Episode image is a detail from the cover of The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, published in 1997 by Flamingo; jacket design by the Senate; cover photograph © Sanjeev Saith.
For the 101st Page One (which, as listeners of Page One 100 will know, is actually the 102nd episode of the podcast), Charles Adrian talks about the five novels he would take with him to a desert island, if he were forced to go. And allowed to take books. These books are essential. And long.
The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst is discussed in more detail in Page One 141, which you can find here.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
This episode features a jingle written for the podcast by the band Friends Of Friends.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 28th July, 2015.
Book listing:
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
A Place Of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust
The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Links:
Vikram Seth misses his deadline
Vikram Seth on Desert Island Discs
Longest novels ever written wiki
Friends Of Friends on Soundcloud
Episode transcript:
Charles Adrian
Hello. Charles Adrian here. And this is the 101st Page One. I've got the window open so you might hear some traffic noise. I don't know if you can hear the the tree rustling outside in the breeze. I'm never sure how much my microphone picks up until I listen to it afterwards. Anyway, here's the jingle:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the Book Podcast.
So I'm going to carry on calling this the 101st Page One, by the way, even if—as listeners of Page One 100 will know—it's actually the 102nd episode of the podcast. It doesn't matter. It's going to be an extra long edition, I think. It could be almost double length today—you'll know better than me at this point how long it is—and for good reason, I think. Because what I wanted to start off with was this: After I put together the 100th episode—or Page One 100 or whatever you want to call it—and I'd spent a few days looking at the list of all the books that have been read from over the course of this podcast—and, you know, there are 327 books on that list—I realised—sorry, I realise that this sentence doesn't seem to be getting any closer to its end but it is, I promise—I realised that there are several hugely important books that don't appear on that list. Important to me, I mean. And I realised: when I interview someone we always start with a book that they like but I've never explicitly brought a book that I like. So, given that this is Page One 101 [one oh one], I thought: ‘Let's finally cover the basics. And let's take the time to do this.’ Because these these are big books. They're the books that I would take to the desert island with me if I were sent to one. They're not necessarily the books that have had the most profound impact on me in terms of challenging my beliefs or changing the way I think about things. But they're all books that I've got completely lost inside in a way and… and to a degree, I would say, that rarely happens. Almost never, except in these cases. And for that reason they are all magical books for me. They're books—to paraphrase a quote that's on the cover of the first one I'm going to talk about—that will keep me company for the rest of my life. Which is why I want to share them with you.
Now, as I say, all the books on today's episode are big books but this first one is one of the biggest. According to one list I saw online it's the sixth longest novel written in the English language. Apparently it's 593,674 words long. It's A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth and the full cover quote—which is from The Times—reads: ‘Make time for it. It will keep you company for the rest of your life.’ It's true, it will. It is a long read but it is so worth investing in. It's so rich. It's a wonderful story but I'm not going to tell you much about the story, I think. I'm just going to read you the first page and hope that if any of you are yet to read it yourselves you might just want to know what happens on the second page. I mean, that's how it works with long books, right? You read a page; and then you read another page; and then another one; and then another one; and eventually you get to the end. And then you cry because something absolutely extraordinary is no longer a part of your life—or at least not in the way it was while you were still exploring it.
The first chapter of A Suitable Boy is titled:
Browsing through books, two students meet one day.
A mother mopes; a medal melts away.
Here's the first page:
[pages turning]
1.1
‘YOU TOO will marry a boy I choose,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter.
Lata avoided the maternal imperative by looking around the great lamp-lit garden of Prem Nivas. The wedding-guests were gathered on the lawn. ‘Hmm,’ she said. This annoyed her mother further.
‘I know what your hmms mean, young lady, and I can tell you I will not stand for hmms in this matter. I do know what is best. I am doing it all for you. Do you think it is easy for me, trying to arrange things for all four of my children without His help?’ Her nose began to redden at the thought of her husband, who would, she felt certain, be partaking of their present joy from somewhere benevolently above. Mrs Rupa Mehra believed, of course, in reincarnation, but at moments of exceptional sentiment, she imagined that the late Rughubir Mehra still inhabited the form in which she had known him when he was alive : the robust, cheerful form of his early forties before overwork had brought about his heart attack at the height of the Second World War. Eight years ago, eight years, thought Mrs Rupa Mehra miserably.
‘Now, now, Ma, you can't cry on Savita's wedding day,’ said Lata, putting her arm gently but not very concernedly around her mother's shoulder.
‘If He had been here, I could have worn the tissue-patola sari I wore for my own wedding,’ sighed Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘But it is too rich for a widow to wear.’
