Save Me From My Shelf Podcast

Cover of Lysistrata, showing a man totally naked except for a headband and a little scarf around his shoulders making the 'come on, baby!' arm motion to a woman who has both hands up in protest.

Cover of Lysistrata that spoofs the poster for The Graduate. A woman's leg can be seen while her hands sexily take off a stocking. In the background is a stunned looking Greek soldier.

Some of you guessed correctly:

For our International Women's Day episode, we'll be joining the ladies of ancient Greece on a sex strike with Aristophanes's incredibly horny comedy, 'Lysistrata' (411BC).

Episode drops 11 March. Milesian dildoes at the ready!

It's in the subtext, probably

Yes, because we were actually just lying to you before and wasting your time; we're doing Peter Pan.

Georgia O'Keefe painting of a red vaginal flower

Georgia O'Keefe painting of a blue, green, yellow, and white vaginal flower

The big play-on-words in our last text's title ('Much Ado About Nothing') is that there's an awful lot of fuss over a vagina

The same is true of our NEXT text--also a play--which will drop around International Women's Day.

What are we reading?

Book cover for Much Ado, showing a lil naked Cupid sitting weirdly astride a big red heart while fishing. Why not!

Book cover for Much Ado showing a placid looking woman as 14 disembodied hands point angry fingers at her. I guess that's Hero?

Old picture of Much Ado showing a blue drawing of a house and gardens with various C17th people wandering around. It's cool.

Boring-ass cover fro Much Ado, showing a masquerade mask, which makes sense, on top of a bunch of sheet music, which does not.

Happy Valentine's Day!

If you like Beatrice and Benedick's schtick in 'Much Ado', you'll love Abby and Daniel's combative barbs.

We fight about D's bad attitude, endless fart jokes, & odd directorial decisions. Let's eat HIS heart in the marketplace! Yum yum yum!
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TOMORROW, tomorrow, and tomorrow: our coverage of 'Much Ado About Nothing' comes out - including yet more dramaturgical insights.

Film poster of Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado, with Denzel looking especially sassy.

Book cover for Much Ado, showing a swooning bride at the altar with a bunch of people clustering around her, not really seeming as upset as they should be.

Book cover for Much Ado, showing presumaby Beatrice being weirdly gripped at the wrists by Benedick, coming at her from behind. I don't get why they're standing this way. Also, there is a strange and superfluous bush or tree or something in front of them, despite literally no other scenery. This artist was high at the time of drawing.

Book cover for Much Ado, showing a masquerade mask at the top, a bunch of birds on a bunch of flowers, for some reason, an engagement ring in the centre, even though I think engagement rings are anachronistic at this point, and some jester hats at the bottom, despite there being no actual jesters in the text (every character IS a fucking clown, though)

Everyone guessed correctly!

Our Valentine's Day text (replete with argument kinks, very loud balcony sex, and a whiplash-inducing strangers-to-fiancees-to-exes-to-spouses relationship) is William Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing'.

Every single one of these perverts needs to GET IT TOGETHER.

Stock photo of a white woman in the beigest possible living room yawning while reading a book.

It's time to guess the clue to our next episode (our Valentine's Day text--so you know it probably has *something* to do with love, marriage, and/or sex).

While our next text is an unambiguous classic, an essential part of the canon ... we don't see what all the fuss is about.

What are we reading?

Yeah, it is not a very sensitive book on pretty much ANY front, but especially that one. There was a lot of 😬 while reading it

Welcome to Season 7! Let's kick off a year of fan favourites and camp classics with our trashiest novel yet: Gaston Leroux's 1910 'Phantom of the Opera'.

Abby has the time of her life, Daniel is checked out, and our new imaginary producer, Diane, keeps us on task.
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TOMORROW: If you thought 2026 already couldn't get any worse, our new series starts with Gaston Leroux's thoroughly stupid 'The Phantom of the Opera' (1910) - a rare example of a novel that's *more* incoherent and histrionic than its musical adaptation.

