Comics’ Books - S02, E02 - Transcript
GUEST: VIV GROSKOP
HOST: LUCY DANSER
LUCY DANSER: Hello and welcome to Season 2 of Comics Books, the podcast where your host Lucy Danser, that’s me, talks to my favourite comedians and comic writers about the books they love.
[MUSIC]
LD: Today I am delighted to be speaking to the writer, broadcaster and comedian Viv Groskop. You might have watched her on stage, seen her on Women’s Hour, heard her podcast How To Own the Room or read one of her books about literature. She’s such an incredibly multi talented woman that amazingly that description doesn't even scratch the surface and I could go on for days just introducing her but instead let’s just talk to Viv. Hello Viv!
VIV GROSKOP: Hello! Thank you for that lovely introduction. I do indeed probably do too many things.
LD: I think you have the perfect career honestly. I’m so...
VG: Never say that to anybody. What things look like from the outside is never the same as how they are on the inside. But thank you.
[LAUGHS]
LD: So I was particularly excited about having you on the podcast because obviously although I’m speaking to comedians, my big love are books and reading and from what I know about you, you are also a pretty obsessive reader or have always been?
VG: Yeah. I mean I find it difficult to imagine anybody who doesn't have reading at the centre of their life if that doesn’t sound really pretentious. I guess I’ve always wanted to read books. My Mum used to say when I was really little that I used to get really angry when I was about two or three because I couldn’t read. I always felt that, I mean I’m not saying, I then didn’t read until I was five or six. It wasn’t like then I taught myself to read within two weeks. But I always felt like, it’s interesting in the age of the internet because things are perhaps a bit different now, but growing up in the seventies and the eighties, I always felt like everything that you needed to know was in books.
LD: Yes.
VG: And you’re not going to find out about it from people because they’re not going to tell you a lot of the juicy stuff. So all the stuff you really need to know about how life really works it’s all in books. Like, a lot of it is in fiction. You know, we rehearse ideas about life and things that we wouldn’t be prepared to say in non-fiction or in real life, we rehearse them in fiction. Yeah so I, I felt that from a really young age and I’ve always found that books are hugely comforting. They can just take you to places that you can't otherwise go to and I think that’s true even now. You know, when I was a child I didn’t travel much, my horizons were pretty small. I grew up in a small town in Somerset, I didn’t even imagine that I would go and live in London. That was, I was a bit like Dick Whittington, like the big city and it’s paved with gold! But even now that we can travel so much, pandemic notwithstanding, and that we can find out anything we want at the ouch of a button on the internet I still think that books, however you read them, whether it’s a physical book or a digital book, books still can transport us in a way that another medium can’t.
LD: I agree. Do you have any preference between digital and physical books?
VG: Yeah I used to be very anti-digital. I used to, in my kind of early journalism career I did an awful lot of book reviewing. It’s kind of how I got into journalism in a way. I can remember one of my first commissions when I worked on a newspaper was to write a book review. And I always felt like reading on digital was a bit of a cheat and that you needed to see the physical book and know what readers would be getting if they bought it.
LD: Yeah.
VG: So I was very anti for quite a long time even though when you’re reviewing a lot of books, to have digital access can actually kind of speed up that process and make it easier. But I, over time, have become more converted. So I use both now, especially because in the last three, four years I’ve judged a lot of literary prizes back to back. The most recent one being the Women’s Prize where you have to read 150 books in the year. And you learn really whatever works. So whatever works for you as a reader. If it helps you to read as much as you want to by reading some of it on an iPad or even, I have my kindle app on my phone and I read a lot of non fiction on there, or shorter books. But then other books I absolutely have to have the hard copy and I have to have it in my hands and there are so many beautiful collectible hard copies now. So I’m just a whore now Lucy, I just mix everything up.
LD: It’s alright. I chose to have a floor to ceiling bookshelf rather than a wardrobe in our flat. So my husband and I have all our clothes in a small hole under the stairs.
VG: Wow I was gonna say you’re naked but you’re reading a lot of books. That’s a special type of relationship.
LD: Yeah. I feel, you know, you don’t need clothes if you’ve got books.
VG: I like that.
LD: I read a little thing you wrote about judging and about having to get through that dearth of books. Has it affected your enjoyment of reading do you think?
