Alice and Bethany catch up on what they've been reading, but it turns out it's been a weird reading year for them both. Much yapping lies ahead.

Alice and Bethany chat through a few of the books they're excited about for the rest of the year, and ask their author and bookseller friends for more recommendations! Because of the way we have to record episodes in advance, at least one of the books is already out, so if any of them sound good to you, it may be possible to read them already rather than wait!

Following the escandalo that has dogged the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us, Alice and Bethany discuss a few forthcoming adaptations of books, plus one that's taking up a lot of Alice's brain space, released on the same day as this episode...

Alice and Bethany look inward and discuss the two books Bethany has released this year! First up, Big Date Energy, aka what happens when you try to write a romcom where the main character is more like 'The Friend', and then Slowcoach, where we talk about how weirdly horrible and borderline traumatic PE lessons were.

Alice and Bethany talk through what they've been reading so far in 2024, and how not recording the pod has affected their reading habits.

Inspired by the New York Times' list of the 100 greatest books of the 21st Century, Alice and Bethany each compile their own top 10s, and find they have only one book in common, but don't agree on what that book is about...

Bethany's list: 

The Fact of a Body - Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
Manhattan Beach - Jennifer Egan
Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Crimson Petal & The White - Michel Faber 
Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Life After Life - Kate Atkinson

Alice's list:

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata (trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori)
Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi
In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado
Just Kids - Patti Smith
Lanny - Max Porter
My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl - Andrea Lawlor
Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel
What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt

Alice and Bethany have the huge pleasure of talking to girlie of the moment, Eliza Clark, largely about her new novel Penance but also about true crime, Tumblr, the wild success of Boy Parts and its upcoming stage adaptation!

Alice and Bethany have the great pleasure of talking to Heather Parry about her short story collection This Is My Body Given For You, which is a gnarly little thing full of troubling images and ideas. She also talks about the great work she does at the Society of Authors, and lots more!

Alice and Bethany have the great pleasure of talking to the film journalist and programmer Anna Bogutskaya about her new non-fiction book Unlikeable Female Characters! They take a dive into the world of 'unlikeable' women through film and TV from erotic thrillers to Skyler White via the Hays Code and Amy Dunne from Gone Girl.

Bethany has the huge pleasure of chatting to Virginia Sole-Smith about her revolutionary new book Fat Talk: Coming of Age in Diet Culture, which investigates the radical possibility of abandoning our cultural fears around 'childhood obesity' to create bodily autonomy in children and beyond.

Alice's debut novel, Death of a Bookseller, is out NOW! So obviously Bethany had to ask her all the nosy questions about it!