Book Club for Masochists: a Readers' Advisory Podcast

It's episode 230 and time for us to talk about media we've been enjoying! We discuss music, video essays, movies, comics, books, crafts, and more!
You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system.
In this episode
Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray 🦇 | Jam Edwards
Things We're Enjoying:
Matthew The Music Video Is Dead, Long Live The Music Video by Patrick (H) Willems
Hobtown Mystery Stories, vol. 2: The Cursed Hermit by Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes, colour by Jason Fischer-Kouhi
Witchy Stitching: 25 Patterns to Haunt Your Home by Meg Black The Witchy Stitcher


Meghan KEXP "Me more cowboy than you" by the Brudi Brothers
Glass Beams (full set)
Angine de Poitrine (full set) The kerfuffle Meghan mentioned

Live on KEXP podcast

Live music at local venues
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker

Jam New music highlights (YouTube playlist): The Apple Tree Under the Sea by Hemlocke Springs
Nothing's About to Happen to Me by Mitski
"23" by Lime Garden
"Bend Your Knees" by Henry Mansfield
"ça pik un peu quand même" by Miki

Jam's full Jan-Feb 2026 New Music Playlist (spreadsheet will be shared in our Discord)

Hundreds of Beavers (2022 movie)
Raspberry and almond sourdough cake Based on the "Cherry and Almond Bake" recipe from 10-Minute Sourdough by Vanessa Kimbell


Anna Twinkleby
Nicole Rudolph Who Cursed us with Popcorn Ceilings?
The Myth of a Clean Home
They're selling us AI floor plans (with @AbbyCox )
TMFD Alum Spotlight: Nicole Rudolph, Fashion Historian

Webtoons Love is Loading (mature) by 97pieces
Love is Loading (all ages)
Our Sunny Days by  Jeong Seokchan
Our Sunny Days, vol. 1


Other Media We Mentioned
Michael Jackson - Thriller
Childish Gambino - This is America
Beyoncé - Formation
Lambrini Girls on KEXP
triple j - Like a Version playlist
Jam's music  podcast
The Apothecary Diaries
Links, Articles, and Things
Artemis II
Beyoncé explains why she stopped making music videos
YouTube Ditches the Billboard Charts
15 Non-Fiction Books about Psychology by BIPOC Authors:
Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers' Advisory Podcast chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.
Patterns That Remain: a Guide to Healing for Asian Children of Immigrants by Stacey Diane Arañez Litam
Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma by Mariel Buqué
Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Well-Being by Yuria Celidwen
Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness by Catherine Cho
What My Bones Know: a Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo
The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color by Natalie Y. Gutiérrez 
Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone by Khameer Kidia
But What Will People Say? Navigating Mental Health, Identity, Love and Family Between Cultures by Sahaj Kaur Kohli 
How I Know White People Are Crazy and Other Stories: Notes From a Frustrated Black Psychologist by Johnathan Mathias Lassiter
Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice by Jennifer Mullan
Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life by Shigehiro Oishi
Autistic and Black: Our Experiences of Growth, Progress and Empowerment by Kala Allen Omeiza 
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
All the Little Monsters: How I Learned to Live with Anxiety by David A. Robertson
Permission to Come Home: Reclaiming Mental Health as Asian Americans by Jenny T. Wang
Give us feedback!
Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!
Check out our Tumblr, join our Discord Server, or send us an email!
Join us again on Tuesday, May 5th when we'll be talking about Sapphic Horror!
Join us again on Tuesday, June 2nd we'll be talking about "coming of (old) age" books.