‘Ma!’ said Lata, a little exasperated at the emotional capital her mother insisted on making out of every possible circumstance. ‘People are looking at you. They want to congratulate you, and they'll think it very odd if they see you crying in this way.’
Several guests were indeed doing namasté to Mrs Rupa Mehra and smiling at her ; the cream of Brahmpur society, she was pleased to note.
‘Let them see me,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra defiantly, dabbing at her eyes hastily with a handkerchief perfumed with 4711 eau-de-Cologne. ‘They will only think it is because of my happiness at Savita's wedding. Everything I do is for you, and no one appreciates me. I have chosen such a good boy for Savita, and all everyone does is complain.’
Lata reflected that of the four brothers and sisters, the only one who hadn't complained of the match had been the sweet-tempered, fair-complexioned, beautiful Savita herself.
‘He is a little thin, Ma,’ said Lata a bit thoughtlessly. This was...
I don't know whether that's enough to get you hooked. It's a small, gentle beginning and it swells from there.
Okay. Page One 101, book two:
I'm staying in India for the second of my books today. It's Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. You'll see that all of my choices are pretty mainstream. A Suitable Boy was left off the Booker Prize shortlist—famously, according to a Guardian article on Vikram Seth missing the deadline for his sequel to A Suitable Boy, which I'll link to in the description of this episode. Midnight's Children, on the other hand, won the Booker Prize and the James Tate Black Memorial Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and the Best of the Bookers in 2008. I mention that not because I think prizes are always a mark of quality but because in this case I happen to agree that it is a very good book.
Again, it's the storytelling. It's a beautifully written book that repays the effort it takes to get into it. As always, Salman Rushdie takes history and myth and magic, and he weaves them together so lightly, so playfully.
The first book I ever read by Salman Rushdie was The Satanic Verses and it blew me away. I was 16, on a choir tour to Florence and Venice, and I'd never read anything like it. It was playful and rich—that word's going to come up a lot today, I think—and funny and irreverent and if I'm dumping it in favour of Midnight's Children for today's episode it's only because I think Midnight's Children has more heart. If I had to choose between the two, this is the one that I would take to my desert island because it's also playful and rich and funny and irreverent—and it's lovely.
I first read Midnight's Children when I was preparing for my finals at university and I didn't have the patience for it. I got... I don't know, maybe a hundred pages in and I hadn't really read any of it. Nothing made any sense. But luckily I went back to it a few years later and it stayed with me.
Now, before I read I just want to say I'm aware that Salman Rushdie is not the first writer to do what he does. Let's not get into any discussions about how much he undoubtedly owes to Gunter Grass and anybody else that you might want to mention. It's enough for me that he does what he does masterfully. Okay. I just needed to say that.
Here's the first page:
[pages rustling]
Book One
The perforated sheet
I was born in the city of Bombay... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate – at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.
Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Sheherazade, if I am to end up meaning – yes, meaning – something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a...
It's long past time for me to play some music. Here is something called Bluer Than Midnight by The The.
Music
[Bluer Than Midnight by The The]
Bluer Than Midnight by The The [/ðə ðiː/]. I assume that's how they pronounce their name, by the way. Please feel free to correct me.
Okay. Book three. Another Booker winner—another Booker star indeed: Hilary Mantel.
In my list of favourite author of all time Salman Rushdie has been knocked off his top spot by this woman over the last few years and this is the book that made me fall in love with her. Don't get me wrong: I adored Wolf Hall and I've only put off reading Bring Up the Bodies because I'm waiting for the third book to come out and then I'm going to start again from the beginning and read the whole of... you know, the three of them in a row. Anyway, the point is: Wolf Hall is a wonderful book that I have done my best to persuade many, many people either to read or to start reading again because they've started and got confused and given up. This book is less confusing and maybe—if I'm honest—a little less good, in the sense that it's less... virtuosic, I suppose. She doesn't dance quite so lightly, the straw is only spun into gold and not stardust—but it's good gold and it's worth having. This was the book that convinced me—and other people too, I think—that historical fiction is a living, breathing genre; that it can be something that feels like it's happening right now, all around, and suddenly you look up and realise that not only has the afternoon disappeared but somehow you're at home in your flat in London and it's 2000-and-something and Bastille is just an interchange between Line 1 and Line 5 on the Paris Metro system. Weren't there people being guillotined?
As I read this I felt as though I understood for the first time how the French Revolution might have come about; how it might have worked; how the shifts in power might have happened; how individual personalities shape historical inevitabilities—the things that become inevitabilities, I mean, because of the personalities involved. And because once they happened they must always have happened—in this universe, at least.
