Shelf Healing Rebecca Markwick

This week I chat with Prof Martin Eve about what therapeutic reading actually means when you look hard at it and how writing can be significantly more therapeutic at times. We discuss the wellbeing benefits of Open Access publishing, the fears surrounding it, and how entwined the nature of the literary critic is for Martin when he reads.

Works and Authors mentioned in the episode:
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Brett Easton-Ellis
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchen
See Under: Love by David Grossman
China Mieville
The Lord of The Rings by JRR Tolkien
Civilisation and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
Lesley Thompson
Rosewater (The Wormwood Trilogy) by Tade Thompson
The Day of the Triffids by Jeff Wyndham
Distant Horizons by Ted Underwood
Redlining Culture by Richard Jean So
Toni Morrison

This week I chat with Philip Connor, Commissioning Editor at Penguin Random House Audio and host of the podcast What Editors Want. We chat about how Philip's reading habits have changed and moved more into non fiction as well as how he found himself searching for himself in books on grief and dying. The importance and suprising nature of finding representation in literature and how audio has lent itself to him rereading books and now commissioning works in audio.


Joan Didion
CS Lewis
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
The Hidden Spring  by Mark Solms
Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F Hamilton
Ubik by Philip K Dick
Emmanuel Carrère
Emma Southern
Mary Beard
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan
F Scott  Fitzgerald
Virginia Woolf
Vladimir Nabokov
WG Sebald
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
Why I Write by George Orwell

Dr Samantha Rayner talks with Cathy Rentzenbrink about her book Dear Reader, and the therapeutic effects of reading on mental health and wellbeing. It's a lovely episode that travels through time with books that affect multiple generations, how books are enjoyed for what they are not who they are marketed at, and how writing can be hard but the satisfaction of finishing is worth the difficulty.

Cathy Rentzenbrink's books
Everyone is Still Alive debut novelThe Last Act of Love
A Manual for Heartache
Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books
and her debut novel Everyone Is Still Alive is released in July 2021

Authors and works mentioned in the episode:
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Agatha Christie
The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
Georgette Heyer
Jean Plaidy
Harriet Evans

Cathy's book recommendation
Humankind by Rutger Bregman

eA lively and entertaining interview with Professor John Mullan about theraprutic reading and his very favourite authors Charles Dickens and Janes Austen.
John takes us on a deep dive into what we can enjoy in literature and how he finds humour to be the very best comfort read possible. We travel through literature from Shakespeare, stopping at 18th century literature, then right though to modern day authors and thrillers.

John's most recent books:
The Artful Dickens
What Matters in Jane Austen?

Authors and works mentioned in the podcast:
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
Charles Bukowski
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Dante's Inferno
Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
Dombey and Son
Great Expectations
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Vladimir Nabokov
Agatha Christie
P.D James
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Lie with Me by Sabine Durrant
Emma by Jane Austen
Moby Dick by  Herman Melville
A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Prelude by William Wordsworth
Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
Symposium by Muriel Spark 

I have the great honour this week of interviewing a podcasting legend, Jordan Harbinger.

On The Jordan Harbinger Show, Jordan deconstructs the playbooks of the most successful people on earth and shares their strategies, perspectives, and practical insights with the rest of us. He has hosted a Top 50 iTunes podcast for over 14 years and receives over eleven million downloads per month, making The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the most popular podcasts in the world. 
Huge thanks to Jen Harbinger for helping to schedule this in across very different timezones! 
We talk about why his show has worksheets and how unexpectedly popular they are, why it's important to cover the difficult and gross topics that are happening in the world, Jordan's strong belief in exposing cults and scams and how you can support friends and family who are trapped in them. We also spend time discussing his Feedback Friday episodes and the amount of research that goes into the responses and how vital that is in order to help people with very niche problems. Lastly we talk about how hard it can be to restart in business from scratch and how looking at those around you who support you and realising what you have done so far can help you to dive back in and start again.

The Jordan Harbinger Show

Episodes mentioned:
David Kilgour - The Heartless Art of Forced Organ Harvesting
Frank Bourassa - The World's Greatest Counterfeiter Part One
Rutger Bregman - Humankind: A Hopeful History
Feedback Fridays
Psychopath after your son
Chased by a European gangster

I chat with the wonderful Joanne Harris MBE, an author across an incredible number of media. We chat about the therapeutic effects of reading and writing, how personifying illness can be beneficial and the ups and downs of translations. We have a very interting chat about reading as a bilingual, the joy of graphic novels, and sneaking those books your mother doesn't want you to read at the library.

Works and authors mentioned:
Lee Child
Georgette Heyer
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny
Gustave Flaubert
Andre Gide
Guy de Maupassant
Alexandre Dumas
Francoise Mauriac
Stephen King
George R.R. Martin
Mervyn Peake
Agatha Christie
Laura Grandi Italian translator and author
P.G. Wodehouse
John Mortimer
Sandman by Neil Gaiman
Brian Vaughan
Becoming Unbecoming by Una
Chi's Sweet Home by Kanata Konami
Inkblot by Emma Kubert and Rusty Glad
Wayfareres Series by Becky Chambers