Show Notes
It’s a bumper episode 8, with Pandora and Bobby tackling two million-copy-bestselling, much-loved-movie-inspiring titans of the nineties. In Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, Pandora finds a surprisingly feminist heroine who’s no less funny 25 years on. And in Nick Hornby’s beloved High Fidelity, Bobby meets his match in a perpetually depressed man-boy who needs to love himself before anyone else can love him back.
Books/articles mentioned: Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding High Fidelity, Fever Pitch and About a Boy by Nick Hornby One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov A Life Of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs Shark Heart by Emily Habeck Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams Me Before You by Jojo Moyes One Day and Us by David Nicholls Less by Andrew Sean Greer Heartburn by Nora Ephron Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel
Books for episode 9: Augustown by Kei Miller Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Book Chat
A bittersweet episode of Book Chat has Pandora and Bobby discussing two fittingly bittersweet books: Stoner by John Williams and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Also, “some news”, a hearty goodbye, and a look back on some of our Book Chat faves from episodes past.
We bring two books both published in 1970 to the table. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by “the poet laureate of puberty” Judy Blume, and The Bluest Eye, by the legendary Toni Morrison.
After last month’s crowd-pleasers, Bobby and Pandora sink their teeth into two very different, equally meaty books. In Augustown by Kei Miller, a “dismal little valley” in Jamaica becomes a boiling pot of tension when a young boy’s dreadlocks are cut off. And in Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, the boiling pots are a little more literal – and Pandora shares an all-timer of a kitchen horror story.
Book Chat is back, and episode 7 pits a Pulitzer-winning author against a Nobel-winning author. But not really: in the battle of the Annies whose name ends in ‘X’, both Bobby and Pandora are winners. Discussing Close Range by Annie Proulx, Bobby feels the need to make apologies for the unapologetic bleakness of rural Wyoming – while Pandora is transported back to the excruciating experience of Catholic boarding school girlhood in Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story.
Episode 6 takes on one little known book and one very, very well-known book. Pandora finally reads A Visit from the Goon Squad and falls in love with Jennifer Egan's entire canon, while Bobby has mixed feelings about one of Pandora's absolute favourite books of recent times, When I Hit You, about a woman's violent marriage to a communist professor in South India.