The Stacks - Podcast Rankings and reviews

I have been an OG Stacks podcast listener and as the show continues to grow, the more my world shifts for the better. This isn’t just another bookish podcast with amazing guest interviews and weekly opportunities to add to an never ending TBR, it’s an experience. Traci is the BFF I think we all wish we had and just when I think an episode can’t top another, it does. This show has opened up my eyes to books I would not have normally picked up- books from different perspectives, social justice reform and tackling racism. I look forward to my Wednesdays episodes, and plan to continue Traci as often as I can!
And if you don’t believe me, listen to her most recent interview with Jessica Valente! It’s fantastic!

I’ve been a weekly listener of The Stacks for almost two years now and it is one of the podcasts that I always look forward to. I love how Traci’s author interviews help showcase who the writer is as a person. The books and topics discussed are always timely and relevant!

I have been reading WAY more since I became a regular listener of The Stacks! I love being more up to date with all things books. Traci is a fabulous interviewer and even if a book isn’t fully my thing I still really enjoy the interview and learning from the conversation.

I have enjoyed the stacks podcast for a long time, but I honestly don’t understand why it chose a book that so many of us literally cannot read or discuss for our mental health. Did the Lolita episode engage with the topic of what reading this book might be like for a CSA survivor? No. Did it conflate the choice not to read or platform a book with censorship? Yes. Did the episode discuss how regardless of whether an intellectual reading of the book can indict the mundane tyranny of American society, this book has been consistently and radically misread, as evidenced by the cover, and the fact that Alice Munro’s daughter’s abuser specifically cited this book when blaming a 9-year-old girl for him abusing her by calling her “a Lolita”? No. When a book is so actively harmful to CSA survivors’ mental health that when it is assigned in college classes my students and myself routinely need to ask for an alternate assignment (CPTSD is no joke!) and we sit here and just wish that more people pushing this on us understood this basic reality, and wonder why we constantly have to read the perspective of perpetrators over and over and over again in all of our classes; and when a book is, after 70 years, chronically and actively misread, mis-marketed (my copy has a Vanity Fair review blurb on the cover calling it “the greatest love story of our time”) and repeatedly used as justification by perpetrators, then do you think for a moment about maybe, just maybe, I could pick something else, other than some thoroughly canonized white man’s novel that has been read plenty enough before the Stacks announcing so loudly and clearly how little it cares about CSA survivors being able to be part of its book club?

Hope you all who weren’t raped as children had fun intellectualizing the aesthetic value of this chronically-assigned, syllabus mainstay, never-in-danger-of-going-out-of-print book so beloved of perpetrators and so terrorizing of us survivors.