Comics’ Books - S01, E02 - Transcript
GUEST: ESHAAN AKBAR
HOST: LUCY DANSER
LUCY DANSER: Just a quick note to say that if any of this sounds a bit technically dodgy, for example like it’s perhaps been recorded remotely during lockdown, well, it has been. On with the show.
[MUSIC]
LD: Hello and welcome to Comics’ Books. I’m Lucy Danser and for many years I’ve worked as a producer alongside a number of excellent comedians. I’m also a book obsessive who’s always asking friends and strangers alike what they’re reading. So I thought I’d bring my two passions together and find out, what do funny people read? I am delighted today to welcome a comedian who’s been lighting up the comedy circuit with his wit and charm. You might have seen him on Mock the Week, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order or the Saturday afternoon show Eshaan, Sunil and Nim on BBC Asian Network. It’s Eshaan Akbar. Hello!
ESHAAN AKBAR: How are you?
LD: I’m good, how are you?
EA: I’m so excited and nervous to be doing this.
LD: Why are you nervous?
EA: I’m nervous because I’ve always loved books and, as you’ll find out, books have been a big part of my life, but doing anything that’s mildly literary you gotta feel like you know what you’re talking about and this is one area where I just feel a bit like, “Ugh what if I get caught out?”
LD: You see, I don’t think it matters. I think that that’s maybe one of the things that stops people reading or talking about books but really books are genuinely for everyone. I mean you can be very academic about it and have all your facts in order or you can just love reading and that’s fine too.
EA: Yeah. I mean I absolutely, I grew up absolutely loving reading and I feel like I can talk about it but it’s just because maybe, also you Lucy, you’re a very intimidating personality.
LD: Me!? I’m so gentle, so gentle and lovely.
EA: I mean could you be any more octaves higher? I don’t know.
[LAUGHS]
LD: So mean. Tell me first how your lockdown’s going.
EA: My lockdown is going all right. I’m loathe to admit it but yeah it’s going all right. I am locked up with my Dad who is a paramedic. He’s sixty and he’s Asian which puts him right in the middle of being quite at risk. So I’m always quite nervous for him but he seems very happy to be out there instead of spending time at home with me. Which has made me recently think that perhaps my Dad is cheating on me with the doctor’s son he always wanted.
LD: That does make sense.
EA: And so I’m just working through that at the moment.
LD: It’s hard.
EA: But other than that I’ve been quite productive and yeah things have been good and yeah I’m having a nice time.
LD: You’ve been doing some sort of online gigging and stuff haven’t you?
EA: I’ve done a couple of quote unquote stand up gigs online which have been quite fun actually, it’s a completely different skillset. But every week I do a podcast for Fiverr which is an online recruitment agency. I do Newsjack Unplugged, I was hosting that and I’ve got a few other podcast things and I get to do stuff like this. So yeah it’s all keeping me quite busy. I’m writing a sitcom like every other comedian at the moment I think. And working on various other writing projects. So I’ve been enjoying the time but I really miss just being out on stage and not being out of my house has been quite difficult.
LD: Are you going out for walks and stuff?
EA: I am. I actually recently started a whole exercise plan.
LD: Oh!
EA: And you know I thought, it’s taken nine weeks of lockdown to inspire me to actually do some exercise. Listen, when Boris first said you’re allowed one bit of exercise a day, this was weeks ago now, that’s when it dawned on me that actually I should be exercising. That if even in the middle of a pandemic you’re making concessions for exercise maybe this is something i should have been doing the whole time. And now he’s given us permission to be doing unlimited exercise I’m like okay, I’ll stick to the once, I’ll do just the once, I don’t know what unlimited exercise looks like. So yeah I’ve been exercising which has been nice.
LD: Well, just so you know, the limit, it wasn’t that you could only exercise once a day. It was that you could only exercise outside once a day Eshaan. You could be doing Boxfit HIIT all day on YouTube inside. This whole time if you wanted to.
EA: What What? Hold on. Listen exercise is a whole new world to me, you’re speaking gobbledegook to me right now.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: I’m not very good at exercise either but I am trying to do it a little bit while we’re stuck in because, well like you said, Boris said it’s absolutely essential to exercise.
EA: Apparently, he’s not the kind of person, I mean he’s not the kind of person you’d want to take any kind of advice from but when you look at him you wouldn’t kind of think to yourself you know what he’s talking about when it comes to fitness.
LD: Yeah yeah yeah, he’s maybe not the one. This is obviously pertinent to the podcast, have you been doing any reading while you’ve been in lockdown?
