u/sispehar

Adam's intro for Meera Syal mentions that Anita and Me became a set text on the UK school curriculum. He's "still waiting to hear if that's going to happen with Ramble Book." He thinks it will.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the Adam Buxton slice for September, all from the Meera Syal episode.

• One Two Three Four (Craig Brown). Bought years ago, stalled, finally finished: "oh no, where's my friend gone, I felt bereft."
• The Castle (Jon Ronson), which in some ways "feels like a sequel to So You've Been Publicly Shamed." "It's really good, recommend that."
• Famesick (Lena Dunham). "Very interesting but pretty hardcore."
• The Land and Its People (David Sedaris). "One of his best in recent years, I thought."

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-adam-buxton-podcast

The Eric Weinstein episode on the state of American science accounts for half the books this month, and the other half are the usual suspects.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the All-In slice for August.

The most interesting reference was Science, the Endless Frontier by Vannevar Bush, brought in by Michael Kratsios. Roosevelt wrote to his science adviser asking what to do with the American science enterprise after the war, and the reply became the founding document of how federal research funding has worked ever since.

From the Weinstein episode: A Genetic Switch by Mark Ptashne, described as the work of one of the most brilliant and irreverent people he knows, and The Anarchist Cookbook, cited in a point about how little basic chemistry the public now knows.

Also:

• The Sovereign Individual (Davidson and Rees-Mogg), in the argument for decentralised AI. It keeps turning up on this feed.
• Bad Therapy (Abigail Shrier), called a fantastic book while announcing her as a guest
• The Vision of the Anointed (Thomas Sowell), in the discussion of AI founders as missionaries rather than mercenaries

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/all-in-with-chamath-jason-sacks-friedberg

The Martin Lewis episode is a Beatles history seminar with drinks, so five of the eight books this month come from that one conversation.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the Club Random slice for August.

The Beatles run:

• 150 Glimpses of the Beatles (Craig Brown), which Bill reviewed for the New York Times during the pandemic, and which taught him that Yoko was sending Lennon letters constantly
• Many Years From Now (Barry Miles), the authorised Paul biography, from a friend close enough to both to have helped set up the Indica Gallery where John and Yoko met
• The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (Hunter Davies), and the errata about John and Paul meeting in July 57, not 56, because Paul misremembered it in the interview
• I, Me, Mine (George Harrison), and the fact that he did not mention Lennon in it, then wrote him a tribute song

Bill on his own reading: Hamlet in college, which landed emotionally because, in his words, he was a brooding loser at the time, and Macbeth from high school, which he knew well enough to be annoyed by a film adaptation.

Also Lord of the Flies, discussed in the Max Amini episode alongside the new adaptation, and War of the Worlds via Orson Welles and childhood fear.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/club-random-with-bill-maher

Twenty-three episodes and twelve books, which for a daily news show is a decent haul. Most of it is political biography and one long argument about memoirs that are not true.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the News Agents slice for August.

The straight recommendation was Harold Wilson: The Winner by Nick Thomas-Symonds, in the Andy Burnham episode. A revisionist account arguing Wilson has been badly underestimated and caricatured as an unprincipled fixer, when he was one of Britain's most effective postwar prime ministers. "Next book, which I can heartily recommend."

The Jason Arday episodes produced the most interesting thread of the month: his own Great and Unfortunate Things, and then a wider point that nonfiction publishing "is littered with memoirs that would be more appropriately marketed in fiction." James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, Angela's Ashes and its disputes, and The Salt Path all came up as precedents.

Politics: Anthony Seldon's Sunak at 10, and Seldon himself on the earlier Conservative Century he wrote with Stuart Ball. Andrew Gamble's The Conservative Nation. Regime Change (Swan and Haberman) via the Natalie Harp story.

Spare came up twice in the Harry and Meghan discussions, in both cases as an obstacle to reconciliation rather than as a book.

