Log in

goodpods headphones icon

To access all our features

Open the Goodpods app
Close icon
headphones
Book Retorts

Book Retorts

Book Retorts

profile image
profile image

2 Creators

profile image
profile image

2 Creators

A show about explaining your weird media finds to your friends
profile image
profile image
profile image

4 Listeners

bookmark
Share icon

What is Book Retorts about?

A show about explaining your weird media finds to your friends. Each episode we take turns recapping a weird media piece the other has never experienced, trying our absolute best to explain it to them. Chaos ensues.

All episodes

Best episodes

Top 10 Book Retorts Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Book Retorts episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Book Retorts for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Book Retorts episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Book Retorts - Wonder Woman 1984 - Part 1
play

04/06/22 • 90 min

This week Danielle brings the superhero craziness with the 2020 film Wonder Woman 1984. If you didn’t see the first Wonder Woman film, don’t worry, neither did Sam, and Danielle barely remembers it, so no context needed! Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is your average working 80s girl, only she’s really an immortal Amazonian from Themyscira who is still pining for Steve (Chris Pine), the love of her life and a pilot who died in World War 1. When a botched robbery brings a mysterious citrine in to the Smithsonian where Diana works with her mousy new friend Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), things start to go awry. While holding the stone, both Diana and Barbara make wishes in their heads and then a magic wind blows, foreshadowing the granting of their wishes. Barbara wished to be strong and beautiful like Diana, but Diana’s wish is a surprise for later. That’s when Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) rolls in, he’s the head of an oil company/Ponzi scheme who has just made a large donation to the museum, which seems to grant him carte blanche to just touch evidence, like the citrine, in an FBI investigation. He invites them all to a gala that night in his honor and Barbara is instantly taken with him and agrees while Diana declines. That night at the gala, Diana is now suspicious of Max and shows up anyway, and is immediately sexually harassed by every guy in there, since all men in this world are completely terrible. She brushes them off, but then one of them says a phrase that Steve once said to her, and Diana realizes her wish came true: Steve is back! Only, Steve is not himself, his consciousness has been shoved into the body of another man. What happened to the mind of the man whose body this was originally? Who cares, certainly not our supposed “heroes” Diana and Steve, who immediately drop everything to go have sex in that poor, possessed man’s home with his unable-to-consent body. Meanwhile, Max Lord (seriously, that name) has initiated a make-out session with Barbara in order to steal the citrine. With the citrine safely in his castle/home, Max does something absolutely bonkers and wishes to become the wishing stone. It might be reasonable to take a moment here to discuss the rules of the magic citrine, but the rules for this wishing stone are so arbitrary and crazy you’re just going to have to listen to all our rants to get it, there’s too much to include here. Maxwell then starts coercing others into wishing things that benefit him while touching him, and then also taking something from them in exchange for the “wish”, and if that’s confusing, get used to it. Anyway, Max jets off to Egypt while Diana and Steve, now back on the case, follow him in the dumbest way imaginable. This movie is so long, and chock-a-block full of nonsense, that Danielle has to end it there before Sam gets so angry at the inconsistent wishing rules and dumb Wonder Woman lasso tricks that he quits the podcast entirely.


Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

profile image
profile image

2 Listeners

comment icon

1 Comment

1

bookmark
plus icon
share episode

Despite everyone’s best efforts, the Thankers are back! This time Danielle and Sam do a little ego stroking to grow their already prodigious senses of self-importance. So enjoy as they discuss some of the media and themes they’ve shared which they’re thankful for, and just have all of the trouble speaking like normal human beings.


Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

profile image
profile image

2 Listeners

bookmark
plus icon
share episode
Book Retorts - Book Reshorts: What's in a Name?
play

01/12/22 • 27 min

Sam’s back with another game for Danielle which he calls: What’s in a Name? Sam wants to take a moment to look back on some of the not terrible things that happened in 2021, so he pulls four books that were published that year and, using only the titles and author names, asks Danielle to guess the plots of those books. Danielle does remarkably well, and may even have improved on one book, but the real winner is all of us for learning about some new things to possibly read, and some fun alternate plots. So join us for another fun game to ring in the new year!


Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

profile image

1 Listener

comment icon

1 Comment

1

bookmark
plus icon
share episode

It’s that time of year again where Danielle and Sam share the media and tropes they are thankful for. This year Sam has a special gift for the world: The word “thanker”. You’re welcome, world.


Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

profile image

1 Listener

bookmark
plus icon
share episode
Book Retorts - The Lake House

The Lake House

Book Retorts

play

08/10/22 • 77 min

This week Danielle brings the 2006 time traveling romance movie The Lake House. When Dr. Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock) sells her lake house to apparently no one, she decides to leave a note for the next owners in the mailbox, like a totally normal human being. Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves) moves in and receives her letter. This confuses him, because the letter mentions things about the house—like apparently impossible to remove dog prints in paint—that don’t exist. Instead of just ignoring this letter like a sane person, Alex writes back and puts the letter in the lake house mailbox. After Kate fails to save a man pancaked by a bus in front of her, she decides the best course of action is to return to the lake house and raid the mailbox there and see if the new owners took her letter. She finds the letter from Alex and they start exchanging letters, learning that Alex is writing from 2004, while Kate is writing from 2006. They also seem to have a magic dog that they both have owned for years even though it’s, again, the same dog and they don’t know each other. They engage in more time-communication shenanigans, like Alex planting a tree for Kate that suddenly magically springs into existence before her eyes. It should be noted Sam absolutely hates the nonsensical time mechanics of this movie. Alex engages in some light time-stalking of Kate, and then he kisses her at a birthday party Kate’s not-Alex boyfriend threw for her when she still doesn’t know who Alex is. It should also be noted that both their families know they are having romantic communications through time and, insanely, no one seems to care. So join us for what is amazingly, baffling, the least coherent time travel story ever heard on Book Retorts, which is really saying something.


Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

profile image

1 Listener

comment icon

1 Comment

1

bookmark
plus icon
share episode
Book Retorts - Book Reshorts: Partial Recall 4: More Forgetting
play

01/05/22 • 38 min

This week Danielle gets her revenge on Sam by asking him to recap the previous Winter Bizarre episode Snowmageddon. Listen as Sam remembers a series of non-snow related disasters, but literally nothing else that happens in this SyFy movie. While his recall fails, Sam does take the opportunity to accidentally make Snowmageddon a better movie by misremembering events as being more exciting than they actually were. Is his half-remembered version better than the original? You decide!


Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

profile image

1 Listener

comment icon

1 Comment

1

bookmark
plus icon
share episode
Book Retorts - Moonfall

Moonfall

Book Retorts

play

06/14/23 • 106 min

This week Sam crashes to Earth with the 2022 Roland Emmerich film Moonfall. During a routine satellite repair mission—which astronaut Halle Berry (Sam forgot her character name) went on instead of her honeymoon—things go terribly wrong. A mysterious goo causes the space shuttle to lose power and Halle Berry is knocked out. Luckily, her astronaut buddy Ryan (née Brian) manages to land the shuttle safely. For his heroism, he’s promptly fired and loses his wrongful termination lawsuit against NASA. Years later, a man pretending to be a professor is convinced that the Moon has been knocked from its orbit and, oh by the way, is also a massive alien built mega-structure powered by a captured white dwarf star; ya know, normal stuff. No one believes him (obviously) even though NASA, now with Halle Berry in a leadership position, has noticed the Moon moving closer to Earth. This is, obviously, a massive problem, and the standard disaster elements of floods, meteorites, and earthquakes pummel Earth. Halle Berry calls on her old buddy Ryan to pilot a mission to bring an EMP bomb to the Moon to defeat the evil goo, which she is convinced is a malevolent, alien AI that, once defeated, will allow the Moon to correct itself back to its normal orbit. It’s at this point Sam’s head explodes with the terrible science and insane conclusions jumped to in this movie. There’s also a subplot where Ryan’s delinquent son is on a mission to take Halle Berry’s son to Colorado where her ex-husband is holed up along with Ryan’s ex-wife and her new husband. Apparently, Colorado is the safest place to be if the freaking Moon crashes into the Earth. Ryan and crew mount up to take the fight to the Moon, but can they defeat an alien AI? Why is the AI intent on attacking humans in the first place? What the heck is the Moon? We promise, the answers to all these questions and more are both forthcoming and extremely stupid.


Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

profile image

1 Listener

bookmark
plus icon
share episode
Book Retorts - Dead on Target - Part 1
play

09/07/22 • 79 min

This week Danielle returns to her teen detective roots with the Hardy Boys Casefiles book one, from 1987, Dead on Target by Franklin W. Dixon. Frank and Joe hardy are two young men who Sam cannot distinguish between despite Danielle’s instance that they are, in fact, very different characters. The book opens with a dramatic scene of Joe’s girlfriend, Iola, exploding in a car bomb at a political rally she was organizing for a presidential candidate. We cut back an hour and learn this rally is, in fact, a dress rehearsal for a political rally, which is definitely not a thing. After Iola gets explodified, Joe, who was a terrible boyfriend, is extremely distraught and Frank agrees to help him do what they do best: Incompetently attempt to investigate her murder until they luck into a solution. After talking to some people at the local mall, they’re attacked by unknown evil people with, hilariously, dart guns. They escape in the car of a government agent they met earlier named Mr. Gray. A brief car chase later, where Joe earnestly tries to murder some of their pursuers, and the Hardy bros are told to go hide in South Carolina while Mr. Gray and the secret government organization he works for, The Network, takes care of the terrorist organization that attacked them. The Hardys are not ones to listen to reason, so they muster all the hacking skills that existed in 1987, and hack into an airport computer to determine that Mr. Gray is headed towards London, and they follow him there. They quickly foil an attempted hijacking which, considering the terrorist weapons were a single grenade and a can of mace, wasn’t much of a threat to begin with. But the real mystery of this book, in Sam’s mind, is just one thing: How are these inexperienced bothers consistently able to insert themselves into a secret government anti-terrorism organization? And further, how has this terrorist organization, known as the Assassins, existed since the freaking Crusades? Unfortunately, the Hardys have no answers to these questions, but with any luck they may yet solve the mystery of who killed Iola, and bring them to justice. So join us for part one of this fast-paced reboot of the classic mystery series!


Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

profile image

1 Listener

bookmark
plus icon
share episode
Book Retorts - The Net

The Net

Book Retorts

play

09/22/21 • 91 min

This week Danielle brings us our first Sandra Bullock film with the 1995 cyber-thriller The Net. Angela Bennett is an average cyber-security employee/freelancer/contractor/thing who is a consummate recluse. She does out there things such as chatting in message groups and ordering pizza online, the horror. When a mysterious floppy disk (look it up, kids) is mailed to her house she finds it contains links to a mysterious backdoor that lets her access supposedly secure systems. The colleague who mailed her the disk flies his one-man aircraft out to see her, but dies in a suspicious crash before arriving. Unperturbed by his sudden death, or chaos at the airport due to a seemingly unrelated hacking, Angela jets off on a vacation to Mexico. There she encounters the sexy nerd Jack and they quickly hit it off on his boat, but just when Jack is about to kill her for that floppy disk (which she inexplicably brought) Angela escapes. That’s when Angela discovers her identity has been erased and replaced with a different identity that marks her as a criminal. Now Angela must find out about the shadowy organization behind her identity erasure and how their magic wizard computer powers work. Also, if she could find out what their motivations are, that would be great too, because we can’t figure that out. So dive into what Hollywood thought computers were in 1995, and join Sam and Danielle as they struggle to answer the film’s biggest question: Who is Cyberbob?


Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

profile image

1 Listener

comment icon

1 Comment

1

bookmark
plus icon
share episode
Book Retorts - Legend - Part 1

Legend - Part 1

Book Retorts

play

03/09/22 • 110 min

This week Danielle whisks us to a world of romance and fantasy in the Jude Deveraux novel Legend. Meet Kady, your average successful, attractive professional chef with no sense of self-worth. She’s engaged to Gregory, an obvious misogynist and whose mother owns the restaurant where Kady works, so it’s a perfect match. Fortunately for Kady, she happens across an improbably large flour tin. Upon opening the tin Kady finds a perfectly sized wedding dress from over a hundred years ago along with shoes and accoutrements, all somehow stuffed into that flour tin without damage. Bafflingly to Sam, Kady immediately puts the dress which opens a portal which Kady immediately goes though. She now finds herself in 1870s Colorado and sees a man being hanged by three other people. Leaping to the unsubstantiated conclusion that she must save this man and the other three are evil, Kady, still in her poofy wedding dress fights them off and takes the unconscious, half-choked man down and then goes to bed. Kady wakes up to this strange man making out with her and just accepts his explanation that he thought she was angel. The man, Cole, immediately proposes marriage which Kady refuses (yay!) but after she can’t find a job in the nearby town she takes him up on his offer (boo!). This begins a portion of the book involving the obligatory long looks, breathless almost make outs, and Kady having several opportunities to return home, but feeling just too darn torn to go back through the portal because Cole is too dreamy. Even when Cole imprisons her in his estate, Kady decides to stay and cook a massive feast since apparently she can’t leave but does have complete control over his finances. Also, Kady has been dreaming of an Arabian man with a veiled face every week since she was a child, and you might think this would be important, but the only important thing Sam can focus on is how terrible Kady’s taste in men is and WHAT SIZE IS THAT FREAKING FLOUR TIN?


Be sure to check out I Drink Your Podcast, especially the Fish Tank episode featuring Danielle and Sam. You can find them on Twitter @IDYP_Podcast, Instagram @idyp_podcast, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.


Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

profile image

1 Listener

comment icon

1 Comment

1

bookmark
plus icon
share episode

Show more best episodes

Toggle view more icon

FAQ

How many episodes does Book Retorts have?

Book Retorts currently has 188 episodes available.

What topics does Book Retorts cover?

The podcast is about Comedy, Podcasts, Books and Arts.

What is the most popular episode on Book Retorts?

The episode title 'Wonder Woman 1984 - Part 1' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Book Retorts?

The average episode length on Book Retorts is 78 minutes.

How often are episodes of Book Retorts released?

Episodes of Book Retorts are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of Book Retorts?

The first episode of Book Retorts was released on May 31, 2020.

Show more FAQ

Toggle view more icon

Comments