So: it's A Place of Greater Safety and it's another monster of a book. But—again—I say, ‘Go for it! You have so much to gain from diving into this!’
And it has its own creation myth, actually. The story goes that after Hilary Mantel had published a few novels—I think—she was asked by an interviewer if she had any manuscripts sitting at the back of a drawer somewhere gathering dust and she said, ‘Yeah, yeah, there's this historical novel about the French Revolution that I wrote ages ago’. And her agent saw the interview and called her up and said, ‘So. A historical novel about the French Revolution, eh?’ And it was tidied up and published and... the real meat of her career started.
That might not be exactly what happened. One of the reasons I could never be a historical novelist in the way that Hilary Mantel is, is that I don't really care about details—or not enough to actually look them up. One of the things that she does so well—both here and in Wolf Hall, I think—is to take characters and speeches and recorded events—things that that really happened, that really existed—and without distorting them she weaves them exactly as they are into her narrative so that everything has its place and everything makes absolute sense. But everything is dancing to her tune because wherever something isn't recorded or known about she just creates it. And it's entirely convincing. You don't see the join.
Here's the first page, anyway. The first page of A Place of Greater Safety:
[pages turning]
There's loads of stuff at the beginning. It's brilliant. There are character lists and maps. It's... it's wonderful. I forgot to say there are also... there are... there are family trees in A Suitable Boy. I mean it... [sighs] I mean, that's the sign of a novel that's going to be good, isn't it? Right. Anyway.
1. Life as a Battlefield
(1763-1774)
NOW THAT THE DUST has settled, we can begin to look at our situation. Now that the last red tile has been laid on the roof of the New House, now that the marriage contract is four years old. The town smells of summer; not very pleasant, that is, but the same as last year, the same as the years to follow. The New House smells of resin and wax polish; it has the sulphurous odour of family quarrels brewing.
Maître Desmoulins' study is across the courtyard, in the Old House that fronts the street. If you stand in the Place des Armes and look up at the narrow white façade, you can often see him lurking behind the shutters on the first floor. He seems to stare down into the street; but he is miles away, observers say. This is true, and his location is very precise. Mentally, he is back in Paris.
Physically, at this moment, he is on his way upstairs. His three-year-old son is following him. As he expects the child to be under his feet for the next twenty years, it does not profit him to complain about this. Afternoon heat lies over the streets. The babies, Henriette and Elisabeth, are asleep in their cribs. Madeleine is insulting the laundry girl with a fluency and venom that belie her gravid state, her genteel education. He closes the door on them.
As soon as he sits down at his desk, a stray Paris thought slides around his mind. This happens often. He indulges himself a little: places himself on the steps of the Châtelet court with a hard-wrung acquittal and a knot of congratulatory colleagues. He gives his colleagues names and faces. Where is Perrin this afternoon? And Vinot? Now he goes up twice a year, and Vinot – who used to discuss his Life Plan with him when they were students – had walked right past him in the Place Dauphine, not knowing him at all.
Now, I realise that I wasn't very consistent with the names, was I? I said [French pronunciation] Henriette and then I said [English pronunciation] Elisabeth and Madeleine. Or did I say [French pronunciation] Madeleine? Anyway: [French pronunciation] Elisabeth, it should probably be. I don't think it matters. That's the point, isn't it? When you're reading it, it just comes out in your head as it comes.
I should probably say that with all of these books I don't really expect any of you to be hooked straight away. These are the kind of books that don't necessarily pass the first page test, I think. You have to sit with them. I mean, who is Maître Desmoulins? We've no idea. It's going to be a while before we find out what he's doing in a story about the French Revolution. I mean, who is... Who is Henriette? Who's Madeleine? Who's [French pronunciation] Elisabeth or [English pronunciation] Elisabeth? The same goes for Midnight's Children. Same goes for A Suitable Boy. You have to give these books time. They will hook you if you let them but you have to let them.
And this is nowhere more true, perhaps, than with my fourth book. It's a famous monster of a book and it doesn't help that it's written in a foreign language. It's À la recherche du temps perdu—often referred to simply as Proust. As in: 'Have you ever read Proust?' And according to the Wikipedia page on the longest novels ever written in any language it comes in at number 3 with 1,267,069 words over 3,031 pages in the Galimard edition—which is the one I have. It's in seven volumes, which makes it much easier to read. You can definitely get an edition with all of the books under the one cover, as it were, but rather like with Lord of the Rings or—I don't know—The Alexandria Quartet I don't see why you would. This way, you can pick up a volume, take it away with you on holiday perhaps, and it's quite a normal-sized book.