EA: Well the answer is no, the short answer is no. I started reading again a couple of weeks ago. It was actually a biography of Karl Marx that I started reading by Francis Wheen. But no, I, basically I stopped reading six years ago. And I stopped reading, and I don’t want to get too heavy, but I stopped reading at the time that my Mum passed away and the reason is, and I only realised this during lockdown actually, which is that my association with reading was inextricably linked to my memory of my Mum. Because my Mum was a hugely significant advocate for reading and we would read together all the time. It was a hugely central part to our relationship actually. And so unbeknownst to me for the last six years I had somehow developed this kind of mental block when it came to picking up a book.. And I’d bought plenty of books in the time, you know going to a bookshop still remains one of my favourite things to do and I’d bought books over the years but everytime I started reading them I just felt like I couldn’t. I’d just stop and I had no idea what it was and during the course of this lockdown I discovered that that was probably the block. So luckily I picked up this book about Karl Marx and I had a purpose to it which was I’m doing a podcast about Karl Marx after recording this one as it happens. So that was the impetus I needed .
LD: So that’s interesting that you have such an emotional link to reading. Not even to the books in particular, just to the act of reading .
EA: Yes.
LD: That it’s sort of disabled you from really trying at all.
EA: Yeah I think, so, to give you a bit of a sense of my childhood. So my Mum was, she was a huge fan of Victorian literature as will become clear. In fact she spent her whole life believing that she had been reincarnated into modern times but was actually the daughter of an aristocrat back in Victorian times, she completely believed she was. And so when I was growing up, this is pre-internet you know, my entertainment was books. And my Mum and I would sit next to one another and read books. She’d, you know, give me a book to read and she’d read whatever book she was interested in. And we’d sit down and we’d talk about it. And my weekends were, in large part, the timetable was just set around books.
LD: So it’s more that it was just very natural to you and it was after it was gone that you realised quite how, quite how central it had been would you say?
EA: Yeah yeah absolutely. I mean, this podcast is called Comics’ Books, it’s meant to be funny but it’s just harrowing at the moment isn’t it.
LD: No it’s not meant to be funny, it’s meant to be comedians talking about what they read. You can be deep and interesting .
EA: You can see how all the Victorian literature has influenced my thinking about the world. Yeah, after she passed away, I no longer undertook the act of reading and the act of reading was always synonymous with my Mum being next to me.
LD: Do you remember what was the very first book that you either read or had read to you?
EA: Before I started reading novels I, my Mum would read Enid Blyton to me. I have a distinct memory of being five or six years old and having all the Enid Blyton books on our bookcase. My Mum would spend a lot of time reading the Quran. So the Quran is the main text for Muslims and believed to be the word of God and the Hadith which is a collection of the life and times of the prophet Mohammed. And my Mum would read those to me. So I had those two and then a big part as well, because my Mum was from Bangladesh, Archie Comics! Randomly, Archie Comics was, they were always randomly in the toilet, in the bookcase. I’d always be reading those.
LD: I love a toilet book.
EA: Oh yeah. Yeah we had a bookcase above the toilet.
LD: Very important. Underrated I think.
EA: And I thought it was just normal and so many of my friends would come round, would say ‘What the hell is this’, I’m like “Well you can just pick out a book and read”. “Yeah but it’s the toilet”. I’m like “That’s exactly where you can read, it’s great!”
LD: It’s the most private place when you’re a kid. People are always bursting into your bedroom but the toilet is just lovely and quiet.
EA: Yeah, yeah. We had loads of Reader’s Digests there as well.
LD: Yep, we did, we did. Very good!
EA: We had loads of Reader’s Digests and my Mum, and my Dad to be fair, would be like “What did you learn from points to ponder” and I’d have to…
[LAUGHTER]
EA: If you think about it, my upbringing was very weird.
LD: It was quite weird.
EA: Quite weird. I mean, now that I think about it, this is why I didn’t have friends when I was eleven or twelve because I’m going to school talking about points to ponder.
[LAUGHTER]
EA: Ah God! No wonder I became a comedian. This is…
LD: So, now when you read how do you read now? Or how have you started to read?
EA: This is a great question. I don’t want to sound too pithy but I’m kind of learning again. So, I’m trying to find the place where I like reading. I don’t really like reading in bed.
LD: OK, why? It’s so cosy.
EA: I like reading books with the same kind of respect I’d afford any other activity. Look I’m one of these people. I don’t fold the corners of my pages, I don’t break the spine of my book,
LD: Oh, you’re one of them.
