The Avid Reader Show

Feb 18 2025 789 ep. 37 mins 926
The Avid Reader Show Podcast artwork

The Avid Reader is a podcast for book lovers. Tune in for interviews, recommendations, and insider news from Sam Hankin, host and owner of independent bookstore Wellington Square Bookshop - www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com

  Arts  Fiction  Leisure
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


Episode 774: Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy - Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember

Feb 18 2025 60 mins  
We tend to think of our memories as impressions of the past that remain fully intact, preserved somewhere inside our brains. In fact, we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them. Memory Lane introduces readers to the cutting-edge science of human memory, revealing how our recollections of the past are constantly adapting and changing, and why a fa

Episode 773: David Bates - An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence

Feb 18 2025 60 mins  
A new history of human intelligence that argues that humans know themselves by knowing their machines.We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Desc

Episode 772: Gareth Gore - Opus

Feb 18 2025 54 mins  
A thrilling exposé recounting how members of Opus Dei—a secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic sect—pushed its radical agenda within the Church and around the globe, using billions of dollars siphoned from one of the world’s largest banks.In an era of disinformation and deep fakes, here is a real-life conspiracy which hid in plain sight for more than sixty years. Gore tells

Episode 771: Jonathan Silvertown - Selfish Genes to Social Beings: : A Cooperative History of Life

Nov 26 2024 55 mins  
For all the "selfishness" of genes, they team up to survive. Is the history of life in fact a story of cooperation?Amid the violence and brutality that dominates the news, it's hard to think of ourselves as team players. But cooperation, Jonathan Silvertown argues, is a fundamental part of our make-up, and deeply woven into the whole four-billion-year history of life. Starting with

Episode 770: Elizabeth Winder - Parachute Women: The Women Behind The Rolling Stones

Nov 25 2024 60 mins  
Parachute Women: Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and the Women Behind the Rolling StonesDiscover the true story of the four women who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help shape and curate the image of The Rolling Stones—perfect for fans of Girls Like Us.The Rolling Stones have long been considered one of the greatest rock-and-roll bands of

Episode 769: Jim Baggott - Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement

Nov 22 2024 66 mins  
The definitive account of the great Bohr-Einstein debate and its continuing legacyIn 1927, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein began a debate about the interpretation and meaning of the new quantum theory. This would become one of the most famous debates in the history of science. At stake were an understanding of the purpose, and defense of the integrity, of science. What (if any) limi

Episode 768: Lewis Cohen MD - Winter's End: Dementia and Dying

Nov 21 2024 64 mins  
Arguably among the worst of all medical afflictions, the dementias slowly destroy one's personality, take a tremendous emotional, physical, and financial toll on patients and families, and are irreversible and inexorably fatal. Winter's End: Dementia and Its Life-Shortening Options is constructed around a lengthy and detailed nonfiction account that is layered with the voices of ap

Episode 767: Rowan Jacobsen - Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul

Nov 21 2024 50 mins  
When Rowan Jacobsen first heard of a chocolate bar made entirely from wild Bolivian cacao, he was skeptical. The waxy mass-market chocolate of his childhood had left him indifferent to it, and most experts believed wild cacao had disappeared from the rainforest centuries ago. But one dazzling bite of Cru Sauvage was all it took. Chasing chocolate down the supply chain and back thro

Episode 766: Debbie Urbanski - After World

Aug 28 2024 61 mins  
A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel—only for it to fall in love with the novel’s subject, Sen, the last human on Earth.Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is simple: remove humans from the ecosystem.Sen Anon is

Episode 765: Roz Dineen - Briefly Very Beautiful: A Novel

Aug 28 2024 45 mins  
Roz Dineen’s Briefly Very Beautiful is a spellbinding dystopian novel about the lengths one will go to for their children in a world teetering on the edge of apocalypse. In a land destabilized by unsafe air, wildfires, floods, viruses, supply shortages, and homegrown terror, Cass is raising three small children by herself in the city. Her husband, Nathaniel, has gone all too