The Book Club Review

Looking for the perfect summer read? Kate is joined by Laura Potter and returning guest Phil Chaffee to compare recent reads before putting this year's biggest summer books to the test. Inspired by reading lists from The New York Times, The Times, Lit Hub and The Booker Prize, they decide which books are beach reads, suitcase books, and which they'd happily leave behind at the airport. Plus, they reveal the books they're packing for their own holidays.
Books discussed
Recently read
The Golden Mean — Annabel Lyon
Plato and the Tyrant — James Romm
Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon
The Game of Kings — Dorothy Dunnett
The House of Niccolò series — Dorothy Dunnett
We Are Green and Trembling — Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (trans. Robin Myers)
Evaluating the picks from the summer reading lists
Hot Milk — Deborah Levy
The Eighth Life — Nino Haratischwili
A Month in the Country — J. L. Carr
Whistler — Ann Patchett
The Things We Never Say — Elizabeth Strout
Land — Maggie O'Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave — Maggie O'Farrell
John of John — Douglas Stuart
I Want You to Be Happy — Jem Calder
The Director — Daniel Kehlmann
Villa Coco — Andrew Sean Greer
Our holiday recommendations
The Feast — Margaret Kennedy
Free Food for Millionaires — Min Jin Lee
Famesick — Lena Dunham
Swimming Home — Deborah Levy
Radiant Star — Ann Leckie
The Balkan Trilogy — Olivia Manning
Wait for Me — Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire
The Pursuit of Love — Nancy Mitford
Also mentioned
Pachinko — Min Jin Lee
Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo — Douglas Stuart
Less — Andrew Sean Greer
Transcription — Ben Lerner
Reading Lolita in Tehran — Azar Nafisi

Timecodes
00:00 Welcome
02:44 Phil on The Golden Mean
07:39 Laura on Dorothy Dunnett
11:55 Kate on Green and Trembling
16:54 Beach read game rules
18:20 Booker picks: Hot Milk
19:40 Doorstop epic The Eighth Life
21:46 Classic: A Month Country
23:07 NYT Beach Reads, Whistler by Ann. Patchett
25:33 Elizabeth Strout and American vibes
28:22 Switching to the (UK) Times list
28:29 Times list features
29:03 Maggie O'Farrell debate
30:51 Douglas Stuart pick John of John
33:05 New paperback picks
35:03 Kehlmann masterpiece The Director
38:28 The LitHub list of lists
38:55 Villa Coco verdict
41:44 Get more from the pod on Patreon
43:26 Our personal holiday reads
44:03 Phil recommends The Feast
46:01 Min Jin Lee deep dive
48:18 Lena Dunham Famesick
51:44 Laura's summer stack
53:56 Mitfords and Tana French
01:02:20 Final wrap and farewell

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What makes secondhand books so irresistible? Kate and Laura celebrate the joy of used bookshops, their favourite places to shop, literary finds and the thrill of unexpected discoveries. There's also an interview with W. B. Gooderham, author of Dedicated To, a book that explores the touching, funny and sometimes heartbreaking messages that can be found in the handwritten dedications tucked inside secondhand books. Whether you're a devoted secondhand book hunter or simply love hearing readers talk about books, this episode is a celebration of literary serendipity, book collecting, and the enduring pleasure of finding exactly the right book when you least expect it.
Book list and links
Bookshopaholics: The Paperhound • Episode #139
‘Owner of Vancouver's eclectic MacLeod’s Books marks 50 years of serving bibliophiles’,John Mackie for the Vancouver Sun
The Second Shelf bookshop (now in online form)
Aphrodisiacs in your Garden by Charles Connell
The Transitive Vampire by Karen Elizabeth Gordon
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
Things I Learned on the 6.28 by Stig Abell
Griffin Bay Bookstore, San Juan island
Episode #51: Barnabees Bookshop
Skoob books
Dedicated to, compiled by W.G. Gooderham
The Diary of a Nobody by George and Wheedon Grossmith
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend
Wise Children by Angela Carter
Arabella by Georgette Heyer
House of Niccolo and Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett
Judd Books, Bloomsbury
Timecodes
00:00 Welcome and a pod milestone
00:48 Secondhand book-hunting
03:01 Browsing vs. buying
07:58 Secondhand treasures
11:52 Kate's love of books about books
16:23 Dream bookshops
17:18 Our favourite places to buy secondhand
20:42 Patreon Break
21:50 Kate meets W.B. Gooderham
23:43 Skoob books and inscribed editions
27:22 How Wayne's collecting began
28:41 Dedicated To: The forgotten friendships hidden stories and lost loves found in secondhand books
30:50 Releasing Books Back
32:09 To inscribe or not to inscribe
33:07 Diary Of A Nobody by George and Wheedon Grossmith
37:32 Adrian Mole Editions
38:39 Wise Children
39:51 Pnin – a collection that took Wayne years to assemble
41:28 Bookshelves and Umberto Eco's library
44:04 Laura shares some of her favourite used-book haunts
47:54 Why secondhand books matter
49:08 Episode wrap

