Unfortunately Required Reading

This week Amanda and Victoria do an unnecessary deep dive into Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott and discuss how he created Scottish tourism.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss the massive historical inaccuracies of John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and real-life drama.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss the god Dionysus and the play The Bacchae by Euripides.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss the novella The Vampyre by John Polidori (NOT LORD BYRON), and how it helped create the vampire genre we know today.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss another book that probably should have been a trauma indicator, Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voight...also Anime Horse Girls

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss the epic poem by Virgil (or Vergil), The Aeneid. Also, our weird obsession with bunt cakes.

Welcome to our first "Book Club" episode, as Amanda and Victoria discuss Sinners, Conclave and the atrocious Lilo and Stitch live action. Fair warning: there's no outline, no script, and plenty of tangents. Back to our regularly scheduled programming in July!

This week Amanda and Victoria explore Simone de Beauvoir's exploration of women, The Second Sex, and discuss intersectionality and a whole blend of modern-day f**kery.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Uncle Tom's Cabin and its enduring (and destructive) legacy.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss the possible series finale of the US by talking about Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and his accurate, and not so accurate, talking points.

This week Amanda and Victoria celebrate Victoria's birthday month with A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and the legacy of New Orleans.

Somehow in this economy we get Baron Von Cheeseplate back on the show to discuss William Goldman's The Princess Bride, as well as how much we all hate that weird Evangelical puppet, Douglas.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Henry James' novella, The Turn of the Screw. After Daddy's Little Harbinger shows up (Mothman) our audio started to have some problems, the episode crashing twice. The rest of his death story is posted on UnfortunatelyRequiredReading.com for the curious.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss the Daniel Quinn book of Socratic dialogue with a gorilla, Ishmael.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Robert Graves' epic I, Claudius, and immediately questioning Graves' concepts of history.

Happy Birthday Month to Amanda! This month, we discuss Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird (and Victoria actually does the shortest short story long.)

This month Amanda and Victoria discuss City of Night by John Rechy for Pride Month and discuss the old ways and the new of Queer community and acceptance.

Baron Von Cheeseplate joins Amanda and Victoria to discuss Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, and the impact of this work on pop culture.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, Manifest Destiny, the Minnesota Massacre, the lie of Westward expansion and why neither host can spell prairie.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Lady Chatterley's Lover, sex politics, and what DH Lawrence means by a "crisis."

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, and the myth of typical femininity.

This month Amanda and Victoria discuss Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, traumatic childhood abuse, and the utterly depressing life of Franz Kafka.

Baron Von Cheeseplate returns to discuss 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne with Amanda and Victoria.

For Spooky Month Amanda and Victoria discuss Stephen King's infamous work The Shining, alcoholism, hotels, and Stanley Kubrick.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, ethnobotany, drugs, and enough weird stuff to fill a 2-hour podcast.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Sadako and the 1000 Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr, as well as the atomic bomb and the lasting effects on America and how it is viewed internationally.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Victor Hugo's massive fan fiction, Les Misérables.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Happy Pride!

This month Amanda and Victoria discuss George Orwell's Animal Farm, and the historical events that inspired it.

By some miracle, we made it to 100 episodes. This week we discuss Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and wonder why we give this book to children.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss HG Wells as The War of the Worlds.

This is the reuploaded version of our episode on Doctor Zhivago. Some listeners advised the end had been cut off by our editing software. Thank you!  This week Amanda and Victoria discuss the drag that is Doctor Zhivago and why it was so scary to the USSR.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas.

Amanda and Victoria FINALLY get to record together in person for the first time in....almost three years?  Welcome back with The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. We discuss ableism, rest cures, and the garden metaphor. 

This week Amanda and Victoria read a book that managed to break Victoria, Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Amanda and Victoria discuss The Witch of Blackbird Pond and why Kit definitely would have been found guilty of witchcraft in Connecticut.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss the uncomfortable dating history of Hans Christan Andersen...wait, we mean The Little Mermaid. 

This week Amanda and Victoria read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick, the book that was adapted loosely into Blade Runner.

Amanda, Victoria, and special guest Baron Von Cheeseplate discuss William Gibson's Neuromancer.

This week Amanda and Victoria cover spooky season with Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe for Spooky Season.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Sophocles' work Oedipus Rex (aka Oedipus the King) and make surprisingly few jokes about incest.

This week Amanda and Victoria read Love in the Time of Cholera.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss the most beloved Latin American novel of all time, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Sartre's one-act play No Exit.

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Tennesse Williams' one act play, The Lady of Larkspur Lotion. 

This week Amanda and Victoria discuss Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit.

This week we discuss the Iliad for Pride month.