Classics & Coffee: Making a Literature Podcast with My Daughter

During the summer, my daughter, Juliette, and I started seriously talking about doing a podcast. This conversation started earlier, but we really started working on it around June. What arose from those conversations was Classics & Coffee, a podcast where we would talk about books while drinking coffee. This format seemed obvious to us since both of us read extensively. I, of course, read a lot for work, and Juliette reads for school as well. However, we both read for pleasure, especially to learn more about the world around us.

For the first season of Classics & Coffee, we chose five books. We chose a joint book and then each of us chose two other books to discuss. Our joint book was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a novel that both of us loathe but also enjoy. For her books, Juliette chose two of her favorite novels, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. For my books, I chose two books that I was using in my classes, William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. These choices gave us a wide variety of books ranging from nineteenth century England to twenty first century Nigeria.

We initially went into the season with planned out questions for each book. We’d talk about why we chose the book, what we like about it, what we dislike about it…