The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast

What books have you wanted to reread as soon as you finished them? Inspired by this fascinating prompt from our friend Nora, we decided to dive into this fun topic. We talk about the categories of books that inspire immediate rereads, share a few of our own examples, and discuss when (or if) we’ve ever actually done it. What books have inspired you to turn the last page and immediately go back to the beginning?

Shownotes

Books

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Absolution, by Jeff Vandermeer

Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope

The Wood in Midwinter, by Susanna Clarke

On the Calculation of Volume, by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland

Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

The Warden, by Anthony Trollope

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Ruth L.C. Simms

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

Moby-Dick: or, The Whale, by Herman Melville

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkein

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens

Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson

A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson

The Ghost Writer, by Philip Roth

The Counterlife, by Philip Roth

Zuckerman Unbound, by Philip Roth

The Anatomy Lesson, by Philip Roth

The Prague Orgy, by Philip Roth

American Pastoral, by Philip Roth

I Married a Communist, by Philip Roth

The Human Stain, by Philip Roth

The Taiga Syndrome, by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana

The Walk, by Robert Walser, translated by Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky

Splitting and Order, by Ted Kooser

Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins

James, by Percival Everett

So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell

Time Will Darken It, by William Maxwell

The Chateau, by William Maxwell

Felix Holt, by George Eliot

Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante, translated by Jenny McPhee

Other Links

Nora’s Instagram Post

One Bright Book

Episode 49: Rereading

Episode 76: Author Completionism

Episode 77: Poetry

The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast is a book chat podcast. Every other week Paul and Trevor get together to talk about some bookish topic or another. We hope you’ll continue to join us!

Many thanks to those who helped make this possible! If you’d like to donate as well, you can do so on Substack or on our Patreon page. These subscribers get periodic bonus episode and early access to all episodes! Every supporter has their own feed that he or she can use in their podcast app of choice to download our episodes a few days early. Please go check it out!

How do you fill the yawning chasm that arises after you finish a great book or a long group read? Is it a time of excitement and possibility, or a daunting and overwhelming trial? Fresh off of finishing several doorstops ourselves, we discuss how we approach what we want to read next.

Summer Book Club

The Mookse and the Gripes Summer Book Club 2024 is coming up fast! This year we are only choosing from William Trevor novels. After losing for the last two years, he will not lose again! But what will the book be? As in the past, we will be holding a vote over on Twitter / X! Watch my account on May 21!

The Books:

The Children of Dynmouth (1976)

Fools of Fortune (1983)

Felicia’s Journey (1994)

The Story of Lucy Gault (2002)

Dates:

Voting starts May 21 and runs through the early hours of May 25 for us in the mountain time zone.

We will announce the winner in the next episode!

The episode discussing the winner will be Episode 86, coming out on August 8.

Shownotes

Books

The Peregrine, by J.L. Carr

Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young

Ulysses, by James Joyce

The Ambassadors, by Henry James

Tone, by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno

The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse

Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald

The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton

Urne Burial, by Robert Burton

Reinhardt’s Garden, by Mark Haber

The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot

Silas Marner, by George Eliot

The Eustace Diamonds, by Anthony Trollope

O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Anthony Briggs

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, by Rebecca West

Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum, translated by Basil Creighton with revisions by Margot Bettauer Dembo

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Michael R. Katz

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, by Anne De Marcken

The Peasants, by Władysław Reymont, translated by Anna Zaranko

Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford

Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector, translated by Benjamin Moser

The Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson

Too Much of Life, by Clarice Lispector, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

The Murderer, by Roy Heath

The Oppermans, by Lion Feuchtwanger, translated by James Cleugh with revisions by Joshua Cohen

Green Equinox, by Elizabeth Mavor

Twice Lost, by Phyllis Paul

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, by Manuel Puig, translated by Susan Jill Levine

Elena Knows, by Claudio Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle

A Little Luck, by Claudio Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle

Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante, translated by Jenny McPhee

A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell

Anniversaries, by Uwe Johnson, translated by Damion Searls

The Extinction of Irene Rey, by Jennifer Croft

The House on the Strand, by Daphne Du Maurier

Links

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling Substack

Jonathan Golding and Mark Haber on Instagram Live

The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast is a book chat podcast. Every other week Paul and Trevor get together to talk about some bookish topic or another. We hope you’ll continue to join us!

