Required Reading – Details, episodes & analysis

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Required Reading

Required Reading, Dr. Nic Hoffmann, Michael Carroll and Mike Burns.

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Education

Frequency: 1 episode/24d. Total Eps: 64

Dr. Nic Hoffmann, Mike Burns, and Mike Carroll are teachers at the Marist School teaching the American Experiment Class. In an attempt to update our curriculum, we have been reassessing the books we assign, we were assigned in high school and college, and the books we wish we assigned. Do people even read anymore? I mean, we do, but how do we keep the student engaged with the Required Reading.

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🇩🇪 Germany - Books
15/07/2025
#89

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Green Day - Dookie

Season 5 · Episode 60

Monday, November 11, 2024 • Duration 37:07

With Required Reading, we’re launching something new! As we hinted at the end of last term, we’re exploring a broader American Studies approach, tentatively called Zeit Guys. After covering a book last week (and with another on the way), we’ll be diving into Green Day’s Dookie album in the same style—personal stories, analysis, and enjoyment. We’re excited to try this out, and we’d love your feedback! Let us know if you’d like more music, a few movies, or if you prefer sticking strictly to books. Thanks for listening and joining us on this journey!

Host: Dr. Nic Hoffmann

Panel: Mike Burns and Mike Carroll

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Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Season 5 · Episode 59

Friday, October 18, 2024 • Duration 01:05:45

This week on Required Reading, we talk Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and hidden in here is an easter egg that will unlock Hoffmann's Gold.

WE ARE BACK, BABY!!!!

Host: Nic

Panel: Mike and Mike.

From the Random House book cover: "In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win."

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Against Heaven's Matchless King by Michael Carroll

Season 1 · Episode 58

Thursday, August 1, 2024 • Duration 39:22

Hello! We are starting to dust off the cobwebs of summer break. As we do, we return to one of Mike Carroll's short stories. Please enjoy! We will be back with the new format soon, so keep following us here!

Thanks,

Nic

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Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Season 4 · Episode 57

Monday, June 3, 2024 • Duration 54:18

This week we dive into the Culinary Underbelly with Anthony Bourdain as we talk about his masterpiece Kitchen Confidential.

Host: Dr. Nic Hoffmann

Co-host: Mike Burns and Mike Carroll

From the Ecco back cover: "An updated and revised edition of Anthony Bourdain's mega-bestselling Kitchen Confidential, with new material from the original edition

Almost two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat before You Read This,” by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now classic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation, a megabestseller with over one million copies in print. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business.

Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine—this time with never-before-published material."

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A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

Season 4 · Episode 56

Thursday, April 25, 2024 • Duration 55:23

This week on Required Reading, we all called our brothers and fathers. We read A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, one of the greatest American parables ever written. Make your brothers, fathers, husbands, etc read it, also while you are at it, whoever you are, READ IT.

Host: Dr. Nic Hoffmann, Mike Burns, and Mike Carroll.

Book summary from University of Chicago Press: "When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Forty years later, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs through It has established itself as a classic of the American West. This new edition will introduce a fresh audience to Maclean’s beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Elegantly redesigned, A River Runs through It includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award-winning 1992 film adaptation of River. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.”

Redwall by Brian Jacques

Season 4 · Episode 55

Friday, March 15, 2024 • Duration 01:02:49

This week, Mike Carroll raps poetic about the role a mouse book played in his literary life. We talked about Redwall by Brian Jacques, volume 1 of 22; them mice sure get up to mischief!

How does Redwall by Brian Jacques hold up?

Co-hosted: Nic Hoffmann and Mike Carroll

"One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time The book that inspired a legend—the first novel in the beloved, bestselling Redwall saga. Welcome to Mossflower Wood, where the gentle mice have gathered to celebrate a year of peace and abundance. All is well…until a sinister shadow falls across the ancient stone abbey of Redwall. It is rumored that Cluny is coming—Cluny, the terrible one-eyed rat and his savage horde—Cluny, who has vowed to conquer Redwall Abbey! The only hope for the besieged mice lies in the lost sword of the legendary Martin the Warrior. And so begins the epic quest of a bumbling young apprentice—a courageous mouse who would rise up, fight back…and become a legend himself. Perfect for fans of T. A. Barron’s Merlin saga, John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. “The medieval world of Redwall Abbey—where gallant mouse warriors triumph over evil invaders—has truly become the stuff of legend.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer" - From the Firebird Publishing book summary

