The Audio Book Club on The Big Short
Our critics discuss Michael Lewis' latest.
Posted Monday, April 19, 2010, at 7:12 AM
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This month, the Audio Book Club discusses The Big Short, Michael Lewis' best-selling book on the financial crisis. According to Daniel Gross, what distinguishes The Big Short from so many other crisis books—there have been dozens—is that it focuses on the winners, rather than losers. That is, on a few people who made money due to the crisis because they bet against the housing market. In a 45-minute book club, Gross, Troy Patterson, and Stephen Metcalf analyze Lewis' style and career and wonder what The Big Short reveals about the future of democratic capitalism.
Slate's Audio Book Club now comes to you on the third Monday of every month. We don't yet have a book picked out for April, but there's a good chance we'll discuss Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Look for our discussion on iTunes or on the Slatehome page on Monday, May 17. Also, become a fan of the Audio Book Club on Facebook.
You can also listen to any of our previous club meetings through our iTunes feed or by clicking on the links below. To download the MP3 file, right-click (Windows) or hold down the Control key while you click (Mac), and then use the "save" or "download" command to save the audio file to your hard drive.
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
White Noise, by Don DeLillo
Lit, by Mary Karr
The Original of Laura, by Vladimir Nabokov
"A Small Good Thing" and "The Bath," by Raymond Carver
The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
A Vindication of Love, by Cristina Nehring
Thy Neighbor's Wife, by Gay Talese
"The Swimmer," by John Cheever, and "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," by Flannery O'Connor
Atmospheric Disturbances, by Rivka Galchen
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Night of the Gun,by David Carr
American Wife,by Curtis Sittenfeld
Brideshead Revisited,by Evelyn Waugh
Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill
Anna Karenina,by Leo Tolstoy
Beautiful Children,by Charles Bock
All the King's Men,by Robert Penn Warren
Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Tree of Smoke,by Denis Johnson
The Audacity of Hope,by Barack Obama
The Road,by Cormac McCarthy
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Independence Day,by Richard Ford
The Emperor's Children,by Claire Messud
The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
Beloved,by Toni Morrison
Everyman,by Philip Roth
Saturday,by Ian McEwan
The Year of Magical Thinking,by Joan Didion
Questions? Comments? Write to us at podcasts@slate.com . (E-mailers may be quoted by name unless they request otherwise.)
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Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com and follow him on Twitter. His latest book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, has just been published in paperback.
Stephen Metcalf is Slate's critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s.
Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.