Today we discuss lesbian pocket universes, intricate stonework forest wall THAT DONT EXIST IN THE TV UNIVERSE, and beautiful scenes in the 6th episode of Amazon's Wheel of Time adaptation. The Flame of Tar Valon

Stephen is Back! 

We cover the 6th episode of the Wheel Of Time Blood Calls Blood. If you stay after the credits we will go on a tangent about the Expanse books and other probably much better Amazon show!

We got to the good episodes!!!! 

Today we cover the 4th episode in Amazon's Wheel of Time, the first episode that strays far, faaar afield of the books and also the first good pretty much all the way through epiosed. 

Stephen couldn't be on this episode he was busy watching the epic new Spiderman movie... Then Joel couldn't get it edited very fast because he was busy helping people move and doing holiday stuff. buuuut all that doesn't matter because we have the best guest host we could have asked for Jacob Dale, who not only re-watched the episode right before recording but came with pages of notes and instantly became perhaps the best prepared voice you've ever heard on this podcast.

Thanks 1 million to Jacob and we will see you next week with episode 5!

Tune in for our coverage of episodes 2 & 3 of Amazon's Wheel of Time. 

Fair warning we had technical issues, a lot of spoilers, a little to drink and a guest on the episode! 

Thanks again to Joel's BF Dylan Bales for joining us to give the perspective of someone who hasn't read any of the books on the first 3 episodes of season 1. 

We're Back!!!

So Joel has been finally reading the Epic Fantasy series Wheel Of Time, and Amazon is now making it into a show. Stephen and Joel are going to follow along and tell you what they changed from the books, what we wished they would have done and what we thought of each episode. 

Along the way, we're going to have guests with different levels of exposure to the source material come on and give their opinions. 

This week we are taking on the first of what sorta works like a three-parter episode Leavetaking which serves as everyone's... sub-optimal at best live-action introduction to the Wheel of Time universe. 

What's the book about that guy hallucinating all night? or the one where a husband and wife are separated for a long time and totally wink wink didn't cheat on each other? 

Play along as we try to stump each other with badly explained plots. Can you guess them faster than we can? Do you have a badly explained plot you think will stump us we'd love to hear from you email us at BookreportPod@gmail.com

"That was a Journey... that made no sense and I'm sorry we went on" Quote from this episode and oney good explanation for why it took so long to come out. 

I'd say sorry both Stephen and I went through a move, vacations and job changes also it just got hot and the world keeps getting more discouraging and less fun and we got lazy, but all those sound like dumb excuses and who cares. So we are back with weird trends in books and badly explained plots plus book games and more and more recomendations. I can't promise we will get back to doing episodes every week or every other week but we will try to be more regular.

Thanks for listening remember to share with friends!!

There are some house keeping announcments and a shout out at the begining... and then Joel kind of goes on a 15 minute rant about the Oklahoma Legislature. Eventually we get to a place where we pick out a writing prompt and through digital time travel then present two brand new original works we wrote over the weekend. Enjoy! 

Well, we almost get to a point this episode, mostly we have fun dissecting some of our favorite archetype scenes and discussing On Writing Tips. tune in next time when we hopefully share more of our original work. 

After Stephen finally got a switch Joel gave in and played one of the Witcher games and both saw this post on reddit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBCZgXHrigo  The guys decided to talk about what other book-to-video-game adaptations we would want to play.

Just in Time for Easter!! It's here the fourth and Final part of our "Christian" "Literature" series!

I pray that next week I can stop putting everything in air quotes.

Today we talk Masturbation, Cult indoctrination, Doxxing, Balancing your checkbook, and the gender fluidity of God...

I wish I was making ANY of that up.

Why does this genre exist? We don't answer that question...or really even ask it but we do go over the best and worst examples of this problematic and prevalent 90s book trend.

More "Christian Lit" this time that doesn't even need to be in quotes, but let's stick with a theme. Last episode we kinda unapologetically shit all over the Left Behind books and modern "Christian" pop culture in general. Today we're focusing on some actual literature that is both Christian and GOOD?!

