In today's podcast, Claire Armitstead, John Crace and Sarah Crown tackle the celebrity "books of the year" lists, asking why they've become such a fixture of the newspaper calendar. John Crace provides a digested codebook that will help you to read between the lines of the celebrities' recommendations, and in case you're not taken with their suggestions, the panel come up with a few of their own.
Next, the poet Paul Durcan talks to Sarah Crown about the challenges of collecting 40 years' work into a single volume, and, in advance of next week's Guardian first book prize, Claire Armitstead talks teenagers with Eleanor Catton, whose brilliant and controversial shortlisted debut novel The Rehearsal is set in a girls' high school.
The Guardian books podcast books of the year
The Rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton (Granta)
Life is a Dream: 40 years reading poems 1967-2007, by Paul Durcan (Harvill Secker)
The Children's Book, by AS Byatt (Chatto & Windus)
The Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore (Faber)
The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (and/or the previous two in the trilogy), by Stieg Larsson (Maclehose Press)
Family Britain, 1951-57 by David Kynaston (Bloomsbury)
Perfumes: The A-Z Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez (Profile)
100 Facts about Pandas by David O'Doherty, Claudia O'Doherty and Mike Ahern (Square Peg)
Big Chiv! My Goals in Life by Martin Chivers (Vision Sports)
