Join Hugo and Nick each month to tackle a new book, discuss what makes it work, and write the best book ever written. We might even have some fun along the way.
Find us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Book suggestions, comments, thoughts, ramblings, and insults all welcome at:
contact@bingereadingbookclub.com
The Podcast That Will Make You A Better Reader (or your money back!*)
*If you give us money, we will not return it.
So, folks, what’s the podcast actually about?
Nick: Well, maybe you, like Hugo, want to read more books in 2025, but you don’t know what to read. Maybe you’re interested in writing and storytelling and how it all works, but you don’t know where to start. Maybe you just want to hang out with some bookish folk once a month. Whatever your reasons, this is the show for you.
Hugo: Stop pitching, Nick! You still haven’t explained what we’re actually doing.
Nick: Ah, good point.
Hugo: So, each month, Nick picks a book that he believes presents an aspect of storytelling extremely well — that might be character, structure, pace, setting, or any other number of aspects of the writing craft. You read the book during the month (like you would for a book club) and assemble with us at the end for a chat about what it does well and what we can learn from it as writers and readers while having a lot of fun along the way. I guess you don’t have to read the book to listen to the episode (we’re not checking homework!), but I can guarantee the experience will be better if you do. Plus, you wanted to read more books, right? What better way to hold yourself accountable?
Nick: The books will span the genres — crime, fantasy, horror, contemporary realism, sci-fi, and more — and push you out of your reading comfort zone step by step. By the end of it, you’ll be joining us in our ultimate goal: to write the greatest book ever written.
What’s the next book, then?
Nick: The book we’ll be discussing next episode, out July 31st, is the fun and action-packed Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel. It’s a great sci-fi concept wrapped up with some neat ideas.
Hugo: And what should listeners keep an eye out for as they read?
Nick: I picked this one for the way it uses interesting and fresh ways to tell a story, like a modern epistolary novel. It’s all transcripts of voice notes, recorded dialogue, and documentation.
Hugo: Transcribed though, right?
Nick: Yes — unless you listen to the audiobook!
THE BOOK!
Read below for an up-to-date version of the book Hugo is writing with Nick’s help (SPOILERS):
In the dark halls of the Maceration Building, a controversial child is born. The stand-in sage-femme clutched the baby by the head, neck, and body, still glistening with schmutz and baby dirt. Her hands were rough, like they had pulled one thousand roots from the ground, and in dire need of moisturising. As she stands beside the mother, who was gently resting her head on the cobbles, a man dressed in the finest silks this side of Istanbul inspects the child. The sage-femme hands the child over. The man nods. As the mother reaches up to take her child back, the silken man turns away, his cape fluttering, taking the child with him.
The clock strikes twelve as Jean Silkman strides through the doors of the masceration hall and into the night, baby in arms outstretched. A banshee scream echoes into the night and dissipates in the wind. Back in the dim lights of the birthing chamber, the Sage-Femme says, ‘Don’t be a baby, it is just an Enfant’. Though the flame of humanity in her eyes betrays the sentiment. The mother is certain he will kill the baby.
15 YEARS LATER
As Jean-Baptiste Duvalle stepped out of the train into a whisper of sunlight, he knew he was about to be shot. A glint of metal stared him down like an untold secret, like a story waiting with bated breath for its final denouement. Jean-Baptiste froze like the bored faces of the statues found around his parents’ mansion. This was the first time he had seen a gun outside of a game or a film. It didn’t seem real, it looked smaller than he imagined, like a toy car in the hands of an adult. A click, and a stream of liquid ejaculated from the end of the device, soaking him from head to toe. Jean Baptiste laughed.
Stood before him in blue overalls, checkered slip-ons, a tie, and no collar to his shirt, was a clown. It grimaced at him, maybe almost as if it were about to cry. Jean-baptiste relaxed and cracked a smile, almost forgetting why he had come to the city. Ahead of him was an arduous task born of necessity. But why did he have to come on clown college graduation day? It seems a little suspicious, doesn’t it? If you sense that, then maybe you’re a little sharper than Jean-Baptiste, so focused on his all-consuming task. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to catch what’s about to happen before he does.
Etampes boasts a magnificent array of architecture, from the 12th-century ruins of Louis VI’s tower to the fine Romanesque spires of the crenellated walls. Jean-baptiste, still a little moist from his squirtin,g made his way down the narrow streets towards the Anne de Pisseleu Hotel, situated in the heart of the city. It was the baker's dozen of cathedrals, and the religious underpinnings they represented, that drew Jean-Baptiste to this city. While he enjoyed the sight of these edifices, it was not without a sense of trepidation that he passed by their fine and mighty wooden doors. He walked up to the first of these doors and with a piece of red chalk he had carried for three long years, he drew the outline of a bull.