And one that is not a book so much as a diagnosis: Ed Husain's The Islamist, cited on why young men radicalise.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-news-agents

August was the heaviest reading month this show has had in a while. Rabbit Hole #5 with Jimmy Carr on its own threw out about twenty titles, and the Q&A episode turned into a straight reading-list dump.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the Modern Wisdom slice for August. The Jimmy Carr episode got its own thread here a couple of weeks back, so this is the whole month in one place.

Chris pushed two hardest:

• Red Rising by Pierce Brown. "I might be the biggest front end of the funnel drug dealer for people getting into Red Rising." Favourite fiction series of all time, and a Pierce Brown episode is apparently waiting on Red God being finished.
• The Precipice by Toby Ord. Named as the one book that is not on the top-five list but that everyone should read anyway.

Also from the Q&A: Dungeon Crawler Carl (Matt Dinniman), which he says will rip your face off, plus The Obstacle Is the Way and Ross Edgley's The Art of Resilience from his injury recovery.

The Rabbit Hole episode ran through East of Eden, Stoner, Finnegans Wake, The Great Gatsby, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Napoleon: A Life, The Population Bomb, Nuclear War: A Scenario, Abundance, The Anxious Generation, Copernicus on his deathbed, and Joseph Campbell.

Guest books: Fed Up and The Story of the Human Body (Daniel Lieberman), Lifespan (David Sinclair), A Billion Years of Sex Differences (Steve Stewart-Williams), Extreme Ownership and Way of the Warrior Kid (Jocko), Troubled (Rob Henderson).

And a genuinely funny detour: the dating episode turned into a Freida McFadden appreciation, The Housemaid, The Housemaid's Revenge, The Teacher, The Patient, described as a guilty pleasure.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/modern-wisdom

It is a food show, so two books in a month is about right. Both arrived sideways, which is the only way anything arrives on Off Menu.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the Off Menu slice for August. Short one.

Jinkx Monsoon, telling a story about a pet pig that hated the vacuum cleaner and would run over and yank the cord out of the wall every time. Conclusion: "that's some pig." Charlotte's Web, arrived at by pig.

Mark Gatiss, on a taste triggering a memory, going full In Search of Lost Time about it. "I remember having that in Wagamama going, I know this taste." Proust in a Wagamama is the most Off Menu sentence of the year.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/off-menu-with-ed-gamble-and-james-acaster

Almost all of these come from one episode. "What Makes a Killer Thriller?" walked through the Times list of the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century and the hosts kept going off-list, so August ended up looking like a crime fiction syllabus.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is The Daily's August slice.

The ones they were most emphatic about:

• Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn). On nearly every author ballot they collected. "One of the most delicious sets of unreliable narrators ever used in a book."
• Case Histories (Kate Atkinson). Called an all-timer, twice, in the same breath.
• In the Woods (Tana French), who has four books on the list. In the Woods at 3, Broken Harbor at 20, The Witch Elm at 33, The Likeness at 34.
• The Secret History (Donna Tartt). "The house could have burned down around me during the big reveal scene."
• The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Michael Chabon), the pick they clearly enjoyed defending most.

The rest of that episode: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Da Vinci Code, The Girl on the Train, Slow Horses, Big Little Lies, Mystic River, Presumed Innocent, Room, Winter's Bone, The Sympathizer, The Goldfinch, The Plot, Lonesome Dove, Northwoods, plus a childhood detour to The Silver Crown and Charlotte's Web.

Elsewhere in the month: Regime Change (Swan and Haberman) came up twice, Priya Parker previewed The Art of Fighting, Matthew Futterman on The Cruelest Game before the US Open, Ina Garten on Simply Ina, and the French parenting episode leaned on Bringing Up Bebe.

Also, Matthew Rhys naming The Moon's a Balloon as one of his favourite books in the world.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-daily

Eight episodes, four books, which is normal for Pivot. Two of them are forthcoming books by people in adjacent chairs.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the Pivot slice for August.

The publishing story of the month was Call Me, I'll Hide the Body, the Anne Heche novel that set off a fourteen-publisher bidding war and sold for 2.4 million dollars. Kara has been, in her words, sort of obsessed with the story.