VG: Yeah, it’s a very good question because it does become a very kind of focused, outcome centered way of reading. You know you have a sense of responsibility and depending on the prize that you’re reading for, because I’ve probably judged about ten prizes now, some of them are non-fiction, some of them are fiction, some of them were a mix. Like, I judged the Wellcome Prize and that’s a mix of fiction and non-fiction with themes of science and medicine. It’s a fascinating prize to read for.
LD: Their shortlists are always incredible.
VG: Yeah but you learn how to read really fast. And you learn to read whilst always bearing your own biases in mind of course you are always going to have them and often when you’re on a judging panel you may well have been chosen to represent your particular kind of biases so it’s okay to have them. But you also learn to read with other people in mind. So you’re less likely to just chuck something away because you just think ‘Oh I would never read this, this isn't me’. You learn to be more generous and think ‘Well who would enjoy this book? Let me try and see it through their eyes’. After a while though and especially ‘cos you know I absolutely love the Women’s Prize, it’s very dear to my heart and I think it’s an incredibly important prize. But this year because of the pandemic it was extended by an extra six months so as soon as the Women’s Prize was announced I took great pleasure in reading not exactly trash but sort of guilty pleasures that I hadn’t previously allowed myself to dig into.
LD: There’s nothing wrong with that kind of book. I love that you can switch between the more kind of hefty tomes and the ones that are light and silly and make you feel just, kind of cuddled up with silly words.
VG: Yeah, I’m a great believer in reading what you want to read and not caring what anyone else thinks of it. So I use the terms trash and guilty pleasure very lightly and facetiously really because I don’t feel guilty for anything that I read. And I think at different times in our lives, we need different things.
[MUSIC]
LD: So we’ve talked about reading, let’s talk about the books that you’ve chosen. What made those books significant, what makes a book significant to you or important or memorable?
VG: For me it’s either a book that I will repeatedly re-read and return to at different times in my life or it’s a book that was seminal for me at a particular time that I won’t necessarily ever read it ever again. It’s almost like a key, a book. A special book. So it’s a key that unlocks something in you that makes you see the world differently to how you saw it before or makes you think, ‘Ah it’s very simple, aha I am not alone, I am not alone! In this big old world!’
LD: Well your first book I had never heard of but when I mentioned it to my Mum she became positively giddy.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: And that was Kit Williams’ Masquerade.
VG: Yes, I really recommend people have a google of Kit Williams’ Masquerade, notice I’m not really telling you to buy it. I don’t even know if it’s still in print. Kit Williams’ Masquerade came out in the late seventies or early eighties and it was this extraordinary children's picture book. Nominally about a hare, as in H-A-R-E, it was definitely a hare and not a rabbit ‘cos I remember learning for the first time the distinction between those two things. And it was part of a very clever and surprisingly never to be repeated media campaign centered around this piece of treasure. Like a jewelled hare that had been created. And the idea behind the book was that if you unlocked all of the keys in the book. I mean mental keys like all of the clues then you would know where this piece of treasure was hidden. And it was hidden and buried somewhere. And I must have been given it when I was about six or seven and it wasn’t just the book, it was the idea that lots of people everywhere were reading the same book at the same time and we were all trying to figure out this puzzle and it was this magical idea of somewhere this treasure is buried and someone’s going to get to it. And I’m pretty sure that I was following this story to see if anybody had found it. And it was on the telly as well. I mean it was on the national news this book like nearly every night. The hunt for the jewelled hare continues! This is what life was like in the eighties right, before we got the internet? And I just remember being so taken with this and desperately, I suppose it’s metaphorical in a way that whenever you read a book you’re desperately trying to unpick all the clues that the author is setting for you, of this is what I want you to about the world and you’re trying to pick up on all those clues, and in this particular case it was literal. You know, if you got all the clues right you would go and find the treasure and I think I imagined that you would kind of like win the lottery. There’s some, I purposefully didn’t look up before talking to you the story of what happened in the end because I know it’s really depressing.
LD: Oh yeah, I’ve read that.
VG: And I read that and thought ‘Oh I didn’t wanna know that’ but it’s something like nobody found the treasure or it wasn’t real. I think it all turned out to be something of a hoax.
LD: No it was real.
VG: It was real was it?
LD: Yeah he made this very lovely treasure that he made himself and put in a box so that metal detectors couldn’t find it but I think, do you want me to say what happened?
VG: Yeah yeah go on reveal it.
