Secret Life of Books

Best Valentine’s Day ever! SLOB’s “Wuthering Heights” watch-party. Sophie and Jonty take it character by character – inanimate characters included — to decide who are the winners and who are the losers in the Fennell-Robbie-Elordi mash-up adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel. And in the episode’s gripping second half they move onto the really meaty questions: race, class, sex, domestic violence, and pets.As the movie poster says, Come Undone - with SLOB - this Valentine's season.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The storm clouds are gathering in anticipation of the Valentine’s Day release of Emerald Fennell’s raunchy film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The film has been described by one critic as “very horny, very sumptuous, and very demented.” Margot Robbie looks set to change the way we read this beloved classic, well, if not forever, for a few weeks during awards season.It’s fair to say that anyone remotely connected to the world of classic literature is standing by, getting ready to jeer.And it’s also fair to say that the film has propelled Wuthering Heights to become the most read classic of 2026. The New York subway, the London Tube and many other transport systems worldwide are dotted with earnest young people, proudly nose-deep in their Penguin Wuthering Heights.If SLOB has a motto, it’s be prepared. To ready our devoted listeners for the big V. Day release, we’ve recorded a brand-new episode on Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte’s novel, which may just be the most unhinged, genre-busting, unputdownable classic in English, is back, bigger, better, and balmier than when SLOB recorded our first episode back at the very beginning of this podcast.We drink deep, but always with our trademark cheeky humor, in Emily Bronte’s biography, the secrets behind the book’s writing, and why the Heathcliff-Catherine love-story it is most definitely not GOATED, as the kids say.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sophie talks to Richard Ovenden, OBE, the 25th Bodley’s Librarian at Oxford, about the manuscript of Frankenstein, one of the most extraordinary, and fascinating, literary treasures of all time. Richard is head of Oxford’s Bodleian, as well as the University's libraries, museums, and even botanical gardens. Though Richard isn’t personally dusting off the attic vases or planting the bulbs, he does still spend huge amounts of time with rare books and manuscripts.In this thrilling bonus episode he talks about how the Bodleian came to own the manuscript of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, along with the large, fascinating, and often very weird collection gathered from the Shelley family and their friends over several generations.This is an amazing behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the world’s great libraries, why old books really matter, and why SLOB was right all along that Percy Bysshe Shelley is bad news.To see the manuscript, go to the Digital Bodleian: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/53fd0f29-d482-46e1-aa9d-37829b49987d/Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Published in 1970, written by an unknown new writer, The Bluest Eye is the great African American novelist Toni Morrison’s debut. It remains in many ways her most radical. It’s one of the most banned books in America since its publication – for its unflinching, explicit depictions of domestic abuse, racial and sexual violence in small town America. Morrison wrote openly about Black sex and Black violence, challenging the increasingly celebratory tone of American literature in the late 1960s. Reviewing her in the New York Times, the legendary critic John Leonard recognized just how important Morrison’s voice would be. ““The Bluest Eye” is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black; the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been ‘designed specifically to murder possibilities,” he wrote. “She does it with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.” Morrison would go on to write many Modernist-inflected literary tours de force, including Song of Solomon and Beloved, and is the first and only Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. We’ll be taking deep dives into Morrison’s work across four special episodes of SLOB, for Black History Month.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A serial killer on the loose in the foggy, battle-scarred streets of London after the Second World War. Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is Bleak House meets 1984 meets Silence of the Lambs. In this last in the current Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty looks at how Allingham - more, perhaps, than the other Queens of Crime - evolved her craft to suit the changing world around her. She dials back the importance of her aristocratic front-man sleuth Campion (who she first introduced in 1929) to focus more on the grizzled, working-class detective Charlie Luke. This book is a stepping stone out of Christieland into the world of PD James and Ruth Rendell.