Ask Us Anything: Anniversary Mailbag Edition

17:45Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I think just to yes and that a little bit, you can force function yourself a little bit by finding, say, the American Film Institute's top 100 movies and just watch them. You know, Some people like to watch them in a row or make little pieces of paper and put them in a bowl and get out of the analysis paralysis by sticking to it that way or use random.org and just try something. I think I am not an expert in film. I'm a much more amateur fan of film. I like to think about movies, but I don't have the same background by any stretch of the imagination that I do with books. But I think some of the similar things can be applied.

18:24Rebecca Schinsky:I think look at structure. look at what is said what is not said i mean i i do think it's a little bit more translatable if you read listen see with a critical consciousness pay attention to detail and start connecting details and you could do that with painting you can do that lyrics you can do that with movies all of them are based on sort of the same inductive reasoning model where like what is in this thing and how to put them in combinations together i think one thing that's different about film versus books is I would tend to follow the director if you like something. It's more of a director's medium.

19:01Rebecca Schinsky:So you might look for that. Sometimes a screenwriter, if the screenplay is especially, you know, verbal or something like that, or you find one of the great ones and you want to go run down, say, William Goldman's or some other great screenwriter, do it that way. I haven't found a film podcast that does what Zero to Well Run does. I don't even know that I'm a candidate for it. I will say we both listen to The Big Picture on The Ringer hosted by Sean Fantasy and Minda Dobbins. I really like them. They do mostly new movies, but sometimes they'll go back into the catalog. So if there's a new movie out there, you want to hear some talk about, that's really good.

19:36Rebecca Schinsky:The thing that they don't do that I miss is they don't really talk about ideas. I mean, that's not really a slam, but they're much more interested in the actors and what worked and it's more like a review kind of a show. It doesn't do as much of getting outside of whether we liked it or what the box office was to say, what are the immortal questions that are asked? You know, that part of what we do doesn't really exist there. They sometimes will do a little bit of history or background on that author or the people in it. It tends to be much more actor focused, which is the way most people consume film.

20:13Rebecca Schinsky:Likewise on The Ringer though, So if House of R, hosted by Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson, does a movie episode, I will listen to that. They did a summer of Christopher Nolan around the Odyssey. And they do a much longer researched background situation. Joanna Robinson wrote, I can't remember, it's called the MCU, but it's about Marvel, like the making of Marvel movies. She's got a book coming about the Harry Potter phenomenon, Warts and All. And there's a little bit more warts than hog in dealing with Harry Potter these days.

20:45Jeff O'Neal:What a phrase, Jeff O 'Neill.

20:47Rebecca Schinsky:But I really trust her to do these things carefully. And she's a former bookseller and she's a good reader in her own right, Joanna Robinson. So if they do a movie episode, it's usually like two and a half hours long. They really get into it.

21:00Jeff O'Neal:Those are deep dives.

21:01Rebecca Schinsky:A whole bunch of passion. And again, I don't do every one, but it's a movie I'm interested in. I'll do it that way. But I don't have a zero to well scene or whatever the cinephile version. I was kicking around in my head.

21:11Jeff O'Neal:I was waiting for Jeff to stop talking. Retirement projects for us. Right. Excellent. Well, this one should be maybe an easy one for at least one of us. What bookstores, Katie wants to know, would you recommend for visiting during a first trip to New York City? I mean, you got to go to the Strand and then I'll kick it to Jeff.

21:30Rebecca Schinsky:I do think I have to go to the Strand. Yeah. Well, say more about that, Rebecca. What is the Strand? Where is it? Why is that the first bingo square?

21:36Jeff O'Neal:It's enormous and historic, like takes up what almost a whole city block, several levels, a mix of new and used books, which is increasingly hard to find in independent bookstores. And I mean, there's a rare books room if you want to be fancy and then you can find all sorts of random copies of stuff like you can spend a few hours wandering around the Strand and not get tired or not run out of interesting things to see. cool merch. It's just iconic. It's just an iconic New York bookstore experience. One of the things I love about New York bookstores is that there's also one for every specialty.

