Curious Readers Podcast

If you’re into poetry, @cathygalvin.bsky.social 's new collection, Ethnology, is one of the best I’ve read in a long time.
An amazing evocation of physical place and place as it exists in memory & associations. It builds into something that is more than the sum of its (brilliant) parts.

Next up on the TBR is Brandon Taylor's latest novel about forbidden love in Manhattan's art scene #Litfic #BookSky

🎧 NEW EPISODES 🎧 And we're back! Join us for an indepth discussion about our reading plans for the year ahead, plus we deep dive into Daniel Kraus' gruesome one sentence long NYT bestseller Angel Down. Not to be missed 📚 #BookSky #LitFic #LiteratureSky #Horror

🎧 EPISODE 25 OUT NOW 🎧 Join us for our end-of-year bibliofest as we talk about our top 10 books of the year - plus we dish the dirt on the titles that sadly didn’t live up to our expectations over the last twelve months #BookSky #Reading

It was written in 1906 and stylistically it’s definitely a product of its time. It’s a satire mainly about the clash of traditional Japanese values with western intellectualism - so if that sounds appealing, go for it! I enjoyed it, but it might not be for everyone 📚

This is going to be interesting for me: not a big fan of graphic novels, so there's certainly room for improvement 😁 at my end.

Happy to jump in today!

#BookSky

📚🎧 EPISODE 24 OUT NOW - join us as we talk about our favourite graphic novels, this year’s National Book Award winners, reading Stephen King for the first time, radical exteriority, and men in publishing #BookSky

Book Mail! #BookSky

This morning’s walk through a 16th century churchyard listening to the best of MR James on audiobook. Only made myself jump twice 🫠 #BookSky #Horror #Ghosts #Reading

Could be a trend, especially in dystopian fiction.

Some book covers that caught our attention recently #BookSky

😆 It’s a great book, although I did find it quite difficult to stomach in places!

Just finishing The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and about to start The Written World: Essays and Reviews by Irish novelist Kevin Power.

Loved the Cărtărescu. Bolaño’s Collected Short Stories are really good too. Published by Vintage in the UK (and US?)

For the final day of #NovellasInNovember Adania Shibli’s MINOR DETAIL is a stark novella set between 1949 and the present, pairing a clinical first section detailing a murder committed by Israeli soldiers, with a second half in which a Palestinian woman methodically retraces that crime #BookSky

Day 29 of #NovellasInNovember is Eric Vuillard’s THE ORDER OF THE DAY, a taut, acidic reconstruction of the events that eased Hitler’s rise to power. A book about people convincing themselves that appeasement is prudent rather than cowardly #BookSky #LitFic #Reading

The Margate Bookshop looking very inviting this morning 📚🥸

Day 28 of #NovellasInNovember is THE COUNTRY WILL BRING US NO PEACE by Matthieu Simard. After the death of their infant son, Simon and Marie move from Montreal to a remote village, hoping the countryside will soothe their grief. Instead, the silence sharpens it #BookSky #Horror #Reading #LitFic

The book, And the Walls Became the World All Around, is stood upright on a table against a blank background. The cover is facing the camera.

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2025 is ‘And the Walls Became the World All Around’ by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing, translated from Swedish (Sweden) by Sigrid Rausing and published by @grantabooks.bsky.social !

Day 27 of #NovellasInNovember is SNOW COUNTRY by Yasunari Kawabata which follows an affair between Shimamura, a detached Tokyo intellectual, and Komako, a young geisha in a remote mountain hot-spring town. A meandering slow burn plot with clean, elegant prose #BookSky #LitFic #Reading #Translation

American poet Billy Collins putting it all in perspective #BookSky #Poetry

Day 26 of #NovellasInNovember is SEA OF INK by German author Richard Weihe. A delicate, fragmentary portrait of the 17th-century Chinese painter Bada Shanren, who survives the fall of the Ming dynasty and retreats into an almost monastic life of art and nature #BookSky #LitFic #Reading #Translation

Yes, do check us out! Glad The Rose Code is on your TBR 🙏📚

Got my copy a few days ago. Yet to start. How is it?

Day 25 of #NovellasInNovember is Tove Jansson’s MOOMINLAND MIDWINTER, which sees Moomintroll unable to get back to sleep after waking up from hibernation. Adventures with Little My, Sorry-oo, and Hemulen ensue. Arguably one of Jansson’s most elegiac books #BookSky #Reading

Day 24 of #NovellasInNovember is PETER HUJAR's DAY in which the titular photographer tells all about his exploits across a single day - December 18, 1974 - among New York's demimonde, featuring Allen Ginsberg, Fran Leibowitz and Susan Sontag #BookSky #LitFic #Reading

Yes. And if publishers think they can market them they need to be honest about which books are being produced by LLMs so readers can avoid.

More than half of UK novelists believe AI will replace their work A new study by the University of Cambridge found many authors’ work has already been used – without their permission – to train large language models

This is depressing. Can we get AI to do the boring stuff please and leave authors to write the novels? #BookSky #AI

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

The spledge on Olivia Laing’s new novel really is a thing of beauty. The whole book design is spot on in fact. The story is pretty gripping too (120 pages in so far) #BookSky #Reading

Just read Craig Thompson’s ‘Ginseng Roots’ for an episode on graphic novels, and… wow. It’s a bit zigzagging at times, but the mix of memoir, global politics and cultural history is just so perfectly balanced. Plus, I’ve learned a lot about ginseng! #BookSky #GraphicNovels #Reading