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With the release of Chloe Zhao's rapturously acclaimed film Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's much-loved 2020 novel, SLOB re-releases one of our earliest episodes.Hamnet is a beautiful, lyrical novel about Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, and the early death of their son, Hamnet. O'Farrell refocussed Shakespeare's story on the women who are usually only glimpsed at the edges of his life, reinventing Anne Hathaway as a vivacious, sexy, creative and compelling full character. In doing so she reimagines Hamlet the play as a mediation on family, love, and loss, organized around Shakespeare's wife.Our Hamnet episode itself is a historical curiosity. #18, in the earliest days of our podcast, it's officially SLOB juvenilia. We've changed and grown in the last year, and we owe everything to our listeners who tell us how it is and how it should be.Please tell us what you think about Hamnet, book or film, by jumping on our Patreon chat: https://www.patreon.com/messages/9473d46b4c7d4e59be6239f82a3e8115?mode=campaign&tab=chatsWhether you plan to see the film or not, this book has stayed in the zeitgeist ever since it was published.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Murder is Announced (1950) was Agatha Christie’s 50th published book. So when better than the 50th anniversary of her death to celebrate one of her greatest works - and introduce Miss Marple into the back SLobalogue? In this third episode in our Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty skip daintily from one side of the Second World War to the other to see if - and how - Agatha Christie’s plots and characters were impacted by the devastation. What we find is an England down-at-heel. Austerity. Rationing. Widespread poverty. Deserters roaming the country. Paranoia and fear of foreigners. When a murder occurs at the (still) charming village of Chipping Cleghorn, the local police are all at sea. The problem is nobody really - truly - knows their neighbours anymore and are people who they say they are? Enter Miss Marple, the Victorian relic with a mind like a sink, to put everything straight - and remind us all that Agatha Christie truly has no peer when it comes to an elegant and rollicking good crime story. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, for the second of our episodes on the Queens of Crime, we travel by steamer with Ngiao Marsh and her celebrated detective Roderick Alleyn, who decides to go on holiday in Marsh's native New Zealand — no trivial undertaking for an Englishman in the 1930s. Alleyn comes to NZ for the mountains and rivers, but stays for the bloody and highly innovative murder of a theater impressario, whose company is touring from London with the magnificent leading lady Carolyn Dacres.P.D. James, a second gen Queen of Crime herself, wrote that ‘the method of death in a Ngaio Marsh novel tends to linger in the memory.’ Much about this novel lingers in the memory, including the remarkable descriptions of New Zealand's scenery and perhaps most of all Marsh's decision to bring Maori culture and traditions to the forefront of the story. In Vintage Murder, Marsh creates a tension between three factions - the imperial mentality of the touring theater company, the colonial subservience of the New Zealand police force, and the irrepressible agency of Maori culture. And while Roderick Alleyn has everyone metaphorically sipping together at the end, those tensions remain unresolved. Vintage Murder is a great thriller AND a disturbing portrait of late British imperialism. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Runcie is author of the acclaimed Grantchester Mysteries - the focus of six books and a hugely successful ITV television series - following vicar-sleuth Sidney Chambers in his sleuthing career from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. James talks to Jonty about where he finds the gold in the Golden Age of Crime. In particular, Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. He then talks about the inspiration behind the Grantchester Mysteries, which develops into a conversation about his father - who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1980s - and the trials and tribulations of the Church of England in the late 20th Century.The Grantchester Mysteries are:Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (2012)Sidney Chambers and The Perils of the Night (2013)Sidney Chambers and The Problem of Evil (2014)Sidney Chambers and The Forgiveness of Sins (2015)Sidney Chambers and The Dangers of Temptation (2016)Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love (2017)The Road to Grantchester (2019)As well as discussing many books from the Golden Age, James and Jonty both enthused about David Kynaston's brilliant and ongoing 'Tales of a New Jerusalem' cycle of history books focused on Britain after the Second World War. The cycle, which started with Austerity Britain (2007), has been a big influence on Grantchester.