Episodes
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In part 2 of SLoB's Valentine's special, more heroes and heroines from the world of classic books get the brutal Tinder treatment as Sophie and Jonty assess the romantic moves of your literary faves. They are in full agreement concerning the lead characters of Sense & Sensibility and Go Tell It On The Mountain, but the conversation turns fractious as they lock horns over whether Frankenstein or his monster is the greatest lover in Mary Shelley's famous novel. Fortunately, Dracula - that great peacemaker - is on hand to elicit full agreement that he, the Prince of Darkness, is the ideal date.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.
Content warning: moderate swearing and sexual content
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It's Black History Month and Sophie and Jonty are bringing their analytical chops once again to the giant of 20th-century literature, James Baldwin.
In his debut novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, Baldwin had captured the experience of growing up in 1930s Harlem. In his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, he focused instead on his experiences as a gay man, living in Paris. But, unlike Baldwin, the narrator of this novel is white.
The hero David is torn between two desires - his burgeoning love for an Italian barman called Giovanni, and the imperative to marry his girlfriend Hella. He struggles to choose, but the casualty is Giovanni rather than David. Baldwin wrote Giovanni’s Room while wrestling with his own homosexuality - and his fears about the life of loneliness it condemned him too - and developing new theories about white and black experience in America. Sophie and Jonty talk about the unique experiences behind the writing of this novel, the powerful expression of homosexual desire, and why Paris isn’t all it’s meant to be.
Content warning: mild sexual content
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.
Further Reading
Notes On A Native Son (1956) by James Baldwin
James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Books, 2019) by Bill V Mullen
The Ambassadors by Henry James (1903)
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Episodes manquant?
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It's Valentine's Day and love is quite literally in the air as the Secret Life of Books beams, via a complex network of satellites and data banks, to your ears. In this Bonus Episode, Sophie and Jonty reflect on what they've learnt about love from the classics, and rank the leading men and ladies of the books covered so far as lovers. St Valentine first appears in English literature in Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and weaves his way via Jane Austen and Charles Dickens through to the present day.
In this first part of 2, Sophie and Jonty revisit Picnic at Hanging Rock, which begins with a Valentine's Day picnic gone wrong, and spend far too much time talking about Jane Eyre's Rochester, who somehow - despite driving one woman mad, giving another false teeth as a gift, and getting himself up in drag to woo Jane - is one of literature's great sex symbols. Gullver - of 'Travels' fame - gets a look in, as do Lockwood, Cathy, Hareton and the rest of the kids from Wuthering Heights.
Part 2 of this conversation is available on Patreon and will join the main feed on Friday February 21, 2025.
Content warning: moderate sexual content and bad language.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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“Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”
King Lear is the Mount Everest of Theatre - a sprawling masterpiece of political turmoil, personal betrayal, horrifying gore and great poetry. It makes ‘Succession’ look like The Midsomer Murders. Lear is the pagan king who decides to divides his kingdom between two daughters (and banishing a third), only to find himself outcast, succumbing to madness, adrift in a world collapsing into civil war. Who better to tackle this cautionary tale of domestic and political crisis than Rory Stewart, host of The Rest is Politics, who has watched the downfall of several rulers, in one way or another.
For Rory, King Lear is ‘THE’ play. He fell in love with it at school and becomes only more seduced by Lear, as a character, the older he gets.
While Sophie and Jonty, in predictable style, try to tie the play to the Reformation and Shakespeare’s personal life respectively, Rory shames them by making the case that some works of art can’t be explained purely by the world around them; that something magic, and beyond Shakespeare’s own control, took place when he booted up his Quill 2.0 and started writing.
Rory also admits that, during his political career, he sometimes felt like Goneril to Boris Johnson’s King Lear; and rather yearns to be Lear himself, raging and shouting in the rain.
Content warning: the f-word is used thrice.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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One ring to rule them all
One ring to…
Yes, SLoB finally turns its Sauron-like eye on what is thought to be the second best-selling novel of all time (after Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities): Lord of the Rings. And who better to share this experience than Dominic Sandbrook, historian of the 20th Century, co-host of the Rest is History podcast, and Tolkien devotee.