EA: I’m very very, and it breaks my heart when I see that happen. I have, you know, serious issues when it comes to how my books are handled. So because I wouldn’t eat in bed I wouldn’t read in bed.
LD: Oh I also eat in bed.
EA: OK, well there we are then.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: We’ve drawn our line.
EA: We’ve drawn our line there.
[MUSIC]
LD: Let us talk Eshaan about your book choices. I was, I mean now you’ve explained to me why you’ve gone for so many sort of Victorian classics. I was quite surprised when I first got your list through. I don’t know, I don’t know what I expected you to read but it wasn’t The Secret Garden I guess.
EA: The Secret Garden was the first novel that I finished and the first novel that I read repeatedly. And it was one of my Mum’s, it was in her top three. And I remember she gave me her copy to read first which she bought in Bangladesh. She would have had this book in Bangladesh in around 1960.
LD: When did she move here?
EA: She moved here in 1970.
LD: So a lot of her formative reading was in Bangladesh but she read a lot of British literature?
EA: Yes because my Mum came from a very posh family and they sent her to a Roman Catholic posh school where Bengali wasn’t on the curriculum, it was all in English. She went to a school where they had etiquette classes.
LD: Oh wow.
EA: And so, because she was so immersed in all this stuff, she absolutely loved Victorian literature. Yeah so her weathered copy she gave me and she handed it to me like it was a prized trophy and was like, ‘This book is absolutely amazing’. And I read it and it is amazing but for a child it’s really heavy.
LD: Well I’d forgotten. You know when you read something when you’re young and you think, ‘Oh that’s nice’ and then you go back to reread so I did for this and I thought ‘oh that is quite heavy actually. There’s a lot of quite serious themes in that book.’
EA: Yeah. I mean, parents don’t really love you and then there’s a cholera epidemic that kills them. Then you go to an uncle that you don’t really know and it’s just a bit like ‘oh there’s a lot to unpack here’.
LD: Yeah!
EA: But I think she’s a wonderful writer Frances Hodgson Burnett and she creates this beautiful world, particularly when she wrote about the garden and I think I immersed myself. That was the first time I found myself immersed in this world and actually she was able to do such an amazing job of having these harrowing stories but the centrepiece of the garden gave you just that moment of escapism from the harsh realities of Mary’s world.
LD: Yeah.
EA: I think also the fact that she was born in India to British parents, I had a bit more of a connection to it in the sense that my Mum, she didn’t think that the Empire was great but she was also not averse to some of the things to do with the Empire.
LD: OK, I feel like that’s kind of normal when there’s just so many aspects to it. Many of them terrible obviously but I think you can’t hate every single thing I suppose. Particularly if she loves Victorian literature and the idea of class and all that comes with it doesn’t it?
EA: Yea, yeah, yeah exactly. And also you know having, my brother who’s ten years younger than me, so I would have read this book when I was about nine/ten, when I re-read the book around eleven/twelve and I had this younger brother, I felt a lot of connection between Mary and, well, it was her cousin Colin.
LD: Colin, yeah.
EA: So I felt a lot of kinship there and I think that’s probably why it embedded to me because I thought to myself, well you know if my brother was the way Colin is I would want my brother to find every bit of happiness. So yeah, so I found myself having that kind of connection as well.
LD: Do you think you’d re-read that again now?
EA: Absolutely. And also I think that if I was ever to have children and they got to the age where they could read and understand this book this would probably be the first book I’d give them.
LD: Aw. You wouldn’t be scared that they’d be terrified by all the darkness?
EA: No. Because you know what, I mean that’s the thing with Victorian literature. It was, the Dickens, the Brontes, it was all steeped in reality and it was harsh and it was painful and it was difficult and I loved it for that reason. And it just prepares you doesn’t it, prepares you for the shitness of life. Sorry!
LD: Well it’s true. I mean life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns and I do think that some of the classics that I read when I was younger, even contemporary fiction, but I’ve, I read a lot of Michelle, I don’t know if you said Magorian or Majorian, but she wrote a lot about the Second World War and kids that had been made refugees. She wrote Goodnight Mister Tom and A Little Love Story and Back Home and even though we weren’t going through a sort of war, it was the first time where I’d read books where everyone was scared all the time. You know, they were scared about where their parents were and they were scared about bombs and they were scared about Hitler. But they were also joining theatre companies and going on picnics and meeting each other for tea. And I think we always underestimate Young Adult literature. When I’ve gone back to read it now that a lot of it is about dealing with the darker side of life.
