Secret Life of Books

Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole
  • 4.9 (64)
  • ARTS
  • UPDATED WEEKLY
Secret Life of Books

Every book has two stories: the one it tells, and the one it hides.The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking, occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, an English professor at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC. Every week these virtuoso critics and close friends take an iconic book and reveal the hidden story behind the story: who made it, their clandestine motives, the undeclared stakes, the scandalous backstory and above all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew.-- 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: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLinkinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. Self-Help, dodgy marriages and the siren call of Australia: David Copperfield Part 2

    2 DAYS AGO

    Self-Help, dodgy marriages and the siren call of Australia: David Copperfield Part 2

    In Part 2 of David Copperfield, we pick up David where we left him, sobbing at the door of Betsey Trotwood’s house in Dover. From this low, David’s life changes - he is no longer a victim, but embarks on a (very long) journey towards self-reliance, re-encountering old friends like Micawbers and Steerforth, but also new characters like Uriah Heep and the simpering Dora.  To make sense of this long, rambling journey of redemption, Sophie and Jonty reveal the influence of the emerging self-help movement on Dickens’ world-view and how his side-hustle as the director of a Home for Homeless Women inspired him to send many of the characters in David Copperfield off to Australia at the end of the book - and the inevitable happy ending this suggests.  BOOKS MENTIONED OR USED AS SOURCES:  Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) by Claire Tomalin  Self-Reliance (1841) by Ralph Waldo Emerson  Self-Help (1859) by Samuel Smiles  1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (1944) by Lewis Namier  Demon Copperhead (2022) by Barbara Kingsolver Rivals (1988) by Jilly Cooper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    54 min
  2. ‘Umble beginnings, childhood neglect, and did Dickens steal from Charlotte Bronte: David Copperfield

    5 DAYS AGO

    ‘Umble beginnings, childhood neglect, and did Dickens steal from Charlotte Bronte: David Copperfield

    David Copperfield is the name of an American illusionist, whose feats included levitating over the Grand Canyon, walking through the Great Wall of China and making an airplane disappear. It’s also the name of novel by Charles Dickens.  Published in serial form between 1849 and 1850, David Copperfield charts the degradation and eventual success of its narrator - a figure based closely on the author himself. So much so that Dickens later referred to the book as a ‘favourite child’, which considering his self-proclaimed habit of ‘slaughtering’ his child characters is fortunate for Copperfield.  David Copperfield is very much A Tale of Two Stories - a literary pun which Jonty is very pleased with. The first story is that of David’s neglect as a child, the second of his adult life as he aspires to a state of self-reliance.  In this episode, Sophie and Jonty look at the mid-life crisis that precipitated the writing of Copperfield as Dickens suffered a minor breakdown, excavated memories from his unhappy childhood and distributed increasingly silly names to his many children.  We discover the literary innovations that resulted from Dickens choosing to adopt first person narrative for his child star, how he ripped off Charlotte Bronte without acknowledging it, and the vast cast of unforgettable characters like the Micawbers, Betsey Trotwood, and Uriah Heep that carry his story along.  Finally, we leave listeners on a cliff-hanger as poor David, homeless and destitute, walks from London to Dover and flings himself at the mercy of his long-lost aunt. What will happen to David? Will he rise to success and levitate across the Grand Canyon? Listen to part 2 to find out.  -- 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/shorts insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/ bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Producer: Boyd Britton Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo Designer: Peita Jackson Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Content warning: moderate swearing and sexual content BOOKS MENTIONED OR USED AS SOURCES:  Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) by Claire Tomalin  Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne Tom Jones by Henry Fielding Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1h 2m
  3. BONUS: SLoB's Secret Crushes and Clandestine Encounters pt 2

