Pulp fiction v the classics: summer reading

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1:21Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Today, we are blissfully abandoning the news and the real world to talk about something altogether more enjoyable. Fiction.

1:41And we're thinking about what books to take on holiday. What do you plan to read on the plane, on a sun lounger by the pool, or while you, for once, give in to all those screen time demands of your kids? We're talking escapism, relaxation and happiness. I know, not our usual fare. These are the books you want to read, not necessarily the ones you're going to be bragging about or brandishing on the bookshelf behind you during your weekly meeting with your boss. Going under the covers with me are some of the esteemed bookworms of The Economist. Catherine Nixey, our Culture and Britain correspondent.

2:17Hello, thank you for having me. Tom Standage, our Deputy Editor and World Ahead Editor. Great to be here. And from Paris, we're also joined by our culture editor, Alexandra Sewitch-Bass. Good to see you. Today we're discussing Pulp Fiction versus the Classics. What is the value of an escapist read? So let's start. I'm interested in what you mean by a good book. Catherine, why don't you kick us off? Well, it's really interesting, isn't it? This discussion absolutely presupposes that a good book and a book that you enjoy are probably two different things. And the question is, why is that? What is good writing and what is worthy writing?

2:57And what do we mean when we say both? I mean, I love Jilly Cooper. I tried to say that she was a great novelist and it got taken out in an article. It got corrected. A sub said, I'm not sure that she's a great novelist. So why is she not a great novelist? Because I love her novels. But she isn't. She isn't, as you say. She's not one you'd put on the shelves behind you when you're in your weekly Zoom and certainly not in an interview, I suspect. Tom? Well, when I'm on holiday, I do want escapism. And I read a lot of books for work. I read a lot of nonfiction. And so I want fiction and I want escapist fiction.

3:30And it's actually not just when I'm on holiday. I remember when 9-11 happened, my immediate response was to go to the bookshelf and get a Patrick O 'Brien off the shelf for my commute the next morning because I just wanted to escape into some other period of history. And I think that is an example of a series of books that are considered both extremely well-written and escapist and enjoyable to read. So I think there is an overlap. I'm not going to be saying, oh, this summer is finally time for me to read Ulysses. I'm going to be reading things at the more fun end of the spectrum unashamedly. It is funny, isn't it, how it's always Ulysses specifically that comes up with these things.

4:10But you could argue that it's when you're on holiday that you actually have the time to take to read something that involves a deeper read. Alexandra, where do you stand on this? I would very much second that point. Throughout the year, people pile up books that they've either been given or that they bought as impulse purchases. And holidays are the time where you can read them. So I'm the type of person who brought George Orwell with me in 1984 to Turks and Caicos. I brought Hillbilly Elegy with me on my honeymoon. I think that there's no place like the sun and no time like holiday to really escape into beautiful prose.

4:48So I am more in the heavy literary camp on holiday than I am in the escapist camp. But of course, the best books can merge both good writing and escapism. Let's turn to a couple of our colleagues who've recommended their proposed summer reads for us. First, we're going to hear from Josie DeLapp, our Middle East editor. If I were going to recommend books for summer reading, or indeed any time of year, I would recommend Jilly Cooper, specifically The Rutger Chronicles, and even more specifically, the first six of The Eleven. They have the breadth of Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope. They are truly sagas of human nature, but they have the wit and the humour of Jane Austen.

5:39They are funny and they are warm. And I think they offer a really interesting take on human morality and human character. And I think particularly at the moment, that's a truly joyful thing to read. And actually, I want to hear another recommendation straight off that, because I think they relate. From Harriet Noble, editor of our Checks and Balance podcast. I am a great fan of the works of Curtis Sittenfeld, especially American Wife, which I think was the first of her books that I read maybe over a decade ago. I think I was on holiday in France. And her books are so easy to read. But they have these sort of pretensions of grandeur.

