Welcome to Literary Friction. I'm Octavia Bright, coming to you from London, connected by our Lord and Master the Internet, with my treasure of a co-host Carrie Plitt, who's joining me from Oxford.

Hi, Carrie. How are you doing? Hello, dear Octavia.

It's very nice to see your face over the internet. How am I doing? I hadn't thought about this.

I have no idea how I'm doing. I really don't know. I'm very happy to be here with you. Otherwise,

who knows? Let's just keep it. Change is minute by minute. How are you doing? Same really. I mean, yeah, minute to minute. But this minute right now, very pleased to see you. And also kind of baffled by the fact that this is our last show before we take our summer break in August. And I cannot believe we've got around here

so fast. It feels like a year since we were last in the studio before COVID made us be

home school recorders, which was our show with Kylie Reid. And that was actually only a few

months ago. I haven't seen you in real life for five months, basically. That might be

the longest. We've gone for years. Years and years. I'm sure. Yeah. Because we see each other once

month at least. At least, yeah. Wow. What a thought. Anyway, it's crazy. So, yeah, we're going to be taking a summer break and we wanted to

leave you with a joyful minisode so the theme of this minisode is going to be joy it is and we're

joyously joyful about this joy theme we are brimming over with it. We are. No, we are. We are. As ever, please bear with us on the sound quality front. We're not quite in our closets, but it's all pretty makeshift. And some rowdy seagulls have taken up residence on Octavia's roof and routinely dive bomb the fox that lives at the end of

Nextdoor's garden. Not a joke. Definitely not a joke. Very, very noisy. The traffic has resumed

on the street next to my house. So you may hear a couple of cars trying to get past the traffic

lights on the next street, which Sheila, our neighbor is very angry about. But she's been fighting it

for years from the council, we'll do nothing.

That famous Oxford gridlock.

But whether you're new to the show or an old hand, welcome, thanks for tuning in.

The format for these minisodes between full shows is, for the next half hour-ish, we'll first

have an

informal conversation about something book-related and anything else that might come up.

And as Octavia mentioned, we'll be talking about joy.

...