The Worst Bestsellers Worst Bestsellers

I love this podcast! It makes me feel both nostalgic for the books I loved as a kid and amused at the absolute garbage I used to love. The hosts are super funny and insightful. I would love if they reviewed Judy Blume books the next time they want to feature some good material. I read all of her books ~1 billion times growing up and I’m sure other listeners did, too. It would be fun to revisit them via this pod!

Every show is basically just the hosts retelling the entire plot of the featured book, with about 5 minutes of insights and opinions. Maybe the hosts stick to recapping the plot because ppl complain that the show is too “political.” Honestly it’s their right to share their opinions. The show is called Worst Best Sellers so I expect the hosts to tell me WHY these books are the worst. That’s what I came here for, not to hear a 45 minute plot summary. Maybe the hosts feel that the badness of the book will be inherent in the plot summary, but any book would sound kinda dry if you just summarize the plot beats.

tl;dr: I wish they spent more time discussing things like writing style, tropes, and character development instead of just recounting the whole plot.

I keep coming back to this podcast because I want to love it, and informed critique of bad media is totally my jam, but two big things keep turning me off: the tonal shift at the end to the time-filler games (pick one, you don’t need a full 30 minutes of them in a podcast that’s already reasonably long), and more importantly, how absolutely rude the hosts are to the guests. Why do they have guests at all? At least half the time, any time the guest tries to say something, it’s cut off with something like “yeah okay, anyway...” If they’re that impatient with guests speaking, they should just do the show without them. It’s not really a necessary addition.