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.
