And it’s so good to be back in your ears. We’ll be here like clockwork from now on, dropping a fresh chat on the first weekend of every month. If you’re new to Book Chat, it’s a literary podcast Bobby and I started in 2022 over in regular podland, and then, after a little hiatus (when we both had new babies), we came over here.
The joy of Book Chat is that we have just one rule: the book has to be more than two years old. Apart from that, anything’s fair game! According to The Guardian, “the hosts easy and knowledgable chat [makes] the titles very tempting”, while in the words of Stylist:
“The idea is that rather than encouraging us to race out and buy the latest copy of whatever’s all over our Instagram feed, we look to books that we perhaps bought ages ago and forgot we even had. Or we can buy the book secondhand or borrow it from a mate. Think of it as an old-school book club, just in podcast form, and with Pandora Sykes and Bobby Palmer. Sounds good to us.”
It’s thanks to Bobby — a wonderful novelist, whose books Isaac and the Egg, and Small Hours I very much recommend — that I inhaled the entire Tales of a City series in a month, did a total 180 on Wuthering Heights (how many classics are ruined by studying them for GCSE!?) and discovered the brilliance of Mohsin Hamid, Jennifer Egan and Annie Proulx (did you know that Brokeback Mountain started life as a short story in The New Yorker?) And it is thanks to me, that Bobby read the transcendent Augustown by Kei Miller, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and got… really depressed by one of my favourite short story collections, David Szalay’s All That Man Is.
My regular feeling with Book Chat is >where have I been? How have I only just read this!?< And I’m so grateful for that feeling. It’s the very best feeling you can have as a reader.
