The Book Club Review

When the Guardian drops a list of the 100 Greatest Novels in English it's time to drop everything to talk about it. Luckily pod-regular guest, journalist Phil Chaffee and Joseph Dance, host of the Curious Readers podcast, also had views, and were willing to get together on a Sunday evening to share them. You'll hear our hits, our misses, how many we’ve read, whether we should have read more and much musing on whether a list like this is the way to get people excited about reading. We explore the joys of the sub-lists – the contributor lists – all squirrelled away on a sub-section of the Guardian's website, that arguably provide more excitement and inspiration than the fairly canonical top 100. Which is the best Brontë? Which is the best Austen? Do we age into certain books? If you've read all seven volumes of Proust shouldn't that count for more than one entry? All this and much, much more. Enjoy – this was an absolute delight to make and I hope it makes you smile as much as it did me.
Have your say: get in touch on Instagram @bookclubreviewpodcast or email [email protected], or head to our website for full shownotes. What would be in your top-10?
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The Guardian’s List of the 100 Greatest Novels published in English, copied below for ease of reference.
*underlined – the ones Kate has read
Middlemarch
Beloved
Ulysses
To the Lighthouse
In Search of Lost Time
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Madame Bovary
The Great Gatsby
Bleak House
Emma
Mrs Dalloway
Moby-Dick
Nineteen Eighty-Four
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Persuasion
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Wuthering Heights
The Portrait of a Lady
Things Fall Apart
Midnight’s Children
The Remains of the Day
Lolita
Don Quixote
The Trial
The Brothers Karamazov
Pale Fire
Frankenstein
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The God of Small Things
David Copperfield
Wolf Hall
Great Expectations
The Handmaid’s Tale
Invisible Man
The Age of Innocence
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Song of Solomon
Heart of Darkness
The Magic Mountain
Housekeeping
Giovanni’s Room
The Golden Notebook
The Leopard
Vanity Fair
The Metamorphosis
A Fine Balance
Wide Sargasso Sea
My Brilliant Friend
The Golden Bowl
The Transit of Venus
Orlando
The Waves
Mansfield Park
The Sound and the Fury
Disgrace
Never Let Me Go
Howards End
The Rings of Saturn
Half of a Yellow Sun
White Teeth
The Good Soldier
The Color Purple
The Master and Margarita
The Man Without Qualities
Blood Meridian
Crime and Punishment
Jude the Obscure
Kindred
Our Mutual Friend
Austerlitz
Nervous Conditions
The Bluest Eye
Dracula
The Rainbow
A House for Mr Biswas
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Rebecca
Buddenbrooks
The End of the Affair
A Farewell to Arms
The Talented Mr Ripley
The Vegetarian
The Turn of the Screw
The Line of Beauty
Ragtime
The Left Hand of Darkness
Jacob’s Room
Life and Fate
Sentimental Education
Invisible Cities
The Known World
The Return of the Native
Pedro Páramo
Catch-22
The Road
The Go-Between
My Ántonia
Particular books we touch on in the show
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Ulysses by James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Orlando, The Waves and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
The Princess of Clèves by Madame de Lafayette
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
The Trial and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
The New Life by Tom Crewe
Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs Oliphant
The Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Known World by Edward P. Jones

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What if the antidote to our increasingly frantic world isn't a grand gesture, but simply the act of paying attention?
This week, Kate and Laura are joined by actor, podcaster, and author Miranda Keeling – returning to the pod to talk about her wonderful new book, The Place I'm In, a collection of the small, luminous moments she's gathered from daily life. After her debut The Year I Stopped to Notice, Miranda is back with more of her 'noticings': fragments from parks, supermarket queues, and streets that remind us how much magic is hiding in the everyday.
Their book club read is the perfect complement: The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Şavas – a soulful, quietly funny novel following Asya and Manu as they hunt for an apartment, trying on different futures for size in a city far from home. Asya, a documentary filmmaker, spends her days in the park gathering footage – an anthropologist of the ordinary – and her project rhymes beautifully with Miranda's own.
Plus recommendations inspired by the art of the everyday.
You can find out more about Miranda and her work at mirandakeeling.com, and her podcast Stopping to Notice – over 200 five-minute episodes of binaural location recording – is the perfect companion listen.
Find all the books mentioned at our bookshop.org shop. And if you'd like to join Kate's monthly book club and reading community, head to patreon.com/thebookclubreview.
Booklist
Ashes and Stones by Alison Shaw – a journey through Scotland in search of the women killed in the witch trials
Open Book by Jessica Simpson – Laura takes a nostalgic trip back through her twenties
No Such Thing as Monday by Sîan Hughes – a brilliantly written novel from the author of Pearl; up there with Eimear McBride ( A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing) and Maggie O'Farrell
The Anthropologists by Aysgul Savas
The Imperfectionist, Oliver Burkeman's newsletter
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Flesh by David Szalay
The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler
Memories of Distant Mountains (illustrated notebooks) by Orhan Pamuk
A Nobel Laureate's journals offer much colour but little drama, by Dwight Garner for the NYT (gift link)
Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading by Robert Douglas Fairhurst
The Place I'm In by Miranda Keeling
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A new local literary festival provided the perfect opportunity to record the very first Book Club Review live. Kate is joined by author and broadcaster Bee Rowlatt, whose books include the best-selling Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad, which went on to be dramatised by the BBC, and In Search of Mary inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft. Bee also runs the Wollstonecraft Society, a human rights charity. Her debut novel, One Woman Crime Wave, is a novel that explores the realities of wealth, influence, and inequality in present-day London and offers plenty of talking points for book club discussion and debate. Join our festival audience to hear more about Bee's life and work and why Mary Wollstonecraft and her writing has never been more relevant.
Books mentioned
Find all the titles below in The Book Club Review's bookshop on Bookshop.org
Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad: The True Story of an Unlikely Friendship by Bee Rowlatt
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
In Search of Mary by Bee Rowlatt
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft
One Woman Crime Wave by Bee Rowlatt
An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestly
Uprising by Tahmima Anam
Feminism for a World on Fire by Natasha Walter
Notes
Find out more about The Mary Wollstonecraft memorial sculpture (The Guardian)
Follow the Barnsbury Book Festival for news and updates
Patreon
Discover what's on offer over on The Book Club Review Patreon. In becoming a member you'll get extra shows and become part of a warm community swapping book recommendations and connecting over our shared love of books and reading. At the book club tier you can join our monthly book club and come and talk books with Kate in person every month. And as a paying member you're supporting Kate in making this independent podcast.

