Olivia Laing and Charlie Porter

A Good Read

BBC

Arts, Books

4.2 • 847 Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Author and cultural critic Olivia Laing, whose books include The Lonely City, Funny Weather and Everybody, is joined by fashion writer and curator Charlie Porter, of What Artists Wear and Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, and presenter Harriett Gilbert, to talk about the books they love.

Olivia recommends Bad Blood by literary critic Lorna Sage - a memoir of her eccentric childhood and adolescence in 1940s rural Wales. Charlie loves Honey From A Weed by Patience Gray, a cookbook which exalts local knowledge and seasonal cooking, taking readers to a time and place far removed from modern life. And Harriett brings The English Understand Wool, a 2022 novella by American author Helen DeWitt, which takes unexpected twists and turns and which Harriett argues, merits reading more than once.

Comment on instagram: @agoodreadbbc Produced by Eliza Lomas for BBC Audio

Transcript

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0:00.0	Things just swirling around my head.
0:03.6	Am I really the product of this?
0:06.1	Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests.
0:11.0	Little did I know what more was to come.
0:13.4	I'm Jenny Clemen and in the new series of The Gift,
0:17.5	we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database.
0:22.8	They didn't know that I was different.
0:25.7	You had kids together.
0:27.0	Yeah.
0:27.5	Then you met.
0:28.3	Then we met.
0:29.2	The Gift.
0:30.1	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:34.1	BBC Sounds, music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:38.7	Hello, I'm Harriet Gilbert.
0:40.4	Thank you for downloading a good read, the podcasts,
0:43.6	where two guests and I recommend books we love and describe why we love them.
0:47.9	We don't always see eye to eye, but I hope you'll find some great reading suggestions here.
0:53.9	Hello, with me today, Olivia Lang Lang, whose half dozen books of cultural criticism include
0:59.0	the Lonely City, Funny Weather, and most recently, Everybody, subtitled a book about freedom.
1:06.5	Olivia is also the author of the novel Crudo.
1:10.1	Joining her is the fashion writer and curator
	...

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