By The Book

For this month’s book club, fellow BFMer and Potterhead Dhanya Nair joins us to discuss J.K. Rowling’s official return to the world of children’s stories, with her free online serialised novel, The Ickabog. Expect plenty of excitement as we dissect the fairy tale that nevertheless displays some unexpectedly dark plot turns, and decide whether Rowling manages to weave her signature magic. In Footnotes, we return to the real world to discuss Rowling’s recent online controversies, and how they have affected the relationship her fans have with her.

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Purveyor of witty, sparkling dialogue, observations about women, life and marriage, and writer of heartfelt romance, Jane Austen remains one of the most popular (and reprinted) authors of all time. In our second episode of Bibliography, our monthly author series, we focus on Jane Austen's life, six novels, and modern interpretations of her work. After, we talk about some of our favourite book-to-screen Austen adaptations.

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In a book that is being described as “Crazy Rich Asians meets Bridget Jones’s Diary”, Malaysian-born-Singapore-based writer Lauren Ho’s debut Last Tang Standing tells the humorous story of 33-year-old Andrea Tang: a successful lawyer and woman of the world, but also about to become the lone unmarried member of her generation in her family. We speak with Lauren about writing humour, Asianness, and whether she enjoys the “chick lit” label. We wrap things up with a Footnotes discussion on the chick lit genre, and why it’s so often not given its due.

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He caddied for prime ministers and gave lessons to kings, and rubbed shoulders with golfing greats in his own time. The Legend is about the life of a local sporting hero, V Nellan, focused not just on his love of golf but about a life well-lived and well-told. We speak to one of the co-authors of the book, Bob Holmes. After that, on Footnotes, in conjunction with the 4th of July, we talk about books that represent America today, in all its complexity and racial struggles.

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He caddied for prime ministers and gave lessons to kings, and rubbed shoulders with golfing greats in his own time. The Legend is about the life of a local sporting hero, V Nellan, focused not just on his love of golf but about a life well-lived and well-told. We speak to one of the co-authors of the book, Bob Holmes. After that, on Footnotes, in conjunction with the 4th of July, we talk about books that represent America today, in all its complexity and racial struggles.

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In this month’s book club, we are joined by history PhD candidate and former BFMer Chase Caldwell Smith, to discuss Rutger Bregman’s Humankind - A Hopeful History. Together, we discuss the book’s case for optimism, its central thesis that humans are inherently decent, and whether we were able to get onboard with the idea. In Footnotes, this leads us to discussing other books that left us feeling, well, optimistic.

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On this episode of By the Book, we observe International Fairy Day by looking into all the ways in which the fair folk and the land of Faery have influenced our stories and oral traditions. We also discuss some of our favourite stories that have fairies (and why they're different from fairy tales).

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Welcome to Bibliography, our monthly author series where we focus on and deep-dive into one specific author’s works, style, influences and legacy. We’ll also be talking about interpretations and adaptations of their works. Kicking things off, is perhaps the best known writer of all time, the Bard himself, William Shakespeare.

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From telling the true version of the Lord of the Flies, to dismantling long-held beliefs around the Stanford Prison Experiment and the murder of Kitty Genovese, Humankind is a book that sets out the argument that humans are fundamentally decent. Veering through examples and science from different disciplines such as biology, psychology, and human history, this is a book that attempts to cut through the cynicism of the modern age and offers a more optimistic version of what it means to be a realist. In this episode we speak to author Rutger Bregman to hear how this book came to be. And in Footnotes, we offer a mini book club, examining the darker worldview on offer in William Golding's classic, Lord of the Flies.

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With June 1 being the Global Day of Parents, we celebrate good parents in literature (despite their relative rarity!), and talk about how different authors have depicted the lasting impact of good parenting in their stories. Books discussed include A Girl from Yamhill (Beverly Cleary), About a Boy (Nick Hornby), Boy, Snow Bird (Helen Oyeyemi), A Song of Ice and Fire (George R. R. Martin), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl), and The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri).

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