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The Book of Love vs The Dud Avocado: Fantasy, Paris & Book Club Verdicts
In this episode of The Book Club Review, we return to our book club roots with two wildly different novels: The Book of Love by Kelly Link and The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy.
The Book of Love is the first novel from acclaimed American short story virtuoso and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link. In a seemingly ordinary coastal town three teenagers become pawns in a supernatural power struggle. Vulture magazine named it ‘the escapist masterpiece of the year’ but what did Laura’s book club think?
Our second book-club pick is Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado – a fizzing, exuberant novel from 1958 about a young American woman let loose in Paris, determined to live life on her own terms. It gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living, a book that feels bracingly modern despite being nearly seventy years old. But did it make for a good book club read?
We've also got some listener feedback on Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, we're catching up on recent reads, and the books we’re excited about next.
Get more from the pod on Patreon
Come behind the scenes and enjoy extra episodes, book club membership, community chat threads, readalongs, Kate's reading diaries and more, head to patreon.com/thebookclubreview
Booklist
You'll find all the books mentioned in the pod's Bookshop.org bookshop
Bookshop.org list
Slow Days Fast Company by Eve Babitz
Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
The Book of Love by Kelly Link
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett
Other links of note
One Grand Books
Frances Ambler's substack
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Valentine’s-ish Literary Romance: Lucas Oakley on Nearly Departed, Boys Book Club & love stories that stay with you long after reading
Join Kate and Lucas Oakeley for this Valentine's-ish episode of The Book Club Review, recorded at Housmans Bookshop in King's Cross. We're exploring literary fiction where love takes centre stage, but the reward is complexity rather than a guaranteed happy ending.
Nearly Departed manages to combine the enjoyable tropes of Rom Com with the thoughtful exploration through writing that we associate with literary fiction. We explore how Lucas’s real-life experiences—witnessing a fatal cycling accident and his father's first wife dying young—shaped the book's exploration of love, loss, and second chances, and the art of balancing humour with heartbreak while playing with rom-com tropes.
Of course, we’ve got plenty of recommendations for love stories with emotional depth, including Lily King's Writers & Lovers, Andrew Kaufman's All My Friends Are Superheroes, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, David Nicholls' Sweet Sorrow, Douglas Stuart's John of John, and hot-book-of-the-moment Wuthering Heights.
We’re also discussing Boys Book Club, the organization Lucas has co-founded to encourage men to read and talk about books. What makes a great book club pick for an all-male book club? We’re going to be finding out.
We’ve even got Valentine's recipe – rigatoni with a long-simmered ‘Sunday sauce’ – and a couple of cocktail ideas.
All in all, the perfect ingredients for a literary Valentine’s weekend.
Become a member of The Book Club Review community
Join The Book Club Review community on Patreon for ad-free listening, extra episodes, Kate’s weekly reading diaries, the opportunity to connect with other listeners in the chat groups, and at the higher tier to talk books in-person with Kate at the monthly book club. Find all the details and how to sign up at patreon.com/thebookclubreview.
Booklist
You can find all the titles mentioned in this episode in the Book Club Review bookshop on bookshop.org
Nearly Departed by Lucas Oakeley
 Heart The Lover by Lily King
All My Friends are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman
Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls
John of John by Douglas Stuart
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Comfort MOB: Food that Makes You Feel Good
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser
All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger
Links
Follow Lucas on Instagram and Tik Tok @lucasoakeley, and you can find out all the details for the Boy’s Book Club at theboysbookclub.co.uk
Housmans bookshop, the longest continuous-running radical bookshop in Britain, established in 1945 and based in London’s Kings Cross since 1959

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