22:14Jeff O'Neal:So if you're into something, go find the specialty bookstore. New York has a whole bookstore dedicated to books about food and cooking and cookbooks. And that place, like that is my mecca. That is such a fun field trip to go on. So I think it really depends on, do you just want to like tick the box of going into as many indies as possible because you can totally do that or do you want to have kind of a specialty experience yeah i think that's a great

22:41Rebecca Schinsky:tip um one thing rebecca and i probably it um gets us some demerits on our book nerd bingo card is we are not huge go to the local indian store just because reason because we've been to a lot of these and we love indie bookstores and they serve their communities well but as a visitor like i've kind of seen most of the books. I'm not usually generally surprised. I'll go back to my hometown Raven bookstore when I'm in town and spend some money there. I think that's a great point. One that is especially notable for New York because of Broadway and theater is the Drama Bookshelf. 39th in Manhattan.

23:14Rebecca Schinsky:It was somewhere else for a while. It had some funding problems. I'm just sort of going off the dome here. But then Lin-Manuel Miranda got behind an effort to save it. And it's something you're just not going to see. It's all plays. It's all scripts. and that's very cool and it's in Midtown it's not hard you don't have to go sort of in the middle of Queens or something to go to on that side if you want a New York City bookstore experience that is sort of like Disneyland but of indie bookstores the McNally Jackson at Rockefeller Center is a wonderful beautiful bookstore that is in the middle of Midtown I don't know that it's anybody's local bookstore there's McNally Jackson other place in the city that maybe locals go to but it is beautifully sighted it's extremely well curated It's well lit.

23:56Rebecca Schinsky:They have a huge collection. You can go up and down the stairs. That's when I'd say. But if you want, I don't know, walking along kind of a cobblestone street, even if it's not actually cobbled, it's cobbled in your mind. go check out three lives in the village which is this beautiful local bookstore that has like gold embossed letters on the awning overhanging the corner in this beautiful little street and you're going to want to take a picture and feel like maybe you're in you've got mail or something else like that and they are excellently curated as well it's extraordinarily expensive neighborhood now i do not i wonder if they own the building of the largest or somebody else but I'm so glad that three lives still exist.

24:36Rebecca Schinsky:So that's kind of, and then the Strand. I don't know if I've told the story on this show. Maybe I'll save that for a different day. But when I moved to New York, I dropped off my bags at the hostel I was staying in, waiting on student housing, and took the train to go to the Strand the same night. And I didn't know where I was going. And I ended up in the middle of a gay pride parade, which I was like, wow, New York is a lot different than Kansas. It's like this every night. No, it was Pride. A whole New York experience. And then I walked across to the Strand. It was open until 11. It was like this beautiful kind of cloudy night.

25:06Rebecca Schinsky:I was like, oh, my God, this is it. This is it, baby. This is a wonderful experience. This is the stuff.

25:11Jeff O'Neal:Also, for this listener, first, the kitchen bookstore, the cookbook store, it's called Kitchen Arts and Letters, if that's interesting to you. The New York stores tend to get tons of great author events because of New York being the center of publishing. So you might also just like pull up a list of the stores that are going to be near you on your trip or that you're willing to go to. and look, especially going into the fall big book season, and then just go see some author events. Jeff and I went kind of by accident to see Jennifer Egan at The Strand a couple years ago. It's famously very difficult to get either of us to go to an author event for the same reasons that it's difficult to get us to just wander into an indie bookstore.

25:52Jeff O'Neal:I've seen this. But we were in town for work. We were just looking around and I was like, Egan's going to be at The Strand. She was in conversation with Ramana Lam. It was really fun.

26:03Rebecca Schinsky:Mm-hmm.

26:04Jeff O'Neal:So just like let yourself access the whole literary experience of being in New York rather than I think making it about a bingo card of bookstores. My 32nd anecdote here is that on my first trip to New York as a teenager, somebody asked, knowing that I was a bookworm, I have wanted to go to McNally Jackson. I heard McGraw-Hill, which I remember from like textbooks. I was like, why would I want to do that? Educational publisher. And I didn't go.

26:25Rebecca Schinsky:You're like, this is a tough hang, the lobby of this corporate office building. Idiot.

