The Book Club

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Caroline Moorehead, whose new book A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul tells the remarkable story of one of Italy’s best-known writers – who used the pulp detective novel to shine a light on the social and political rot of his native land.
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This week’s Book Club podcast deals with attention: what it is, why it is in crisis, how it came to be the biggest business in the world, and how we can resist the tech juggernaut that is destroying it. I am joined by two co-authors of the new book Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. They tell me why the ‘attention economy’ would be better termed ‘human fracking’, and how the problem is so much more than can be solved by a new year’s resolution or more restrictions on screen time.
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My guest in this week’s Book Club is Joanna Kavenna, who talks about her witty, philosophically riddling new novel Seven: Or, How To Play A Game Without Rules. She tells me about taking her bearings from Italo Calvino, making up a board game and then being the world’s worst player at it, how AI challenges our sense of ourselves – and how Morten Harket found his way into her fiction.
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In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen, whose new book The Score: How To Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game asks why rules and scores and metrics are so liberating in games, yet so deadening in real life. He tells me about the societal perils of our growing dependence on quantitative information, what Aristotle got right, and what yo-yos can tell us about the meaning of life.
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Sam Leith is joined by Philip Hensher to pick over their books of the year.
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