EA: Absolutely. And also it’s, through all that tragedy and all that difficulty, weirdly, beautiful art is born and this is what, to me, what Victorian literature represents. Almost every book of the time is, the fact that people were able to write such beautiful books and such seminal texts, you know it’s no surprise that even in the modern age, that people do tend to turn to Victorian literature and try and rehash them.
LD: Yeah.
EA: And make films based on old Victorian literature. In fact, you know, the multibillion dollar Bollywood industry is just modern Victorian literature. It’s just pain and families and, well there weren’t any dancers in Victorian literature, but they add the medium of dance.
LD: It’s interesting though because it’s not the easiest to read, you know. I mean I’ve read a lot of contemporary literature for this podcast that people have picked up and rereading Wuthering Heights which is your second choice was one of the harder things I had to do just because it’s a slower process I think. Or it is at least for me.
EA: Absolutely. Especially Wuthering Heights, it’s very very dense and yeah I think that’s the thing is because, it’s a bit of a catch 22 in the sense that you need the description and the description often helps immerse you into that world but you have to be willing to do that. You have to be willing to go on that journey.
LD: Yeah.
EA: Otherwise it’s just heavy reading.
LD: I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Victorian literature for someone that was not into reading. And I think sometimes you read it at school and it’s not always the best introduction to books.
EA: Absolutely. In school I always did unsurprisingly, I always did very well with Victorian literature. I quite liked Shakespeare but I never immersed myself as well as I did intoVictorian. And I distinctly remember my English Master saying, Oh God I can’t believe I said English Master.
[LAUGHTER]
EA: In case you hadn’t worked out dear listeners I went to private school which has turned me into an absolute tosser. Oh God help me.
LD: I’m definitely not gonna cut that, you know that right?
[LAUGHTER]
EA: My English teacher.
LD: Master.
EA: He once, enraged, absolutely enraged that I wasn’t taking King Lear seriously and he goes “Why don’t you have the same passion for this as you do for the bloody Victorians?” I was like, I had no idea that this was my reputation.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: So, tell me about why you chose Wuthering Heights.
EA: Right. So. Wuthering Heights. This book. This was my Mum’s favourite book. My Mum was weirdly in love with Heathcliff all through her life!
LD: Understandable.
EA: And the real story for this is, so English was the fourth language I learned to speak. And...
LD: And tell us all your languages then. Come on, show off.
EA: All right. Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi. Whatever. So when my Mum heard me speaking English with my friends around the age of ten, maybe eleven, she was absolutely incandescent with rage that I dared to have an accent that was in keeping with my local area. You know, I had an East London, Essex twang and my Mum could not believe it. She heard me speaking to my friends, she grabbed me by the earlobe, dragged me home, pulled out Wuthering Heights and said, “Right, now’s the time for you to learn about Heathcliff”.
[LAUGHTER]
EA: And I’m like “What is Heathcliff? Is it a new bit of discipline I’ve never heard of?” And she’s like “Heathcliff is the most amazing man in the entire world. You’re going to read Wuthering Heights and you’re going to become like Heathcliff. A gentleman”. I’m like “OK”. And, of course, as you read the book you kind of learn that he’s a bit flawed.
LD: He’s a bit of a dick.
EA: Just a bit flawed. Just a tad flawed. And so yeah, I immersed myself in this book and I absolutely love it. The sweeping plains of the moors and the detail. All of that. Loved it. And then whenI read it again later I remember going to my Mum and saying, “Mum, why would Heathcliff not have a Yorkshire accent? If you want me to speak, surely I should speak like Geoffrey Boycott”. And my Mum looked at me and said, “There is no way a gentleman can have a Yorkshire accent”.
[LAUGHTER]
EA: Oh Mum, you’re so racist!
[LAUGHTER]
EA: Sorry to any Yorkshire listeners, my Mum couldn’t take it, I’m sorry.
LD: Oh my God, you’d have been great with a Yorkshire accent.
EA: Can you imagine. [Affects Yorkshire accent] It’d be bloody great. I don’t know what that was, sorry.
LD: It was something, it was something. I enjoyed it. I mean Heathcliff was the original bad boy so I get where your Mum’s coming from but I wouldn’t want my son to be a Heathcliff for sure.
EA: I kind of think my Mum wouldn’t have had an issue. Genuinely! She liked the fact that he was dark and flawed but he was just so impressive and, but a lot of Victorian literature like particularly, yeah a lot of Victorian literature has this where the female protagonist has to fall in love in spite of the awful characteristics of the male leads.
