A Good Read

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A Good Read: Adrian Chiles and Martyn Ware

07/02/2023

Adrian Chiles and Martyn Ware

BBC Radio 4 - A Good Read, Adrian Chiles and Martyn Ware

Fiction and non-fiction books worth reading chosen by well-known guests

An eclectic mix of fact and fiction reading.

This week broadcaster and writer Adrian Chiles and musician and sound artist Marty Ware join Harriett Gilbert with their reading suggestions.  Martyn nominates A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess which he says has influenced his career as a musician. He even named his band Heaven 17 from a reference in the book.  If you can get past the brutality and violence it's a novel that throws up many moral questions about the nature of good and evil.  Both he and Adrian Chiles are fascinated by the use of Russian language throughout the book.
Adrian Chiles chooses Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer. Set in the late 1950s and early 1960s it's a slow burn love story of a couple who meet at a writers' conference and begin exchanging letters that lead to a deepening friendship and feelings before they make their way to the glamour of New York City.
Nina Simone's Gum by musician Warren Ellis receives a resounding Hooray and thumbs up from both Adrian and Martyn as Harriett's choice.  It's an eclectic book about the importance and emotion of objects centred around Ellis' custodianship of a piece of chewing gum discarded by the singer Nina Simone at one of her final British concerts.  Ellis spotted her take out the gum and put it on a towel on the piano before beginning her concert at the Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre which was being curated by Ellis' friend and bandmate Nick Cave. After the singer left the stage Warren Ellis jumped onto the stage and took the towel and kept it safe for twenty years in an almost shrine like setting before releasing it into the world and realising the emotional power such an object holds. 

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