In this Fellowship of Literary Analysis, Dominic, Sophie and Jonty are united in believing that Lord of the Rings - a novel which, superficially, appears to be about orcs and wizards in a fantasy realm - is in fact one of the greatest novels about the 20th Century. Together, they plunder Tolkien’s work and life to show how seismic events - two world wars, the rise of fascism, industrialisation, environmental disaster - found expression in his sprawling masterpiece.
Jonty and Dominic clash, like marauding armies on the plains of Mordor, over whether the many poems and songs in Lord of the Rings are of a quality that the reader deserves. While Sophie embarks on the inevitable digression into the Dead Marshes of the Protestant Reformation.
Dominic gives the shock announcement that Tolkien almost called Frodo ‘Bingo’, which would have made for a great episode of Bluey but not for a terrifying novel about good versus evil. Even less so if Tolkien had also followed his original intention to call Aragorn ‘Trotter’ and the Elves ‘Gnomes’. After all, it’s hard to imagine Cate Blanchett signing up for the role of Galadriel, the ethereal gnome
Further reading:
The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination by Dominic Sandbrook (London: Allen Lane. 2015)
JRR Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter (Harper Collins, 1998)
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The Pulitzer Prize winner, fan-favorite Geraldine Brooks first read Gilead on a packed flight and found herself clambering over passengers for a Kleenex. Find out why Robinson’s quiet, meditative, multi-generational story remains a model and touchstone for one of the most admired and loved novelists writing today.
Or, to echo Jonty’s effort to sound like the cool kids: why is Gilead such a stone-cold classic?
Geraldine talks openly about love, beauty and her determination not to turn away from the world in a time of global crisis. Sophie talks openly about why Geraldine is her non-consensual mentor for living the Australian-American life right. Will all these caring-sharing vibes make Jonty feel left out? Or, like Barack Obama, is he just another happy fan of this modern masterpiece?
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Gilead, from 2004, by the American writer Marilynne Robinson, is a smash-hit novel about Calvinism, three generations of Congregationalist minister and a cat called Soapy. Unlikely trifecta through this is, Gilead is a gorgeous, life-affirming tale that has the distinction of being one of Barack Obama’s favorite books. The Gilead tetralogy - the four novels that make up Robinson’s Gilead cycle, were Oprah’s Book Club pick in 2021 and Robinson is beloved by intellectuals and celebrities alike.
Despite all the Calvinism - or maybe because of it - it is a beautiful novel about fatherhood, intergeneration struggle, the legacy of the Civil War, appreciating the everyday beauty of life, about mortality and letting go.
Robinson is on public record speaking about the humanity and compassion inherent in puritan theology, its role in leading us out of our global political crises, the conversational, engaging genre of the sermon as a literary form, and why – like Sophie – she thinks the Protestant Reformation is right up there with the invention of cinema and the internet as one of a handful of the most impactful and transformative cultural events of human modernity.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Further Reading and Listening:
Marilynne Robinson, the Gilead novels: Gilead, Home, Lila, Jack.
Conversation between Robinson and Obama:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/11/05/president-obama-marilynne-robinson-conversation/?srsltid=AfmBOoq8ggGJ-bnyvBupbhzTEzu0XzgRR2kSqVWxk2RlHDjvUCaIGLyD
Podcast with Marylinne Robinson about Calvinism:
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/marilynne-robinson/Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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If you think Jane Austen is light and bright and sparkling, think again. In Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel, Jane goes to the dark side. Listeners remembering Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet laughing prettily in pale dresses might be expecting a tale of sisterly affection and romantic walks, while Hugh Grant stammers and charms his way towards inevitable wedlock.
Tune in to hear how Austen changes the course of the English novel by writing about teenage girls left homeless, the unfairness of inheritance laws, and vulnerable young women whose lives literally depend on being able to trust the men they love. She weaves in a double tragedy where a mother's and a daughter's lives are destroyed by unwanted pregnancies. Austen writes about chronic anxiety and depression, with wickedly clever barbs and catty character take-downs.
Jonty and Sophie discuss the events that led Austen to write this black comedy in the way she did. Hear what was happening in Jane’s seemingly uneventful life that explains the darkness and the scandal of this story, albeit set in delightfully large houses and charming cottages, with a liberal dose of balls, smart carriages, fashionable dresses and even a custom-ordered toothpick-case.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast
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Further Reading:
Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life.