Now, I can't say anything about how this might read in English. I studied French at university; I lived in France for several years; I can read French almost as easily as English if I concentrate a little first; and in French this is a dream of a book. I don't say it's easy. The very first part of the book—Cambray—was a set text during my first year at university and I found it extremely difficult. I had no idea what was going on. I read it and reread it and—slowly—out of the mist came something that started to make sense: shapes started to appear; things started to slot together; characters and situations became recognisable. And later on, when I set out to read the whole thing—about five years after I left university—I found myself diving in and swimming around as if someone had given me gills and a tail.
It's not without its faults, this book. There are some pretty dry sections. Proust's whole theory of love is limited and—frankly—irritating on a first reading—partly because it's so clear that he's disguising his own homosexuality and partly because what he describes as love is really just possessiveness, as far as I can see. But, I mean, who knows? Maybe if I ever come to reread it all the way through I'll feel differently.
And when it's good, it's so very good. When I think about what I love about this book, I immediately think of the characters: his mother, his grandmother, his ridiculous aunts, Swann, Odette, the Duchesse de Guermantes, the Baron de Charlus, Robert de Saint-Loup, Charles Morel. They're so vivid. And then the descriptions: the light on the water, the experience of seeing two church towers come into alignment against the evening sky, the arrival of the petite bande along the beach. And this is a big part of what Proust is up to. All the way through the novel he's saying, ‘How can I fix this on paper? How can I recover this experience, this time that's passing?’ In a sense, he's saying, ‘What is the point of all of this life that we're living? What do we have to show for it?’
And then throughout all of this—in the background—there's also the social shift: the collapse of the aristocracy—the smart set, as you might call them; the rise of the young vulgarians; the inevitable passing of glamour, more basically. You can contrast his first glimpse of the beautiful, unapproachable Duchesse de Guermantes with his last encounter with her, for example, at a grim party at someone-or-other's house.
But I won't say any more. Here's the first page—in French:
I [un]
Or I [une]? I never know.
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteine, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n'avais pas le temps de me dire : « Je m'endors. » Et, une demi-heure après, la pensée qu'il était temps de chercher le sommeil m'éveillait ; je voulais poser le volume que je croyais avoir encore dans les mains et souffler ma lumière ; je n'avais pas cessé en dormant de faire des réflexions sur ce que je venais de lire, mais ces réflexions avaient pris un tour un peu particulier ; il me semblait que j'étais moi-même ce dont parlait l'ouvrage : une église, une [sic] quatuor, la rivalité de François Ier et de Charles Quint [/kæŋ/].
Or Quint [/kænt/]... Quint [/kwɪnt/]... I have no idea how to pronounce that in French.
Cette croyance survivait pendant quelques seconds à mon réveil ; elle ne choquait pas ma raison mais pesait comme des écailles sur me yeux et les empêchait de se rendre compte que le bougeoir n'était pas allumé. Puis elle commençait à me devenir inintelligible, comme après la métempsychose les pensées d'une existence antérieure ; le sujet du livre se détachait de moi, j'étais libre de m'y appliquer ou non ; aussitôt je recouvrais la vue et j'étais bien étonné de trouver autour de moi une obscurité, douce et reposante pour mes yeux, mais peut-être plus encore pour mon esprit, à qui elle apparissait comme une chose sans cause, incompréhensible, comme une chose vraiment obscure. Je me demandais quelle heure il pouvait être ; j'entendais le sifflement des traines qui, plus ou moins éloigné, comme le chant d'un oiseau dans une forêt, relevait... relevant les distances, me de... me déqui...
Hmm.
... relevant les distances, me décrivait l'étendue de la campagne déserte où le voyageur se hâte vers la station prochaine ; et le petit chemin qu'il suit va être gravé dans son souvenir par l'excitation qu'il doit à des lieux nouveaux, à des actes inaccoutumés, à la causerie récente et aux adieux sous la lampe...
Oh, it's wonderful.
Right. And here's Martha Wainwright singing Barbara's similarly wonderful Dis, quand reviendras-tu?
Music
[Dis, quand reviendras-tu? by Martha Wainwright]
Dis, quand reviendras-tu? sung by Martha Wainwright.
Right. Page One 101, book five. The last one.
It's India again, I'm afraid. I don't know what this India thing is. I've never been to India. I would like to go. All sorts of people tell me that it's an extraordinary, beautiful, varied, crazy, bracing, fascinating country but I haven't made time for it. And yet three of the five most important books in my library are by Indian authors and set in India. Maybe it has something to do with my schooling. I don't know.