Phantom book cover showing a beruffled man in a mask and a dashing hat, gesturing ambiguously.

Phantom book cover showing a cowering woman in a bathrobe and with truly fucked up hair, on her knees at the feet of a man in a tux. His head is cut off in the image, but his stance says: smug.

Phantom book cover, showing a negative-space illustration of a half-mask and a rose.

Phantom book cover showing a man in a top hat, opera cloak, and tux, rowing a woman in a bathrobe in a lil boat (technically I think he's punting, but that doesn't quite sound right).

You guessed right! Season 7 (on camp classics and fan favourites) starts with Gaston Leroux's 1910 melodrama, 'The Phantom of the Opera'.
And if you think the stage show is OTT, has an insufferable Raoul, and nonsensical plot points...then, babygirl, you better gird your loins for the original text.

It's not The Woman in White .... YET.

No, but we've talked about doing this one and Hunchback for a long time.

Nope!

Still from Beavis and Butthead, where two gormless looking teenage dweebs sit on a couch and gurn at each other, hornily.

The crone-witch from the 1930s animated Snow White, leaning in through the open half-door.

A still from Shrek, showing big ole green lumpy Shrek holding Princess Fiona's dainty lil hand as the sun sets. Aww!

A still from Batman Returns, showing Danny DeVito hamming it up as the grotesque Penguin. My good dude could use some colour corrector for this dark under-eye circles!

Happy New Year, Shelfers! Time to guess the clue to our next episode.

In S6, we saw an awful lot of attractive characters. The Duchess of Malfi, Emma Bovary, Molly Bloom, everyone in Streetcar and Fanny Hill, etc.

But uggos need love, too! So for our S7 opener, I want to read about a real munter.

Book cover of Uncle Tom's Cabin showing an illustration of a Black woman and Black child tending a garden next to the presumably titular cabin.

Book cover of Uncle Tom's Cabin showing an illustration of a blonde girl in a white dress reading a book to a Black man in rags, while they both sit in a shack with a hammock, while a white woman looks on approvingly. Also, there is a dog.

Book cover for Uncle Tom's Cabin showing an illustration of a bunch of white men standing around looking at a Black man in rags. One of the white men holds a whip.

Super old-fashioned book cover for Uncle Tom's Cabin, showing a woman of ambiugous race talking to a Black man, while she points at something in the distance. They are standing in front of the presumably titular cabin, and also there is a whip and a pair of shackles hanging from the title letters of the book.

In our final banned book episode, we celebrate (?) Christmas with the inappropriately summery (but sufficiently maudlin) 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (1852).

Turns out, everything we knew about this book we learned from 'The King and I' and was therefore wildly incorrect!

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We come out all guns blazing for our Christmas episode, and the final instalment of our banned books series, with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Civil War-causing/-winning 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (1852) - what's more, it's crammed with sizzling Quakers...

Out on Wednesday!

We had a few correct guesses! Our Christmas text, which is overly sentimental and OBSESSED with Heaven, is Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (1852).

Get ready for some vom-inducing emotional manipulation on 17 December!

This is a quote from the article summing up both studies in Technology Review: "A multi-university team of researchers has found that chatting with a politically biased AI model was more effective than political advertisements at nudging both Democrats and Republicans to support presidential candidates of the opposing party. The chatbots swayed opinions by citing facts and evidence, but they were not always accurate—in fact, the researchers found, the most persuasive models said the most untrue things."

Two independent studies found that AI chatbots were better at persuading voters than political ads. The most persuasive bots also lied the most. This is something that humans working in psyops have known for decades. AI is psyops at scale. www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/04/1...

Classical painting of God in Heaven (on some sort of ceiling, I'm guessing), throwing his arms around like a diva, surrounded by angels, and looking down on the viewer

Time to guess the clue to our next (Christmas!) episode.

We've spent a lot of time IN Heaven on this show (Paradise Lost, Dante's Divine Comedy, etc).