Kevin Roose announced The AGI Chronicles, out in early October, on the last ten years in AI, and said he is done with writing otherwise.

Mark Cuban on Abdul El-Sayed's Medicare for All: A Citizen's Guide, which is about as close to a recommendation as that episode got. "It's not bad. He has a lot in common with Trump on some of his positions on drugs."

And Ryan Holiday's Wisdom Takes Work, cited for the observation about watching Elon Musk go from reading Soviet rocket manuals to getting all his news from social media.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/pivot

Four episodes in July and six books, and effectively all of them come from the Cory Doctorow episode at the end of the month.

Short list, but the Doctorow one is a genuinely good summer read if AI dread is your thing.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for The Weekly Show.

The one Jon actually recommended:

• The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, Cory Doctorow. Jon said he had been in a bit of a doomer spiral about AI and what it will do to how we work and how we deal with each other, and that this book shifted his perspective. He was careful not to call it optimism, and clearly uncomfortable about feeling it at all.

Doctorow's own citations:

• Enshittification, his other one, which he says is really a story about monopolies and what Lina Khan calls too big to care.
• Gouged, by Lindsay Owens, out soon, on surveillance pricing. He called her the best.
• More Everything Forever, Adam Becker. The line he pulled out is the best argument against Mars I have heard. Detonate every nuke on Earth at the same moment a dinosaur killer hits, and Earth is still more habitable than Mars could ever be, because it still has water, oxygen, gravity, a magnetosphere and a troposphere.
• Atlas Shrugged, in an aside to libertarian friends.

Also 107 Days, which arrived by accident. Someone said there are 107 days until the midterms, and the room slowly worked out why that number sounded familiar.

I track every book mentioned on The Weekly Show here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-weekly-show-with-jon-stewart

It is free and there is no signup.

Eight episodes in July produced one single book, which is honestly the funniest result I got this month. I run this scan across every show I track and Bad Friends came back with one entry.

Not much of a summer reading list, but here it is.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for Bad Friends, in its entirety.

The book:

• The Prince, Machiavelli. From Comedy Store Snitch. The bit cited is chapter three, on what you should do when you take over a region. Let the people keep their religion and their laws, go among them and live with them. It was then applied directly to the situation the show was discussing, which I will let you discover yourself.

That is the whole list. Eight episodes, one Machiavelli.

I track every book mentioned on Bad Friends here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/bad-friends

It is free and there is no signup.

Only three episodes fell in the window and three books came up, so this is a small one.

Still, one of them is the obvious summer read for this crowd.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for Dear Hank & John.

The books:

• Hollywood Ending. Hank said he has been reading it a second time, which he almost never does, and had something good to say about why. Reading it knowing how it goes makes the first part a different book. That opening stretch is a story about people making a thing, and it is enjoyable from the maker's point of view. The harder parts are all about the thing being out in the world where you can no longer change it.
• All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren. Came up during a tangent on acknowledgements, and the fact that books did not used to have them because the author was not yet a character. You do not get a page of Shakespeare thanking the first cast of Romeo and Juliet.
• The Canterbury Tales, brought up for exactly the reason you are thinking. Chaucer is all about the fart joke.

I track every book mentioned on Dear Hank & John here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/dear-hank-amp-john

It is free and there is no signup.

Three episodes, five books. Not a big month, but the mix is very them.

Posting it in case anyone wants something for the last of the summer.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for the show.

The books:

• You Had to Be There, Jodie Harsh, and Night People, Mark Ronson on being a DJ in nineties New York. Both came up in the same conversation with an agent. The follow up advice was to do the Jodie one on audio, which got the response that nobody wants to listen to a British person for hours.
• Watchmen, Alan Moore. Used properly, for the idea that every hero in it represents a different moral compass and Veidt is the villain who thinks he is doing good by killing three million people to prevent a nuclear holocaust.
• The Boys, Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Read alongside the show, with a very good question attached about how anyone watches it and remains a Trump person.
• The Hunger Games, and a spirited complaint about Katniss taking two whole movies to notice Peeta.

