Our host Vick Hope is joined by Kemi Rodgers.
Kemi is a presenter, DJ and radio host, best known for her work on Capital Radio and as a co-host for I’m a Celebrity: Unpacked on ITV2 alongside Joel Dommett. Kemi’s love for music extends beyond radio – her expertise led her to produce a documentary for Warner Music, and she’s a familiar face at festivals and events, where she frequently DJs. She often hosts art events and shares her passion for history in her own social series, History with Kemi, making history accessible and engaging for her audience.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Kemi’s five most influential books by women.
It’s a bit like Bridget Jones for teens and pre-teens! It spoke to me in a way that I just don’t understand how any author who’s not a 14-year old girl could’ve written that. And of course, if I wrote a book as a 14-year old girl, it wouldn’t probably be relatable to 14-year old girls right now because the culture is so different. But the way that [Rennison] writes spoke to me and I felt like I was Georgia.
I feel so strongly about financial independence, for everyone but particularly for women, and financial stability – and you can choose to do whatever you want in life, but as long as you have your own pot that’s just yours […], so long as you’re never trapped in a situation and you have the knowledge of what’s going on around you. […] This book breaks it down so much, and I think in the opening chapter it says you’re going to be really angry when you read this book, because you’re going to realise how easy it was all along.
In the first opening chapter [Taddeo] talks about her mum in Italy and I just felt like I’d been punched in the gut, and I felt like that repeatedly for the rest of the book. I think it’s probably the first book I’ve read where I was like ‘oh my god’, because as I say I like dealing in non-fiction, which this is, but in my mind this is written like fiction. […] This was a real turning point for me where I read a book that was so poignant and somehow, with just these three women, how it encapsulated the different themes and things we’ve all had to deal with, and I kind of liked that I was being punched in the stomach – not because I liked what any of these women were going through – but just the way Taddeo has written these three women, their intricacies and desires in these different tales.
I read it in a period of my life where I actually felt affected by what she was saying; not because I’ve lost a partner, but because I now have a partner who I think I might spend the rest of my life with, and what she’s describing here, I can’t imagine happening and I don’t want to ever happen. I think reading it when you have a special someone in your life, it terrified me. I finished the book (it’s one of those books you just don’t want to put down!) and my partner was asleep in bed next to me and I literally got out a notebook, found a pen, and wrote pages and pages of why I love this man so much.
I recommend this book to literally everyone. It’s a brilliant story, it’s a fiction book but I believe the author was inspired by a few different women and put them into these two characters. I love the two sisters who are going through the same thing, they’re both in France in WW2. […] I’ve never actually immersed myself in anything that was from the viewpoint of a French person who was living in that war, so I felt it was a different approach really because their land was just taken, and it’s about how these two sisters respond to things.