LD: So what Wikipedia told me and I’m not saying this is right, is that first of all someone called in because, even though it was in the UK they sold so many copies worldwide that they said if someone could send him a postcard with the exact location on they would win it and he would dig it up for them basically.
VG: Aah.
LD: So someone sent it in and said that they’d found it and it turned out that this guy's friend’s girlfriend was Kit Williams’ ex-girlfriend and she’d found out vaguely where it was and told them, so that they would then sell it and give the money, apparently to a charity. So they were the ones who won it even though they shouldn’t have. But then just after them, two physics teachers actually solved it.
VG: Aw little physics teachers. You can always rely on the physics teachers.
LD: But I don’t think they got the hare. I think the hoaxer got the hare.
VG: Well that was a cheat really wasn’t it?
LD: Yeah.
VG: So yeah anyway let’s forget all of that and imagine that I discovered the hare.
LD: Congratulations.
[LAUGHTER]
VG: But it was, yeah the experience of reading that book and knowing that others were reading it and it being part of something bigger than me. I think that’s what really did it for me.
LD: So incredible, so incredible. And then straight after that you chose Little Women.
VG: Yeah Little Women which I really enjoyed rediscovering in the last year through watching the film. The new film which I think is wonderful. Little Women I must have read when I was about nine, ten, eleven. And I became obsessed with acquiring all of the sequels. I think there’s about two or three sequels. I know I had Jo’s Boys and my parents had such trouble acquiring these books for me, I can remember it being quite a big deal. But yeah Little Women I loved because I have a sister and, I don’t have more than one sibling, I just have my sister Trudy, and I loved the idea of these sisters living together and how sweet their Mum was with them. And just the closeness of that relationship that they had where they all really love each other but they also hate each other as well and I think that was maybe the first time that I read a book and realised that really truthful portrayal of human life is painful and it tells you what people really think about each other. It’s not just ‘Oh let’s go and look for this treasure and everyone thinks everyone’s great’. You know there’s a lot of cruelty. You know women are very cruel to each other often, sisters are very cruel to each other. My sister will tell you that for sure. I bit her on the nose when she was about four, I was so horrible to her.
[LAUGHTER]
VG: So you know it’s the sort of book that isn’t afraid to show you that. I love that moment when, is it Amy, says to Jo I think, she says, “Oh you’ve cut off your hair and that was your one true beauty”. You know this sort of subtle bitchery that goes on! I just thought that was wonderful. And although if you watch the Greta Gerwig film, am I saying her name correctly, apologies if I’m not, you’ll see she really brings out that strand of Jo wanting to be a writer and the feminism behind that and her not wanting to have to compromise and get married and become someone’s wife. I won’t pretend for a second that I saw that subtext when I was like ten or eleven but I definitely felt a little seed of it and it definitely sowed something in me of thinking ‘yeah why shouldn’t Jo do what the hell she wants with her life? Why is it a big deal, why does she need to be somebody’s wife, why does she have to be pretty and have long hair?’ And it was the first places that I was reading about these ideas, and I definitely didn't formulate this in my head and I didn’t really know what to do with those thoughts and what it meant, but it definitely planted a seed and it was definitely one of the first places I went to as a reader where it portrayed somebody who wanted to be a writer. And I knew at that point that I thought I wanted to be a writer as well. So that’s what I was saying before about how, you know, we go to books for clues about how to live and we look for especially if we don't have any examples in our immediate life on this and certainly pre-internet this is true because now you could just look up ‘how do I become a writer’ or ‘how do I get an agent’. You couldn't do that when I was a child so you’re always reading things to try and figure out how does anyone do anything? And that book showed me.
LD: At the time things that stood out to me I think were Jo, because again I wanted to write, but also Beth. I think for me, it was a book where I felt the frailty of human life and that these terrible things could happen.
VG: Yeah I think I was always quite irritated by Beth and I just thought-
[LUCY GASPS]
VG: Sorry this is really heartless, this is the real me now. ‘Gosh why can’t she just get better, what’s wrong with her?’
[LAUGHTER]
VG: Which is really awful.
LD: She does seem pathetic for a lot of it and I remembers seeing a play adaptation when I was much younger where Beth was sort of just this ghostly girl wafting around in the background while everyone was busy getting things done and you thought, ‘Oh there’s a lot going on there, maybe you could stop whining’.
VG: Yeah Beth is a really interesting character because she’s a bit of a, I don't know, other fans of Beth may totally disagree with this but I think this. I think she is the least fully formed character and she only really exists in order to make the others look more vibrant. To make their choices look more dramatic and to make their losses and their gains stand out more. That’s what Beth is, a sort of literary device really.
