u/sispehar

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.

Twenty six episodes across July and eighteen books. The Ann M. Martin interview accounts for a big chunk of it, because a Babysitters Club fan got to interview the author and completely lost it.

Worth a look if you are still picking summer reading, or need something to hand a kid.

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 Daily Show.

The two the desk actually pushed:

• Get a Financial Life, Beth Kobliner. The pitch was that everyone in their twenties and thirties should put it in a backpack and read two pages at a time on the train. Financial literacy being undertaught was the whole framing.
• The Baby-Sitters Club, Ann M. Martin, on its 40th anniversary. The interview covers Kristy's Great Idea, Keep Out Claudia, The Ghost at Dawn's House, We Love New York and the new spin off Babysitter's Summer. There is a genuinely uncomfortable moment about the racist family in Keep Out Claudia and what the books were trying to do in the late eighties.

Other guests and their books:

• This Is The Plan! (Ben Wikler), One Life and Unguarded (Megan Rapinoe), Hello Molly! (Molly Shannon), Winning Ugly (Brad Gilbert), The Red Book (Carl Jung, via Elliot Page on doing dream work for characters), Fame Sick (Lena Dunham, as a time capsule joke).

Odyssey corner:

• The Odyssey and Edith Hamilton's Mythology, from the interview about the film. The bit I liked was Jon saying one of the writers actually studied the texts in Greek and would therefore be a pain to watch the movie with, mostly because a joke Odysseus makes to the Cyclops did not make the cut.

Also Doctor Dolittle and Healing Back Pain, the last of which Michael Kosta admitted he had mocked for years and has now read and mostly agrees with.

I track every book mentioned on The Daily Show here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-daily-show-ears-edition

It is free and there is no signup.

I pulled every book Michael and Peter picked apart on If Books Could Kill over the first six months of the year. Six episodes, and a big chunk of the list is get-rich-quick and self-help, which tracks.

No single book dominated, but the one that came up most was Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.

The bulk of the first half was the money cluster. A run of Thomas J. Stanley titles: The Millionaire Next Door, The Millionaire Mind, Networking with the Affluent, Selling to the Affluent, and The Millionaire Woman Next Door. Plus David Bach's The Automatic Millionaire and Smart Women Finish Rich, T. Harv Eker's Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, Mark Victor Hansen's The One Minute Millionaire, and The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.

The other thread was recovered memory and trauma: Michelle Remembers, Remembering Trauma by Richard McNally, and The Body Keeps the Score.

Scattered around the edges: Bullshit Jobs and The Overworked American, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Hillbilly Elegy, Grit, and both of Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour books.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/if-books-could-kill. Free, no signup.

I logged every book that came up on 99% Invisible over the first six months of the year. It leaned heavier on American history and the Constitution than the show usually does.

The two Roman Mars kept coming back to:

• These Truths by Jill Lepore. He called it one of his favorite books, a full history of the United States.
• We the People by Jill Lepore, her newer one on the Constitution. He recommended the audiobook since Lepore reads it herself.

The rest, roughly grouped:

• History and America: How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr, The Power Broker by Robert Caro, Fear and Fury by Heather Ann Thompson, The Martians by David Baron
• Design, systems, tech: Shady Characters by Keith Houston, The Grid by Gretchen Bakke, Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian, Longitude by Dava Sobel
• Fiction and classics: Moby Dick, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, The Catcher in the Rye, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Titanic Survivor by Violet Jessop also turned up, a memoir from someone who lived through the sinking.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/99-invisible. Free, no signup.

First time posting one of these here. June came down to one thing: Dostoevsky.

Top picks:

• A full Dostoevsky run: The Brothers Karamazov (the most mentioned), Crime and Punishment, Demons, and Notes from Underground. Jordan counts them among the cardinal dozen books that changed how he sees everything.

His own 12 Rules for Life came up too.

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/2026/06 tracks every book from the show, free, no signup.

For a first Dostoevsky, is it Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov?

First time doing one of these for r/behindthebastards. Tracked every book Robert and his guests brought up in June.

Top picks:

• Border Patrol Nation and Empire of Borders by Todd Miller. Robert said Miller's books are fantastic and a real resource for understanding the border and how we got here.

The rest fit the usual material:

• Empire of AI by Karen Hao.
• Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, on how nations get invented.
• More Than a Massacre by Sabine Cadeau, on the Haitian-Dominican borderlands.
• And a couple of primary sources straight from the villains: Ian Smith's The Great Betrayal (Rhodesia) and Elizabeth Dilling's The Red Network.

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/behind-the-bastards/2026/06 tracks every book from the show, free, no signup.

Which episode this month was the most rage-inducing?