We breeze over the entire works of C.S. Lewis and provide some recommended reads before we go back to judgmental next week. (Just kidding were very judgmental this week too. 

Okay...  We accidentally did a sort-of special episode fr the tenth one in a season again. 

Today begins a new series on a subject were annoyingly uniquely qualified to discuss... Christian culture books. 

Left Behind if you are not in the know is a book series that is the juggernaut of Christian culture. So to start off a series discussing Christian Literature we had to start with the big one.  

Stay tuned after the outro music to here Joel babble nervously as we try to make an intro on the fly...

Also because we talked at length out this but didn't record it here are some links to the history of the Concept of the Rapture if you are interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture
https://web.archive.org/web/20061012001535/http://www.cc-vw.org/articles/irving1.html
https://www.prophecyrefi.org/our-teachings/rapture/invention-of-the-rapture-idea/

Remember when we recommended books? remember how we rewrote the terrible book descriptions into things that actually represented what you were about to read? Well, this episode is just that!

We turned it into a game, forcing each other to come up with book descriptions on the fly for our embarrassment and your enjoyment!

remember to like share and subscribe.

I promise we start talking about the episode's main topic eventually, if you want to skip over all the perfection that is Redwall, Ping-Pong drugs and Wheel of Time bashing go to approx. the 21 mark.

Today we discuss the books that changed the course of a genre, that added or reorganized or retold a story in such a unique way it changed the way we think about stories. 

We also gave each other new writing prompts they are as follows:

Stephen's prompt for Joel: I would like you to write a thriller that takes place at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. It cannot be supernatural. 

Joel's Prompt for Stephen: The dark one rose, the scholars and prophets scoured the countryside to find the foretold chosen one. Its now the last battle the forces of good and evil are fighting what could be Armageddon but everyone knows that no matter what heroics take place on the battlefield the outcome will be determined by the true fight between chosen hero and great evil. But… two chosen ones have shown up.

They both fulfill every minute detail of the prophecies but the foresights also all agree that the final battle is to be one on one. The dark one is here how do you decide who to send out and fight.

We're back!!!

Holidays took a lot longer than we planned and well we kinda forgot to record for a month. Inertia is a difficult piece of reality to overcome. Anyways we finally read our latest short stories and with no restraint on SPOLIERS discuss the Space Trilogy beginning with the Three Body Problem!

As a reminder here are the prompts from over a month ago:

Stephen's Prompt: Tell me about a normal event from a non-human pov (inanimate object, animal, alien, fairy, demon etc) in a way that makes it bizarre (humerus or horrifying) don't explain the event or what you the pov character are but give enough context for me to guess.

Joel's Prompt: Write from the perspective of an AI tasked with creating paperclips as they slowly realize they are destroying the world that created them.

So today we're gonna talk about things that annoy us (What else is new) Book Tropes and Cliches and the best ways authors have avoided them.

Also, we didn't read any more Out of The Silent Planet sry. But we do have new Writing Prompts!!

Stephen's Prompt: Tell me about a normal event from a non-human pov (inanimate object, animal, alien, fairy, demon etc) in a way that makes it bizarre (humerus or horrifying) don't explain the event or what you the pov character are but give enough context for me to guess.

Joel's Prompt: Write from the perspective of an AI tasked with creating paperclips as they slowly realize they are destroying the world that created them.

This isn't an episode about Community... because as amazing as it is, it isn't a book. We are talking about how we hope The Expanse gets at least one movie to wrap up the last 3 books.  Then joel goes on several rants about how book adaptations have a bunch of major problems. Beware of Spoilers for DRESDEN FILES and THE EXPANSE 

We read along Out of The Silent Planet Chapters 9-10

Books have been banned for a lot of very very very stupid reasons. That was the original point of this episode it ended up being an excuse for each of us to rant about politics and social issues for an hour... and every now and then relate it back to books.

We also go over chapter 7&8 of Out of The Silent Planet in our book club section!