If you said creepy children, gothic architecture, and unreliable narrators, then Henry James has you covered The Turn of the Screw. 

This week Andrew mangles words, Craig gets lost in James' Victorian prose, and the two solve the mystery surrounding the ghosts of Bly.

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Good science fiction uses fantastical characters, locations, and technology to comment intelligently on problems that we face in the real world, but the best science fiction can also do this in a suspenseful, entertaining, adventuresome way. Frank Herbert's Dune gets most of the way there, but Andrew can't help but wish he had read it for the first time as a teenager instead of an adult.

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Billed as "The Greatest War Novel of All Time" on many a book jacket, All Quiet on the Western Front chronicles one soldier's harrowing experience in World War I. Our conversation tends toward the serious this week as we touch on the horrors of trench warfare, the issues soldiers face coming home from the Front, and the dehumanizing effects of modern warfare.

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How would you and your family react if you awoke one morning changed into a huge bug? In our kafkaesque discussion of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Craig and Andrew talk about communication issues, the ties that bind human beings together, and why explaining how things happened can actually make a story less meaningful.

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What book could possible be more overdue for a read than Beowulf, one of the oldest extant works of Anglo-Saxon literature?

Join us as we revel in Beowulf's heroic deeds, discuss the finer points of oral tradition, and wonder just who infused this Old English tale with a triple-shot of Christianity.

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Here on Overdue, it's definitely not going to be multi-layered critiques of religion and missives on love and cholera every week. Take this book as a case in point—Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has long been a favorite punching bag of Andrew's, but in the interest of trying new things and keeping an open mind, he's giving this decade-old potboiler a try.

His reactions are many and complicated. Join us for a conversation about why pop-lit is, well, popular, whether it's OK to judge a book by its cover, and some of Dan Brown's less successful sentences.

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When first performed on Broadway in 1964, Edward Albee's Tiny Alice frustrated and discomfited audiences with its metaphysical critiques on faith and religion. It is no less opaque today (at least for Craig), and reading rather than seeing it performed certainly makes things more difficult.

The play's density aside, we do manage to discuss cantankerous authors, symbols within symbols, and staging the supernatural.

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Florentino Ariza, the ostensible protagonist of Gabriel García Márquez' Love in the Time of Cholera, has had 622 distinct sexual partners in the 51 years, nine months, and four days that he has waited for Fermina Daza, his true love. We talk about each and every one of them in this week's episode.

Well, no, not really. But we do have a long and sort of disjointed conversation about cholera, geography, aging, and the nature of love, which befits the disjointed nature of the story itself.

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Did you pay attention in ninth grade English? Craig did, sort of. This week he reads – or rereads, he’s not sure – John Steinbeck’s classic tale of Depression-era migrant workers. Topics of conversation include foreshadowing, hoosegows, and male camaraderie.

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