Co-hosts Sophie and Jonty bare all in a bonus SLoB live ep! After months of rummaging through the dirty laundry of the great writers, it is only fair that we turn a critical eye back upon ourselves - and reveal the secret life of the Secret Life of Books.

In this bonus episode, recorded to mark our official launch before a live audience in Sydney’s iconic Gleebooks, Sophie and Jonty get raw. After briefly discussing why we started SLoB and why the classics matter, we get down to the serious questions: which literary character do we most fancy? Who would we least like to be stuck in a lift with? And who, out of Jonty and Sophie, makes the best bolognese?

Discover why, despite being published by Penguin ‘Classics’, Morrissey’s Autobiography is not and never will be a classic. While Sophie admits to a reading gap so embarrassing it will surely - SURELY - end her career as an English professor. Which book will it be? Listen to find out.

This episode - unashamedly, nay proudly, self-indulgent - is the closest to a mission statement we’ll ever do, so strap yourselves in to discover (drum-roll) the secret life of the Secret Life of Books.

ERROR MESSAGE: there's an embarrassing literary faux-pas in this episode. Let's face it: a mistake. Can you spot it?

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Recommended reading:

Henry James, Wings of the Dove
Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.

Henry Tilney: is he yet another of Jane Austen’s Bad Men, or the stealth MVP with his interest in dress fabrics and interior decorating? Northanger Abbey is Austen’s funniest, most unabashedly joyful and silly novel. It’s also where Jane gets meta – with lots of speeches about what novels are and why we love reading them.

Sophie makes the case that Catherine Morland is the most under-rated heroine in the Austen canon, an upbeat Fanny Price without the sad backstory. Jonty enthuses about the hero Henry Tilney’s interest in gothic fiction, and admits to having a soft spot for the ghastly John Thorpe, the fast-driving, hard-drinking braggart who gets in the way of Catherine’s path to happiness. Despite this, Sophie and Jonty wish him well and will indulge in a side-argument about the likely name of his future wife.

And there’s more! Austen was a secret revolutionary, embedding all sorts of ideas about world revolutions and slave rebellions into this charming novel. We talk about whether Austen's famous satire on gothic novels, the massive bestsellers of the 1790s, is in fact the greatest, and most bestselling gothic novel of them all.

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- The Secret Life of Books invites listeners to join The Conversation, a chance to interact directly with Sophie and Jonty about episode content and to make the case for books we should cover: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

X: @SLOBpodcast

@sophieggee

@ClaypoleJonty

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Further Reading:

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, intro. Claudia Johnson (Oxford, 2003)

Clare Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, (1997)

Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings, (1995). A great book about the female novelists who influenced Austen, discussed in this episode.

Rachel Cohen, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, (FSG, 2020)

Tom Keymer, Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics (Oxford, 2020)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” (Critical Inquiry 1991)

It took 140 years for someone to write back to Mark Twain’s brilliant but troubling masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now the celebrated American novelist Percival Everett has done it with James, a daring, provocative, retelling of Huck Finn through the eyes, mind and heart of Huck’s friend Jim, a runaway slave. What are the untold secrets of Mark Twain’s novel, that Everett brings to light with James? And what should we make of the small but crucial fact that Everett once owned a pet crow, also named Jim?

Everett didn’t train as a literary innovator. He studied biochemistry, philosophy and mathematical logic. And after that he was a horse and mule trainer. Sophie and Jonty speculate about how these career moves provide crucial clues to the secret life of James itself — and why the most important secret of all might be that Everett watched the 1960s TV version of Mission: Impossible while he wrote.

Sophie takes a crack at explaining Everett’s cryptic but alluring statement that all of his work is about “the fact that A is A is not the same thing as A equals A, and even as I say it, it gives me a headache.” And Jonty puts Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained in its place once and for all.