LD: Yeah.
VG: And also to point out that the life that the March girls were living was a life of privilege, and it was a life of choice in a world where many womEn and many people in less fortunate circumstances would not have had any choice. And Beth kind of exists to remind you of that. These are very privileged people living very privileged lives and it’s difficult even for them.
[MUSIC]
LD: I don’t know anything about your next book and I’m going to show my terrible French accent but it’s Bonjour Tristesse?
VG: Bonjour Tristesse by Francois Sagan. Yeah, I chose this because I think it’s a book that more people need to know about and people would really really enjoy. It’s a very short novella. It’s only about 70 pages long. It, I think, please do correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m pretty sure it came out in 1958/1959 in translation. It was written in 1957 when Francois Sagan, the writer, it is fifties and not sixties isn’t it?
LD: It was fifties but I believe some of it was cut out of the original printing.
VG: Oh okay, okay. So late 1950’s and the writer Francois Sagan is seventeen. She wrote this book when she was seventeen. And it became a huge huge phenomenon. I mean sort of similar era really as Nabokov Lolita and this was, I think it probably outsold Lolita actually.
LD: Wow.
VG: So Bonjour Tristesse which means hello sadness and the title is taken from a Paul Éluard poem called À Peine Défigurée for French fans. And it’s the story of a 17 years old girl called Cecile who goes to the South of France for the summer with her Father. And she has lost her mother, her mother’s died a long time ago, and she has a complicated relationship with her Father where he kind of treats her more like an adult than his own child. And they’re quite separated in their lives. And in this holiday she’s trying to treat her a bit more like a daughter because he has on the agenda to bring a potential mother figure into her life because he’s potentially going to get married. And there’s sort of two candidates that are proposed for this. One is a younger woman who is almost, she's only about ten years older than Cecile and the other one is a much older woman who was an old friend of her mothers. So it’s partly about her relationship with her father and these potential step mothers and it’s partly a coming of age novel about her relationship with this boy that she meets and they’re always trying to get away from the adults and have sex with each other on the beach. And it’s, Francois Sagan is a very kind of rebellious and interesting thinker and even when she’s seventeen she portrays this world in a very kind of mature way where she really shows what it’s like to be that age and not really know what you’re doing but want to do it anyway. And it’s also incredibly atmospheric. It’s one of the best summer novels ever written. You can just sort of smell the Ombre Solaire and cold rose emanating from the pages and it has, I won't spoiler it for people because it’s too short and I would just really like people to read it but it has one of the most brutal endings of anything that you’ll ever read that then raises tons of other questions. And it went out to become a huge phenomenon. You know Francois Sagan had a long career and she wrote about another fifty or sixty books but none of them had the impact of this book.
LD: When did you first read it?
VG: I first read it probably when I was about seventeen or eighteen. And I was obsessed with learning French, this is before I started learning Russian, I started learning Rusian when I was eighteen. But I started French from the age of eleven and I was obsessed with France and speaking really good French. And reading in the original where I could. I used to go to France every Easter and every Summer to go visit my french pen friend from my school exchange and it was my total obsession. And part of it was to do with wanting to get away from my family and from the small town that I grew up in and I saw France and Frenchness as being this very glamorous thing and my book Au Revoir Tristesse which obviously is the counterpart to Bonjour Tristesse, Au Revoir Tristesse. Her’s is Hello Sadness, mine is Goodbye Sadness! And that book really delves into our lives as readers and how we use books to escape and to try on different versions of ourselves and in particular it looks into Frenchness and why we think that’s glamorous and exciting and sexy. I mean often French people are really not glamorous or sexy or exciting. Some of them are awful. I had sort of some close encounters with French boyfriends and they don’t smell good some of them! It was not the sexy experience I was expecting. So that book is really asking, using Bonjour Tristesse as a launchpad, it’s asking you know why do we put all this stuff on the French and does it hold up to scrutiny.
LD: That’s exactly what I was going to ask. How the book that you have coming, it’s out now in the paperback isn’t it?
