Booked, Blonde & Busy w/ Olivia Ponton

Booked, Blonde & Busy is Olivia Ponton’s books podcast. Each episode takes one book — or one author — and stays with it: what happened, what it did to her, and the argument she is prepared to have about it. 21 episodes are archived here, every one written up and transcribed in full.

Ponton started reading seriously after moving to New York in her early twenties, and has been open about what it did for her: reading, she says on the first episode, “quite literally got me out of some of the hardest parts of my life.” The show came out of that, plus a frustration with the format everyone else was using. She is explicit that this is not a book club. “I’m not quizzing you,” she says. “This is not like a book club where I’m holding you accountable.” There are no deadlines and no assigned reading — the episode is there for whenever you finish the book, which is the whole reason the transcripts on this site exist.

The reading skews fantasy and romantasy — Fourth Wing was the first book she covered — but the guest list has widened well past that. Novelists including Candace Bushnell, Rebecca Serle, Carley Fortune, Alex Aster and Lucy Score have come on to talk about how their books were actually built. Audiobook narrator Julia Whelan explained why 700 books in she cannot listen to them for pleasure. BookTok creators including Caitlin Bea, Emma Brooks and Abby Abell have argued the recommendations out. The full guest list and the books and topics index are both browsable.

Ponton is a model signed to IMG who moved from Florida to Los Angeles and then to New York for the work, and she has said the reading is what makes that pace survivable — a way to slow down. That texture is in the show: there is a drink of the day in most episodes, the tangents are left in, and the enthusiasm is not performed. If you have finished the book and want someone to talk about it with, that is what this is.