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When the Guardian drops a list of the 100 Greatest Novels in English it's time to drop everything to talk about it. Luckily pod-regular guest, journalist Phil Chaffee and Joseph Dance, host of the Curious Readers podcast, also had views, and were willing to get together on a Sunday evening to share them. You'll hear our hits, our misses, how many we’ve read, whether we should have read more and much musing on whether a list like this is the way to get people excited about reading. We explore the joys of the sub-lists – the contributor lists – all squirrelled away on a sub-section of the Guardian's website, that arguably provide more excitement and inspiration than the fairly canonical top 100. Which is the best Brontë? Which is the best Austen? Do we age into certain books? If you've read all seven volumes of Proust shouldn't that count for more than one entry? All this and much, much more. Enjoy – this was an absolute delight to make and I hope it makes you smile as much as it did me.
Have your say: get in touch on Instagram @bookclubreviewpodcast or email thebookclubreview@gmail.com, or head to our website for full shownotes. What would be in your top-10?
Check out the Patreon for all kinds of extras, from our monthly book club to extra shows and Kate's reading diaries. Find it at patreon.com/thebookclubreview
The Guardian’s List of the 100 Greatest Novels published in English, copied below for ease of reference.
*underlined – the ones Kate has read
Middlemarch
Beloved
Ulysses
To the Lighthouse
In Search of Lost Time
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Madame Bovary
The Great Gatsby
Bleak House
Emma
Mrs Dalloway
Moby-Dick
Nineteen Eighty-Four
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Persuasion
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Wuthering Heights
The Portrait of a Lady
Things Fall Apart
Midnight’s Children
The Remains of the Day
Lolita
Don Quixote
The Trial
The Brothers Karamazov
Pale Fire
Frankenstein
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The God of Small Things
David Copperfield
Wolf Hall
Great Expectations
The Handmaid’s Tale
Invisible Man
The Age of Innocence
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Song of Solomon
Heart of Darkness
The Magic Mountain
Housekeeping
Giovanni’s Room
The Golden Notebook
The Leopard
Vanity Fair
The Metamorphosis
A Fine Balance
Wide Sargasso Sea
My Brilliant Friend
The Golden Bowl
The Transit of Venus
Orlando
The Waves
Mansfield Park
The Sound and the Fury
Disgrace
Never Let Me Go
Howards End
The Rings of Saturn
Half of a Yellow Sun
White Teeth
The Good Soldier
The Color Purple
The Master and Margarita
The Man Without Qualities
Blood Meridian
Crime and Punishment
Jude the Obscure
Kindred
Our Mutual Friend
Austerlitz
Nervous Conditions
The Bluest Eye
Dracula
The Rainbow
A House for Mr Biswas
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Rebecca
Buddenbrooks
The End of the Affair
A Farewell to Arms
The Talented Mr Ripley
The Vegetarian
The Turn of the Screw
The Line of Beauty
Ragtime
The Left Hand of Darkness
Jacob’s Room
Life and Fate
Sentimental Education
Invisible Cities
The Known World
The Return of the Native
Pedro Páramo
Catch-22
The Road
The Go-Between
My Ántonia
Particular books we touch on in the show
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Ulysses by James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Orlando, The Waves and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
The Princess of Clèves by Madame de Lafayette
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
The Trial and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
The New Life by Tom Crewe
Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs Oliphant
The Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Known World by Edward P. Jones