But I want a text that talks about Heaven even more than that. Improbably more. Exhaustingly more. Melodramatically more.

What are we reading?

Book cover of Lord of the Flies showing an illustrated up-close picture of Piggy's face (or just his eyes, nose, and forehead), specifically showing his cracked glasses. It's all in red and black and looks ominous as hell.

Cover of Lord of the Flies, showing a terrified child's face with war paint on, seemingly peeping out of a spiky conch shell. It's illustrated and creepy.

Illustrated cover of Lord of the Flies showing a conch shell pouring blood. Chill!

Illustrated cover of Lord of the Flies, showing a backlit jungle setting against a setting sun, with a bunch of creepy looking silhouettes of boys, one of whom is holding a spear, standing next to a shack. A couple of boys in the hazy background appear to be doing war dances holding spears, and they're the creepiest of all!

Happy (early) Thanksgiving, Shelfers! Don't pull a spear on or chuck a boulder at a relative. Not unless they *really* deserve it.

More importantly, Happy International Men's Day: no girls allowed in our episode on William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' (1954).

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It's human nature to be a snotty private schoolboy - or so William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' (1954) tells us - and we got into the spirit of this message with plenty of quibbling over pronunciation.

Episode out on Wednesday!

'One fly to rule them all, one fly to find them' etc.

Do bikini bottoms alone count?

Because let us never forget the tyrant-adjacent psychopath, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, in 'Dune' (1984), played by Sting in what can only be described as a fascist speedo.

Book cover of Lord of the Flies, showing a bunch of (presumably) masked naked stick-figure lads dancing around with spears, on a red background that's dotted with flames, and also there is a big snake there.

Book cover for Lord of the Flies showing a chaotic drawing of a jungle with loads of tiny lads looking lost in between the plants.

Book cover of Lord of the Flies, showing a boy's face peering out from a bush, or perhaps wearing a sort of headdress mask thing made of leaves. I don't precisely know what I'm looking at. There are also a bunch of flies on a tree trunk or something in the foreground by his jaw.

Book cover for Lord of the Flies showing a Rubenesque young lad in a schoolboy's uniform, with a fuck-off great big fly behind and over him, looking like it's almost going to pick him up. There are a pair of shattered glasses separate from this image, below the book's title.

Some of you guessed our clue correctly:

For International Men's Day (19 November), we will be release the most laddish book we've ever read on the show: William Golding's 1954 anti-colonialist schoolboy castaway narrative, 'Lord of the Flies'.

No girls allowed, and 'Sucks to your Auntie!'

Listener dressed up as Abby, with a light blonde wig and green dress, looking suitable louche and reading a copy of Rebecca.

Listener dressed up as Daniel, with short dark hair and a long-sleeved cord shirt, holding a cup of tea and reading a book that looks suitably dry and academic.

Happy Halloween, Shelfers!

We receive the ultimate honour (and Abby has been able to scratch this off her bucket list): a listener went as not one, but BOTH hosts for Halloween this year. Posted here with permission.

Apologies that we don't have their socials--please tag yourself if this is you!

A still from the film '12 Angry Men', showing 11 angry men facing the camera.

Still from the 1982 film The Thing, showing Kurt Russell and his stupendous hair pointing a gun at something off camera, while four other men look nervously on.

Still from The Shawshank Redemption showing 10 prisoners in denim standing around and looking judgmentally at the camera.

Still from the film Lawrence of Arabia, showing three men kitted up in their Arabian war gear and looking fucking fabulous, if concerned.

It's time to guess the clue to our next episode, which will be released on International Men's Day (19 November).

For this episode, we don't want to hear a woman in our text. We don't even want to SEE a woman. And turns out, neither do any of the male characters.

What are we reading?

The annoyance is all just for the show! We're the opposite of the Sex and the City actresses.

You were probably there at the same time, when she was first a teeny tiny grad student!

When were you at St Andrews? You might have been taught by Justine! (If you did history)