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Tintin and the Blue Lotus by Hergé

Season 4 · Episode 54

Friday, March 1, 2024 • Duration 50:37

We are back, baby! Sorry about the delay, life got in the way, but we are back with a graphic novel, this time the Franco-Belgian super star Tintin with Tintin and the Blue Lotus by Hergé. The world's most famous boy(?) detective helps predict World War II and is highly critical of the Europeans in Asia. Also, comedy! Join us next episode for Redwall by Brian Jacques

Host: Dr. Nic Hoffmann

Co-Host: Mike Burns and Mike Carroll

From the Amazon page: "Picking up where he left off in the Egyptian adventure Cigars of the Pharaoh, Tintin travels to China in The Blue Lotus, a tale which is generally considered Herge's first masterpiece. It's also Tintin's only foray into actual history, specifically the Sino-Japanese conflicts of the early 1930s. The political tensions combined with the chilling threats of drugs give the story an especially high and realistic sense of danger. Herge's interest in China was spurred by a friendship with a young Chinese student named Chang Chong-chen, a relationship that Tintin mirrors with a Chinese boy also named Chang Chong-chen. Herge paints a vivid picture of China and takes the opportunity to denounce ethnic prejudices (though ironically his artistic depiction of the Japanese businessman Mitsuhirato is quite grotesque). Years later, Tintin's relationship with Chang would become the basis of Tintin in Tibet. --David Horiuchi"

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The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Season 4 · Episode 53

Friday, December 15, 2023 • Duration 01:05:37

This week we complete the saga and talk The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien. Since the first season, we have had a guest episode with the great Robert von Hagen, but now, in season four we have completed the Tolkien series. "What about the Silmarillion?" You may asked. "WE HAVE COMPLETED THE SERIES." I reply. Enjoy this indepth thematic episode as we crown a king, liberate the Shire, and mourn some hobbits.

Host: Dr. Nic Hoffmann

Co-Host: Mike Carroll

Panel: Robert von Hagen

From the Del Rey back cover: "The awesome conclusion to The Lord of the Rings—the greatest fantasy epic of all time—which began in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read While the evil might of the Dark Lord Sauron swarms out to conquer all Middle-earth, Frodo and Sam struggle deep into Mordor, seat of Sauron’s power. To defeat the Dark Lord, the One Ring, ruler of the accursed Rings of Power, must be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. But the way is impossibly hard, and Frodo is weakening. Weighed down by the compulsion of the Ring, he begins finally to despair."

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Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Season 4 · Episode 52

Friday, December 1, 2023 • Duration 01:11:56

This week on Required Reading, we talk race, mental illness, and the Incredible Hulk. We read Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, but just want to talk about the rabbits.

Host: Dr. Nic Hoffmann

Co-hosts: Mike Burns and Mike Carroll

From the Penguin Classics back cover: "They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him."

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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

Season 4 · Episode 51

Wednesday, November 1, 2023 • Duration 52:51

This week we return to the universe of the Hitchhiker’s Guide as we discuss the sequel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams.

Host: Dr. Nic Hoffmann

Panel: Mike Burns and Mike Carroll

"Now celebrating the 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy," “Douglas Adams is a terrific satirist.”—The Washington Post Book World Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons? Time for a cup of tea! Join the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his uncommon comrades in arms in their desperate search for a place to eat, as they hurtle across space powered by pure improbability. Among Arthur’s motley shipmates are Ford Prefect, a longtime friend and expert contributor to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the three-armed, two-headed ex-president of the galaxy; Tricia McMillan, a fellow Earth refugee who’s gone native (her name is Trillian now); and Marvin, the moody android. Their destination? The ultimate hot spot for an evening of apocalyptic entertainment and fine dining, where the food speaks for itself (literally). Will they make it? The answer: hard to say. But bear in mind that The Hitchhiker’s Guide deleted the term “Future Perfect” from its pages, since it was discovered not to be! “What’s such fun is how amusing the galaxy looks through Adams’s sardonically silly eyes.”—Detroit Free Press" - From the Del Rey back cover.

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Required Reading – Details, episodes & analysis

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Required Reading – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Amazon21

Other12

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Amazon21

Other12

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