CRACKED SPINES

best friends cyrus and sarah dust off their english degrees to read good books and have bad takes.

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Due to family events and a particularly crazy work week, this week’s episode featuring Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry (zeitgeist!!!) will be delayed. This delay has however enabled me to blaze through Game Changer as well, which I am unexpectedly buzzing to talk about with Cyrus. Cyrus, dont read this next bit, it’s a preview of the discussion to come, but GOD I just kept screaming thru the entire middle section, “YOU HAVE KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR ONE MONTH.”

This is one of the best thing about enemies/rivals to lovers—you have a larger chance of the leads being aware of each other’s existence for more than ten minutes before pledging eternal devotion.

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Latest episode of Cracked Spines went slightly off the rails. And Katie didn’t even do the Cartman voice in a German accent.

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This week, Cyrus and Sarah dig into Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin, a horror novel that asks what if Invasion of the Body Snatchers was set at a conversion camp, and wouldn't that just be so super fucked up? Also on the table is a larger discussion of the extreme horror genre, the nightly abduction of our rooster Bubba, and PISS KINK (all caps). According to Cyrus, the only things a book really needs are the following: body horror, transgender stuff, and goo. Cuckoo has all three!

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Greetings listeners, here it is - the chicken episode, featuring our five beautiful daughters. This week, Cyrus and Sarah dig into some books about chickens: their personalities, their care and keeping, and how to turn your beautiful backyard into a chicken paradise. If you're a patron, head on over to the Patreon to see our intrepid cohosts desperately try to get these unruly birds to sit in their laps. It goes about as well as you'd expect.

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Cyrus and Sarah are back at it again in the Animorphs mines, this time covering books thirty-four through thirty-seven, and things are getting….well, kind of mid, to be honest. Except for the torture. The torture is great. Dive in to hear our intrepid readers arguing about the Goo Goo Dolls for what seems like forever, a whole lot of talk about the SAW franchise, and, unfortunately, a load-bearing bit about Scurvy the cat's nether regions. Don't say I didn't warn you.

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This week on Cracked Spines, Cyrus and Sarah dive into Sarah's latest obsession with Chinese history, cracking open several books by...mostly white authors in the 60's-80's. Okay, so it may not be an scholastically accurate or ethical deep dive, but it is fascinating. Listen as Sarah infodumps on Cyrus about the perils of learning the Chinese language, poetry translation, and gendered nouns.

Content warning: humorous mentions of suicide and absolute butchering of French, Spanish, and Chinese languages. 

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Say "I do" to checking out this weeks episode on Marriage, A History by Stephanie Coontz! See, I did a wedding pun, this description writing stuff is easy. Cyrus and Sarah tackle nonfiction this episode, and have a rollicking discussion about marriage as a centrally organizing pillar of society, women's work, relationships as a capitalist construct, and the equitable division of labor in a platonic lifemate situation. Also how hot they are in Cyrus' bedroom, and how cute Scurvy's little snores are.

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It's finally happening - Cyrus and Sarah have finally read The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson! Turns out they loved it, but isn't that always the way with books you've been putting off? Baru Cormorant is a twisty turny hard fantasy novel about the devastation of empire, with fabulous worldbuilding, fantastic characters, and also it's kinda gay. We love to see it. Topics of discussion include the belief structures behind imperialism, the joy of an unreliable narrator, and what the fuck a 'murre' is.

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Did you know it's really hard to write jokes about books with central themes of racism? Cyrus and Sarah find this out while covering Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, an epic historical fiction novel about the the 20th century Korean experience of Japan. Our intrepid readers, who were sooo sleepy this week, cover personal experiences with identity, the Korean horror movie Exhuma (which totally whips), dead relatives, and the mythologizing of the family narrative. Did I mention they're sooo sleepy?

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Are we in the cultural zeitgeist yet? This week, Cyrus and Sarah cover Sunrise on the Reaping AND The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins, the two latest Hunger Games novels, both of which are prequels to the original trilogy. Did our intrepid readers kind of forget how brutal these books can get? Yeah a little bit. But if we've learned anything from the Animorphs episodes, Cyrus and Sarah love it when teenagers experience inconceivable horrors. Also discussed are the comings and goings of tiny animals in our house, the fallout of the book-reading challenge thunderdome, and Cyrus forgetting that marsupials are, in fact, mammals. May the odds be ever in your favor! Is this anything?

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RESULTS ARE IN, FOLKS. In the past month, Sarah and Cyrus made a bet to see who could read the most books out of their combined TBR piles. Sarah is a super fast reader with one day a week to functionally dedicate to churning through books; Cyrus is an absolute competitive maniac who would rather destroy their body and mind rather than lose. The stakes: either financial ruin for Cyrus, or automotive ruin for Sarah. Two men enter; one man leaves (with their dignity, at least).

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Our favorite horror writer is back at it again! This week we read Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix, a truly harrowing mixture of pregnancy horror, social horror, and eels. In this episode, as you can probably imagine, we talk a lot about abortion rights, fucked up pregnancy stuff, and infanticide. Like honestly probably way too much discussion of infanticide, oopsie, sorry about that. Proceed with caution accordingly. 

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This week in shipwreck narratives: Robinson Crusoe! Perhaps the grandfather of the genre as we know it! And like many grandfathers, turns out he is a lot more racist than you thought, and you did not start with a high opinion. 

Discussion points include: the centrality of the slave trade to the plot of this novel, Robinson Crusoe’s one moment of acceptance of other cultures, and why God keeps punishing him. Featuring a side trip into the novel Foe by J. M. Coetzee and the life and times of Robinson Crusoe’s inspiration, Alexander Selkirk who is MUCH COOLER THAN CRUSOE. BY A LOT. HEY @ DANIEL DAFOE, YOUR NOVEL DIDN’T NEED A NEW PROTAGONIST YA DINGUS.

listen here

[jadenvargen]

i like elephant seals IN THEORY cos they look so goofy but every time i watch any documentary about them all they do is fuck and fight extremely graphically and disgustingly to the death so i’m deeply afraid of them

[smugbots-and-such]

I just googled “why do elephant seals fight” and got a video of one bashing himself in slow, rhythmic, dead-eyed crashes against a truck only slightly larger than itself while said owner just stood to the side, a defeated, perplexed look on his face

[smugbots-and-such]

[just-another-dead-blog]

Pretty sure this is Homer the elephant seal from New Zealand. He’s not fighting that car he’s fucking it. It’s how he got famous, he became a menace to a town after fucking a bunch of cars. He also fucked a restaurant’s power box and caused a blackout. Absolute madman.

[crestofnobility]

Ah, wonderful! Now I’m even more terrified.

[animatedtext]

no clue what to do with these bois so ill leave em here

[myfavoritedemons]

a normal and healthy preoccupation

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LISTEN HERE 

“We can’t keep talking about Javert,” we say, and then talk about nothing else for 30 minutes. That’s right, it’s another Les Mis episode. We know, we’re sorry. Sarah flew across the country so we could drive across the state and finally, for the first time, see the live production together. Featuring the all-new take that Marius is good actually and the classic take that Jean Valjean is the hottest character in literary existence, especially when you put him in leather pants.

Sidenote, we’re posting this some weeks after recording it, and when I was getting ready to post it to social media, I asked Amelia, who edited it, “Did we say anything smart at all in the course of this episode.” 

And she was like, “Absolutely not but we are hilarious,” so I guess that’s the blurb for this one.