    21 FEB

    BONUS: SLoB's Secret Crushes and Clandestine Encounters pt 2

    In part 2 of SLoB's Valentine's special, more heroes and heroines from the world of classic books get the brutal Tinder treatment as Sophie and Jonty assess the romantic moves of your literary faves. They are in full agreement concerning the lead characters of Sense & Sensibility and Go Tell It On The Mountain, but the conversation turns fractious as they lock horns over whether Frankenstein or his monster is the greatest lover in Mary Shelley's famous novel. Fortunately, Dracula - that great peacemaker - is on hand to elicit full agreement that he, the Prince of Darkness, is the ideal date. -- 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/shorts insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/ bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Producer: Boyd Britton Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo Designer: Peita Jackson Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Content warning: moderate swearing and sexual content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    44 min
  4. Free love in Paris, male wrestling and murder: Giovanni's Room

    18 FEB

    Free love in Paris, male wrestling and murder: Giovanni's Room

    It's Black History Month and Sophie and Jonty are bringing their analytical chops once again to the giant of 20th-century literature, James Baldwin.  In his debut novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, Baldwin had captured the experience of growing up in 1930s Harlem. In his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, he focused instead on his experiences as a gay man, living in Paris. But, unlike Baldwin, the narrator of this novel is white.  The hero David is torn between two desires - his burgeoning love for an Italian barman called Giovanni, and the imperative to marry his girlfriend Hella. He struggles to choose, but the casualty is Giovanni rather than David. Baldwin wrote Giovanni’s Room while wrestling with his own homosexuality - and his fears about the life of loneliness it condemned him too - and developing new theories about white and black experience in America. Sophie and Jonty talk about the unique experiences behind the writing of this novel, the powerful expression of homosexual desire, and why Paris isn’t all it’s meant to be.  Content warning: mild sexual content  -- 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/shorts insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/ bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Producer: Boyd Britton Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo Designer: Peita Jackson Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Further Reading Notes On A Native Son (1956) by James Baldwin  James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Books, 2019) by Bill V Mullen The Ambassadors by Henry James (1903) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1h 20m
  5. BONUS: SLoB's Secret Crushes and Clandestine Encounters pt 1

    14 FEB

    BONUS: SLoB's Secret Crushes and Clandestine Encounters pt 1

    It's Valentine's Day and love is quite literally in the air as the Secret Life of Books beams, via a complex network of satellites and data banks, to your ears. In this Bonus Episode, Sophie and Jonty reflect on what they've learnt about love from the classics, and rank the leading men and ladies of the books covered so far as lovers. St Valentine first appears in English literature in Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and weaves his way via Jane Austen and Charles Dickens through to the present day. In this first part of 2, Sophie and Jonty revisit Picnic at Hanging Rock, which begins with a Valentine's Day picnic gone wrong, and spend far too much time talking about Jane Eyre's Rochester, who somehow - despite driving one woman mad, giving another false teeth as a gift, and getting himself up in drag to woo Jane - is one of literature's great sex symbols. Gullver - of 'Travels' fame - gets a look in, as do Lockwood, Cathy, Hareton and the rest of the kids from Wuthering Heights. Part 2 of this conversation is available on Patreon and will join the main feed on Friday February 21, 2025. Content warning: moderate sexual content and bad language. -- 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/shorts insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/ bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Producer: Boyd Britton Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo Designer: Peita Jackson Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    49 min
  6. Shakespeare does 'Succession': Rory Stewart on King Lear