In any case, this has been my favourite book for seventeen years now—in the sense that, in the last seventeen years, if you've ever asked me what my favourite book is I've very likely said, ‘Ouf... Gosh, there are so many. Ooo wow... What could I...? Oh, I don't know. I mean, it's difficult to... If I had to choose one... er... it would... it would be The God of Small Things by Arundati Roy.’ Did it win the Booker? I think it did. That's something I could have looked up. It's... I have what's very probably a first edition so there's nothing written on the front cover except the title and the author's name. I suspect that in later editions it has all that sort of information on it.
So, basically, I was learning Italian in 1997; I was living in Florence, having a very strange and frequently very wonderful time; I was 17 going on 18; and my mother decided to buy me some English books to keep me entertained until my Italian was good enough that I could get going on my university reading list. She bought me Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett, which must have just come out. She knew I liked Terry Pratchett. She bought me something about evening... Italian evening classes by Maeve Binchy. [doubtfully] Mmm yeah. And... And I think she must have asked the woman behind the desk, ‘What's good?’ And the woman said something like, ‘God of Small Things is doing pretty well at the moment’.
I... It's an intense experience, reading this book. It was for me anyway. It's the first book that ever made me cry. I mean, really sob. I was... I was devastated by what happens. Or not so much by what happens, you know, in the sense of the big central event but by the... by the consequences of that event, the blame that seems to fall so unfairly on people who who are so unable to understand what's going on, totally unable to defend themselves, and they carry that guilt forever. And I was so angry about the distortion. Again, blame being placed at the feet of someone who did nothing but good. And... And then there are other people who did bad things and they get away with it. I still feel angry about that.
The storytelling here—again—is beautiful. There's a spiral shape to the narrative that makes our arrival at the centre so much more effectful. And there's this lightness that makes the bad stuff all the more terrible. There's a major scene, for example, towards the middle of the book in which the children are taken to see The Sound of Music at the cinema and... I suppose the key to this book is the inability of some characters to understand and to explain what's happening, and the inability of other characters to see what is happening and to understand it for that reason. And without labouring the point at all Arundhati Roy shows us all of that. We see what happens. We understand it and we see how much is not understood, not explained, not articulated; how much is left dangling into the future to do its damage over time. I'm not going to tell you what happens at the cinema—I'm not going to tell you what happens in any of the book—but the point is... I think this is the message: the point is that it's not so much the event as the silence which surrounds the event that is so damaging. The same applies to things that take moments to happen and things that unfold over whole lifetimes.
This is a... It's a relatively short book. If you're wondering which of my five books you should pick up and start reading, start with this one maybe.
Okay, I'm going to... Here's the first page. Here we are:
I
Paradise Pickles & Preserves
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
But by early June the south-west monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat...
That would be a good sentence all by itself, wouldn't it? ‘In the undergrowth, a rat.’ It could be a whole poem.
So, anyway, those are the basics. Those the five books that are most important to me right now.
I could happily have talked about more books. Tristram Shandy, for example, which I started reading when I was 15 maybe, not realising that I'd picked up Volume Two by mistake and not understanding anything. I read it again ten years later from the beginning and it's amazing—a wonderful, wonderful book. One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I finished while I was on the train to Edinburgh one year and I remember thinking that I'd never come across such a perfect ending. Everything folded itself up and put itself away and the book... it just ended perfectly. Dante's Inferno, which I had to read at university and fell in love with—partly because of Jorge Luis Borges's commentaries. Many of Jorge Luis Borges's stories should be on this list. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The film with John Malkovich and... is it Glenn Close and Uma Thurman... is a travesty. It's wretched! They've misunderstood and missed out everything that makes that book important and brilliant. Perhaps one day I'll do a podcast on that. And maybe... Well maybe I'll just do a podcast on why I like all of those books, why they're important. I've already talked about Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star on Steve Wasserman's podcast Read Me Something You Like. I'll link to that in the description. But I... Anyway, I can't keep talking now. You need to go and do other things with your lives. You've probably got people to see and things to do and I need to stop.
Feel free to tweet me responses to anything that I've said here. I'm @charldrian on Twitter. The website is pageonepodcast.com.
I'm going to play us out with something from an album I discovered very recently. I was listening to the jazz programme on Radio 3 the other day and they played a couple of tracks from Making Music by Pandit Hari... Hariprasad Chauzar... no, wait, hang on a sec... Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, Jan Garbarek, John McLaughlin and Zakir Hussain. It's lovely. It's really a wonderful album. This isn't one of the tracks they played on Sunday or whenever it was I was listening. It's called Water Girl.
Thank you so much for listening. And enjoy... reading, I guess.
Music
[Water Girl by Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, Jan Garbarek, John McLaughlin and Zakir Hussain]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]