podesta

My reading list…

I’ve been reading again (at the moment it’s Hans Fallada’s ‘Alone in Berlin’) and listening to lots of great podcasts about books.  On the way in to work this morning, I was listening to Mariella Frostrup discuss Lionel Shriver’s new novel with that author.  Later on in the piece they mentioned a book called ‘Reading Like a Writer‘, which I’d like to add to my reading list (See the picture).  In the podcast the author Francine Prose (she was always going to be a writer, with a name like that) said that the success of her book was not only great news for her, but is a great antedote for people worried about a lack of literary culture in our world.   It struck me that this is right – but that there’s other evidence too – not the least being the BBC books podcast that I was listening too, and the flowering of other podcasts to do with books.  I’ve been listening a lot to the amazing Guardian Books podcast.  Two episodes in particular have been really interesting and informative.  The first was on the British landscape, covering a British LIbrary exhibition on that topic.  The second was on Utopias and Dystopias, which was excellent – but also gave a real idea of the fun of writing novels – a sense of why people might actually do it, which I think is sometimes missing from literary discussion.