6:24So American Wife is a fictionalised account of the life of Laura Bush, the former first lady of the United States. So it can pretend to be of great historical import, whereas essentially it's just like a soapy love story. She kills her high school sweetheart. She falls in love with this guy who turns out to be George W. Bush and is a bit of a roguin, but then comes good in the end. I just can't work out if this is high literature or total trash. So two recommendations there. And I have to say, I am a fan of both of these and have asked exactly the same question about Curtis Sittenfeld. Catherine, I think you've read these books.

7:07Where do you stand on what makes something actually a good romantic novel versus a trashy romantic novel? I think they can be both at the same time. I don't think I definitely don't think it's either or. I have to say, I love Julie Cooper. I dipped into Curtis Sittenfeld and I found it more on the kind of total trash and which is maybe a little harsh. It was one of those books where nobody said anything. They always laughed or chuckled or gasped. It kind of helped you along too much. What is a good book? What is good writing? I think it's where you feel that the person had a thought, thought, what is my thought and wrote it down.

7:42That's kind of what writing is. And because writing looks like it's words on the page, people think that the act of spewing words onto a page is writing. But really the work, that's the final bit. That's what it head. And I like Julie Cooper because I like what goes on in her head or what went on in her head. She's just died, which is this wonderful world of, as Josie said, heroes and villains who live in these fantastic Queen Anne houses in the Cotswolds. But I would struggle to say, even though I tried to write it in a piece, I would struggle to say it's great literature because of that. There are heroes, there are villains.

8:16I think the best books, if you contrast that to say, Hilary Mantel's will fall. Who is the hero? Who is the villain? Cromwell is the archetypal historical villain, and he's repurposed as our hero. But which is he? We would not label ourselves as such. And if you can't see it in life and you see it in a book, it's probably somehow iffy. I wonder if you've hit on something there about thoughts in the head, because to me, one of the things that distinguishes trash versus literary fiction, if we're going to make that distinction is whether the big action is occurring in the head, in the minds of the people there, which gives us this whole insight into their interior, their world, or whether it's just about the action.

9:01And perhaps one of the reasons why romances are rather scorned is because what is the action? Well, you know, two people get it off or perhaps get married or whatever. Alexandra, I'm interested in whether you have thoughts on why romance is rather scorned upon by the literary world. I think the book's world is always a bit ambivalent about commercialism. And so if something has sold well and is on the New York Times bestseller list, you oftentimes hear from literary people that it's not worth reading. I would think that one of the factors with both of the recommendations we heard is how they've aged and how they've aged differently.

9:45And that, of course, hugely determines how future audiences read them. And I read American Wife maybe 10 years after it came out. It was a commercial. It was on the New York Times bestseller list. It came out in early 2009, right after the Bush presidency. And so it was a roman, a clay, that felt very close to the hearts and minds of readers. And I just think the themes it explores of the inner lives of a woman who doesn't have power, who's standing behind her husband, have now kind of been played to death, including with speculation about the current president and his wife and when she is or is not there.

10:22So I didn't feel that it aged as well. I think some feel Jilly Cooper has aged brilliantly. Although I think aging badly can in itself be a virtue. I mean, Alexandra's being very kind to Jilly Cooper there. I think she's aged terribly. I mean, she is outrageously unfeminist. I was reading one of her earlier novels that predate the Rutger Chronicles. And there's a point where a girl says to her father, who is Florence Nightingale, and her father says a lesbian. I mean, it's full of stuff like that. You know, you can spot feminists because they don't shave their legs and you can spot socialists because they drink your champagne.

10:57I mean, she's sort of villainous, but that's part of, if you're going to enter into that world, that's part of the fun. I would completely agree. I think Jilly Cooper has aged terribly, but I'm interested in whether you think today's chick lit can become tomorrow's classic because what is Pride and Prejudice? But, you know, some women desperate to get a husband and finally, you know, what happens in the end? Great, they get it. So where does it all start? It's a really good point. I mean, P.D. James said that Pride and Prejudice is Mills and Boone written by a genius. But I don't think we should throw away that written by a genius bit.