Ang Lee, Sense and Sensibility.
Rachel Cohen, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels.
D.A. Miller, Jane Austen and the Secret of Style. Section about the toothpick case in Sense and Sensibility.Mentioned in episode: William Cowper, Austen’s favourite poet. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-cowper
Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Right Ho, Jeeves was the 34th novel by the British writer PG Wodehouse, written when he was - struggling writers take note - 52 years old. But you would never guess this. It is fresh, energetic, joyful, structurally perfect and one of a handful of books that might be considered Wodehouse’s masterpiece.
The story follows the escapades of hopeless toff Bertie Wooster and his mentally superior butler Jeeves as they tackle the romantic woes of Bertie’s friends, the demands of his formidable Aunt Dahlia, and bicker over matters of fashion, all against the romantic, timeless backdrop of a large English country-house.
Join Sophie and Jonty as they uncover Wodehouse’s emotionally-starved childhood, during which he was brought up by nannies, aunts and school matrons while his parents sweated the benefits of imperialism in Hong Kong. How he perfected the Jeeves and Wooster characters while his neighbour and friend on Long Island, F Scott Fitzgerald, wrote The Great Gatsby. How he enjoyed the side hustle to end all side hustles as lyricist for the great composer Jerome Kern. How the secret to understanding Jeeves may lie in the opening chapters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. How Wodehouse dedicated Right Ho, Jeeves - arguably his masterpiece - to his tax lawyer of all people.
And how, having achieved fame and fortune as one of the best-loved novelists in both Britain and the United States, Wodehouse torpedoed his reputation by broadcasting a series of Nazi-friendly radio essays for Goebbels in Berlin during the Second World War, joking that the only issue between the Allies and the Nazis was a lack of mutual understanding, that he was no longer proud to be English, and that he would give the Nazis all of ‘India’ if they’d let him go home.
Further reading: Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton is a much-loved and perennially-read novel that has caught the attention of literally millions of readers worldwide. But it’s quiet, low-key book, about family dynamics and difficult feelings, with a modest plot and characters who wouldn’t seem heroic if you met them in real life.
Find out why Charlotte Wood found herself drawn to a novel that refuses to be a “people pleaser.” How does it connect to her own novel Stone Yard Devotional, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Charlotte also unearths one of SLoB’s best-ever secrets about how Elizabeth Strout trained herself to write with radical honesty.
Sophie waxes lyrical about the landscapes of Strout’s homestate Maine, and Jonty makes a passionate care for My Name is Lucy Barton as a classic about men as well as women, equally compelling for the blokes.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Further Reading:
Elizabeth Strout, My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, Oh William, Lucy by the Sea, Tell Me Everything, (Random House, 2016-2024)
Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional (Riverhead/ Allen and Unwin, 2024)
https://www.charlottewood.com.au/Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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To round out 2024, SLoB is hosting the world’s shortest New Year’s Eve party, in which we rank literary history’s most under-the-radar ragers. Crank up your sonos and get ready for classic fun this New Year.
In under an hour, and with lashings of improvisational revelry, Sophie and Jonty review and rank party scenes from the books they covered in 2024.
Most readers of the great English classics come for the amazing settings, the unrequited passions, the rampant alcoholism, homicidal rage and untreated personality disorders. But after this episode, you’ll stay for all the underappreciated scenes of hospitality, small group functions and intimate dinners. SLoB ranks according to five key metrics - all in the name of literary festivity and new year’s optimism.
Pre-game for your 2024 NYE bash with this baby, recorded in a new studio with a special machine that enables Jonty to make amusing sound-effects over the voice tracks.
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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From the “man who invented Christmas,” this is the ultimate Christmas fable. Everyone’s heard of Scrooge, and many could quote his “Bah! Humbug!” And maybe even Tiny Tim’s “God Bless us, every one.” But who knows which Christmas season mega-industry Dickens started, with Scrooge’s parting gift to the Cratchit family? And what was going on in Dickens’s life that drove him to the power and melodrama of this micro-novel?