It's episode 229 and time for us to talk about Media Criticism. We talk about what counts as media, the challenges of writing about emerging forms of media, how we interact with criticism, and more!
You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system.
In this episode
Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray 🦇 | Jam Edwards
Things We Read (or tried to…)
The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men by Manuel Betancourt
Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean by Douglas Wolk
Marvel Age of Comics: Doctor Strange: A Decade of Dark Magic by Stuart Moore, narrated by Jason Lasky
Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado
Culture Creep: Notes on a Pop Apocalypse by Alice Bolin
Pop Classics #15: Ugh, as if!: Clueless by Veronica Litt
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian
We See Each Other: A Black, Trans Journey Through TV and Film by Tre'vell Anderson
The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin
Why I love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature edited by Becky Siegel Spratford
Bad Indian Bookclub: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds by Patty Krawec
Other Media We Mentioned
Parasite Eve
Clever Girl: Jurassic Park by Hannah McGregor
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
33 ⅓
The Importance Of Being Earnest | Official Trailer | National Theatre Live
Lady Sings the Blues
Video Essayists Answer Your Assumptions (with hbomberguy‬, ‪D'Angelo Wallace, and Mina Le, ft. Spencer Agnew)
Our Favourite Video Essayists/Reviewers/Reviews
Action Button
Amanda the Jedi
Any Austin
Dungeon Chill
Every Frame a Painting
Folding Ideas
I Finished a Video Game
Jacob Gellar
Jenna Stoeber
Jenny Nicholson
hbomberguy
Lindsay Ellis
Matt McMuscles: The Worst Fighting Game
Matty Bites
Princess Weekes
ReRez: Just Bad Games
Ryan Hollinger
Super Eyepatch Wolf
T1J
Todd in the Shadows
The WWE's complex "Black" history by F.D Signifier
Extremely Overdetermined Adventure Game Tier List | Part 1: Re-ranking the Top 20 by Innuendo Studios and Questing Refuge
Jam's list of top 10 video essays about media I've never seen
Links, Articles, and Things
The Times Literary Supplement
Bubbles Zine
The Comics Staple
Libro.fm Audiobook Listening Copy Program
20 Media Criticism Books by BIPOC Authors:
Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers' Advisory Podcast chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
Indigenous Celebrity: Entanglements with Fame by Jennifer Adese and Robert Alexander
We See Each Other: A Black, Trans Journey Through TV and Film by Tre'vell Anderson
The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin
Black Music by Amiri Baraka
The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men by Manuel Betancourt
New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi and K-Pop by Fatima Bhutto
Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood by Donald Bogle
Black TV: Five Decades of Groundbreaking Television From Soul Train to Black-ish and Beyond by Bethonie Butler
Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada by Karrmen Crey
Original People, Original Television: The Launching of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network by Jennifer David
Everything to Play For: An Insider's Guide to How Video Games are Changing Our World by Marijam Did
Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema by Karen Han
Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me by Aisha Harris
Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World by Wil Haygood
The Creative Gene: How Books, Movies, and Music Inspired the Creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima
Our Gang: A Racial History of the Little Rascals by Julia Lee
Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship by Lori Kido Lopez
The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema From Fodder to Oscar by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris
Music Is History by Questlove

Give us feedback!
Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!
Check out our Tumblr, join our Discord Server, or send us an email!
Join us again on Tuesday, April 21st it's time for our Spring Media update!
Then on Tuesday,  May 5th, we'll be talking about Sapphic horror (as suggested by tmauch)

It's episode 228 and time for us to talk about Computers and Computer Science books! We discuss technology, digital humanities, coding, and more!
You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system.
In this episode
Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray 🦇 | Jam Edwards
Things We Read (or tried to…)
Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (2016)
Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium (2022) I could not find a free version of this online

Your Computer Is on Fire edited by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip (2021)
The Computer Always Wins: A Playful Introduction to Algorithms through Puzzles and Strategy Games Paperback by Elliot Lichtman (2025)
Must Know High School Computer Programming by Julie Sway (2020)
In the Beginning... Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson (1999)
A Prehistory of the Cloud by Tung-Hui Hu (2016)
Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson (2012)
Other Media We Mentioned
The Soul of the New Machine by Tracy Kidder
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents San Francisco by Ellen Ullman
Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology by Ellen Ullman
ClickArt 65,000
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (1999)
Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson Mother Earth Mother Board