VG: Yeah Au Revoir Tristesse came out in June 2020, so during the pandemic and it’s been really interesting to have the book out now because I was really worried. I was just thinking, well no one’s going to buy it, bookshops are closed, I’ve had all my events cancelled, it’s being published simultaneously in the US and the UK. Can’t we just put it off for a year which, I don’t know, probably wouldn’t make any difference anyway! But in the end it’s ended up having a really great reception and it’s done really well. I think because people love digging into the idea of comfort reading, rediscovering classics. It’s a way of travelling in your mind. When you can’t go to France. And it’s a way of all of us remembering that we do love other cultures, we do love to travel, we do love talking other languages. We just maybe can’t do that right now. And the book gives you the ability to do that without having to go anywhere and quarantine.
LD: Wow. Well I’m very excited to read both of those actually. I’ve read your other book the Anna Karenina effect?
VG: Oh the Anna Karenina Fix. Life lessons from Russian Literature.
LD: Been a while since I read it! But I really like it when you do that, when you’re a reader talking about reading. I think that’s ultimately what I’m doing here. And I think you have to, not everyone likes doing that you know. Some people just like to read and they’ve read it and they’d like to move on and you’ve got the kind of people that like book groups and I suppose we’re those kind of people who just want to talk about what we’ve just read.
VG: Yeah I’m definitely fascinated by the whole process of reading and examining what it is that makes you want to read stuff. Because I've never, I mean I know a lot of people this year during the pandemic have said ‘Oh I haven't really been able to read’ or ‘I could only read poetry’ or ‘I had to start using audiobooks’. Or having that as a huge discovery, ‘Oh wow audiobooks are incredible’. But I’ve never had a time when I didn't want to read and I couldn’t find some sort of comfort from books. So I’m always really interested in other people who feel the same way and why is that. And I’m always on the hunt for, it’s funny because it’s a bit like diets, you know they say, oh self help books as well. They say if diets and self help books worked you’d only ever need one and there are millions of them. But all books are like that, it’s like if books were so great at telling us the answer to life and telling us what to do we would just read one and get on and do it. But we don’t, we read something and we’re like, ‘Oh yeah that's amazing’. Now I’m going to go back to 0 again and start again. And we’re always looking for the next fix.
LD: So your final book, I feel like, has answered the question of what did you vote for in the Womens’ Prize this year. If that’s how it works? If you vote. How do you judge, do you just choose your favourite?
VG: Ah well I’ve, yes, how do I answer that question? I’ve chosen for my final book Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Which is the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize. Which is the 25th anniversary of the Women’s Prize. And I’ve chosen this book because I really realy love it and I want as many people as possible to read it. I’ll say the title again because it is a bit confusing. It’s Hamnet as in H-A-M-N-E-T and I know that that sounds like Hamlet as in the Shakespeare play and this is important because this is what the book is about. So the book is about Shakespeare’s real life son who was called Hamnet. And in Elizabethan times I think the terms Hamnet and Hamlet were sort of interchangeable and so this is, but his real name was Hamnet and when Shakespeare wrote the play Hamlet it is really about him grieving that child. Because he died in adolescence. So this re-imagining of Hamnet’s life and the life of Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, as in spelt Agnes but pronounced An-yez, it imagines their family life and what it must have been like for them as parents to lose a child and what it was like as a woman, as a mother, living in that society trying to look after this child, trying to have your own life and being connected to Shakespeare who was generally just buggering off and doing his own thing and being quite annoying, whilst being brilliant at the same time but nevertheless very annoying. So it’s got some wonderful different strands in it, this book. I mean grief is a huge theme in it, marriage is a huge theme, the emancipation of women and what women’s interior lives were like when their lives were very reduced and they weren’t able to play the societal roles that perhaps they would have wanted to. Those were huge themes in it. But there's also lots of slightly supernatural themes and the idea that there’s a realm slightly beyond us that we might not quite understand. Agnes is, I don’t want to use the word sorcerer because that’s taking it too far. She’s a herbalist and she’s a healer so she really understands the natural world. She’s always growing herbs and taking long walks in the woods and communing with nature. So there’s a wonderful strand in it of celebrating the natural world and she’s making I think, Maggie O’Farrell, a really important point in this book that we think that in order to be free and have an independent life and to have a role in society we have to achieve things and go after things and become the CEO of a company or something like this and have big shoulder pads. But in this book she’s really saying you know what is a quiet power? What is the sort of power where everyone in the village would come to you because you know the right herb that will treat this illness? What is the power of empathy and kindness and of having an impact in a very small world? And it has had such an incredible response from readers this book, people absolutely love it, they’re broken by it, they read it in tears. It’s an incredibly affecting book and yeah if you have a chance to check it out and anything I’ve said makes you think, ‘Oh that sounds quite good.’ Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell.
