Final thoughts on Season 1, including more breastfeeding discussion, some Rage Against the Machine, and musing on the Steinbeckian saga of making this season of Read One Other Book.

Covered By Bruce Springsteen Tom Joad and John Hardy Roman Charity

If you liked Season 1 of Read One Other Book, let me know on Patreon, and follow my work there and on Cohost , Tumblr (for now), and Bluesky (if you must).

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I sit down with Sarah Zedig of Let's Talk About Stuff and Godfeels to watch John Ford's 1940 adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath into a major Hollywood motion picture!

From The New Republic: "In 1940, Nunnally Johnson wrote the screenplay for The Grapes of Wrath; after the blacklist, he authored How to Marry a Millionaire and How to Be Very, Very Popular."

Content warnings: discussion of John Ford's anti-Native American racism and misogyny.

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A preview of a short bonus series on E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros. Listen to the whole episode on Patreon!

working on Read One Other Book makes me sick!! † compressed storytelling † Lord Gro, a portrait † Eddison's own Red Wedding † Prezmyra raises some salient points † and flights of devils sing thee to thy rest † werewolf break † The Worm Ouroboros

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A preview of a short bonus series on E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros. Listen to the whole episode on Patreon!

fauns in the waste white noon † high fantasy is back baby it's good again † lesbian defense of Lauras Croft † zipping along † even on mercury there's no escape from white european racial panic † Eddison's modernity: The Truth Laid Bare, The Ultimate Nothing † some other stuff happens too

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A preview of a short bonus series on E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros. Listen to the whole episode on Patreon!

Do I like escapism? † y'all want a plot summary † The Murther of Gallandus † lengthy descriptions of rocks † shonen power creep for landscapes † an awkward dinner party in Witchland

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A preview of a short bonus series on E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros. Listen to the whole episode on Patreon!

Keeper's Normal Week † Eddison - Tolkien - Martin † Elden Ring † Medieval Furry Rave † Spelling Bee on Mercury † "I tie my purse with a spider's thread" † Quicksilver Dreams

This is structured much less as a read-along podcast like The Grapes of Wrath was and more like a broad overview of the first third or so of the book and some random parts I found interesting, just to give folks a taste of the strange appeal of a book that can be a little inaccessible at times. I recommend listening even if you're not planning on reading the book at all.

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An hour and a half on the last like 4 pages of The Grapes of Wrath. I trace the changing critical opinion on the infamous final scene down the decades and try to make sense of the book's Weird Gender Shit.

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More like read one other bible. Ma and Tom read from Ecclesiastes; I read from Thunder Perfect Mind for some reason. A culmination of the book's strangely spiritual transcendental unionism. I criticize the sparknotes consensus on the book's themes and replace them with some much more complicated and weird and indeed queer and socialist themes of my own.

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A rather scattered episode as the Joads leave the Weedpatch camp. I try unsuccessfully to elaborate on some dead end bits; Casey and Tom encounter the tangible fist of the invisible hand of the market; Steinbeck once again tries to explain in as clear terms as possible why the union makes us strong.

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A side character in about 4 pages total sends me on a quest to better understand Steinbeck's dodgy treatment of Native American characters. 

This episode is a bit of an experimental break from the rest of the podcast. I am IN NO WAY an expert on the subject matter, and decided the responsible thing to do would be to do some research. because the project is a document of my experience with the text, and because I really do NOT want to position myself as knowing more about Steinbeck, race, and the place of Native Americans within the literary canon and popular mythology than I actually do, this podcast isn't just my findings, but a narrative of my whole research process. Along the way I discover that Encyclopedia Britannica continues to be a questionable source, JSTOR still sucks, piracy rules, and there was an entire history of Cherokee and Chickasaw migrant workers moving from Oklahoma to California that Steinbeck... pretty much ignores.

I think this is an important subject for a bunch of reasons I talk about in the episode, so I hope I did it at least some justice, and that my description of my research process was useful (and maybe furthers my goals of destabilizing myself as the "expert critic").

The initial interview I mention is "Route 66, John Steinbeck, and American Indian Literature: an interview with Louis Owens" by David Dunway in Southwestern American Literature. I accessed this through Gale via the Seattle library.

The Cherokee Nation FAQ I reference can be found here: https://www.cherokee.org/about-the-nation/frequently-asked-questions/common-questions/?term=&page=2&pageSize=7

and the other articles I found on scihub are as follows: https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/466974 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.2307/40146630 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2012.86.3.33

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Another politics heavy episode, John finally drops the central metaphor of the book on us, I get distracted reading a bunch of stuff by Walter Benjamin, and characters have an awful lot to say about welfare reform being bullshit.

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The Joads arrive at Weedpatch Camp and take stock, while I slowly lose my entire mind as Seattle is menaced by Navy jets. Also featuring: utopian moments within a very dystopian story, an exploration of how we do a "queer reading" of a character like Ma Joad, and the agony of finding some safety... for a while... maybe.

