Good Scribes Only Daniel Breyer, Jeremy Streich

Season four! Complete! All the books! Ranked! Godspeed! 💪 🖖

About the Show

Hosted by novelists and entrepreneurs Daniel Breyer & Jeremy Streich, Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 4 we’re traveling through the 20th century, decade by decade, because Dan really wanted to see what the world was like before plumbing was a common thing.

Mark Twain once said that "The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession.” When he said this, he forgot to consider Nahko and Pepper 🐾

About the Week's BookA classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.About the Week's AuthorTim O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his later work often explores the postwar lives of its veterans. O’Brien is perhaps best known for his book The Things They Carried (1990), a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by O'Brien's wartime experiences. In 2010, The New York Times described the latter as “ a classic of contemporary war fiction.”In addition, O’Brien is acclaimed for his war novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), which received the National Book Award.



About the Show

Hosted by novelists and entrepreneurs Daniel Breyer & Jeremy Streich, Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 4 we’re traveling through the 20th century, decade by decade, because Dan really wanted to see what the world was like before plumbing was a common thing.

About the BookA classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.About the AuthorTim O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his later work often explores the postwar lives of its veterans. O’Brien is perhaps best known for his book The Things They Carried (1990), a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by O'Brien's wartime experiences. In 2010, The New York Times described the latter as “ a classic of contemporary war fiction.”In addition, O’Brien is acclaimed for his war novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), which received the National Book Award.

About the Show

Hosted by novelists and entrepreneurs Daniel Breyer & Jeremy Streich, Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 4 we’re traveling through the 20th century, decade by decade, because Dan really wanted to see what the world was like before plumbing was a common thing.



Episode Notes

0-5 min — Introduction

5-15 min — Casting the actors

15-20 min — Plot summary begins

20-25 min — Post modernism and stories

25-30 min — Real truth vs story truth

30-35 min — Brotherhood and camaraderie

35-40 min — Anthropological explanations

40-45 min — Loneliness in a modern context

45-50 min — Comedy as a coping device

50-55 min — Problems with memory

55-60 min — Schizophrenia of war

60-65 min — Conclusion

Are reading challenges worth it? What thousand page book is Dan dying to read? And what in god's name is an "anti-library?" Enjoy!

About the Week's Book

Here’s the rub, The Name of the Rose is one of the highest selling books ever. Ever! It sold more copies than The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird, and yet it is hard to fathom how. The book is extraordinarily dense, so fraught with allusions and references that 50% of the its subtext sails quietly past, like a ship in the night. On the podcast we discuss a few theories how this could be. To us, it seems that Eco essentially wrote two novels in one—a detective thriller for the common man6, and a critical commentary for the 20th century post-modernist. At bottom it’s a medieval detective whodunnit whose principle characters are not investigators but 13th century christian monks. Church thrillers are not my jam, but I sure as h-e-c-k admire its commentary, and the man’s hustle 🧠🫡.


About the Show

Hosted by novelists and entrepreneurs Daniel Breyer & Jeremy Streich, Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 4 we’re traveling through the 20th century, decade by decade, because Dan really wanted to see what the world was like before plumbing was a common thing.

About the Book

The year is 1327. Benedictines in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where “the most interesting things happen at night.”

About the Author

Umberto Eco was an Italian writer of fiction, essays, academic texts, and children's books. A professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, Eco’s brilliant fiction is known for its playful use of language and symbols, its astonishing array of allusions and references, and clever use of puzzles and narrative inventions. His perceptive essays on modern culture are filled with a delightful sense of humor and irony, and his ideas on semiotics, interpretation, and aesthetics have established his reputation as one of academia’s foremost thinkers.

About the Show

Hosted by novelists and entrepreneurs Daniel Breyer & Jeremy Streich, Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 4 we’re traveling through the 20th century, decade by decade, because Dan really wanted to see what the world was like before plumbing was a common thing.

Episode Notes

0-5 min — Introduction

5-10 min — ChatGPT guessing game + Casting

10-15 min — Plot summary

15-20 min — Qualms with the novel

20-25 min — Why this is a post-modernist novel

25-30 min — Plot continued

30-40 min — Problems with Post-modernism

40-45 min — Credentialism

45-55 min — The novel’s success

55-60 min — Episode conclusion

Episode Cheat Sheet

Find out who's the real nihilist, and how Daniel derives meaning from his copious acting deals, not to mention one poorly thought out sports analogy. Enjoy!About the Week's Book

Though most people think essays1 when talking Joan Didion, Dan and I read her best known novel for the podcast. Play it as it Lays is the story of an actor whose journey oscillates between dizzying and domestic, as her acting career slows and her personal life collapses. While running barely 200 pages, the book has a quality of being adrift to it that connects directly to Didion’s belief that who we are is affected by where we are.

It’s clear that her reputation is well earned, and I appreciate what’s regarded as Didion’s “Hollywood” book, but I can’t say I’ll be returning to it any time soon. Like her essays, the novel is fragmented in a way that creates an aspect not of closure but its opposite, a kind of frantic recognition that all stories have holes and flaws and will collapse, eventually. The story mirrors LA’s mix of grimness and glamour, and echoes one of her core beliefs: all of us are in some essential fashion, “working” in the dark.

We hope you enjoy this discussion on Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays.

About the ShowHosted by novelists and entrepreneurs Daniel Breyer & Jeremy Streich, Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 4 we’re traveling through the 20th century, decade by decade, because Dan really wanted to see what the world was like before plumbing was a common thing.