Joel Golby's Book Club

Joel reviews a graphic novel called Below Ambition by Simon Hanselmann about Megg The Witch and Werewolf Jones who start a band called Horse Mania. He also digs through the finds of his latest book shop crawl.

What I'd Rather Not Think About is a novel about grieving a twin, captured in little vignettes over roughly 200 pages, but what does Joel and his new co-host Geordie Joel make of it? And is it time to stop writing 7 line chapters?

Joel's broken two of his rules this time round by reading a book that is 1) a hardback, and 2) came out this year. It's Miranda July's All Fours, a book where the narrator is supposed to spend a load of money on a life-changing road trip, but ends up blowing all the cash on renovating a motel room just outside town to look like a Parisian hotel suite.

What's the best writing snack? How important is it to plan your character arc? What do you make of The Hardest Geezer book announcement? Joel answers your questions!

In this episode, Joel's picked out another book that everyone seemed to read before he did. Jenny's Offill's Weather came out in 2020 and is set around the inauguration of Donald Trump's presidency and it's a book that feels like it's set in 2016, but does it hold up in 2024?

Joel watched a great TV show based on Benjamin Myers' 'The Gallows Pole' only to find out that everyone had been reading Benjamin Myers for years. This week, he's reading the 2014 novel set in idillic Northern English countryside, Beastings.

You asked for it, you got it. Joel's read a book that he hated and it's Jonathan Ames' collection of articles and short stories that have not dated well and probably weren't very good at the time either.

Joel's got really into heading down to his local pond and counting the different types of flowers and fish he can see after reading a mind-altering set of essays on exploration, faith and nature by Anne Dillard. Good for him!