I’m using Spotify links this month because for some reason Apple ones aren’t embedding.
The Book Club
Dominic and Tabitha have released several episodes this month, and my favourite was this, on Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I liked the novel a lot, perhaps because I read it seven years late, post-hype.
The Booking Club
Two conversations from Jack Aldane, one with Ross Barkan, editor of Substack-based The Metropolitan Review, and the other with Jay McInerney, who wrote Bright Lights, Big City (1984).
The Common Reader
I have no particular interest in Agatha Christie but this was so good I loved it anyway.
The Exchange
New Statesman editor Tom McTague interviews Anthony Seldon about the latter’s book The Path of Light: Walking to Auschwitz.
The Honest Broker
The Godzilla vs. Kong of literary Substacks.
The Long Read
A thoughtful, first-hand exploration of what AI is doing to English teaching.
New Books in Literary Studies
This caught my eye because I attended David Womersley’s lectures on Jonathan Swift in 2011. He has written a new book called Thinking Through Shakespeare, and Womersley’s story of its origin alone is fascinating on Shakespeare’s uniqueness. He recounts what he was told, by the director of a theatre in Munich, about taking productions of Shakespeare around the world: ‘it was clear that there was always some kind of palpable connection between the audience and what was on-stage, and […] that was not true of other things they put on’. Incidentally, the New Books Network recently published its thirty thousandth episode!
The New Society
The title is clickbaited but this is a good episode: Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck on what Orwell means to him.
Past Present Future
And more Orwell. This is the first of a four-part miniseries on ‘Orwell’s War’ from David Runciman. I don’t agree with everything Runciman says – for example, I don’t think there was something ‘clownish’ about Orwell being anti-war up until 1939, even if that turned out to have been a mistaken position. But Runciman is always worth listening to, and I appreciate his treatment of Orwell as still indispensable. (I’ve written about Orwell here.)
Until next month.