Angourie Rice’s The Community Library podcast
Have you always wanted to join a book club? With The Community Library, a podcast by Angourie Rice, you finally can (minus the flaky friends)
I’ve always wanted to join a book club, and with The Community Library, a podcast by Angourie Rice, I finally can, sans flaky friends and “I didn’t actually read the book” acquaintances. Rice, who graced the Review cover on April 9, 2021, is a bookworm.
A recent episode is dedicated to Persepolis, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. Rice is joined by friend Maija to eagerly discuss the young adult memoir and the author’s experience growing up in Iran during the revolution in the late 1970s.
They describe graphic novels as a unique way to tell a story through the piecing together of hundreds or thousands of little artworks.
Their enthusiasm for the form is infectious as they rattle off recommendations for works by Melbourne’s Chris Gooch and American Daniel Clowes, whose Ghost World is a popular favourite.
Graphic novels can also handle tougher subject matter, as shown by Art Spiegelman, a long time cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine.
Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus, which detailed the holocaust with anthropomorphic depictions of Nazis as cats and Jews as mice.
The Community Library is chitchat about books, but Rice’s upbeat attitude and love of literature shines through. The Persepolis episode includes endearing tangents on the usage of the word “homogeneous” to describe society, where Rice and Maija get mixed up and find their way full circle to the definitions of non-homogenised milk.
At the end of each episode Rice asks her guest what they’re reading at the moment. I met Rice briefly at the Mare of Easttown premiere and asked her for her own recommendations, to which she replied: “I’m reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which I’m making my way through very, very slowly because it’s quite complicated, but really enjoying that. And I’m also reading and listening to an audio book, a young adult book called Felix Ever After, which is a really beautiful contemporary love story and I do recommend both of them.”
Listen to The Community Library on your favourite podcast app.
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