    11 FEB

    Shakespeare does 'Succession': Rory Stewart on King Lear

    “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”  King Lear is the Mount Everest of Theatre - a sprawling masterpiece of political turmoil, personal betrayal, horrifying gore and great poetry. It makes ‘Succession’ look like The Midsomer Murders. Lear is the pagan king who decides to divides his kingdom between two daughters (and banishing a third), only to find himself outcast, succumbing to madness, adrift in a world collapsing into civil war. Who better to tackle this cautionary tale of domestic and political crisis than Rory Stewart, host of The Rest is Politics, who has watched the downfall of several rulers, in one way or another.  For Rory, King Lear is ‘THE’ play. He fell in love with it at school and becomes only more seduced by Lear, as a character, the older he gets.  While Sophie and Jonty, in predictable style, try to tie the play to the Reformation and Shakespeare’s personal life respectively, Rory shames them by making the case that some works of art can’t be explained purely by the world around them; that something magic, and beyond Shakespeare’s own control, took place when he booted up his Quill 2.0 and started writing.  Rory also admits that, during his political career, he sometimes felt like Goneril to Boris Johnson’s King Lear; and rather yearns to be Lear himself, raging and shouting in the rain.  Content warning: the f-word is used thrice. -- 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/shorts insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/ bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Producer: Boyd Britton Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo Designer: Peita Jackson Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    59 min
  7. Wizards, Hobbits and WWII: Dominic Sandbrook on The Lord of the Rings

    4 FEB

    Wizards, Hobbits and WWII: Dominic Sandbrook on The Lord of the Rings

    One ring to rule them all One ring to… Yes, SLoB finally turns its Sauron-like eye on what is thought to be the second best-selling novel of all time (after Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities): Lord of the Rings. And who better to share this experience than Dominic Sandbrook, historian of the 20th Century, co-host of the Rest is History podcast, and Tolkien devotee.  In this Fellowship of Literary Analysis, Dominic, Sophie and Jonty are united in believing that Lord of the Rings - a novel which, superficially, appears to be about orcs and wizards in a fantasy realm - is in fact one of the greatest novels about the 20th Century. Together, they plunder Tolkien’s work and life to show how seismic events - two world wars, the rise of fascism, industrialisation, environmental disaster - found expression in his sprawling masterpiece. Jonty and Dominic clash, like marauding armies on the plains of Mordor, over whether the many poems and songs in Lord of the Rings are of a quality that the reader deserves. While Sophie embarks on the inevitable digression into the Dead Marshes of the Protestant Reformation.  Dominic gives the shock announcement that Tolkien almost called Frodo ‘Bingo’, which would have made for a great episode of Bluey but not for a terrifying novel about good versus evil. Even less so if Tolkien had also followed his original intention to call Aragorn ‘Trotter’ and the Elves ‘Gnomes’. After all, it’s hard to imagine Cate Blanchett signing up for the role of Galadriel, the ethereal gnome  Further reading: The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination by Dominic Sandbrook (London: Allen Lane. 2015) JRR Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter (Harper Collins, 1998) -- 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/shorts insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/ bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Producer: Boyd Britton Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo Designer: Peita Jackson Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1h 19m
  8. Love and Beauty Bonus: Geraldine Brooks picks Gilead as the great modern classic

    31 JAN

    Love and Beauty Bonus: Geraldine Brooks picks Gilead as the great modern classic

    The Pulitzer Prize winner, fan-favorite Geraldine Brooks first read Gilead on a packed flight and found herself clambering over passengers for a Kleenex. Find out why Robinson’s quiet, meditative, multi-generational story remains a model and touchstone for one of the most admired and loved novelists writing today.  Or, to echo Jonty’s effort to sound like the cool kids: why is Gilead such a stone-cold classic?  Geraldine talks openly about love, beauty and her determination not to turn away from the world in a time of global crisis. Sophie talks openly about why Geraldine is her non-consensual mentor for living the Australian-American life right. Will all these caring-sharing vibes make Jonty feel left out? Or, like Barack Obama, is he just another happy fan of this modern masterpiece?  -- 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/shorts insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/ bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Producer: Boyd Britton Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo Designer: Peita Jackson Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    24 min
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4.9
out of 5
64 Ratings

About

Every book has two stories: the one it tells, and the one it hides.The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking, occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, an English professor at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC. Every week these virtuoso critics and close friends take an iconic book and reveal the hidden story behind the story: who made it, their clandestine motives, the undeclared stakes, the scandalous backstory and above all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew.-- 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: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLinkinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    41
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Secret Life of Books
  • Show Website
    Secret Life of Books

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