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- The Secret Life of Books invites listeners to join The Conversation, a chance to interact directly with Sophie and Jonty about episode content and to make the case for books we should cover: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

X: @SLOBpodcast

@sophieggee

@ClaypoleJonty

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/

Further Reading:

Percival Everett, James (Doubleday 2024)
Percival Everett, The Trees (Graywolf 2021)
Quentin Tarantino Django Unchained (2012)

What makes a trip down the Mississippi river so famous - and so notorious? Why did it need to be rewritten in the 2024 novel James by Percival Everett? Is Huck Finn the most famous character in world literature?

We’ve gone on record saying that The Great Gatsby is #1 Great American Novel - but this week we may have to eat our words. Is it actually The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book Mark Twain published in 1884 but set in America before the civil war. Released on the day of the Harris-Trump Presidential election, this episode is all about why Huck Finn remains what it has always been, a novel of division.

Sophie and Jonty talk about why Huck Finn is a novel of divisions and polarizations. A novel for our times. The divisions are between North and South, between slave states and free, between confederates and unionists, between white and Black, between enslaved and emancipated. These are just some of the tensions that Twain took on and even though it’s nearly 150 years old, its themes and ideas are more relevant than ever. But is this book now racist to be readable? Or is it a vision of what America really is, a wake-up call that we must pay attention to?

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- The Secret Life of Books invites listeners to join The Conversation, a chance to interact directly with Sophie and Jonty about episode content and to make the case for books we should cover: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

X: @SLOBpodcast

@sophieggee

@ClaypoleJonty

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/

Further Reading:

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (Norton Critical Edition, 4th Edition, 2021)

Jerome Loving, Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens (University of California Press, 2010)

William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain (Dover, 1997, reprint of 1910 edition)

Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting, ( NYRB reprints, 2024)

Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands - The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford, 2017)

There’s a great forthcoming biography of Mark Twain by the celebrated Ron Chernow, publishing May 2025.

Percival Everett, James (Doubleday 2024)

Ever wonder what Shakespeare got up to in the bedroom? Well, whether you do or not, you’ll find out - along with many other things - in this episode devoted to Maggie O’Farrell’s superb novel Hamnet (spoiler alert: it involves a shed, a kestrel and shelves of bouncing apples, rather than an actual bedroom).

Hamnet was published to critical acclaim in 2020. It brings Shakespeare’s wife - Anne Hathaway (called Agnes in this telling) - out of the shadows, recounting her relationship with a Latin tutor who has an urge to write, the fraught birth of their children, the death of their son Hamnet, the impact this tragedy has on their marriage and, finally, how all this informed the creation of said Latin Tutor’s masterpiece. A play titled - you guessed it - Hamlet.

Most daringly of all, O’Farrell gives Anne/Agnes supernatural powers and suggests that Shakespeare’s meanness in leaving her only his second best bed in his will was in fact an affectionate reminder of the sexy time they had together in said bed.

Sophie and Jonty talk about the long road that brought O’Farrell to this story; the difficulty of bringing historical characters to life; the unique light that O’Farrell’s novel casts on the creation of a literary landmark; and finally ask:does this book about the making of a classic have the potential to become one?

Jonty also confronts Sophie about the sex scenes in her 2007 novel Scandal of the Season, implying a certain gratuitousness, but Sophie ably defends herself on purely intellectual grounds.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

Further reading:

Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020)

Maggie O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death (Tinder Press, 2018)

James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (Harper Collins, 2005)

Stephen Greenblatt, Will In The World (WW Norton, 2004)

Sophie Gee, Scandal of the Season (Chatto & Windus, 2007)

Hamlet is jammed with famous quotes like “to be or not to be,” “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” “time is out of joint,” “the play’s the thing,” “get thee to a nunnery,” and “the rest is silence.” But who really knows what happens in the world’s most famous play? And why is it so damn long? Jonty confides the intense boredom induced by the unabridged 5.5 hour Kenneth Branagh marathon Hamlet during the 90s.

Jonty and Sophie are in heated agreement that Hamlet is not a nice guy but a bit of an over privileged brat. The Ghost, not Hamlet, gets SLOB’s prize this week for MVP. not to mention lovely Ophelia, the play’s most moving and sympathetic character.

