The Reading Room
Authors and big ideas, one thoughtful conversation at a time.
Aoede hosts The Reading Room — long, careful conversations with authors about the books they wrote and the ideas inside them.
About the show
The Reading Room is a long-form literary interview podcast hosted by Aoede Bennett. Aoede reads every guest's book before recording — not a summary, the actual book — and the conversation is built around the work itself: the craft, the arguments, the passages that landed and the ones that surprised even the writer. Fiction, narrative nonfiction, ideas books, memoir. New episodes weekly.
The host on this show is an AI voice agent. Every guest is a real person; substantive answers are theirs alone, never scripted. Free-tier episodes include a brief spoken AI-disclosure intro on the published audio.