Five Very Good Podcasts Now on BBC Sounds

Longtime readers around here will know that I am still a devotee of the iPod Classic, using it to listen to my music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Unfortunately, my iPod Classic has been having battery problems, meaning I can only use plugged in to power. So, it works in the car, but is essentially useless for listening to while doing house chores or working out.

This means I have been forced to listen to stuff like someone from the 2020s (or 2010s); that is to say, on my phone. The first thing I listened to this way was the podcast Doctor Who Redacted, because it can only be accessed through the BBC Sounds app. But once I listened to this podcast (highly recommended, by the way), I realized there was a whole wealth of material that I've been listening to on there, now for around a year I think. As an American, you can listen to whatever you want!*

There doesn't seem, alas, to be a way to view a list of everything you've listened to on the BBC Sounds app, so I am going to give you some recommendations from memory. Probably there is other good stuff I am forgetting.

• "Beethoven Can Hear You" (2020). Actual Deaf actress Sophie Stone plays a Deaf time traveller who travels back in time to meet Beethoven... and discovers that he is not in fact Deaf. Beautifully performed by Stone and Doctor Who's own Peter Capaldi, beautifully written by Timothy X Atack (who I know from the Doctor Who audio dramas), and beautifully sounding, with some interesting things to say about disability and identity.
• Two on a Tower (2021). There are a lot of Thomas Hardy (and other Victorian fiction) adaptations on BBC Sounds, but this has been my favorite of them so far, a genuinely moving adaptation of my favorite minor Hardy, a book that has otherwise gone unadapted. Captures the leads' uncertainty and passion in equal measure.
• Mrs Sidhu Investigates: Murder with Masala (2017). This is a fun mystery comedy, about a nosy Indian caterer who keeps sticking her nose into murders. Meera Syal is hugely funny as the lead, as is Justin Edwards, who plays her long-suffering police contact. My main complaint is that there was only one four-episode series, though it was later turned into both a tv show and a novel.
• Decameron Nights (2014). Ten installments of Boccaccio's Decameron are dramatized in 165 minutes. Lots of good actors in this, and lots of good jokes, really brings the sexual farce elements of the original to life with a lightly modern touch. Lots of familiar voices (Samuel Barnett is good value of course) but you haven't lived until you've heard Big Finish's Jane Slavin as a horny abbess.

• A Vindication of Frankenstein's Monster (2024). I'm not quite done with this, but I am loving it enough to confidently state it will be on my Hugo ballot next year. This story mashes up Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. What if the woman we now mostly remember as the mother of the mother of Frankenstein... kind of became Frankenstein's monster herself? Or, perhaps, she already was? Great science fictional exploration of monstrousness and gender.

* Except for, apparently, Numberblocks Tales, which is a great tragedy for us in the Mollmanns.

Student Review: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Trade paperback, 273 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1818)
Previously read January 2011

Acquired December 2013

Reread February 2014

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
by Mary Shelley

I think like two-thirds of my class had read Frankenstein before, many of them in high school, many others in the introductory class to the English major (professors in our department usually focus on one text that allows them to demonstrate a wide variety of critical approaches, and one often teaches Frankenstein). By focusing on it as a work of early science fiction, though, I think I hit a new angle for most of them:

• "[...] I also enjoyed Frankenstein."
• "I think you should teach Adam Bede, Arthur & George and Frankenstein (which I had already read in high school but didn't get that much out of at the time) again definitely"
• "I thoroughly enjoyed 'Frankenstein,' 'War of the Worlds,' and 'V for Vendetta.'"
• "I really liked Frankenstein, The Thing in the Forest, Sherlock Holmes, and Arthur and George."
• "teach frankenstein (interesting approach)" 

I did realize that I should teach the 1818 text next time, not the 1831 one; the book was less interesting than I remember, and I think that's why.

Review: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Secret Sharer, Transformation: Three Tales of Doubles edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Barry V. Qualls

Trade paperback, 239 pages
Published 2009 (contents: 1831-1910)
Acquired November 2009
Read July 2013

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Secret Sharer, Transformation: Three Tales of Doubles

edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Barry V. Qualls

This small anthology collects three stories from the "long nineteenth century" about doubles, along with some supporting materials (letter, contemporary reviews, other works by the same authors, related works by contemporary authors). The first story is "Transformation" by Mary Shelley, which begins like much of her work, with a dull life story before it finally gets to the meat-- which is over a bit too fast and a bit too simply. Some good ideas, but when I read a lot of early horror, I feel like later writers do it better. Frankenstein this isn't, nor even The Last Man.

"The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," by good old Robert Louis Stevenson,  is one of those stories you suspect might play out better if the whole thing wasn't completely embedded in contemporary popular culture already.  Shock, horror-- they're the same guy! It's not the only book to have such an affliction, though, and I feel like Dracula has weathered that problem much better for some reason.

That leaves us, then, with the best of these stories: Conrad's "The Secret Sharer." I've read little Conrad before (basically just Lord Jim), but I come away with the impression that I must read more. What an odd, immersive story; you totally buy into the protagonist's perspective, and you feel every hit. The book is unsettling because its protagonist is unsettled, and in the end, I was genuinely fearful for the ship and its crew in a way I haven't been for a long time. A sharply written delight.