Episode 11

Angus Fletcher

Professor of Story Science, Screenwriter

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BOOKS FEATURED IN THE SHOW

Jaws by Peter Benchley

It’s not an actual children book. He borrowed it from his parents' nightstand when I was five. He was caught reading it and it was taken away from him. He got upset and eventually found it to finish it.


Reading it for the first time, he recognized in nature: the shark, the tremendous fear, and the panic. The book sees how adults are.

Puckoon by Spike Miligan

He read it when he was about six. The reason he read the book because his father likes the book very much. He thinks it is a pure absurdism.

Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

He was around seven. He remembered the day he found the book he was very amazed. Sherlock is a fascinating character. He thinks one of the most fascinating things is the sense that you can actually saw impossible puzzles. He relates to the Holmes as he feels like he’s outside of the establishment.

Time Machine and The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

He read it when he was eight. To read Wells's stories is to go into in a strange place where in a one hand you see power of technology, imagination and science and then be confronted with a tremendous sense of the impotence of life and our inability to control anything.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

He was around ten when he read it. It's about betrayal, revenge and injustice. The story makes him feel like he has to rewrite life. To see, change and let go is the moment he thinks we become our most powerful selves.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

He read it for the first time as a kind of a mystery story: an emotional and spiritual mystery. He loves the rebelliousness of it. Everyone in the story is so themselves.

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas

He discovered the book randomly at school library. He was just hooked just since the opening pages. He remembered crying as a child reading it.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley

It’s the book that influenced him the most. He thinks this book has almost all the books in it. It’s a story of a transformation.

The Good Old Days- They Were Terrible by Otto Bettmann

It’s a very important book to his childhood. It's a kind of social history book: we romanticize how life in the 19th century America was like.

Asterix in Britain by René Goscinny

He read it when he was five or six. He thought it was a marvelous story of a rebellious and chaotic band who is resisting Julius Caesar and the order of the Roman Empire.