Links, Articles, and Things
Separating the data from the CHAFF by Matthew Murray 🦇,  Fernando Rios, and Seth Erickson
9-track tape
Academic Book About Emojis Can't Include The Emojis It Talks About Because Of Copyright
Media Archaeology Lab
Alice Averlong (formerly Foone)
README
Institute for Advanced Study
15 Computer Science Books by BIPOC Authors:
Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers' Advisory Podcast chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.
Job Ready Java by Haythem Balti and Alan Galloway
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin
Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People by Aditya Y. Bhargava
More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech by Meredith Broussard
Indigenous Digital Life: The Practice and Politics of Being Indigenous on Social Media by Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI by Karen Hao
Ethical and Social Issues in the Information Age by Joseph Migga Kizza
Code for What? Computer Science for Storytelling and Social Justice by Clifford Lee & Elisabeth Soep
AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh
Creative Coding in Python: 30+ Programming Projects in Art, Games, and More by Sheena Vaidyanathan
A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online by Jennifer Wemigwans
System Design Interview: An Insider's Guide by Alex Xu
Number Theory for Computing by Song Y. Yan
Give us feedback!
Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!
Check out our Tumblr, join our Discord Server, or send us an email!
Join us again on Tuesday, April 7th we'll be talking about Media Criticism (as suggested by daftkifty)
Then on Tuesday,  April 21st it's time for our Spring Media Update!

It's episode 227 and time for an emergency backup episode! This episode is the audio version of "Utterly Unfamiliar and Downright Detestable" a presentation we gave for the 2022 Ontario Library Association's RA in a Day event. There's also a video version on our YouTube channel.
You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system.
In this episode
Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray 🦇 | Jam Edwards
Video version
https://youtu.be/hi_C_O_GLIA 

Slides
https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/presentations/7s75df43s 

Give us feedback!
Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!

Check out our Tumblr, join our Discord Server, or send us an email!
Join us again on Tuesday, March 17th when we'll be talking about Computer Science books (as suggested by Lea).
Then on Tuesday, April 7th we'll be talking about Media Criticism (as suggested by daftkifty).

It's episode 226 and time for us to talk about our 2026 Reading Resolutions! We discuss reading books, not reading books, quitting reading books, throwing books in the garbage, and more! Plus: Oh no, the passage of time!
You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system.
In this episode
Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray 🦇 | Jam Edwards
2026 "resolutions"/intentions
Matthew Read all the personal "book of the month" display books
Read all the fiction books owned
Read all of the non-comics non-fiction owned
Read all the graphic novels owned
Be on the internet less and read more
Get rid of books monthly

Anna Read more fiction
Catch up on what fantasy's been up to in the last 15ish years

Meghan Read books already owned (for the podcast when possible); rereads ok!

Jam Read in tiny bursts if that's the time available
Quit books and move on to something else

Give Us Suggestions!
Suggest puzzle books to Jam
Suggest fantasy novels from the last 15 years to Anna
Suggest sources for in-depth book reviews

Other Media We Mentioned
Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs
Blood Meridian and the reddit-ification of literature
Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones
Links, Articles, and Things
Circulating Ideas 304: Passive Readers' Advisory, with Lila Denning
Tiled Words
Puzzmo
Minute Cryptic
Alto (high-speed rail)
Adhesive remover
 American Gothic books by BIPOC Authors:
Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers' Advisory Podcast chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.
Ruby by Cynthia Bond
House of Cotton by Monica Brashears
An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole
The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts
The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
Mayra by Nicky Gonzalez
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
The House of Erzulie by Kirsten Imani Kasai
A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan
When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Cane by Jean Toomer
Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong
Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward
We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White
Give us feedback!
Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!
Check out our Tumblr, join our Discord Server, or send us an email!
Join us again on Tuesday, March 3rd when we'll be talking about Computer Science books (as suggested by Lea).
Then on Tuesday, April 7th we'll be talking about Media Criticism (as suggested by daftkifty).