Sophie makes a foolhardy attempt to link Dickens’ Christmas Carol to our modern wellness and self-care movements, while Jonty takes the moral and spiritual high-road and ties this short novel to Dicken’s interest in social welfare and the Poor Laws. Everyone’s in heated agreement, though, that Dickens has a decidedly creepy relationship to young women, which he channels into the handsy narrator who takes us through this classic tale.
Whether or not you buy into the political messaging and Scrooge’s discovery of “manifesting,” you won’t be able to resist the descriptions of Christmas-time food and drink in merry London, so come ready for Christmas revels.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Support the show
Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - the name of a classic song by Iron Maiden AND a decent-ish poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It’s the latter that’s under the microscope in this episode.
Written in 1798, in a haze of opium smoke and revolutionary fervor, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a long ballad poem describing the supernatural curse against a sailor who shoots an albatross. There’s a ghost ship, angelic spirits, a zombie crew and many unforgettable lines, including ‘water, water everywhere nor any a drop to drink’.
In this episode Sophie and Jonty look at the road to Rime, following Coleridge’s flirtation with anarchism, friendship with William Wordsworth and a particularly unpleasant case of diarrhoea. In so doing, he wrote some of the greatest poems about fatherhood ever (Frost at Midnight) and the orgasmic Kubla Khan.
Sophie does a pretty good job of explaining the complexity of poetical meter in this deceptively simple poem, while Jonty commiserates with Coleridge’s travails as a fellow mouth-breather.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social
Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
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Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Sophie and Jonty find themselves a few sandwiches short of a picnic this week when they take on their first Australian classic book, the legendary “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” This 1960s masterpiece achieved global fame with Peter Weir’s hit film in 1975. And it has lost none of its edge with the passage of time. The intrepid hosts of SLoB discover that the joke’s on them – descended as they are from the white colonial families that Joan Lindsay set out to skewer so mercilessly.
With riffs aplenty on Cath and Kim, Sir Les Patterson and other touchstones of Australian culture, Sophie and Jonty drop the “citizens of the world” act and connect with their Australian origins. And in the serious bits they talk about what’s really going on in this surrealist bush-gothic masterpiece, discussing the secrets behind Lindsay’s Picnic. These include Australian independence from Britain in the year the novel was set and the referendum on First Nations sovereignty in the year the novel was written, as well as the painting in the National Gallery of Victoria that inspired the 70 year old Lady Joan to put pen to paper.
The episode is recorded in advance of the publication of the first full biography of Lindsay, and a provocative new Sydney Theatre Company production of Tom Wright’s stage play, directed by Ian Michaels who has been hailed as the “most exciting director of his generation.” Both coming in February 2025.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
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Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Let’s Twist Again! Not the dance, of course, but Charles Dickens’ incendiary second novel, which he began writing at the tender age of 24. With Oliver Twist, Dickens found his voice - a style simultaneously intimate and epic, funny but terrifying, exaggerated but true to life. Millions fell in love with his characters, shared their misfortunes and triumphs, and had their eyes opened to the plight of society’s outcasts.
To write it, Dickens drew on his own experiences as a child of London, including the year he spent as a child labourer in a factory, mentored by an older boy called Bob Fagin. He also filled it with the outrage he developed as a parliamentary reporter, watching the great and good fail to tackle inequality in Britain.
In so doing, he created some of the most beloved (and hated) characters in literary history - the Artful Dodger, Fagin, Nancy, Bill Sykes. He invented the first detective double-act Blathers and Duff (move over Starsky & Hutch - these guys beat you by a century) and captured London as no writer had before, earning the approval of none other than Queen Victoria. Her verdict: ‘excessively interesting’.
Join Sophie and Jonty as they discover that the real enemy isn’t the criminal underworld, but ‘the system’ (Dickens’ term), come to grips with the awful, snivelling and bullying Mr Claypole (not Jonty, but Noah - one of Dickens’ most despicable villains), and - for reasons only passingly related to Oliver Twist - reveal the cruel nicknames they were tormented by at school. Hardly Oliver levels of suffering, of course, but enough to nurse a lifelong grudge.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast
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Further Reading:
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, Oxford Worlds Classics, 2003.
Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/02/charles-dickens-life-tomalin-review
The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens, 2022.
https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Handbook-Charles-Dickens-Handbooks/dp/0192855719/ref=sr_1_1?crid=37E72VMAQVSUI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.fnQOHbtdzGpLOEmAFjoj_ZVCVdw3tuuFEQoIP7ARHHsV064k9gkbHPU4h28v-qyvW4yRvrCvFpmelrkipRpWwgshRB_XB7vEVsyre-sBfgzzWjLdSt56PCWjL-p6A4cQ1jxHS24BLyNGp83L-sQQ4w.YGLIBW2Rlqa2PI2jK3jo9TG-I-QLDmBgFobMjHbeH84&dib_tag=se&keywords=Oxford+Handbook+charles+dickens&qid=1733096684&s=books&sprefix=oxford+handbook+charles+dicke%2Cstripbooks%2C360&sr=1-1
Lee Jackson, Dickensland: A Curious History of Dickens' London, 2023.
https://www.amazon.com/Dickensland-Curious-History-Dickenss-London/dp/0300266200/ref=pd_lpo_d_sccl_1/133-3551518-8907113?pd_rd_w=z2d83&content-id=amzn1.sym.4c8c52db-06f8-4e42-8e56-912796f2ea6c&pf_rd_p=4c8c52db-06f8-4e42-8e56-912796f2ea6c&pf_rd_r=KFQPNN521TYGS56SRCWV&pd_rd_wg=XOtzg&pd_rd_r=48fe60bb-dd16-45f4-b1a6-5cd7577619b1&pd_rd_i=0300266200&psc=1
Judith Flanders, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London, 2015.
https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-City-Everyday-Dickens-London/dp/1250068266/ref=asc_df_1250068266?mcid=789f73a5e274313391651fd60922739e&hvocijid=8362640346023649414-1250068266-&hvexpln=73&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=692875362841&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=8362640346023649414&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9007527&Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies who may or may not have been called Homer. Leaving aside these mysteries, what is the Odyssey really about, why is it so violent and why is Odysseus himself - the lord of the lies - such an unlikeable hero?
Who better to navigate this intellectual Scylla and historical Charybdis than the world’s best-loved classicist Mary Beard? Sophie and Jonty listen in admiration as Mary describes discovering The Odyssey aged 14 - a self-proclaimed swot with aspirations to be scruffy and cool (or, in Sophie’s parlance, a ‘dag’). How it - or at least the several incidents in which Odysseus’ wife Penelope is told to shut up and go to her room by her own son - inspired Mary’s best-selling book Women and Power. And how the whole poem, which begins with the word ἄνδρα (man), is a riff on toxic masculinity millennia before Andrew Tate was even in a twinkle in Zeus’ eye.
And listen, pithy mortals, to Jonty as he repeatedly mangles Ancient Greek names, particularly the ‘Laestrygonians’, to Sophie as she - for the first time in this podcast - tries and fails to make a convincing link to The Reformation, and to all of us as we advocate the benefits of an oil rubdown every evening.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink
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bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social
Further Reading:Emily Wilson, trans, The Odyssey
Mary Beard books:
Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2019)Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2013)
The Parthenon by Mary Beard (Harvard University Press, 2002)
Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Co-hosts Sophie and Jonty bare all in a bonus SLoB live ep! After months of rummaging through the dirty laundry of the great writers, it is only fair that we turn a critical eye back upon ourselves - and reveal the secret life of the Secret Life of Books.
In this bonus episode, recorded to mark our official launch before a live audience in Sydney’s iconic Gleebooks, Sophie and Jonty get raw. After briefly discussing why we started SLoB and why the classics matter, we get down to the serious questions: which literary character do we most fancy? Who would we least like to be stuck in a lift with? And who, out of Jonty and Sophie, makes the best bolognese?
Discover why, despite being published by Penguin ‘Classics’, Morrissey’s Autobiography is not and never will be a classic. While Sophie admits to a reading gap so embarrassing it will surely - SURELY - end her career as an English professor. Which book will it be? Listen to find out.