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George Saunders is back with Vigil, his first novel since Lincoln in the Bardo. In this episode, Kate is joined by fellow book podcasters Jenny King and Sarah Kemp from The Bookcast Club to discuss it
Given his back catalogue, does Vigil live up to the high expectations we have Saunders, one of America's most admired contemporary writers? Why is he so fond of writing about ghosts? Do death, redemption, capitalism and climate change make for an enjoyable read? Do we want novels to be enjoyable? Or do we want them to make a point?
We're also exploring Leo Tolstoy's classic novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, cited by Saunders as a key influence on Vigil, and asks what both books reveal about how we live, how we die, and whether it's ever too late to change.
Along the way, Kate, Jenny and Sarah share recent reads, their love of a Kobo e-reader, and recommend books (and one film) following on from our book club read.
Books discussed
Vigil by George Saunders
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Transcription by Ben Lerner
Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
North Woods by Daniel Mason
Storyland by Catherine McKinnon
Plus a recommendation for the film Palm Springs.
Patreon
Access extra episodes, join the pod book club and support the show at Patreon.com/bookclubreview
Follow on Instagram @bookclubreviewpodcast
email thebookclubreview@gmail.com
Timestamps
1:26 Recent Reads & Kobos – Bookshelf chat, Kobo e-reader enthusiasm, and current reads including Ben Lerner's Transcription and Kiran Millwood Hargrave's Almost Life.
11:54 About The Bookcast Club
14:41 Patreon Break
16:17 What Is Vigil? – Spiritual guide Jill escorts a remorseless fossil fuel tycoon toward death. Audiobook excerpt included.
22:16 Discussing Jill
28:22 Climate & KJ Boon
31:21 A Christmas Carol Parallels
34:16 Broader Reflections – Kate wonders if great writers can no longer make moral judgments in today's climate; Transcription raises similar questions.
35:54 Verdict on Vigil
38:30 The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Tolstoy's novella discussed as Saunders' cited influence.
43:00 Tolstoy the Man
48:36 Recommendations
52:42 Wrap-up
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In this episode Kate is joined by Amanda Moulson, co-host of Curious Readers, to consider the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist. Ahead of the prize ceremony next week, which one do we think will win?
Perhaps like Amanda you have read them all, but if, like Kate, you're going to struggle to get to all six, which ones should you focus on? Which are the standout reads? Which are the books most likely to delight, surprise, and stay with you long after you've turned the final page?
We're covering all six books, and you’ll also find out what Amanda has on her TBR, the books she most loves recommending, and how a busy book podcaster organises her bookshelves.
Timestamps for the time-poor
00:00 Welcome and Prize Preview
01:31 Meet Amanda Molson
01:44 Quickfire Reading Habits
03:18 Bookshelf Organization
04:06 Favorite Recs and Current Reads
06:20 Kate’s Power Broker Detour
08:54 Patreon Readalong and Book Club
10:12 Women’s Prize Context and History

15:09 Shortlist Book 1 Flashlight
20:51 Shortlist Book 2 Dominion
25:23 Shortlist Book 3 The Correspondent
26:31 Sybil’s Dark Past
27:07 Audiobook Clip Letters
29:15 Cozy Yet Dark
30:22 Famous Author Replies
31:14 Sybil Effect Debate
32:49 Craft and Book Clubs
33:28 The Mercy Step Setup
34:40 Mercy Step Clip
36:35 Child Narrator Power
37:12 Small Press Spotlight
38:01 Kingfisher Obsessive Love
38:50 Kingfisher Clip Warning
40:40 Kingfisher Reactions
41:35 Heart the Lover Clip
44:07 Two Halves Romance
45:36 Illness and Mortality
47:33 Marketing and Triggers
49:04 Winner Predictions

51:23 Wrap Up and Patreon
52:25 Kate’s Recent Reads and Outro

Books mentioned
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
You With the Sad Eyes by Christina Applegate
Open Book by Jessica Simpson
A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken
The Power Broker by Robert Caro
We Are Green and Trembling Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Feminist History for Every Day of the Year by Kate Mosse
The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Flashlight by Susan Choi
Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
Dominion by Addie E. Citchens
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson
Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly
Heart the Lover by Lily King
Writers & Lovers by Lily King
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley
Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
The Director by Daniel Kehlman
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin
You'll find all the titles we mentioned in our Bookshop.org list. Buying books there helps support independent bookshops, and also supports The Book Club Review.
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