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There is a very specific danger that comes with listening to Backlisted, and I think it only fair to warn you about it up front: your to-be-read pile will grow, your bookshop habit will get worse, and you will start saying things like "well, actually, Penelope Fitzgerald's fourth novel is criminally underrated" at dinner parties. People may move away from you at the cheese board. This is a price I have accepted, and one I think you should too.
Backlisted, hosted by Andy Miller and John Mitchinson, has been quietly running since November 2015, and in that decade-ish it has become the literary podcast for people who actually read. The premise is disarmingly simple: each episode, Andy and John invite a guest to choose an old, out-of-print, overlooked, or just unfairly forgotten book, and the three of them sit down to talk about it for an hour. That's it. No gimmicks. No "ten books that changed my life" listicle energy. Just three readers in a room, deeply prepared, deeply in love with what they do.
What lifts Backlisted above the (very large) crowd of bookish podcasts is the chemistry. Andy is the more performative of the two — quick, funny, prone to the kind of enthusiastic tangent that ends in him reading a paragraph aloud and going slightly quiet at the end of it. John is steadier, drier, the institutional memory of the show, the one who'll casually mention he once had lunch with the author's editor in 1987. Together they sound like two friends who have been arguing about books for years and have no intention of stopping. The guests — novelists, biographers, poets, booksellers, the occasional former Archbishop of Canterbury — slot into this dynamic rather than disrupt it.
The format is wonderfully unhurried. Each episode opens with "what have we been reading?" — a segment that functions, if you are weak-willed like me, as a fortnightly shopping list. Then they get to the main book. They read aloud. They dig into biography and context. They argue. They go off on tangents about translation, about cover design, about whether a particular sentence is doing what its author thinks it's doing. The conversations are erudite without being snobby — possibly because both hosts genuinely seem incapable of pretending to like something they don't.
Some episodes function as proper acts of literary resurrection. The so-called "Backlisted Effect" is real: second-hand prices spike, out-of-print novels get reissued, booksellers build front-of-store tables around recent episodes. Their championing of Penelope Fitzgerald, Barbara Comyns, William Maxwell, and Sylvia Townsend Warner has nudged a generation of readers toward writers who deserved more daylight. If you want a sense of the range, recent episodes have covered William Golding's The Inheritors, Iris Murdoch's The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces with Rowan Williams — and they're equally happy spending an hour on Asterix, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Jilly Cooper. There is no hierarchy here. A book is either alive on the page or it isn't, and that is the only thing being assessed.
A small note on tone, because it matters: Backlisted is the rare books podcast that respects its audience enough not to explain Virginia Woolf to them, but never tips into the kind of clubby in-jokes that make outsiders feel unwelcome. New listeners can drop in on any episode without homework. If the book sounds interesting, you'll learn enough to decide whether to read it; if it doesn't, you'll still have spent an hour with three thoughtful people talking well, which is its own kind of comfort.
Are there flaws? Mildly. Episodes tend to run around 70 minutes, sometimes longer, which is a commitment if your commute is short. The hosts have a particular sensibility — broadly British, broadly literary-fiction-leaning, with a soft spot for the postwar twentieth century — so if you want a podcast that will recommend you the latest BookTok thriller, this is emphatically not it. And the "what have we been reading?" segments occasionally go long enough that you start to wonder if we'll ever get to the actual featured book. (We always do. Be patient.)
But honestly? These are quibbles. Backlisted is one of those rare podcasts that makes you a better reader simply by being in your ears. It rewards attention. It assumes you're curious. It treats books as the living, contested, joyful things they are. If you care about literature — or want to — this is essential listening.
Just don't blame me when your shelves start sagging.