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last year, the SLoBlight lingered briefly on Agatha Christie when we celebrated the centenary of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from 1925. This book, more than any other, heralded the start of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction between the two world wars. Taught, short and fraught with menace, these novels were in large part a response to the chaos and brutality of the First World War. The public needed order and diversion. Highly regulated games became popular - contract bridge, crosswords, Mah Jong - and so did detective fiction. These games indeed frequently appear in As the initiation ceremony to the Detection Club shows, detective fiction was a sort of literary game - with clear rules of engagement and a puzzle for the reader to unravel. In this mini-series on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction we’re looking at what happened after Roger Ackroyd. As the 1930s darkened with the great depression, the rise of fascism and - dare we say it - the rather bleak view of human nature contained within Freudian psychoanalysis, so too did detective fiction. At the forefront of these changes were the so-called Queens of Crime - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is the Mount Everest of Victorian fiction. A book so brilliant and monumental that it’s taken us a year of planning to take it on. But as we close out 2025, we’ve established our Middlemarch base camp and started the climb.To put it another way, we’ve recorded an episode in which we treat listeners to the story behind the story of the greatness that is Mary Ann Evans, the woman who became George Eliot. Middlemarch is, in many people’s opinions, the greatest novel in English. To help understand why it’s so amazing, how Eliot learned to write like this, and her life as a reader, writer, daughter and lover (plus, the story behind her pen name), we give you this primer episode.Starting this Friday, we have new subscriber-only episodes every two weeks about Middlemarch itself, going book by book through this magnificent classic. This is how Eliot meant Middlemarch to be read - through 8 stages. One for each of the serialized volumes that ran through 1871 and 1872 before the book was published as a whole in 1874.Join up for the bookclub by becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon, and come along with us for the adventure.Books discussed in this episode:George Eliot, MiddlemarchGeorge Eliot’s translated works: David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined; Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity; Benedictus de Spinoza, EthicsGeorge Eliot, Scenes of Clerical LifeGeorge Eliot, Adam BedeGeorge Eliot, The Mill on the FlossGeorge Eliot, Silas MarnerGeorge Eliot, RomolaGeorge Eliot, Felix Holt, The RadicalGeorge Eliot, Daniel Deronda Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It won't come as a surprise to SLOB fans that the literary classics invented Christmas.But if you've got your finger on the buzzer and are already mouthing the words "Dickens, A Christmas Cracker" think again.We take you back to Christmas Eve, somewhere in North Wales, around about 1385 (brrrr). Cue the giant, jolly yet murderous Greene Knight, who shows up in the local mead hall, and issues a complicated and charmingly allegorical seasonal challenge to the Knights of the Round Table.From there we pay visits to the frankly unsatisfactory Christmases of the English Renaissance (wet, high-fiber pudding porridge, anyone?), the austere anti-Christmases of Puritan England, the weak-tea Christmas-adjacent efforts of the eighteenth-century, and then — boom — the advent of Victorian Christmas excess, with trees, fairy lights, turkeys, and giant inflatable santas in every front yard.We wish all our beloved SLOB listeners a Merry Christmas, and whether you celebrate or not we know you'll find the Cracker a veritable trove of literary trinkets and tidbits.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know that Jane Austen has a big birthday this week -- her 250th to be exact. Happy Birthday Jane!Over here on SLOB we're throwing Jane a party, and we've invited guests. They're truly the guests of honor. The women who made Jane Austen. You may not know all of their names, or any of them. We introduce some literary superstars from their own day, who influenced Austen's craft, storytelling, irony and encouraged her appetite for wild, subversive stories.We tend to see Austen as a lone genius, carving out a voice for women in a world where they were often unheard. She was, in fact, just a particularly brilliant member of a wider social and literary movement. She was great, and she was great because she stood on the bonnets of giantesses. Please meet the bolters, bad-asses, barn-stormers, bold adventurers. The bloody-minded and the bloody-brilliant.Writers and books mentioned in the episode:Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His SisterDelarivier Manley, The New AtlantisEliza Haywood, Love in ExcessCharlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote and HenriettaAnn Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance; The Romance of the Forest; The Mysteries of Udolpho; and The ItalianMary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women; A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark; Maria; or, the Wrongs of WomanFrances