TBM Podcast, Episode 12: Books for Boys

Welcome Back, at long last, to the TBM Podcast!

Episode 12 is our long-awaited “Books for Boys” episode, recorded several months ago. It was rumored that this episode lay in a secret chamber along with the 116 lost pages of the Book of Mormon. Some even wondered if “the real Episode 12 is all the friends we made along the way.” But joyfully, here it is for your listening pleasure.

Before addressing the main topic, G and MC discuss a couple of important “news” (ahem) items, including the New Era article from August 2019 clarifying points of the Word of Wisdom (1:18). At 7:29, we begin an extended discussion of changes to church youth programs, including the new For the Strength of Youth conferences. By way of warning, G draws a comparison between between changes to the youth programs and Clayton Christensen’s concept of “disruptive innovation” (18:54).

At 26:34 we begin to discuss our principal topic of “Books for Boys,” with a nice introduction by G. Here is a rapid-fire list of all the books or genres we recommended for boys:

Plutarch’s Lives (34:55) The Mad Scientists Club (series) (40:38) The Great Brain (series) (40:38) The Hardy Boys (series) (43:13) Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn (49:43) Hatchet/The River (50:30) The Call of the Wild (52:25) Danny the Champion of the World (53:10) Encyclopedia Brown (series) (56:18) Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators (series) (57:15) The Boy Scout Aviators (57:55) Newspaper comics compilations (esp. “Calvin and Hobbes” and “Peanuts”) (1:00:47) “The Bark of the Bog Owl” (Wilderking Trilogy) (1:03:52) Sports “autobiographies” (1:05:14) Spy novels (1:06:40) Fail-Safe (1:07:25) Alas, Babylon (1:08:45) Popular novels turned classics (1:09:25) Kidnapped (by Robert Louis Stevenson) (1:10:00) Usborne’s Illustrated Stories from Shakespeare (1:10:20) The White Company (Arthur Conan Doyle) (1:11:15) Anabasis (Xenophon) (1:11:45) Aesop’s Fables (1:13:27)

Bonus books (not part of our recommendations for boys, but good books): War and Peace and War (Peter Turchin) (32:45) Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (Anthony Esolen) (33:36)

There’s much more besides the specific book recommendations; we think you’ll enjoy the whole discussion. Also, we were going to include Amazon links for all books mentioned, but as you can see, it’s quite a list! So if you are interested in any of these and have trouble locating them, please let us know in the comments. Thanks again for listening!