This episode - unashamedly, nay proudly, self-indulgent - is the closest to a mission statement we’ll ever do, so strap yourselves in to discover (drum-roll) the secret life of the Secret Life of Books.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
bluesky: @secretlifeofbookspodcast
Recommended reading:
Henry James, Wings of the Dove
Spenser’s Faerie QueeneSupport the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Henry Tilney: is he yet another of Jane Austen’s Bad Men, or the stealth MVP with his interest in dress fabrics and interior decorating? Northanger Abbey is Austen’s funniest, most unabashedly joyful and silly novel. It’s also where Jane gets meta – with lots of speeches about what novels are and why we love reading them.
Sophie makes the case that Catherine Morland is the most under-rated heroine in the Austen canon, an upbeat Fanny Price without the sad backstory. Jonty enthuses about the hero Henry Tilney’s interest in gothic fiction, and admits to having a soft spot for the ghastly John Thorpe, the fast-driving, hard-drinking braggart who gets in the way of Catherine’s path to happiness. Despite this, Sophie and Jonty wish him well and will indulge in a side-argument about the likely name of his future wife.
And there’s more! Austen was a secret revolutionary, embedding all sorts of ideas about world revolutions and slave rebellions into this charming novel. We talk about whether Austen's famous satire on gothic novels, the massive bestsellers of the 1790s, is in fact the greatest, and most bestselling gothic novel of them all.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsX: @SLOBpodcast
@sophieggee
@ClaypoleJonty
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
Further Reading:
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, intro. Claudia Johnson (Oxford, 2003)
Clare Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, (1997)
Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings, (1995). A great book about the female novelists who influenced Austen, discussed in this episode.
Rachel Cohen, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, (FSG, 2020)
Tom Keymer, Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics (Oxford, 2020)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” (Critical Inquiry 1991)
Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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It took 140 years for someone to write back to Mark Twain’s brilliant but troubling masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now the celebrated American novelist Percival Everett has done it with James, a daring, provocative, retelling of Huck Finn through the eyes, mind and heart of Huck’s friend Jim, a runaway slave. What are the untold secrets of Mark Twain’s novel, that Everett brings to light with James? And what should we make of the small but crucial fact that Everett once owned a pet crow, also named Jim?
Everett didn’t train as a literary innovator. He studied biochemistry, philosophy and mathematical logic. And after that he was a horse and mule trainer. Sophie and Jonty speculate about how these career moves provide crucial clues to the secret life of James itself — and why the most important secret of all might be that Everett watched the 1960s TV version of Mission: Impossible while he wrote.
Sophie takes a crack at explaining Everett’s cryptic but alluring statement that all of his work is about “the fact that A is A is not the same thing as A equals A, and even as I say it, it gives me a headache.” And Jonty puts Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained in its place once and for all.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsX: @SLOBpodcast
@sophieggee
@ClaypoleJonty
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
Further Reading:Percival Everett, James (Doubleday 2024)
Percival Everett, The Trees (Graywolf 2021)
Quentin Tarantino Django Unchained (2012)Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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What makes a trip down the Mississippi river so famous - and so notorious? Why did it need to be rewritten in the 2024 novel James by Percival Everett? Is Huck Finn the most famous character in world literature?
We’ve gone on record saying that The Great Gatsby is #1 Great American Novel - but this week we may have to eat our words. Is it actually The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book Mark Twain published in 1884 but set in America before the civil war. Released on the day of the Harris-Trump Presidential election, this episode is all about why Huck Finn remains what it has always been, a novel of division.Sophie and Jonty talk about why Huck Finn is a novel of divisions and polarizations. A novel for our times. The divisions are between North and South, between slave states and free, between confederates and unionists, between white and Black, between enslaved and emancipated. These are just some of the tensions that Twain took on and even though it’s nearly 150 years old, its themes and ideas are more relevant than ever. But is this book now racist to be readable? Or is it a vision of what America really is, a wake-up call that we must pay attention to?
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsX: @SLOBpodcast
@sophieggee
@ClaypoleJonty
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
Further Reading:Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (Norton Critical Edition, 4th Edition, 2021)
Jerome Loving, Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens (University of California Press, 2010)
William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain (Dover, 1997, reprint of 1910 edition)
Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting, ( NYRB reprints, 2024)
Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands - The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford, 2017)There’s a great forthcoming biography of Mark Twain by the celebrated Ron Chernow, publishing May 2025.
Percival Everett, James (Doubleday 2024)
Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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