Burney, Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla and The WandererCharlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets and The Old Manor HouseElizabeth Inchbald, A Simple StoryMaria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, Harrington and Belinda.Jane Austen, The Beautifull Cassandra (juvenilia) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are you a cat-person or a tyger-person? William Blake was both. Find out why such a big fuss about "The Tyger," which never fails to show up in google searches for the best poem in English. "The Tyger" has a lot going for it: short, punchy, mystical and definitely about a tiger. But beyond that, everything is up for grabs. Who was this William Blake, not just one of the most loved poets of all time, but among the strangest. Had he actually seen a tiger in 1794, or is his tiger a metaphor for other powerful, scary, orange things, like the French Revolution, child-labor, or other Romantic Poets? Why were tigers in the news at the time, and what does Blake's poem have to do with much-loved mechanical tiger in the Victoria and Albert museum? Sophie and Jonty discuss Blake's quirky brilliance as an illustrator, his similarity to Chagall, his early life and late obsession with John Milton, and the literary rarity of Blake's being both a Great Poet and a Nice Guy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stephen King and Shirley Jackson agree that The Turn of the Screw is the GOAT of ghost-stories. It’s a gripping, excellently creepy potboiler about a mad governess and a pair of haunted children in a scary Victorian country house.Henry James already had 14 novels and a load of short fiction behind him when he wrote The Turn of the Screw, and he channeled his talent for opaque, ambiguous storytelling to come up with one of the most truly chilling psychological thrillers ever written.The novella – yes we’re happy to report that this is a short read – was serialized over three months in a magazine called Collier’s Weekly and then reprinted with another story as The Two Magics. It was a hit, which it needed to be because avid listeners to SLOB will remember that the 1890s in London was a competitive time for supernatural page turners. We’re looking at you, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Find out why this is the decade of the unputdownable classic Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the world's favorite novelists, on his own favorite novelist. Colm Toibin has written many beloved novels, for which he has won many prestigious prizes. The novels include Brooklyn and Long Island; The Magician and The Master. This last is Colm's fictional recreation of Henry James' extraordinary career-save in which he bounced back from the failure of his West End play, Guy Domville, to write, in rapid succession, several of the greatest masterpieces of 19thC fiction. It takes confidence imaginatively to inhabit the mind and creative life of Henry James, the writer who, more than anyone before him, worked out how to inhabit his characters' minds and creative lives. Not only does Colm pull it off in The Master, he repeats the trick in many other novels, giving us characters of immense emotional and psychological depth. Sophie and Jonty quickly realized why Colm had felt able to tackle the ultimate challenge of mind-reading Henry James. Colm, it quickly emerges, is a staggeringly astute literary critic and craft-teacher. Aspiring writers, masters of their craft, and curious readers alike will be blown away by the fluency and virtuosity of Colm's account of what he's learned from Henry James, his own development as a writer, and much more.Colm Toibin, The Master, Brooklyn, Long Island. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Many readers consider The Portrait of a Lady to be the greatest novel in English. But for some reason, James' fellow novelists loved to dump on him. Nabokov called him a "pale porpoise," and said his books were strictly for "non-smokers." Virginia Woolf, who knew him as a family friend, wrote, "we have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?" T.S. Eliot said that he had "a mind so fine no idea could penetrate it." Ouch.Sophie and Jonty beg to differ. For once, we think Virginia Woolf got it completely wrong. Serialized simultaneously in America and Britain over 1880/81, A Portrait of Lady is one of the great peaks of English writing. It tells the story of Isabel Archer, an American heiress, who is determined to enjoy a life of travel and independence, only to fall into the clutches of a gaslighting con-artist called Gilbert Osmond. James' first masterpiece is a gripping domestic thriller, which marked a revolution in the portrayal of women in literature, creating a heroine who is psychologically complex, outspoken, transgressive and determined not to be pinned down by Victorian moral standards. It also marks a revolution in our understanding of the human mind. Henry James’ brother was the so-called Father of American Psychology William James. Both of them tackled the question of what really goes on in the mind in different ways. It has one of the best opening sections ever, and one of the most fascinating and ambiguous endings. It's not for the faint-hearted reader, sure, but it repays every moment of a reader's attention. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SLoB is turning 1! To celebrate, Sophie and Jonty re-read one of their all time favorites, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.My Family and Other Animals (1956) is the beloved, hilarious, brilliant chronicle of a childhood idyll — which is also a series of comic disasters — set on the Ionian Greek Island of Corfu.The memoir is the first part of a trilogy that includes Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods and Gerald Durrell wrote dozens of other books about his life as a naturalist and conversationist. But My Family was his break-out hit that made him into a celebrity-animal whisperer, and royalties from the book allowed him to establish the famous Jersey Zoo for wildlife conservation. Long before the zoo, however, came the celebrity animals of the Corfu years, whom we meet in this glorious memoir: Quasimodo the pigeon, Achilles the Tortoise, Aleko the seagull, Ulysses the Owl, Sally the Donkey, Widdle and Puke the puppies and of course, Roger the dog.Sophie and Jonty dive into the story behind the story of everyone’s favorite animal story and learn what was really going on behind the scenes of this delightful but dysfunctional family. Find out why “Mother,” Mrs. Durrell, moved with her children to Greece after a life in British India and Bournemouth; learn about the full identity of the irascible and hilarious brother Larry, and hear what happened to the other Durrell siblings after they became famous.And for all the beauty and bucolic happiness of Corfu in the 1930s, there was backdrop of complex and fascinating geopolitical unrest across the Eastern Mediterranean, which Sophie wants to discuss in much greater depth than Jonty has patience for.Mentioned in the episode:Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, The Garden of the Gods.Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet; Prospero’s Cell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Salem’s Lot (1975) is Stephen King’s second published novel, and many would say it's his best. It tells the story of a plague of vampires running amok in a blue-collar town in New England and the band of heroes who come together to fight them.  We’re aware that many listeners may not have read a Stephen King novel, although they will probably have seen - and enjoyed - a film adaptation, and may wonder what Salem’s Lot has to do with a podcast about classic books.  This episode answers that question by telling the story of how and why Stephen King became the biggest horror writer in the world. Since his debut with Carrie in 1974, he has published 60 novels and sold over 400 million books. He is one of the most successful writers ever - and films adapted from his books and stories include The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining, Stand by Me and Misery - all landmarks of cinema based on brilliant writing. And though only one of these four books is a horror novel, in this episode we stay firmly in the horror lane and get to work figuring out what makes Salem’s Lot so enduringly gripping. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chocolate Mouse, anyone? Rosemary’s Baby was a smash hit on release - the best selling horror novel of the 1960s, eventually selling over 4 million copies. The year after publication it was adapted into one of the greatest films of the decade - directed by Roman Polanski with Mia Farrow as the eponymous heroine.  At first glance, it seems that Ira Levin’s story was at odds with the prevailing spirit of free love - read the room, baby! But as we’re going to find out - the secret of Rosemary’s Baby is that it perfectly captured the spirit and anxieties of the age. Ira Levin would repeat the trick with the Stepford Wives in 1972 and The Boys From Brazil in 1976, but Rosemary’s Baby is his masterpiece. A book which is simultaneously an outlandish fantasy and one of the greatest novels about coercive gaslighting relationships. Sophie and Jonty ask a tough question: is Levin's depiction of a coercive relationship just too real? Do we come away feeling that Rosemary has real power and agency that speaks to us now, or is the book's depiction of domestic violence and misogyny and trapped in its own cultural moment just as much as the stuffed mushrooms and Gibsons the couple consume on the fateful night that the horror takes hold?Content Warning: the book and film — and this conversation — contain descriptions of sexual violence, rape and abusive relationships.Books and Film Referred to:Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby Roman Polanski, Rosemary's BabyF. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great GatsbyJane Austen, EmmaJ.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the RyeTom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the VanitiesBetty Friedan, The Feminine MystiqueCharlotte Bronte, Jane EyreAdrienne Rich, "In the Evening"Valerie Solanas, SCUM ManifestoAndrea Dworkin, Women HatingJulia Kristeva, Powers of Horror -- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.