11:29I think that's quite important. I mean, you can read Pride and Prejudice. You were saying sort of what happens. I mean, fundamentally, nothing happens in all of my favourite books. They're all almost all universally characterised by nothing happening. But it's how it happens. It doesn't happen really well. And it happens really carefully. They've thought about what everyone is saying and thinking at the time and they've written it down. And it feels truthful. I don't want to get all Hemingway, but, you know, it feels like it's right. It feels like somebody has had that thought and put it down.

11:57To prepare for this, I was reading George Orwell's Politics in the English Language, and it's an essay where he talks about how bad writing feels like people have just taken together strips of language and pasted them down. And that's what bad writing feels like. You know, their heart leapt. They lurched to the left. You can feel the phrases. They're like, they're not being freshly minted. It's like jamming together fridge poetry. and I think the good writers are the ones who are thinking they're doing that hard thing. Don't you think it also depends on how a reader comes away feeling like whether it was time well spent because something can be very badly written and greatly escapist and you can still feel like it was time well spent and this goes with television too there can also be shows where you feel like you've just consumed junk food and never want to eat again or see another screen.

12:44The really tricky distinction is the division between good trash and bad trash, which is what we really want to know. Now, we've been talking about escapism and what we each read. So, Tom, I thought we would turn next to sci-fi, which I believe is one of your preferred genres and possibly not one of mine, dare I say it. And I've also invited Alex Hearn, our AI writer, as a foil for you, Tom. Hi, Rosie. Nice to be here. But first of all, one of our senior producers on the intelligence, Rory Galloway, wants to recommend a series of books from a sub-genre I am not familiar with, literary role-playing game or lit RPG, where the story mechanics are driven by video game rules.

13:30The series of books I want to recommend is Dungeon Trawler Carl by Matt Dinneman. It's a fantastic series. I'm on book eight already. but it's about Carl and his cat Princess Donut. Carl goes out to rescue his indoor cat who somehow manages to get outside and at that exact moment aliens decide to squish all human buildings into the floor killing everyone inside. Those aliens create a dungeon with 18 floors that Carl and his now sapient cat Princess Donut have to fight through and they go after dungeon bosses and they make loads of friends along the way. It's a sci-fi slash fantasy. it's utterly hilarious the characters are brilliant and it's just complete escapism and I love it so I can recommend it to anyone you'll be on book eight in no time

14:21Rory will probably never allow me on mic again but it sounds like the worst book in the world to me um Alex have you read this book I've not no but I think something that really stands out about lit RPG as a genre is akin to romanticity, because what it offers to readers is the knowledge of what you're getting into. You have a set of expectations that will not be subverted. And that, for an escapist piece of fiction, is really good. It's really useful to know. There is a whole encyclopedia of tropes that this genre builds on that you as an experienced reader of lit RPG don't need explained to you.

14:58And even if it's your first lit RPG book, you as an experienced player of RPG games or even just someone who is aware of that world can kind of pick up and jump straight in. This overlap between gaming and literature, I mean, normally people talk about, you know, gaming is inspiring movies. But it made me realise when I was reading these descriptions of these kinds of books that use essentially gaming tropes to get people to keep turning the page, it made me realise that actually quite a lot of sci-fi is a version of that. If you read Andy we're, that's essentially what's happening. I mean, The Martian is essentially a survival video game.

15:33It's Minecraft or No Man's Sky, but it's a novel. And another example, and we've got one right here, in fact, is Martha Wells' wonderful Murderbot books. A new one has just come out, and I'm saving it for my summer holiday. But these are similarly written in a way that is quite akin to playing a video game. So I haven't read that particular example, but I can sort of see the appeal of it and I think it might actually bleed into other kinds of certainly science fiction and fantasy writing. Can I just ask what does that mean? I don't think I've played a video game since I was eight. What do you mean they're like a video game?