LD: Yeah.
EA: And all the women have to just accept and just wait until the male lead kind of acquiesces and eventually sees them for who they are. And it’s a bit much, it’s not great for a modern feminist context at all, but yeah the characters were rich and like you said the original bad boys. But yeah so Wuthering Heights was very important to me and it made me sound the way I sound now.
LD: Mmm.
EA: Because I had to read it aloud to my Mum who said, “Read it as though you’re on radio”.
LD: Well now you are on the radio.
EA: On the regs. On the regs.
LD: See, your Mum knew what she was doing.
EA: Oh bloody hell.
LD: You should thank Wuthering Heights next time you’re on Newsjack.
EA: I will. This goes out to Heathcliff.
[LAUGHTER]
[MUSIC]
LD: Did you choose your next two books or are these mother choices too?
EA: One of them is a mother choice. God I sound like such a Victorian kid as well don’t I? Mother chooses everything for me.
LD: Perfect.
EA: OK I’ve read many other books. These are the books that had the biggest impact on me. One of them was chosen by my Mum, one of them by myself. Which one would you like me to talk about.
LD: A Thousand Splendid Suns because, I think I wanna read it from the description I had to research for you, I didn’t have time to read it before this but it sounds amazing.
EA: A Thousand Splendid Suns is a book that I chose.
LD: Yourself?
EA: Yeah myself. Like a big boy. Went to the shop without Mummy.
LD: Well done.
EA: So Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American author who wrote the absolutely amazing Kite Runner which has been adapted into a film and a theatre. And a play, the book hasn’t turned into a theatre, there isn’t a theatre called The Kite Runner. Anyway. So this was the follow up to the book and what’s different about this, and Khaled Hosseini says himself, is that it explores a mother/son relationship whereas The Kite Runner explores a father/son relationship. It was a book that had two female afghan leads and it is set in the time of the Taliban in Afghanistan and it is just brilliant and it is the book that moved me to tears on the tube. And Hosseini, by his own admission, says that this was a much harder book to write than the Kite Runner I think partly because he was right about the second album syndrome just because the kite runner was so good but also because he was trying to write about female leads when he had some sort of connection with the male leads in his first book. But he did an amazing job and I don’t want to say too much if your readers are going to read it, your listeners are going to read it, and you yourself. But you absolutely fall in love with the characters and you feel every emotion. And Khaled Hosseini, much like some of his Victorian predecessors is brilliant at painting a picture and you find yourself immersed in the world that they’re occupying. And so for this reason I chose A Thousand Splendid Suns because it was absolutely amazing.
LD: And your final book is, that must be, by process of elimination a mother choice.
EA: It is a mother choice. Now this, I was thirteen years old and on my birthday my Mum gifted me two books. One book was A Path to Power by Margaret Thatcher.
LD: Wow.
EA: Because my Mum was, she was a Thatcherite, okay guys fine, my Mum loved Margaret Thatcher.
LD: I feel like you’re really not proud of yourself in this.
EA: What’re you going to do, eh? My Mum was a staunch Thatcherite, my Dad a staunch Trade Union Labourite. OK?
LD: Perfect marriage.
EA: So I grew up in this household with these two hugely opposing views of the world and she gave me that book. And she also gave me the book that I chose for this which is a long walk to freedom by Nelson Mandela. And eagle eared listeners, or whatever the equivalent is, I’ve changed the phrase, bat eared listeners, bat’s have good hearing don’t they?
LD: Yeah they do, really good hearing.
EA: What is the phrase? Is there a phrase about ears?
LD: I mean you’ve really put me on the spot now and I cannot be certain.
EA: Sorry. Eagle eared listeners and bat eared listeners will know that Margaret Thatcher once referred to Nelson Mandela as a terrorist but that didn’t seem to affect my Mum too much who admired Nelson Mandela and suggested that I read this book about it. And yeah it was my first autobiography and he is a hugely impressive man and Nelson Mandela was, this particular book, helped me understand unsurprisingly a lot about race relations, not just about South Africa but across the world. In the UK, as someone who was of an Asian background whose own father was stabbed by the National Front twice, this was a book that really helped me understand the struggle.
LD: Yeah.
EA: And why it’s important. And why even today at the time of recording we still have situations as we do in America where an unarmed black man is kind of, asphyxiated to death with the knee of a police officer and so this had a huge impact on me from that perspective but also the stuff I learned about how one can achieve greatness even with humble beginnings. I remember this was the book where I learned that Nelson Mandela and his family would use cow dung to build houses and I remember this fact completely changing my view of the world.
