Podularity Books Podcast

Our second guest to select her Books of the Year is Elizabeth Knowles. Elizabeth spent much of her career as a historical lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. She is also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and, most recently, the author of How to Read a Word, a book that aims to make lexicographical sleuths of us all. You can hear my recent interview with Elizabeth by clicking here. And here are her Books of the Year: Since I was thirteen and first encountered M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, I have had an affection for his particular subsection of the genre. The protagonist (generally learned) is drawn through his speciality into an exploration which is as tempting as it is unwise. The background (a country library or monastic church) is solidly evoked, but a crack through which terror can enter opens and widens as too many questions are asked, and warning voices are ignored. Throughout his canon of short stories, James again and again successfully achieves what he himself …

Today we begin a new series of guest posts in which writers and publishers choose their favourite books of 2010. Our first guest is Elizabeth Speller, whose first novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett, was published to great acclaim earlier this year. You can hear my interview with her about the book here. Her second novel, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, will appear in May 2011. Here are her choices (you’ll find an interview with one of her selected authors, Madeleine Bunting, here): My greatest pleasure this year came from reading Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Read selectively, randomly or straight through (I did all three, in order) it is a wonderfully intelligent and lively journey through the landscape of the imagination between the wars. Harris informs but also has huge fun with the creativity, fantasy and sometimes spectacular self-indulgence of the period. I’m delighted to see publishers producing such visually beautiful but serious books to compete with e-publishing. It was announced …

I was in Oxford on Friday to interview Rosamund Bartlett about her recent Tolstoy biography, which coincides with the great man’s death a century ago on 20 November 1910. The interview will appear shortly on the Blackwell Online website, but in the meantime, here is Rosamund reading a short extract from the book itself, in which Tolstoy as a boy listens to his grandmother’s blind storyteller recount a bedtime story… Click here for the reading.

Amexica is the name journalist Ed Vulliamy has coined for the 2,000-mile-long borderland between the US and Mexico. It’s a land that has fascinated him for the past thirty years – “repelled and compelled”, as he puts it in the interview. “Charismatic,complex, irresistible” is how he describes it in his new book, Amexica, which he discusses with me in this podcast. The US-Mexican border is the busiest such crossing in the world – a million people use it every day. And some of them are engaged in the trafficking – of people, arms, drugs, and dirty money- which gives this land its often brutally violent character. In the interview we talk about that violence, where it comes from, the ways in which it mirrors developments in the global economy and – perhaps most worryingly – the fact that “children are growing up along the border with this as their world”.

Elizabeth Knowles is a historical lexicographer, which means that she researches the histories of words – how did they come to mean what they mean today and what journeys have they taken to arrive at these meanings? Elizabeth firmly believes that “there is no such thing as a dull word” and to prove it has written How to Read a Word in which she reveals some techniques you can use in order to undertake fascinating journeys of your own in the history of our language. What follows are extracts from an interview in which she talks to George Miller about some of the words she discusses in the book – and we put her to the test by asking her without any forewarning how to go about researching two unusual terms. Just click on the links below to listen to the extracts. And if these whet your appetite, a longer interview about the book can be heard by clicking here. Kate Moss famously once said: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Here Elizabeth talks …

Antony Jay’s Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations – entitled Lend Me Your Ears – is now in its fourth edition. To mark its publication, I went to interview Antony – perhaps best known as the co-author of the “Yes, Minister” series – at his home in Somerset. You can hear the whole interview by clicking here; or you can listen to highlights by clicking on the links below. My first question was: what makes a quotation a political quotation? Click here. Politics is a field more prone than most to misquotation. Antony Jay discusses a notorious quote attributed to James Callaghan, which he never in fact said. Click here to find out what it was. What are the challenges of pinning down who said what in the modern world of 24-hour news, blogs and soundbites? Click here. Was there such a thing as a Golden Age of political phrase-making? Click here to hear Antony Jay’s view. Who are some of Tony’s personal favourites among the many thousands of writers and politicians in the book? Click …

In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I talk to Geneva-based journalist and political analyst Vicken Cheterian about recent events in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan. We talk about inter-ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbek peoples, the stance of Kyrgyzstan’s neighbours, Russia and Uzbekistan, and the role which Cheterian believes the West should play in helping bring this former beacon of reformism and pro-Western attitudes back from the brink of chaos. You can listen to the podcast by clicking here. The LMD podcast archive is accessible here.

John Grindrod was born in 1970 in Croydon and still lives in South London. Last year he published Shouting at the Telly, a book in which a host of comedians, actors and writers wrestle with such weighty issues as:  Is Freddie from Scooby-Doo a colossal pervert? What does Howards’ Way tell us about the eighties? How do you win America’s Next Top Model? Which programmes do you only watch when you’re off sick?  I spoke to John about the book for the Blackwell Online podcast when it came out. You can listen to it here. Here are John’s holiday reading choices: The most obviously summery book I’ve been reading has been Travis Elborough’s hilarious and hugely informative Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, a cultural history of seaside resorts and our national obsession with piers, paddling and penny arcades. Travis grew up in Worthing and his disdain for the place colours the book, but this is as much a reconciliation with his own seaside demons as it is a gloriously eccentric travelogue around England’s …

Maria McCann’s first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, set in the English Civil War was published  in 2000 to great acclaim. Her second, The Wilding, appeared earlier this year and was also very warmly received; the Guardian, for example, called it “taut and compelling” and the Independent a “tour de force”. It is set in the West Country during the Restoration, when a reckoning has to be made of acts committed during the turbulent time that preceded it and well-kept family secrets begin to unravel. The paperback of The Wilding is out next month. You can listen to my interview with Maria in which she talk about writing the book by clicking here. And here is her Summer Reading selection: At some point in the eighties, working as a library assistant in London, I came across Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda and the surreal image of a glass building floating away downriver has haunted me ever since. In those days, surrounded by library stock and with no work to do in the evenings, I read …

Marcus Chown is cosmology consultant of New Scientist. His books include Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil and We Need to Talk About Kelvin, which has just been long-listed for the 2010 Royal Society Book Prize. I interviewed Marcus about We Need to Talk about Kelvin for the Faber podcast. You can listen to the interview by clicking here. Here are his summer reading selections: It is probably odd to recommend a book so far only half-read but I knew from the opening page that Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World was going to be special. The story of two orphaned brothers adopted by very different families, set amid the political turmoil of post-colonial Indonesia, its prose is rich and atmospheric. Reminds me of Graham Greene. Aw, a Malaysian writer based in London, deserves to be far better known than he is. I had never before read anything by Rose Tremain but, after putting down The Road Home, I wanted to read more. The novel charts the …