16:05The books that Rory was talking about I think actually tell you the level of the characters and how powerful they are what objects they have and what skills they have and in a video game you start off with no weapons or a very basic weapon and no skills and you gradually become more powerful as you go through the game and you unlock new abilities and you can go back to places and to enemies that you couldn't have defeated before and so on. And so all of those tropes, they start in myth, they get put into games and now they're being recycled into fiction. So I think those sorts of mechanics are familiar to people who play games and maybe don't read.

16:36And this might be a way of getting people who do like playing games, but don't read to try reading. Sounds very much like Pride and Prejudice for the modern world. You know, this is your father's wealth turned into your gaming ability and your skills and superpowers. Alexandra, did you have something to add here? It gets at this question of escapism. We've seen a huge growth in this category of books, mainly on audiobook. Women who are doing other things, men who are doing other things, listen to them. People really praise the voice actors who are narrating the books. And that's why they're doing so well on charts like Audible.

17:15Rory's recommendation is number one in America. right now. So his enthusiasm has tempted me, in fact, to take Dungeon Crawler Carl with me on vacation. That reminds me, actually, the number of people who've recommended Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir's book to me, as an audiobook, is extraordinary because they say it's much, much better than reading the book. The narrator is so good. That brings me to another recommendation from Sarah Larniuk, who's our audio correspondent on The Intelligence. The book I recommend to absolutely anyone who will listen to me and in fact the series, is Red Rising by Pierce Brown.

17:51This book has been out for a while and it's sci-fi which is absolutely not normally my genre of preference. However, it ended up being that I crossed over from fantasy interests into sci-fi last year with this particular book because I just heard so many good things about it and all of it, if anything, was actually underhyped because the characters are incredible. You absolutely fall in love with every single person that comes to the page, whether they're good, whether they're bad. And it is a very escapist type of book. And the series in its entirety really deals with war and the morality of the ruled and the ruling and how to overcome these really intense questions that are prevalent in our society, but it allows you to do it in a way that is fun, engaging, fast paced.

18:42And honestly, I could reread the book again right now. And I only finished it in December. Alex, it's interesting to hear that description and think about this idea of escapism. You're our AI writer. Do you read novels to escape or do you read novels to understand the world or think about what might be possible? Obviously both. I love a good escapist piece of fiction, but yes, for me, science fiction and fantasy does have a real professional element. There is an incredible amount of bleed through from the more ideas-driven science fiction authors to the real world and back. I mean, this time last year, one of the books I picked up for my summer reading was called The Diamond Age or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

19:31And this is a towering work of science fiction by Neil Stevenson, who amongst other things has influenced the real world by being the person who recoined the term avatar in the way we now use it, lifted it from Hindu mythology and repurposed it to mean your reflection in cyberspace. The Diamond Age is a book about a young girl who finds a very valuable piece of technology, which is an automatic tutor, something that teaches her from her life in the slums of Shanghai all the way through into high society. And it is a book that has been mentioned to me in a professional context endlessly. People want to build the young ladies illustrated primer.

20:11They, in education AI, refer to this book as the thing that got them into their space, which is hilarious because this book could also be called Why Building the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer Will Drive Young Women Insane. It is not a book about how it's great to remove human teachers from the education process. It's a book about the importance of human connection. But not everyone in Silicon Valley is great at subtext, right? There are so many other examples as well. I mean, Jeff Bezos created the Alexa voice assistant because he grew up watching Star Trek. He's now got a rocket company. He really wants to make the sci-fi future real.

20:47The same with Elon Musk, big fan of Iain M. Banks's books, has named some of his drone ships after spacecraft in those books. And also Iain M. Banks provides one of the more optimistic views in sci-fi of where AI might end up. So it's not just that sci-fi imagines what the future might look like. There are entrepreneurs who say, I'm going to build that thing for better or worse. There is this very much two-way traffic between sci-fi and real technology. It's interesting, isn't it? Because we talk about feel-good fiction, but actually terrible things happen in most of these books that we're talking about, and yet we still somehow feel good about it.