LD: Yeah.
EA: And just thinking I had no idea, a) that you could do that but also the fact that ’m reading about a man who wrote this book that started like that, when I’ve had the privilege of having bricks and mortar around me.
LD: Yeah.
EA: And so my Mum, and my Dad for that matter, both, all three of us read the book actually and we’d sit down and we’d talk about it and my brother was born in the year that apartheid ended so Long Walk to Freedom was hugely significant for me for those reasons.
LD: Yeah. So I haven’t read all of it. I went to South Africa and I went to the Apartheid Museum and they had extracts of it and I remember just, I realised he was on Robbin’s Island for so long. With no definitive idea of when he was coming out and the thing I found the most affecting was he wrote about how he treated the guards, how he spoke to them.
EA: Yeah.
LD: How he made them see he was human by treating them as human.
EA: Well.
LD: The most incredible explanation of…
EA: Well I read a follow up to this. A book called Goodbye Bafana. And Goodbye Bafana was written by one of his guards. A guy called James Gregory who just detailed that, the subtitle of this book is, so the title is Goodbye Buafana, the subtitle is My Prisoner, My Friend. And he also detailed that Nelson Mandela, yes he treated James with such great respect that James and him ended up becoming friends on this island whilst James was a gatekeeper in a sense of the very system that imprisoned him. And yeah Nelson Mandela just conducted himself with such grace. He was, of course all of our great heroes are flawed in some way, people would look at Nelson Mandela’s relationships with his wives and his children and say he was not great.
LD: He was a womaniser?
EA: But this pursuit of perfection I think is fraught with danger but at his core Nelson Mandela was an amazing man and Long Walk to Freedom was an absolutely amazing book to capture and I’m really glad that he wrote it.
LD: Have you ever thought about writing a book?
EA: I am working on a novel.
LD: Ooh.
EA: Which is based on my Mum’s life actually.
LD: Aw.
EA: Which I started a few years before she passed away because my Mum’s story, like I’ve said, particularly if you are someone, well anybody actually who’s listening, use this opportunity to speak to your parents and your grandparents about their stories. Because you will unearth stuff that you just, you sometimes bemoan, I sometimes bemoan being someone who grew up at this time because I don’t think I’ve got interesting stories to tell my kids and my grandkids.
LD: Yet. Yet.
EA: Yet. The other day I tweeted to say that I made myself some poached eggs and avocado on toast and I’m looking forward to telling my grandkids about my part in fighting this pandemic.
[LAUGHTER]
EA: Yeah, so I’ve been working on a novel which, there are discussions underway. So it’s a sweeping tale of love, loss and searching for your child.
LD: In the Victorian style I assume?
EA: In a Victorian style yes. There’ll be a lot of detail. So yeah hopefully that’s something I can pull off before I die.
LD: And I wanted to say that you’ve got, I know you didn’t mention this when you said that you’d been hanging around doing stuff but aren’t you putting one of your big shows on the YouTube?
EA: I am so my 20, gosh, 2018 show Prophet Like it’s Hot.
LD: Very good show. Enjoyed it.
EA: Thank you. Yes I’m releasing that on YouTube. I haven’t decided on the date yet but it will be in June at some point. So keep an eye on my socials as I make announcements about that.
LD: I shall.
EA: But yeah I’m looking forward to getting that released.
LD: So Eshaan, while everyone is on lockdown and some of the independent stores are struggling a bit, we thought we’d do some nice shout outs for ones that are opening and trying to encourage some more purchases being made. Do you have one that you’d recommend?
EA: Yes, look for the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town.
LD: Owl?
EA: O-W-L. Owl.
LD: Oh I’ve driven past that one. It’s massive.
EA: It’s really big and uh, nice little green facade which I like. I don’t know why. That’s what drew me in, it was in the green facade and the gold writing. I was like, that looks good.
LD: You don’t need a reason, it’s absolutely fine.
EA: But yeah beautiful, it’s really big, it’s got a good range. And yeah it’s very nice. So that’s the one I’d recommend.
LD: Well Eshaan, thank you so much for coming and talking about books with us today. It has been a delight.
EA: Thank you for having me Lucy.
LD: Thank you for listening to today’s episode of Comics’ Books. I hope you enjoyed it. In the show notes you’ll be able to find full listings of all the books we mentioned as well as links to our featured independent bookshop. Have a great week reading, laughing and then reading some more.