Many thanks to those who helped make this possible! If you’d like to donate as well, you can do so on Substack or on our Patreon page. These subscribers get periodic bonus episode and early access to all episodes! Every supporter has their own feed that he or she can use in their podcast app of choice to download our episodes a few days early. Please go check it out!

We all have those books that are waiting in the wings, begging for a chance to make their way off the shelf and into our hands. This week, we chat about why some books seem to get stuck on the sidelines, even though we always think they’ll be the next one up. We discuss some of the reasons this happens and each share five of our own benchwarmer books, doing our best to justify why we keep ignoring their pleas to “put me in coach!”

Shownotes

Books

Horror Movie, by Paul Tremblay

Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer

The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller

Circe, by Madeline Miller

To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolfe

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy

The Human Stain, by Philip Roth

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy

Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

Absalolm, Absalom!, by William Faulkner

Baudolino, by Umberto Eco

The Gormenghast Novels, by Mervyn Peake

Strong Motion, by Jonathan Franzen

The Twenty-Seventh City, by Jonathan Franzen

Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips

The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Books) Saved My Life, by Andy Miller

We, the Drowned, by Carsten Jensen

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence

The Rainbow, by D.H. Lawrence

Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence

Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi

Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes

Hons and Rebels, by Jessica Mitford

Romola, by George Eliot

The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen

At Play in the Fields of the Lord, by Peter Matthiessen

The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker

Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen

Tigana, by Guy Gabriel Kay

Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell

The Last Colony, by John Scalzi

Old Mans’ War, by John Scalzi

The Ghost Brigade, by John Scalzi

Zoe’s Tale, by John Scalzi

The Adventures of China Iron, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre

Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Anthony Briggs

The Expendable Man, by Dorothy B. Hughes

Felix Holt, the Radical, by George Eliot

Phineas Redux, by Anthony Trollope

Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope

Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope

Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy

Other Links

Jack’s Instagram Post

Episode 31: New Directions, with Mark Haber

Episode 6: Our Fantasy Past (and Future?)

The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast is a book chat podcast. Every other week Paul and Trevor get together to talk about some bookish topic or another. We hope you’ll continue to join us!

Many thanks to those who helped make this possible! If you’d like to donate as well, you can do so on Substack or on our Patreon page. These subscribers get periodic bonus episode and early access to all episodes! Every supporter has their own feed that he or she can use in their podcast app of choice to download our episodes a few days early. Please go check it out!

This week we turn back the clock and revisit our very first podcast topic: Bucket List Books! We check in on our progress over the last few years, discuss our philosophies and motivations, look ahead to our next bucket lists books, and share plenty of listener feedback. What books are on your bucket list—and why?

Summer Book Club

The book for the Mookse and the Gripes Summer Book Club 2024 is William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault. You can start reading it whenever you want to! We have lined up a guest to join us to discuss the book in Episode 86, coming out on August 8.

Shownotes

Books

Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, by Patrick Radden Keefe

Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett

Long Island, by Colm Tóibín

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young

A Little Luck, by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle

Not a River, by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott

Festival and Game of the Worlds, by César Aira, translated by Katherine Silver

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken

War, by Céline, translated by Charlotte Mandell

Death on the Installment Plan, by Céline, translated by Ralph Manheim

London, by Céline

Journey to the End of Night, by Céline, translated by Ralph Manheim

The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, by Mathias Énard, translated by Frank Wynne

