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  • Review: John Scalzi’s “When the Moon Hits Your Eye”

    Review: John Scalzi’s “When the Moon Hits Your Eye”
    Jun 23 2025
    Jesse Dukes offers a quick review of popular science fiction writer John Scalzi's newest novel, "When the Moon Hits Your Eye". While he initially put the book down after reading the first chapter, due to frustration with the absurd premise, on a second read, Dukes found that the book has its charms.
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    10 Min.
  • Ep 89 A Creeping Awareness or Cixin Liu’s “The Three Body Problem” Part 1.

    Ep 89 A Creeping Awareness or Cixin Liu’s “The Three Body Problem” Part 1.
    Jun 16 2025
    The Three Body Problem begins with an inexplicable series of tragic mysteries, most notably, that physics as we know it has stopped working. Slowly, the reader is given enough clues to start to suspect various causes, although halfway through, we still don’t really know what’s going on. Dukes has read it before, and Bagg has not, so they lads compare notes as to their experience of the creeping awareness of the disturbing truth dawning on the characters. We have a Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/upper_middle_browAnd a Discord server!https://discord.gg/h734EZ3hBU
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    1 Std. und 7 Min.
  • Episode 88: “Creation’s Folly,” or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Part II

    Episode 88: “Creation’s Folly,” or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Part II
    Jun 5 2025
    The boys wrap up their discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and come away somewhat ambivalent: this is clearly a work of importance, imagination, and invention, but it feels…unfocused. We posit that the undeserved press and social pressure clouds what is otherwise an incredible meditation on creation: what are a creator’s responsibilities to their creation, and what effect does the fulfillment (or neglect) of those responsibilities have upon the created?
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    1 Std. und 8 Min.
  • Digression: Solo Canoe Sailing on Long Lake

    Digression: Solo Canoe Sailing on Long Lake
    Jun 2 2025
    Friend of the show Justin shares another update, as well as his foray into what he terms Contemporary Victorian Episolary Short Travel Non-Fiction. Justin is paddling a solo canoe (and often carrying the canoe) along the 700 Mile Northern Forest canoe trail, and we are digressing from our regular programming to share his dispatches. We are pleased to include Justin's drawings of canoe sailings rigs including the standard rafted canoe rig. And the author's innovative solo canoe sailing rig. As well as the pdf of his entire account as a downloadable .pdf. BJFR Canoe Sailing NarrativeDownload
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    31 Min.
  • Digression, From the North Woods with Justin Reich

    Digression, From the North Woods with Justin Reich
    May 22 2025
    We reach Upper Middlebrow education expert Justin Reich on the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, at the edge of mobile phone reception. He gives us a dispatch, mid journey, from a rather literary setting. Justin is finishing his sabbatical with nothing but a canoe, a backpack, a couple of paddles, and aluminum pole (for poling up river) and a canoe portage cart. The North Woods in May bring long days, rainy weather, and if you're lucky, few black flies, and reasonable water level. From the Northern Forest Canoe Trail website: The Northern Forest Canoe Trail is a 700-mile water trail from Old Forge, New York to Fort Kent, Maine, that goes through private and public lands. The trail follows traditional travel routes used by Native American, settlers and guides. It is the longest inland water trail in the nation.
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    43 Min.
  • Episode 87: “A Dude who Made a Dude,” or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Part I

    Episode 87: “A Dude who Made a Dude,” or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Part I
    May 19 2025
    Mary Shelley was 18 when she started writing Frankenstein, which many consider the first science fiction novel. Over the next twenty years, she revised the book several times, and the version she left behind remains a remarkable work of imagination. Shelley is amazingly inventive and talented, but the lads find th novel to be hard going, and a slow starter. They wonder at the use of framed narratives, and how long the book takes to give Frankenstein’s creation a voice.
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    1 Std. und 7 Min.
  • Episode 86: “A Study in Structure,” or Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet

    Episode 86: “A Study in Structure,” or Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet
    May 9 2025
    The lads go bananas over Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes mystery, "A Study in Scarlet," published in 1887. We meet the mercurial Sherlock Holmes and his by turns skeptical then credulous biographer, Dr. John H. Watson, late of Afghanistan. The short novella or long short story wastes no time in driving towards the solving of its central mystery, but then makes a strange swerve into the American West and a bout of extended exposition. Chris and Jesse spend a rollicking hour discussing the book and excavating its odd structure. The final verdict? Two pills up.
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    1 Std. und 1 Min.
  • Ep 85, “Science vs. Evil” or Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”, Part II

    Ep 85, “Science vs. Evil” or Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”, Part II
    Apr 28 2025
    Bram Stoker arrays his crew of brave companions against what they've finally realized is an ancient un-dead evil. And the author seems to be elling us something about the nature of the human capacity for scientific inquiry, and love. The lads detect a bit of the old "chessboard problem", the name we've given to an author's struggle to create a compelling third act while artfully tieing up all the character arcs and loose ends established in the first acts. But Bram Stoker's inventiveness and lyrical prose keeps the novel highly readable until the thrilling ending, which manages to be poetic, moving, and suspenseful.
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    1 Std. und 18 Min.