21:24this is one of the reasons why I don't like sci-fi I don't want that word and that here it is but I think I think one of the things that a good escapist novel does that a good novelist does is that they don't write a book they create a world and that you want to step into it you know the minute you open a Jane Austen even if you haven't read it you know if you've read three you know them all more or less if you've read a Jilly Cooper you step into Russia you step into Blankshire in Jane Austen you step into Dickens's London you know where you are and I think that's it. I think having new ideas is very painful and difficult in encountering new things.

21:55That's why people turn again to Agatha Christie or they turn again to whichever sci-fi writer they like. They like the comfort of it. I think sci-fi can give you both because it is, if you look at the Ian Banks books, they are quite similar, but they're also, each one of them twists the formula in a different way. And that's really, you know, the appeal of sci-fi, certainly to me and to people like me and Alex who are trying to work out what the future looks like, is that sci-fi is actually always about the present and it's trying to work out if you take something that's going on in the world now and take it to its logical extreme what might that look like and so that is a an interesting academic exercise so i think you can have familiarity but novelty and it being baffling initially and trying to figure out what's going on is a big part of the appeal of that genre too alex thank you so much for joining us it's been great to have you thanks for having me

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25:01So we've been talking about terrifying things that hopefully will never happen. It seems a perfect segue to thrillers, one of the other big genres and probably the big genre that people are willing to admit that they take on holiday. Let's hear the guilty pleasure of John Fasman, one of the regulars on this show. As The Economist Culture Correspondent, I'd love to tell you that I spend my summers transiting Cicero or reading Dante in the original, but that's just not true. My first love as a reader was crime fiction, and that's where I always go back to. Lee Child is my current favorite crime fiction author.

25:39He has written 31 novels, most of them featuring Jack Reacher. The conceit is that he is a military veteran and got tired of people telling him where to go and when to go there, and so he just goes where he wants, when he wants, and he roams around America, sort of getting into scrapes. To my mind, there are three things that Child does really well, three reasons to read them. The first, and this is going to be nails on the chalkboard to any literary fiction snobs, is plot. I read an interview with him years ago in which he said the plot in a novel should function like a rental car. It should be smooth and unmemorable, but the plots certainly are a smooth vehicle for Reacher himself.

26:15And he's kind of an odd character. He's not especially likable. He's surly, he's brusque, and he's violent. But it's fun to watch him figure out problems and administer justice. The last thing I love about him, and this is where I think he's really undervalued, is he's a terrific observer of the American landscape. So John mentioned the term fiction snobs then, and I feel like I shouldn't be seen to be looking at anyone. But Catherine, let me turn to you here. I'm interested to know why you think we read. Good question. fiction snobs, I mean, perish the thought. I'm sure there's none of those here.

26:50Why do we read? I mean, there's a million reasons to read. There's to read to be seen holding a book. There's to read to know what's in the book. There's to read to pass the time. We're reading a lot less because we're a lot less bored. I'm really interested in boredom, which is declining, but nobody measures it because it sounds really boring. Why do we think that some books are better than others? I think that's sort of the question. Is there such a thing as a good book? Loads of people have written about this. So Philip Larkin wrote an essay called The Pleasure Principle, where he said, the only reason to read is because you're enjoying it, more or less is what he says.

27:23And he wrote his poems when his friends were going to the pub on the principle that if it wasn't more enjoyable for him to write a poem when his friends were going to the pub, then it wouldn't be more enjoyable for someone to read it rather than going to the pub. And there's a Virginia Woolf essay where she says, how should you read a book? And she says, you know, in everywhere else in life, if you're told what to do, in books the world is your own, is Hamlet better your choice? Having said that.

