Episode · People I (Mostly) Admire · 2023-08-19
Books mentioned on 112. Reading Dostoevsky Behind Bars
Reginald Dwayne Betts spent more than eight years in prison. Today he's a Yale Law graduate, a MacArthur Fellow, and a poet.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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The Harry Potter Series
Discussed“so I'm going to maybe embarrass myself but I love the Harry Potter series”
Where to get it
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M.
Discussed“but with Zen and the other Motorcycle Maintenance, I know that book it is not in the library”
Where to get it
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The Things They Carried
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is a critically acclaimed collection of interrelated semi-autobiographical short stories about American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War.
Discussed“yesterday actually I was having lunch with somebody and he said the things they carry and I was like of course we have Tim O'Brien in the collection”
Where to get it
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is a landmark masterpiece of magical realism that chronicles the multi-generational saga of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo.
Discussed“so you have your 100 Years of Solitude”
Where to get it
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Insurrections
Insurrections by Rion Amilcar Scott is a critically acclaimed collection of short stories that portrays the complex lives of African Americans in a fictional Maryland suburb, exploring themes of community, faith, struggle, and identity.
Discussed“but you also have somebody like Rion Scott who's an amazing short story writer and we had this collection of his called insurrections in the catalog”
Where to get it
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The Maltese Falcon
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett is a classic hardboiled detective novel that revolutionized the crime fiction genre with its gritty realism, morally ambiguous characters, and iconic protagonist, Sam Spade.
Discussed“and that might be right next to the Chester Himes or right next to the Maltese falcon or right next to the other run of Stephen King books that we have in there”
Where to get it
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Black Boy
Black Boy by Richard Wright is a powerful autobiographical memoir detailing the author's harrowing upbringing in the Jim Crow South and his eventual escape to Chicago, marked by systemic racism, poverty, and intellectual awakening.
Discussed“so we got black boy and that's a 300 page book”
Where to get it
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot D%c3%ad%c3%ad%c2%a1z is a celebrated contemporary novel that follows an overweight, sci-fi-obsessed Dominican-American nerd growing up in New Jersey while haunted by an ancestral curse known as fuk%c3%ba.
Discussed“we broke somebody in to perform a brief wondrous life of Oscar Wilde”
Where to get it
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The Secret History of Wonder Woman
The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore is a comprehensive non-fiction biography that uncovers the hidden origins of the iconic comic book superhero through the lens of early twentieth-century feminism, psychology, and the life of her creator, William Moulton Marston.
Discussed“and so the next day we literally got a letter from this woman saying I picked up that secret history of Wonder Woman and it is such an amazing book”
Where to get it
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A Gentleman in Moscow
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is a historical novel that follows an aristocratic count who is ordered to spend the remainder of his life inside a luxury Moscow hotel.
Discussed“so if you get hooked on the Russians you could find the resources like they go dostevsky they go check off they go a gentleman in Moscow which is a very new book to set in Russia”
Where to get it
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The Black Poets
The Black Poets edited by Dudley Randall is an influential poetry anthology celebrating African American verse from its spiritual roots to contemporary revolutionary voices.
Discussed“But yo, somebody sent me a book, and I ended up getting this book called The Black Poets, and it changed my life. The first poem I read by Etheridge Knight was called 'For Freckle Face Gerald'—it had a line in it that says 16 years hadn't done a good job on his voice—and it talked about how the 160”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (1) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
“and somebody mentions beloved”