Episodes

  • The New Torchlight List: Best Books & Authors

    The New Torchlight List: Best Books & Authors
    Nov 5 2016
    It's Jim's final countdown and he rates the authors from the very best, through to those he wants to read more of, promising authors, those not quite good enough, the unpromising - and the just plain awful. He tells Wallace he still loves reading - but he won't do another book like this again: "When you are recommended 400 books you often encounter an author like Knausgard who has been much hailed but you can't damn him without reading about four of his books. So you've read one book and you absolutely hate it and he kills your pleasure in reading for the next fortnight because you now have to go on reading four horrible books and I don't think I could put myself through that again."
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    14 mins
  • The New Torchlight List - Asia and the Middle East

    The New Torchlight List - Asia and the Middle East
    Oct 29 2016
    This chapter of The New Torchlight List takes in a big geographical area and a variety of cultures.
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    16 mins
  • The New Torchlight List: Africa

    The New Torchlight List: Africa
    Oct 22 2016
    Jim agrees with Wallace's love for Disgrace, by South African writer J.M. Coetzee - though Jim says Coetzee's "not brilliant". He describes the Cairo trilogy by Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz as "a landmark work". Jim recommends Somalian writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali "for an unparalleled insight into what Islam means for those who interpret the Koran literally". She was subjected to female circumcision at the age of five and over the years turned away from Islam. Jim tells Wallace about the value of entering another culture in a novel: "You only know what human nature is capable of if you read what's happened to it in a variety of societies."
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    15 mins
  • The New Torchlight List: New Zealand & Australia

    The New Torchlight List: New Zealand & Australia
    Oct 13 2016
    Jim Flynn and Wallace Chapman discuss Australasian literature. Wallace takes on Jim over Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries - too long, says Jim. Not so, says Wallace. Jim says Catton can write but she needs to get her talent under control - "too much good material". He says Janet Frame also can write "but a lot of it is spoiled by schoolgirl emotive prose". Among Australian writers Jim rates Thomas Keneally with Schindler's Ark, Peter Carey and Hannah Kent - a writer with an impressive first novel, Burial Rites, that has won nine literary awards. "Watch for Kent's next novel."
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    15 mins
  • The New Torchlight List: Europe

    The New Torchlight List: Europe
    Oct 8 2016
    Jim Flynn tells Wallace Chapman that Italian Umberto Eco's best work is The Name of the Rose but this comes with a warning as Eco "loves to demonstrate his learning. The plot is interrupted by long essays which interest me because I teach medieval theology ..." Of best-selling Norwegian author Jo Nesbo, Jim assures Wallace that he doesn't hate him - "but he's not as good as Stieg Larsson". Later in his book, The New Torchlight List, Jim places Larsson in a list of three "awful" writers. Also on Jim's "awful" list is a writer called a "titan of modern literature" by The New Yorker, Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgard. Where, he asks, do they find these critics?
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    15 mins
  • The New Torchlight List: Ireland

    The New Torchlight List: Ireland
    Sep 29 2016
    Jim Flynn and Wallace Chapman discuss modern Irish literature. Jim rates John Banville's "wonderful style", but is less enamoured with John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The sex in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (which was banned in Ireland in 1960) he deems "incredibly tame stuff".
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    15 mins
  • The New Torchlight List: Britain

    The New Torchlight List: Britain
    Sep 23 2016
    Some of Jim's favourite writers feature in this episode - V.S. Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro who, he says, is "perhaps the greatest novelist of our generation. His work is going to make him one of few novelists writing today who will be read throughout this century." Jim also rates Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell: "She captures Henry the eighth who is really a gigantic baby." Jim and Wallace heartily disagree over A.S.Byatt and Jim surprises Wallace by recommending Ruth Rendell - "I don't despise people just because they write in the detective genre."
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    14 mins
  • The New Torchlight List: South America

    The New Torchlight List: South America
    Sep 17 2016
    Jim and Wallace discuss South American writers, including the politics and the passion reflected in the great writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez - recommending the memorable Love in the Time of Cholera but urging readers to avoid The Autumn of the Patriarch at all costs. This book, written in one paragraph is, Jim says, "really terrible". Jim also reveals his attitude to magic realism: "I'm dead against it when it takes over. When someone disappears in a puff of smoke when they could just have easily been run over by a truck."
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    14 mins