27:51What's the question? Are some books better? Why do we read? Some books are better. Speaking of some books being better than others, our next recommendation is a thriller and you should take note of this suggestion as it comes from our world-renowned defence editor, Shashank Joshi. The book I'd like to recommend is The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy. And I've got my trusted copy right here. No one has ever confused this for a work of great literature, but it is a fantastic techno thriller. In fact, Tom Clancy almost invented the genre of techno thrillers because it's a really pacey account of submarine warfare, of a disaffected Soviet submarine captain, Marco Ramius, probably best known for being played by Sean Connery in the subsequent film, with a terrible, terrible Russian accent.

28:43But this book was not only a fantastic thriller, it was also incredibly realistic in so many military ways. In fact, when Tom Clancy, the author, met the Navy Secretary under the Reagan administration, he was asked, how did you get so much classified information? And of course, it wasn't classified. It was all just painstakingly pieced together from various open sources. but Clancy had a really, really good grasp of undersea warfare, even when he was straying into some more outlandish ideas, like the book's idea of a secretive caterpillar drive system, the Soviet submarines. I think it still stands the test of time.

29:19Submarines are still absolutely critical to modern warfare. They're still part of the great game between the superpowers under the Atlantic, under the Pacific. And The Hunt for Red October is probably one of the best depictions of modern undersea warfare that we have had in the last 40 or 50 years. A serious recommendation from Shashank there for an oldie but a goodie, an author known for his fast-paced, highly readable thrillers. Alexandra, it strikes me that we're being told all the time what to read. You know, there are all these bestseller lists and of course, the lists of the 100 best books, books to read before you die, etc.

29:59So many. As we speak today, we're preparing to put out The Economist's best books list of the year so far. The Guardian just put out 100 best books and somehow put Middlemarch as the first, which I think shows you part of the problem with some of these lists, which is that these lists are a reflection of how people want to be seen is readers. And so with the Guardians list, it's publicly available where people ranked their books and what their top 10 was. So I think rather than putting any of the commercial or genre fiction that we've been speaking about, people put books like Middlemarch and name authors like Proust as being the top.

30:37But of course, these lists are completely imperfect exercises. You have human ego, you have how people want to be seen. And of course, you have the bias of previous lists. And we encountered that when we tried to put together an article looking at how long it would take you to read the best books of all time. We did that by looking at a list of other lists to try and come up with a more definitive list of the best books. But of course, it's a completely imperfect exercise that's, of course, so personal for so many people. Wasn't expecting to be in this position, but Middlemarch is a really good book.

31:13I feel like we should say that. Middlemarch, really? and they'll not be in my top 20. I even read it on holiday, although admittedly in the dim and distant past when I had much more relaxing holidays with fewer people demanding my time. I love this idea that reading is an area where you've got a lot of control. But I think there are other parts of our lives where we also don't have to just pick one option. There are different kinds of travel you can do. You can go for two weeks by the sea versus a very intensive cultural weekend somewhere. You can eat food in different ways. And I think reading books is the same.

31:47I had never read any Jack Reacher books. And earlier this year, I thought, you know what? I've never read a Jack Reacher book. I should just read one because people say they're really good. And I did. And I was very impressed by it. It was good fun. I might read another one at some point. But I was just curious of what it was like. But that doesn't mean that I can just read that. I was the last person in the world who hadn't read Wolf Hall. So last year, I read Wolf Hall. I enjoyed that very much as well. And then I'm going to spend my summer reading sci-fi, basically. So we don't have to pick one.

32:13and we can choose, just as we do in lots and lots of other areas of our lives, to, you know, try different things at different times. I believe it's just possible there are a few people who also haven't made it through Wolf Hall to the very end, dare I say. Thank you so much. It's been great to have you here. We'll put the link to all of these brilliant books into the show notes. Alexandra, thank you from Paris. Thank you. Catherine, Tom, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

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