LD: I really hope it will get people to read more Maggie O’Farrell as well if they enjoyed it because I think, well she’s not an underrated writer, obviously she’s a huge success story as a writer, but I don’t often meet people who read a lot of stuff and I wonder if that will change now.
VG: Yeah Maggie O’Farrell is an extraordinary writer and one of the things this book really shows is her versatility. This is her first really historical novel in the sort of tradition of historical fiction. I mean she has got books that are set maybe 100 years ago but this is perhaps the most classic historical fiction that she’s written and I feel like the next thing that she’ll write will be something totally different. I love the vanishing of Esme Lennox, that’s one of my favourites of hers. But she’s a very brilliant interpreter of human feelings. She really understands psychology and the psychology of families and of dysfunction.
LD: Yeah.
VG: And she is, I have read a lot of interviews with her where she talks about her writing technique and she’s very very obsessive and detailed. I just read an interview the other day where she said she wrote seventeen drafts of her first novel. She’s a real grafter. Not a moment wasted on social media Lucy.
LD: I’m gonna have to really step up my game I think!
[LAUGHTER]
LD: Before we tie this up, you chose an independent bookstore to give a shout out to and you’re the first person to have chosen this one.
VG: Very good. Everybody needs to know about this place. Mr B’s Emporium in Bath in Somerset where I come from. This is an absolutely beautiful, real life bookstore. They also have a beautiful online presence. They do lots of social media, they have a fabulous website and they’ve got a YouTube channel and they’re run by this guy Mr B, he is a real person and it’s a family run business, it’s very small and intimate and they care so much in this bookshop. It’s a tiny little sort of, it’s in a back street in Bath. It’s the sort of place where you could just go there and six hours later you’ll come out and you feel like you’ve been in there for five minutes and they have a lot of really great ideas about how to get a community interested in reading. They have loads of amazing events that happen in store but they also have loads of events that reach out to the outside world and I think this is so important for indie bookstores for them to survive in the coming years. Because it’s incredibly difficult to run an independent bookstore and to make a profit from it. It’s virtually impossible. These people are total heroes who do this and try to create these hubs at the heart of our communities. But one of the things that they do, and you can look this up online, they offer a bibliotherapy service which is a book clinic .So you can buy it for yourself or you can buy it for someone else. And you can do it in real life or you can do it on Zoom or on the phone or by email. You get in touch with them and you have a consultation with them, with one of their booksellers who are, you know they’re all basically like librarians, everyone who works in this store and they talk to you about all of your reading preferences. What you love, what you hate, what’s your favourite book, what’s the last thing you read. What kind of things are you interested in in your life. They talk to you a bit like a therapist or a job interview would and at the end they give you a prescription of, these are books, these are say six or ten books, I can't remember how many it is, that you’ll really love. And I know lots of people who have done this and they’ve just been blown away by the suggestions. It’s you know when a friend recommends a book and you read it and you’re like ‘I can’t believe how this is just so perfectly aligned to me. This is like it was written for me, how did you know?’ They manage to do that. And they have a service where you can buy this for other people and you can also buy a subscription so that these books arrive every month, so all the time you’re getting these new suggestions that are tailored especially for you as a reader and it’s that level of personal attention and really really engaging with the idea that reading is so intimate and subjective. And I think we lose sight of that sometimes now because of the impact of bestsellers and books that become a phenomenon and everyone’s talking about this one book and it’s just so refreshing to have a bookstore like Mr B’s emporium in Bath who are willing to engage with every single reader on an individual basis and say, “Ah well if you loved Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments the you’ve got to read Naomi Alderman’s The Power.” They just know, they know.
LD: Such a great idea.
VG: It’s a brilliant idea.
LD: So good. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today Viv.
VG: Thank you!
LD: Thank you I hope you have a lovely rest of the day. I suppose, yes it’s only 3:30, have a lovely rest of the day. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Comics’ Books, Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Comics’ Books. Hopefully you’ve had a chuckle, learned something new and, most importantly, added some new reads to your list. You can find full listings of all the books we talked about today in the show notes. If you enjoyed the podcast it’d help us out massively if you could leave us a review on your listening platform. Finally, you can follow us on twitter, facebook and instagram at ComicsBooksPod.
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