There many unanswered questions in Hamlet and Sophie argues that “to be or not to be?” isn’t even in the Top 10. And also, why do actors speak so slowly when delivering the “to be or not to be” speech? Jonty - at last - concedes that the Protestant Reformation is at the heart of this text! Plus we get a quick primer on political and religious life under Queen Elizabeth I, who was in crisis with a threatened rebellion from the Earl of Essex. The queen wasn’t the only one in a career slump in the late 1590s - Shakespeare was having problems with his work-life balance too.

Why — and how — did he and his business partners dismantle their theater and carry it across the Thames one frosty December night in 1598? Hear why Shakespeare played the Ghost in the first performances of Hamlet, and how this very adult play is also about the death of Shakespeare’s 11 year old son named Hamnet, a few years earlier.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

Further Reading:

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Folger Shakespeare Library edition. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/

James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (Harper Collins, 2005)

Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton UP, 2014)

Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton UP, 2017)

T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood (Dover Publications, reprint edition 1997).

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

It certainly did not in Shakespeare’s psychedelic fantasy about cross-dressing, polyamory, speaking truth to power and tik-tok – centuries before the internet. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is endlessly adapted and readapted. At its heart, it’s a play about the madness and thrill of attraction and love; about how strange it is when one human spots another human to spend their life with.

In this episode there are green fairies who fight and turn flowers into love-potions. Is falling in love always this random and inexplicable? But the really big question is: are the faeries Incredible Hulk Green, or Fungus the Bogeyman Green? Help us decide.

Will you side with Jonty that the “Rude Mechanicals” are hilarious and the young lovers are a tedious bore – or do you agree with Sophie that Bottom, Snug and Flute are unfunny and that Hermia and Helena are internet influencers before their time? A queen falls in love with a donkey, and the Duke of Athens compares lovers, poets and madmen.

Join the SLOB team in a moonlit Athenian wood for love and laughs, and a moment of nostalgia for Robert Sean Leonard as Puck in the 1980s hit film Dead Poets’ Society.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

Further Reading:

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The New Cambridge Shakespeare.” (2003).

Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, (Norton, 2004).

Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare, Princeton University Press, 2019.

Leonard Barkan, Reading Shakespeare, Reading Me, (Fordham UP, 2024)

Bart van Es, “Captive children: John Lyly, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and child impressment on the early modern stage,” Renaissance Studies, 33;2, 2019.

Go Tell It On The Mountain is one of the great incendiary debuts of the 20th Century. Published in 1953, James Baldwin’s autobiographical novel follows a fictionalised avatar of his younger self as he navigates his way through an ordinary day in 1930s Harlem. Baldwin showed readers life as he knew it as a black, working-class gay teenager in a racist society.

Baldwin disliked what he called ‘protest’ novels. His interests ranged from classic white writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James to many of the giants of Harlem Renaissance, like Countee Cullen and Richard Wright. He counted Miles Davis and Toni Morrison amongst his friends, but also Norman Mailer and ultimate playboy Hugh Hefner. To write a book about New York, he ultimately needed to leave America - first to Paris, then to a Swiss village, where he - against a backdrop of Alpine hills and the tinkling of cowbells - he brought it to a close.

Go Tell It On the Mountain was respected on publication, but hardly sold like hotcakes. Sophie and Jonty ask why it is that Baldwin, who wrote his greatest works in the 1950s and 1960s, and died in 1987, has become only more relevant in the last decade, with intellectuals, novelists and film-makers adapting or responding to his work.

Content warning: discussion of violence, domestic abuse, racism; mention of rape.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

Further Reading and Watching:

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, (Penguin, 2002 edition, first pub. 1953)

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” in Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Classics 2015)

David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography, (Skyhorse, 2015)

Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters, (New York Review of Books Classics, 2024)

Colm Tóibín, On James Baldwin (Brandeis University Press, 2024)

Eddie Glaude, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, (Crown, 2020)

New Yorker article about Baldwin and Richard Avedon’s collaboration Nothing Personal: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/13/richard-avedon-and-james-baldwins-joint-examination-of-american-identity

Barry Jenkins’s film adaptation of “If Beale Street Could Talk”

Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro”

Support the show

Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.