Tea or Books?

Cats! Dogs! Noel Coward! A.A. Milne! I always start off these descriptions with exclamation marks, but seldom has it been more justified…   In this episode, we pit literary cats against literary dogs, and almost instantly regret it (while also

Roald Dahl, Michelle Magorian, and whether or not to give up on books – I’m back from holiday, and Rachel and I have a lovely new (…long) episode of Tea or Books?   In our first half, we discuss whether

Elizabeth Bowen and novels adapted into films – though not in conjunction…   In the first half of this podcast, we discuss novels adapted into films – and whether or not we would like our favourite novels to be adapted

  I have forced two topics on Rachel – firstly, are you careful with books, or do you manhandle them? (It will all make sense in context.) And then two books that were lynch pins of my doctoral thesis – The

  Two William Maxwell novels go up against each other in this episode – but not before we’ve got to the heart of the emotional issue of whether to keep books or cull books. (Obviously we don’t want to cull

  Historical fiction and books-about-books are the themes for episode 22 of Tea or Books? – and we have a LOT to say on these topics. And we hope you do too! Let us know your thoughts for each category. And

  Shakespeare! That’s right, we’re getting very classy and/or GCSE English in our discussion of his comedies and tragedies – following a fairly haphazard chat about child narrators vs adult narrators. This is what happens when Rachel only tells me

  Happy birthday us! We actually passed our birthday by a couple of weeks, but this is the first podcast after the big day. Can you believe it’s been a whole year? And it might be our longest episode yet.

  Sarah Waters and the seasons – how better to celebrate the sunny weather we’ve been having recently? In episode 19 we look at summer and winter in books (and get tangled in what that could mean) and then talk

  Agatha Christie and curious titles come together in perhaps my favourite episode of the podcast yet. And also the first one where we’re both in our 30s, guys. And also one of our most bizarre. In the first half, we look at

  Letters! Diaries! Oscar Wilde! We’ve got it all – well, those three things – in episode 17 of Tea or Books?, which has taken a bit of time to arrive, for which I apologise. But we are as rambling

  Winnie-the-Pooh vs Wind in the Willows is perhaps the most animal-strewn debate we’ve had so far, as well as being more or less inevitable that we’d get to this one eventually – especially given my tendencies to shoe-horn A.A.

  Plays or poetry? We go broad with the first half of our 15th episode, and (inevitably) barely scratch the surface. You wouldn’t have it any other way, right? In the second half, we pit two much-loved novels by Daphne

  Reprints or original editions? That’s the first question we ask ourselves, courtesy of Michelle of Book Musings, and have a lot of fun discussing it. In the second half of the episode we get uncharacteristically modern – pitting two

  Villains or virtuous folk? No, not describing your hosts Rachel (Book Snob) and me, but enquiring into our favourite types of characters. In the second half, we look at two books by Mollie Panter-Downes: One Fine Day and London War Notes,

  Happy endings? Sad endings? And a couple of Elizabeth von Arnim novels – we have a fun, albeit somewhat sickly episode. It makes me think of my favourite, my-missed sitcom Happy Endings, but we’re actually talking about whether we prefer

  Ebooks! Books! Nancy Mitford! Evelyn Waugh! We’ve got it all for you in episode 11, as we turn our attention to the well-worn path of ebooks vs paper books/tree books/real books (whatever you want to call them) and to

    ‘Tea or Books?’ is back for the new year – and it starts pretty shambolically, as we can’t remember the episode number. Once that is sorted out, we discuss whether or not we set New Year’s Reading Resolutions,

  Welcome to a festive edition of ‘Tea or Books?’ (and another one where I forgot to close my bedroom window when recording) – Rachel (Book Snob) and I discuss buying vs borrowing and whether or not we read specifically

  In this episode Dodie Smith’s much-loved I Capture the Castle goes up against Diana Tutton’s lesser-known Guard Your Daughters, and we debate the merits of biographies and autobiographies. Somewhat to my surprise, we didn’t actually end up talking about all that

  Rachel and I are pitting our favourite publishers against each other in this (belated!) episode – Persephone vs Virago Modern Classics. We definitely want to keep both of them, of course, but had fun talking about our faves and a

  Fictional mothers vs fictional fathers and Dickens on the page vs Dickens on screen in this episode of Tea or Books? – and I think Rachel and I are at our most rambling. What can I say, we had a lot

  It’s been an enormous delay, because of internet issues, but – we’re back! In this episode, Rachel (Book Snob) and I debate rural vs urban settings in novels, then have a Jane Austen battle between Pride and Prejudice against Sense and Sensibility. We

  In this week’s episode, Rachel (Book Snob) and I get waaay out of our depth talking about American classics and British classics, then back onto more secure ground in debating Enid Blyton vs. E. Nesbit. (I stupidly forgot to close my

  A little later than we planned (which is probably a good indication of how unreliable we’re going to be… but I hope not!) here is episode 3 of Tea or Books? with lovely Rachel of Book Snob. In this