Regular listeners will know that we love to get a little meta here on LF, and this month author Ruth Ozeki gave us the perfect excuse to indulge ourselves as we slide into the holiday season. Ruth's latest novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, is about a boy named Benny who loses his father and shortly thereafter begins to hear the voices of inanimate objects, including the voice of the novel itself. In honour of Ruth, and Benny, this show is all about books about books. We'll dig into the ways that literature can be about itself, from books set in libraries to stories about writers to metafictional texts about their own means of creation, and ask what the joys and the pitfalls of this kind of self-referentiality can be - plus all the usual recommendations.

Recommendations on the theme, Books About Books:

Octavia: The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco

Carrie: Writers & Lovers by Lily King

General Recommendations:

Octavia: The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial by Maggie Nelson

Ruth: The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges

Carrie: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Find a list of all recommended books at: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/december-2021-books-about-books-with-ruth-ozeki

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This episode is sponsored by Picador: https://www.panmacmillan.com/picador