Julia and Victoria enter a dream state to talk about Beloved by Toni Morrison and its place within both the horror genre and American history.

Julia reads her essay “What Your Autistic Body Feels Is Real: How I Found Out I Was Gaslighting Myself For Years and What I’m Doing Now.”

Julia and Victoria, who had somehow never read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery, are joined by ANGR Podcast host Sofia Syntaxx, who has collected upwards of ten editions of the book from all over the world, including the most recent translation into their indigenous language Anishinaabemowin. They talk about translation across languages and cultures, childhood dreams, and being haunted by the Duolingo owl.

Julia and Victoria contemplate mortality (and whether they could be buried under paper trees to become books in their next lives) with the help of the darkly comic memoir Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Katelyn Doughty about a young woman trying to become a mortician and revolutionize the way Americans handle death.

Julia and Victoria try to figure out why their 2011 Harper Teen copy of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte looks suspiciously like Twilight and why that’s interesting for the genre of Gothic literature.

When Julia and Victoria found out there was a book out there in the world which combined feminism, writing, and data (aka their three favorite things) called Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, they absolutely had to read it for Book Club. Victoria talks very fast about women’s unpaid labor, and Julia realizes she can ask the world to design things that actually fit her tiny hands. Fair Warning: This is not the book to read before bed because it will fill you with a burning feminist rage that cannot be contained.

Julia and Victoria are joined by their friend Andy Park to discuss Pachinko by Min Jin Lee and his family’s experiences as Korean American immigrants. Julia makes several K-Pop references.

Julia and Victoria contemplate how they will remember the pandemic.

Julia and Victoria take a look at the children’s classic The Giver by Lois Lowry with fresh eyes as an extended critique of whiteness and dominant culture.

Julia and Victoria outline the parallel narratives of We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates: 1. The journey of Coates as a writer and thinker on the rise during Obama’s presidency, and 2. His essays unraveling the true tragedy of America’s history buried underneath the country’s larger-than-life myths.

Where does our food come from? (And why is there so much corn in everything?) Julia and Victoria, with special guest and Book Club’s project manager Rebecca Gesme, discuss Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma in which he endeavors to answer these very important and complicated questions.

Julia and Victoria take a little interlude from reading to discuss the instagram book community known as #bookstagram: the positive side of democratizing book reviews, the struggles of bowing to the almighty algorithm, and the weird trends that don’t make any sense.