Compass, by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell

The Waves, by Virginia Woolf

Carpenteria, by Alexis Wright

Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright

Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust

The Stones of Aran, by Tim Robinson

The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch

Frost in May, by Antonia White

The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford

The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Anthony Briggs

Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce

Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer

Don Quixote, by Cervantes, translated by

Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Michael R. Katz

The Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor

Satantango, by László Krasznahorkai, translated by George Szirtes

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Paradise Lost, by John Milton

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

The Voyage Home, by Pat Barker

Parallel Stories, by Péter Nádas, translated by Imre Goldstein

Pilcrow, by Adam Mars-Jones

Cedilla, by Adam Mars-Jones

Caret, by Adam Mars-Jones

Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James

Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa

My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackery

South Riding, by Winifred Holtby

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot

Silas Marner, by George Eliot

Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot

Felix Holt, by George Eliot

Romola, by George Eliot

Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon

Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon

The Complete Essays, by Michel de Montaigne, translated by M.A. Screech

Lesser Ruins, by Mark Haber

A Summer with Montaigne, by Antoine Compagnon, translated by Tina Kover

The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton

Pilgrimage, by Dorothy Richardson

The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jenni...

Trevor and Paul are back with the fourth annual best of the year extravaganza! In Part I, we count down the first half of our en favorite reads of 2024—and we are once again joined by a cast of friends and listeners who share some of their top books and best reading experiences of the year! Another great chance to grow your TBR pile for 2025!

Shownotes

Books

The Postcard, by Anne Berest, translated by Tina Kover

Gabriëlle, by Anne Berest and Claire Berest, translated by Tina Kover

Two Hours, by Alba Arikha

Crooked Seeds, by Karen Jennings

Fathers and Fugitives, by S.J. Naudé, translated by Michiel Heyns

Not Even the Dead, by Juan Gómez Bárcena, translated by Katie Whittemore

Not a River, by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott

The Wind That Lays Waste, by Selva Almada, translated by Chris Andrews

Dead Girls, by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott

Brickmakers, by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott

Any Person Is the Only Self, by Elisa Gabbert

The Unreality of Memory, by Elisa Gabbert

Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman

Rhine Journey, by Anne Schlee

About Looking, by John Berger

The Inkal, by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius

Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford

The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes, by K.C. Constantine

The Premier, by Georges Simenon

Two Thousand Million Man-Power, by Gertrude Trevelyan

Horror Movie, by Paul Tremblay

A County Doctor, by Franz Kafka

Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, by Angélica Gorodischer, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin

Sons, by Robert De Maria

Brothers, by Robert De Maria

Fletch, by Gregory McDonald

Bedlam, by Charlene Elsby

Quarry, by Max Allan Collins

A Tiler’s Afternoon, by Lars Gustfsson, translated by Tom Geddes

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, translated by

Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry

The Carrying, by Ada Limón

Picnic, Lighting, by Billy Collins

The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker

Bright Dead Things, by Ada Limón

The Hurting King, by Ada Limón

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, compiled by Ada Limón

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West

Clear, by Carys Davies

Malena, by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Philip Boehm

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken

Last Words from Montmartre, by Qin Miaojin, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich

The Preparation of the Novel, by Roland Barthes, translated by Kate Briggs

Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917 - 1922, by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Jamey Gambrell

The Power of Gentleness: Meditation on the Risk of Living, by Anne Dufourmantelle, translated by Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé

Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood, by Lucy Jones

Question 7, by Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death, by Laura Cumming

H Is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

The Goshawk, by T.H. White

The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, by Laura Cumming

The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas, translated by Elizabeth Rokkan

The Birds, by Tarjei Vesaas, translated by Michael Barnes and Torbjørn Støverud

James, by Percival Everett

The Trees, by Percival Everett

The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast is a book chat podcast. Every other week Paul and Trevor get together to talk about some bookish topic or another. We hope you’ll continue to join us!

Many thanks to those who helped make this possible! If you’d like to donate as well, you can do so on Substack or on our Patreon page. These subscribers get periodic bonus episode and early access to all episodes! Every supporter has their own feed that he or she can use in their podcast app of choice to download our episodes a few days early. Please go check it out!