I track every book mentioned on this show here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-bald-and-the-beautiful-with-trixie-and-katya

It is free and there is no signup.

Five episodes. The anarchist cookbook one, the English working classes with Professor Cathy, data centres, and Merlin Sheldrake on mushrooms.

Short list, but three of these would make a decent summer read.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for the Blindboy Podcast.

The main ones:

• Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake. Blindboy introduced him as an incredibly fascinating person and a lovely fella, and the book as a bestseller all over the world.
• The Anarchist Cookbook, William Powell. The whole first episode is on it. Written in 1970 by a nineteen year old who had a look around and decided revolution was needed.
• Becoming an Emotionally Intelligent Teacher, also Powell, decades later. He described it in the Guardian as an implicit refutation of the emotional immaturity of the cookbook, on the grounds that all learning happens in a social context. That is a hell of a pair of books for one man to have written.
• The Chartists, Dorothy Thompson. From the working classes episode, and a lovely aside. Professor Cathy said Thompson was her tutor and the one who gave her the confidence to write about the people she belongs to.

Also Althusser's Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, which Blindboy says he uses a lot, on the repressive state apparatus and the ideological one. And the Mabinogion, after a good minute of trying to remember what the big Welsh book of mythology is called.

I track every book mentioned on the Blindboy Podcast here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-blindboy-podcast

It is free and there is no signup.

Ten episodes and eleven books. Press freedom, the new red scare, Trump versus the BBC, and Cory Doctorow at the end of the month.

Not exactly beach reading, but a decent list if your summer taste runs to media history.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for On the Media.

Press freedom episode:

• In Bad Faith (Lee Levine), on Earl Caldwell and the Nixon administration wanting him to testify about his Black Panther reporting. State of War (James Risen), and the Jeffrey Sterling case that followed it. The quote pulled out is that Eric Holder was every bit as aggressive a prosecutor as Ashcroft, he just had more friends in the media.

Trump and the courts:

• Trump Nation (Tim O'Brien), the 2005 book that said Trump's net worth was at most 250 million rather than a billion, and got sued for five billion dollars over it.

The red scare episode:

• Unhumans (Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec), covered as an object of study rather than a recommendation. Cuban Memory Wars (Michael Bustamante).

Cory Doctorow's episode:

• The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, his new one, arguing that hype is what is keeping the whole industry afloat. The Unaccountability Machine (Dan Davies), which gives him the phrase accountability sink. Keynes on the beauty contest, which is the cleanest explanation of stock speculation I have heard in a while. Speculation is not picking the most beautiful contestant, it is picking the one the other judges will think is most beautiful.

The Rest Is History crossover episode also brought Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto on reading the US as one successor state among many, and a genuinely unpleasant passage from the Marquis de Sade.

I track every book mentioned on On the Media here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/on-the-media

It is free and there is no signup.

Fifteen episodes in July and eleven books. A good few came out of the trivia episodes, which is a slightly cursed way to generate a reading list but it works.

Posting it while there is still summer left to read them in.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for the MeatEater Podcast.

The one with the best pitch:

• Death in Yellowstone, Lee Whittlesey. The argument for it is that if you read a hundred and fifty years of deaths in Yellowstone, your takeaway is that people have always been stupid. Taking a cool picture, impressing a girl, winning a bet, ignoring weather, ignoring an animal. We tend to pin that on 2026. This book says otherwise. We have always been stupid.

The other one in that vein:

• Dying to Hunt Montana, Tom Donovan. Described as too painful to read, specifically the gunshot section, because the writing is too good and too sparse. The takeaway was not that people are dummies, it was that the world is a slightly dangerous place and you still have to go out and mix it up.

The book club and the western shelf:

• A Vaquero of the Brush Country (J. Frank Dobie), The Big Sky (A.B. Guthrie), and Noodling for Flatheads by Burkhard Bilger, which got a proper plug for anyone interested in southern culture and the eccentrics keeping old ways alive.

