Secret Life of Books

A special collaboration between Sophie and the celebrated writer and podcaster Gretchen Rubin, of Happier with Gretchen Rubin, recorded live from New York City. Join Sophie and Gretchen on a literary pilgrimage to the Upper East Side of New York, where they celebrate a shared favourite children's book, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by the extraordinary E.L Konigsburg.
Sophie and Gretchen walk out on the streets of Manhattan and through the galleries of the Met, visiting favorite landmarks from the novel, and discussing what makes this children's book so perfect, both a glorious product of its time and place, and an immortalizing of the Met and New York City for future generations of children and their parents.
It's part of a series Gretchen and her sister are doing called MOVE 26 in '26, to get readers and listeners exercising for at least 26 minutes a day, during 2026!
Check it out here, and sign up:
https://gretchenrubin.com/move26in26/
And learn more about Gretchen and her work on a happier life here:
https://gretchenrubin.com/

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Talent shows like The X Factor, Got Talent and their many spin offs began in the 1380s, not the 1980s! They were invented by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales at the end of a successful and glamorous diplomatic career in medieval Europe.
This is the literary pilgrimage to top all literary pilgrimages, the imagined story of a group of medieval odds and sods, who meet up to in a London pub and walk to Canterbury Cathedral. The owner of the pub, a local MP named Harry Bailey (a real guy), decides that they’ll have a storytelling competition to pass the time while they travel. The winner will get dinner at, you guessed it, Harry's pub.
No one had ever written anything remotely like this before, and Chaucer’s version of pub-mike night became a literary sensation.
The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous works of English Literature ever, and a perennial favorite on "Intro to English Lit" syllabuses. It's written in Middle English, which isn't an easy read now, but has a lot of fascinating local color that has disappeared from modern English. In the first installment of our “Long(ish) Poems” series, Sophie and Jonty explain why the Canterbury Tales remains an evergreen literary staple, what makes Chaucer’s characters so brilliant, and what’s important about the "General Prologue" that kick-starts the whole tale cycle. [Editor's note: work on your titles, Geoffrey!]

Here is Harvard's easy to use version of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English with a modern English translation: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0

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2026 is the year of the Horse. It is also the Year of Classic Literature, thanks to the current crop of high-profile screen adaptations. And, when it comes to the classics, SLOB is all about the small screen.

Most film directors have enormous egos. All too often they use a classic as a departure point to - frankly - just show off. To try and show they are as brilliant as the author. And we don’t like it! Or very rarely. Our hearts lie with the small screen. There the classics can unfold faithfully and with all the time they deserve. Think of the BBC’s adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch and Jane Eyre, as well as modern classics like Wolf Hall and Normal People.

It’s fair to say that the breakout hit of the hour is the BBC’s adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister - a bold rewrite of Pride and Prejudice - starring Ella Bruccoleri, Richard E Grant and Ruth Jones. So, we’re delighted to have Janice on the show this week to talk about not only adapting Pride and Prejudice, but having her book in turn adapted for the screen.

Anyone familiar with Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice will know that Elizabeth Bennet has a very unappealing younger sister called Mary, who - with Austen’s characteristic talent for cruelty - is portrayed as a plain-looking prig, unable to say the right thing, and generally lowering spirits with her moralising comments and sub-par musical performances. You might recall the famous Mr Bennet line spoken about Mary: "That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit."

In this episode, we're joined by author Janice Hadlow to chat all about Mary, TOBS, and what it looks like when you champion the underdog.

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To round out our series on high school novels we're jumping across the pond (aka the Atlantic Ocean) and skipping several decades to find ourselves in early 1990s Massachusetts. Welcome to the world of East Coast preppy culture, where Laura Ashley dresses, LL Bean canvas tote bags, goldfish crackers, classic rock, pink shorts and ties with whales on them, reign supreme.

As with the other three school stories we’ve covered so far, the ultra-elite East Coast boarding school of Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2005 novel Prep is a microcosm of the nation at large - or at least a decent segment of it. Prep is set in the class-conscious world of New England and the boarding schools that are meant to produce the graduates of Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Sittenfeld, who, like her heroine Lee is from the Midwest, picks up the milieu of The Great Gatsby half a century later, and makes the characters are ten years younger. Picture Daisy and Tm Buchanan, Jordan Baker and Nick Caraway in high school, wondering if they should use a different deodorant, and whether they have the right haircut.

Prep was The Secret History of American boarding school stories when it came out, an authentic glimpse into what really went on in these ultra privileged high school campuses. Curtis Sittenfeld would take on other iconic American stories in subsequent novels, rewriting the worlds of First Lady Laura Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton. With Prep she trained her excruciatingly detailed outsider-observer’s eye on the rituals, mores and social markers of America’s white elites.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.In 1969, six years before the Sex Pistols formed and punk broke, a 15 year old boy from Yorkshire called Billy Casper flicked at v-sign at the world. A photograph of that moment became one of the iconic images of late 20th Century Britain, appearing on t-shirts, posters, graffiti, and - of course - a book cover.

Billy Casper wasn't a real boy. He is the anti-hero of Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave, published in 1968. The book is a masterpiece in its own right, but owes its status in part to the film adaptation made immediately after it came out. Director Ken Loach, working with Hines as scriptwriter, decided to make the film exactly where the book is set - in and around Barnsley, a coal-mining town in Yorkshire. The boy in the poster is, in fact, 15-year-old David Bradley - a local working-class boy without any acting experience, whose father worked in the mines. David Bradley and Billy Caspar are almost inseparable in our imaginations. And so that famous photograph, taken on set, became the image used on the cover of future editions of the book.

A Kestrel for a Knave changed school stories forever. Billy is a semi-literature child living in a state of neglect on a housing estate. His school is a bad secondary modern, where the pupils are physically and psychologically abused by their depressed teachers. What makes Billy’s life worthwhile is his love of the countryside, and the kestrel hawk he has managed to raise and keep in the garden shed.

What Billy wants is to fly his kestrel, but the world keeps getting in the way - his brother, teachers, school bullies, even the Youth Employment Officer. Hence Billy’s iconic v-sign - the ultimate statement of his refusal to participate in anything society has to offer.

Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave
Ken Loach, Kes
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