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There's a lot of types of guy in The Grapes of Wrath. I talk about some of them. Also, I dig a bit into how I think Steinbeck humanizes his types of guy even when using them for comic relief, and struggle a bit with my own feelings on the tension between giving people dignity, and not simply excising messy, upsetting realities from our art and discourse.

Towards the end of the episode I continue the discussion from episode 5 about homeless encampments in Seattle and talk about some of the grim conditions, so cw for that from about 58 minutes or so onward.

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I can't figure out what the heck to say about the actual book so instead I get embroiled in terrible booktwit discourse and begin my transformation into an actual supervillain. This interlude is actually kind of useful in laying out exactly the popular attitudes towards "the literary canon" I'm trying to challenge with this project, but more importantly it allows me to make a bunch of jokes about putting on a garish costume and menacing people who are still mad about their 10th grade english class.

• q: are you starting actual cross-podcast beef? are you recruiting minions? can I have a dart gun?
• a: absolutely not I forgot the names of everyone involved about a second after I finished recording

Also I talk about seasonal structure, plotty chapters vs themey chapters, and how great Lost actually is.

Contains a brief clip of music by JG Thirwell.

Content warnings for the contents of The Grapes of Wrath, including ableism and family death.

This episode was originally published on my patreon last year for $3 backers.

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The protagonists of The Grapes of Wrath continue to question the police, Steinbeck prophesizes the inevitable triumph of the proletariat, and I wonder why on earth they not only let us but MADE us read a book that specifically applauds Marx and Lenin in American public school.

This one has some important content warnings. Midway through the initial recording, someone started having a loud, shouting mental breakdown outside my apartment. I cut out as much of that as I could and muted audio where I could but there may still be faint audible sounds of distress that may be upsetting. A portion of the podcast from there is also me working through my own distress and thoughts about the mismanagement of the housing crisis in Seattle. This podcast is also a political one, partly because I'm hitting some very polemical passages in the book itself, and I talk a lot about the dismal feeling state of the american federal government, and the possibility of a "great crackup". Also there continue to be content warnings for the contents of The Grapes of Wrath including animal and family death.

If you want to skip over it, the discussion of homelessness and this particular incident is from about 26 minutes to about 29 minutes.

There are things from the overall project that I've cut or redone for various reasons but I decided to let this stand because I don't think of this project as an essay or a polished Entertainment Product TM but an audio documentary. The intent was to have it be a documentary of me encountering a classic work of literature and trying to make sense of it live, without the filter of an essay format that would let me portray myself as an expert who has "solved" or "completed" the text. But inevitably as the project went on it's turned out that a documentary of my experience with a book is also a documentary of the reality of my life in this city, and in this country. The ethics of this kind of exploration are a consistent theme in the novel, and in this podcast, moving forward.

This episode was originally published on my patreon last year for $3 backers.

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Despite having, in point of fact, covid for the second time in three months when I recorded this one, I think this episode is where the podcast starts to really hit its stride. It's interesting listening to this again, actually, because there's a bunch of stuff in this that I do end up carrying through the whole novel and the whole podcast. In fact, there's stuff here that's kind of essential to understanding my maybe heterodox understanding of the infamous final scene of the book...

How's THAT for a season teaser?

Content warnings for the contents of The Grapes of Wrath, including bestiality jokes.

This episode was originally published on my patreon last year for $3 backers.

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Episode 2 is a bit of a weird and rough experience, as I was still treating the project pretty flippantly and am eating popcorn quite casually and rudely for part of the recording. I also remark in this episode that I felt like I was getting a bit of a cold.

Dear reader. It was not a cold.

Anyway this one is a bit of an uneven auditory experience, as a result.

Content warning for the contents of The Grapes of Wrath, and the kind of fucked up things that happen to people when you live in rural Oklahoma at the turn of the century.

This episode was originally published on my patreon last year for $3 backers.

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Have you ever found yourself irritably telling an over-enthusiastic fan of certain children's novels to "please read even one other book?" I have! And then I thought, maybe I should take my own advice!

The result is about 14 hours of me reading through John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and reacting to this book that over the last 80 years went from popular bestselling novel to a book bored high schoolers read the spark notes for.

Read One Other Book is a free form, diaristic podcast based in my personal experience and weaving my takes on the book in with events from my life. It's not a definitive take, an academic survey, or a polished scripted introduction to aid new readers, but rather just a woman reading a book and talking about it.

In a lot of ways, I suppose this is a response to the ongoing discourse on "democratizing knowledge" and my complicated feelings about how that discourse has mutated. I wanted to start from the premise that maybe "the classics" are often classic for a reason, and are worth reading not just because of what they can tell us, but because good books are enjoyable to read. I decided to put that to the test the best way I knew how: by reading a book that people bought in incredible numbers and seemed to enjoy reading, despite the fact that it's basically just one god damn crisis after another happening to basically likable characters.

This first episode is "Pilot Pilot", and was me first testing the waters for a series that itself is testing the possibilities of a metaseries. It was originally published on my patreon last year for $3 backers.

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