Secret Life of Reading (with Maggie O'Farrell and Ben Alderson-Day)

episode

Secret Life of Books 54 min 2 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 16 days ago

▲ 0

Transcript

jump: chapters · speakers · find in transcript

Transcript

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What makes reading such an intense, life‑changing experience?

Jonty Claypole 0:08

On The Secret Life of Books, we talk about classic books and the life and times of the people who wrote them. Today, we're talking about us, the readers. What happens when we, and that's an inclusive non-royal we, read a book? What is going on in our minds? Why can the experience of staring at words on a page be so intense, life-changing even? Is it just a case of impressions and ideas transferring from an author's words into our imagination? Or is there something more mystical, even uncanny, at work too? To help us answer these questions, we are joined by one of Britain's leading psychologists, Ben Alderson Day, and also by one of the most acclaimed novelists of our times, Maggie O'Farrell. Ben is a professor of psychology at Durham University, author of Presence, The Strange Science of the Unseen Other, and director of the Reader Bank Project, a collaborative research project with the Edinburgh Book Festival into how we read, imagine, and understand stories.

Jonty Claypole 1:08

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of 10 novels. In 2020, she published Hamnet, which it's fair to say is already a 21st century classic. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and was Waddesdon's Book of the Year. With director Chloe Zhao, Maggie wrote the screenplay for a multi-award winning film adaptation, which we all saw a few months ago, sobbed buckets of tears over, and have yet to pick up the pieces and resume our lives after

Ben Alderson-Day 1:37

seeing

Jonty Claypole 1:37

it. Maggie's latest novel is The Brilliant Land. It's actually just called Land, not The Brilliant Land. Following an Irish family just after the Great Famine in the 1860s through to the end of the century. This is The Secret Life of Books. I'm Jonty Claypole.

Sophie Gee 1:56

And I'm Sophie Gee. And this episode, The Secret Life of Reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival with Maggie O'Farrell and Ben Alderson-Day. And we are here, Jonty and I are here with the support of the Ponder and See Literary Foundation in Australia. Thank you very much. So, welcome to the show. We're going to start with a flash round. We're not really responsible for anything today. We're putting it all on these guys. I've realised that there's already been a terrible mishap, which is that the books are matching the wrong

Ben Alderson-Day 2:24

people. I'm happy to have this

Sophie Gee 2:26

one.

Unknown 2:27

Yeah, yeah.

Sophie Gee 2:28

You can figure it out. All right, so here's the question. Today we're thinking about how reading is this transporting, immersive activity. It's more than just sitting with some paper, learning about characters. Something's happening alchemically to us, and that's what we're going to be exploring. So Ben and Maggie, can you share with us a really, one of your most formative, one of your most immersive reading experiences? Name the book. Tell us about the immersion. Ben, you're up.

Ben Alderson-Day 2:57

Well, I mean, it's funny to be sat here because I actually finished Land last night. So I've still got some of Maggie's characters swimming around in my mind. Some of them still literally are swimming, but I won't say who. But no, a book that I can really remember an immersive kind of really intense experience was 1980 by David Peace, who's a Yorkshire writer who wrote the Red Riding Quartet. It was described as Yorkshire noir, which apparently he was unhappy with because it's a French word. He wanted it to be called Yorkshire dark, which makes it sound like an ale. But for anybody who's read it, it's really kind of focused, gripping, kind of evocative capturing of Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s while they're trying to catch the Yorkshire Ripper.

Ben Alderson-Day 3:37

And as the action tightens around the main character in that book, I can still kind of feel the visceral feelings. And I started to get a headache while reading it. I had to stop and just leave it for a while because it was kind of taking me off to a place that I didn't want to be. Well, 1980s Yorkshire. Yeah.

Sophie Gee 3:51

And in a few minutes, you're going to tell us why that was the case, actually, what might be happening neurologically. Maggie? I was really

Maggie O'Farrell 3:58

torn. I was going to talk about my very immersive experience as a child reading Moominland Midwinter.