It's the OneTrackMinds Bonus Books Bonanza!
... which I promised to send you last week! Hurrah!
Hello friends! Shall we leave aside the promise I made to you this time last week alluding to an extra bonus email due last Friday? I think we should, don’t you? Let’s, instead, revel briefly in the realisation that this week marks the second anniversary of this newsletter! Yes, for the past two years now, we’ve been sending you a missive from OneTrackMinds HQ really very nearly every week! With only the occasional week off for Christmas/Holidays etc. That’s worth celebrating, isn’t it? Let’s raise a proverbial glass…
But anyway. On with the main business of this week’s newsletter, which concerns one of our very favourite subject: Books!
We love books at OneTrackMinds, and a lot of our brilliant storytellers over the years have written them. (Indeed, we’ve published our own, as you no doubt know). And seeing as how there’s been a recent glut of particularly excellent books - some written by OneTrackMinds alumni, some by brilliant writers who we’d love to get on the show - we thought we’d share some of our very favourites with you, in the knowledge that you’ll almost certainly enjoy them as much as we did. So, without further ado…
Caledonian Road - Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew was one of our guests at one of the mid-lockdown shows we did at Wilton’s in that dreadful summer back in 2021, when we were only allowed to sell a maximum of 100 tickets, and everyone in the audience had to wear masks and sit far apart from each other as though they were contending with a mass flatulence problem. All to say, far too few of you were able to hear his brilliant story about Lena Zavaroni, which is a dreadful shame. We must try and get him back on the show again, which I now fear is going to be especially hard as his new novel, published last week, is about to shoot him into the very top tier of British novelists, and he surely won’t have the time for us anymore… Caledonian Road is a big, fat 600+ page brick of a novel, and has been likened to the works of Charles Dickens and Tom Wolfe. It’s a ‘state of the nation’ novel, set in that horrible summer of 2021, and concerning a cast of characters drawn from modern British life. I haven’t read it yet (give me a break - it’s 600+ pages, and that it was only published on Thursday), but the reviews have been absolutely stellar, and it sounds right up my street. A Bonfire Of The Vanities for 21st Century London? Yes please!
Four Stars: A Life. Reviewed by Joel Golby
Joel Golby is without question one of the funniest writers working today; his TV review column in The Guardian every Saturday forms a central part of my weekend, and I don’t even watch that much TV. His first book - the excellently named memoir Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant - is a delight, and everyone I gave a copy to has adopted it as something of a cult classic. His new book is also a memoir, but styled in the form of a series of reviews (not unlike John Green’s excellent podcast series and subsequent book The Anthropocene Reviewed, which I’ve a feeling I told you about when I read it last year), and from the excerpts I’ve read, it’s every bit as funny and stealthily moving. Fellow OneTrackMinds friend Nell Frizzell reviewed it in The Guardian if you need further convincing. It’s published on Thursday, but you can preorder a copy now.
Be Funny Or Die by Joel Morris
Funny books by people call Joel are like London buses... You wait ages for one, and then two come along at once. That’s a terrible joke, which goes to show why I need to read Joel Morris’s new book - subtitled, ‘how comedy works, and why it matters’ - and to take some copious notes. Morris - a veteran comedy writer, longtime collaborator of Charlie Brooker, and the co-creator of Philomena Funk - really knows his beans when it comes to comedy, and this book takes the form of, in the words of Caitlin Moran, ‘the ultimate TED Talk on comedy’, which does the miraculous task of being incredibly informative on the subject, while also being very very funny. The book was published by our friends at Unbound back in February.
Is This Okay? by Harriet Gibsone
Harriet was a guest at our last show on March 27th, and so I have already given this book a good airing but I mention it again here because a) it’s about to come out in paperback on April 24th and b) because it’s absolutely brilliant and you should all read it. It’s another memoir, ostensibly focused around Harriet’s search for connection in a digital age, but in the full-faced, no-holds-barred way it tackles Harriet’s struggles with a diagnosis of early-menopause in her late twenties, and the subsequent related fertility challenges she faced, it’s one of the bravest and most moving books I’ve read in a very long time. Despite this heaviness, it’s also an incredibly funny book, and I laughed out loud when reading it on the tube on so many occasions that I worried I might have to ration myself to reading it in private. It’s genuinely brilliant.
Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst
Going slightly off-piste here with this next recommendation, because Sophie Elmhirst is not a previous OneTrackMinds guest. Nevertheless, her first book, Maurice and Maralyn, is so brilliant, I wanted to recommend it to you all the same. It’s a fast-paced and beautifully readable non-fiction account of the crazy ordeal undergone by the slightly eccentric couple Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, who, in 1972, set off from the UK in an effort to sail to New Zealand. Half way through their journey, their sailboat was destroyed by a whale (!), and they then spent the next 117(!) days adrift at sea in a slowly deflating rubber dinghy, until they were eventually, and entirely accidentally, rescued by a Korean fishing trawler. It’s an incredible story, beautifully and evocatively told, and serves as a gorgeous testament to their love for one another, which, the book concludes, was ultimately what kept them alive. It’s a delight - I stayed up late into the night on Sunday to finish it - and I recommend it to you all wholeheartedly.
As always, you can buy a copy of all these books from our Bookshop - and for every book you buy, we get 10% or so of the purchase price, which we greatly appreciate and will put towards making our show even better.
Talking of which, our Audience Survey is still running for the rest of this week. If you’ve got three minutes to tell us your thoughts about OneTrackMinds, we’d be most grateful.
And then we're back on May 31st for our next show, featuring stories from Gethin Anthony, Elf Lyons, Steph Singer and Claire Cartwright. Tickets are selling fast. Get yours here.
That’ll do until next week. We’ll be back then with more news from the OneTrackMinds team. Stay happy until then.
KB. x
Next Show - Friday May 31st | Tickets Here
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