Trivia leftovers:

• Moby Dick, which somebody has on the shelf, has looked at the twenty four hour audiobook, and has been advised is terrible after a few chapters. The Odyssey got exactly the same review. Barnaby Rudge, because Dolly Varden is a Dickens character before she is a trout. The Jungle Book, via Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. The Grapes of Wrath.

Also Gigawatt, the book Ann Vaughan is writing about the AI build out and what it is doing to the energy industry and the American heartland.

I track every book mentioned on this show here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-meateater-podcast

It is free and there is no signup.

Five episodes and thirteen books. Duncan went on a Cormac McCarthy bender and then Grok talked him into Lonesome Dove, which he is fairly clear is not the same thing.

Putting it up in case anyone is still sorting a summer pile.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for the Duncan Trussell Family Hour.

The McCarthy run:

• Child of God, No Country for Old Men (just finished, called fucking great), and Suttree, which he finished and said is so good. His summary of McCarthy is dark, southern, gothic, existentialist, brutal philosopher. Then he asked an AI for something similar, got Lonesome Dove, and reported back that it ain't no Cormac McCarthy.

The occult shelf:

• Liber ABA (Book Four) by Crowley, which he suggests as the starting place while also warning that Crowley immediately tells you to learn yoga and do purification rituals before any of it works. Liber Null and Psychonaut, as a completely different read on magic.

Jung and company:

• The Undiscovered Self. Duncan said he could not believe how prescient Jung was, and that reading pre internet writers on this stuff is eerie. Also The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Wilhelm Reich) and The Trauma of Birth (Otto Rank).

Everything else:

• After Virtue (Alasdair MacIntyre), on modern morality being a broken jumble of leftover fragments. Empire of the Summer Moon, which he is five pages into and already calls phenomenal. House of Leaves, which he did not finish because it creeped him out too much. Frankenstein, used to make a point about people wanting to reconstruct a world that is already dead.

I track every book mentioned on DTFH here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/duncan-trussell-family-hour

It is free and there is no signup.

Four episodes in July and twenty books, which is the highest books per episode rate of any show I follow. Midlife, easy discipline, negotiation, and then the Odyssey one at the end of the month.

Good one for a summer reading list, since the negotiation episode alone is a whole syllabus.

To explain what this is, because it will otherwise look like nothing. I keep a free site called Podshelf where I log every book mentioned across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. It started because I kept hearing a title on a walk and forgetting it by the time I got home. This is the July slice for AoM.

The ones that got real recommendations:

• Good to Great and Built to Last, Jim Collins. Jia Jiang called them two of the most transformative books in business history, then used them to argue that the systems matter more than the effort.
• Influence, Robert Cialdini. John Richardson said he recommends it to all listeners, and used the reciprocity chapter to explain why car dealerships give you a coffee.
• Democracy in America, Tocqueville. From the Odyssey episode, quoting Harvey Mansfield calling it both the best book about democracy and the best book ever written about America. The hook is Tocqueville's astonishment at American restlessness.

Negotiation episode:

• Getting to Yes, Start With No (Jim Camp, described as an anti getting to yes polemic), Difficult Conversations, Thinking Fast and Slow for the anchoring effect, and Richardson's own Never Settle.

The Odyssey and America episode:

• The Odyssey and The Iliad, Dante, Augustine's Confessions, On the Road, and Patrick Deneen's American Odyssey. The argument is that Odysseus is both home seeking and exploring, rooted and restless, and so are Americans.

Midlife episode:

• Passages (Gail Sheehy) and The Seasons of a Man's Life (Levinson), both as the origin of the midlife crisis idea, and Margie Lachman's Primetime as the correction to it.

Plus The Myth of Sisyphus, which opens the Easy Discipline episode. Camus says imagine Sisyphus happy, and Jia Jiang builds the whole book on it.

I keep the running list for this show here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-art-of-manliness

It is free and there is no signup.