The Book Club

I was listening to The Rest Is History the other day while puttering about with some chores, and I strayed far enough from my phone that I wasn’t able to hit the fast-forward button when the ads came on. This was lucky because the first ad I heard was Dominic Sandbrook talking about his Book Club podcast. It sounded interesting, especially since the episode he was spruiking was about Game of Thrones.

So, I grabbed that ep and listened to it while I was driving around later in the week. It was really good. The podcast is a two-hander, with Sandbrook talking to his producer from The Rest Is History, Tabitha Syrett, who seems very smart. She took over production duties for The Rest is History back in 2023, which I suspect roughly lines up with the show becoming much more professional and successful. (It was good before. It’s one of the best pods in the world now.

The Blook Club is a deep dive into a single title each episode, and they seem to do an enormous amount of research.

I was surprised and a little delighted halfway through the GoT pod to hear myself quoted. They didn’t cite me as the source of Martin’s quote describing fantasy writers as gardeners or architects, but I am the source of that quote. I interviewed him just as the first series of the TV adaptation was about to air, and I tried to interview him purely as a novelist. We talked a lot about craft. I was probably the 14th or 15th interview he did that day, and he started off pretty tired, but he perked right up when we got into the subject of how to write rather than what the books were about.

Anyway, that’s just by way of illustrating that these guys don’t just read the book, take a few notes, and talk for an hour or so. You normally get a generous biography of the author and quite a bit of scene setting and context for the period the book was written in. The GoT discussion was in-depth and complex enough that I ended up going to the transcript and copying huge chunks of it to add to my research file for the fantasy series I’m thinking of writing sometime in the future.

I’m currently listening to their episode about Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and enjoying it hugely. If you’re looking for something to help you escape from this wretched timeline, I can thoroughly recommend this podcast. You don’t even have to follow along sequentially. You can just cherry-pick the books you want in the order you’d prefer.

Here’s a little peek at my current list.