26:29Jeff O'Neal:You didn't go, Vanessa. Regrets. I didn't go. Yeah. Anyway, moving on to a question from Liz H. She says, can't get enough of the pod. It's a great place to help her revisit classics. So she's gotten into Gatsby and Odyssey, but has noted that she has seen a lack of fantasy in the feed. Got into the Twilight episode. There's great things to say about that episode, but would love to know if we're going to be covering fantasy. It's something that they gave us a suggestion of authors they would love to see. Yeah. And then as a sidebar to discuss, a comment that she made that I would like to hear somebody's thoughts on is, I think, unfortunately, Twilight and the ripple effect of the romanticy craze has made it even harder to defend fantasy as a serious genre.

27:08Jeff O'Neal:Oh. Go. Okay, well, as the keeper of the calendar.

27:13Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah.

27:14Jeff O'Neal:Yes. Let's start with our picks first, Rebecca.

27:17Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah.

27:17Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, we will get to some fantasy. it's tough with the ones like when you're listing off author names instead of specific titles that is telling like the big series can be a thing but when like Ursula K. Le Guin is more known and I think we've talked about this on a past episode she's more known as like the universe of Ursula K. Le Guin than a particular title kind of similarly for like Brandon Sanderson with Tolkien like I believe The Hobbit is having an anniversary next year so that's probably going to appear on the show. N.K. Jemisin, it's certainly award-winning and we'll get to the Broken Earth books or at least the first one of the trilogy here at some point.

27:57Jeff O'Neal:We take it seriously. I think maybe the inverse of this question about what really recent romanticity and fantasy trends have done to the perceived seriousness of fantasy, I actually want to flip that on its head. It's just that for most of publishing's history, fantasy books that are deep genre, standalone fantasy have not been taken seriously. And that's not cool, but it's true. And really, it wasn't until the internet democratized the conversation about books and forced mainstream media, like forced the New York Times to start covering genre, forced the big publications, and then there were this whole economy of smaller publications like Book Riot that wanted to talk about genre, talk about all genres or bring the communities around specific genres out into the light, that those began being taken seriously by sort of general capital L literary readers.

28:55Jeff O'Neal:Just an unfortunate part of publishing's history and kind of the ivory tower of it all. So I'm not really worried about like how Twilight has impacted the long-term seriousness of fantasy. I'm not concerned about what romanticy is doing to it now. And the books that are like literary fantasy that are winning the awards within that genre like stand quite solidly as serious examples of it that we will take seriously as well. I think because of that whole history, it's been more difficult for science fiction and fantasy books to break into the echelons of readership that you kind of have to cross a certain threshold to be a zero to well-read candidate.

29:38Jeff O'Neal:What do you think, Jeff?

29:39Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I'll start with the last bit of that first. Why do you care about defending fantasy as a serious genre? That's not rhetorical. Like, to whom? On the internet? To people you know? Okay, sure. Don't worry about that. The books will hold up if they're going to hold up. So that's the thing. I wouldn't worry about that. I also think maybe the thing that's hard to remember now is that before there was Twilight, you're 26, so you're young, right? You were 11 or something when Twilight came out. It's not like fantasy was taken seriously before Twilight. Am I misremembering something, right? I mean, we had Tolkien and who?

30:18Rebecca Schinsky:You had the biggies. George R. R. Martin. Well, I'm even going back old. It's like Le Guin and T.H. White, the once and future king. There just wasn't that many at the same time. So I don't think fantasy not being taken serious is other genres. And then it's sort of twin that it gets put in the bed with. Sci-fi maybe a little bit more. Because often sci-fi, we've done more of that or near future dystopia. Fahrenheit 451, Never Let Me Go, things of that nature. 1984. They look to a not yet but possible version of the future to talk about ideas and fears and, you know, trends. When you go backwards, that doesn't happen quite as much.

31:02Rebecca Schinsky:There are ideas in these fantasy novels. I think it actually takes more sort of intellectual work to see where the politics and the culture ideas are happening. But it's not as readily apparent. And ergo, it doesn't become, you know, you don't think of a fantasy book as being political in the way that, say, Handmaid's Tale or, you know, the books we've talked about, though I think they can be, right? Tolkien wrote his work as a response to World War I and the horrors of war. But that's not how most people read it. More people read it because of it, but it makes it a little bit less of a candid or less front of mind for people when they're talking about serious literature that's about stuff to see it that way.

31:43Rebecca Schinsky:So I think we're gonna have a really good time. I'd also say the Odyssey is fantasy, right? It just is. It's early fantasy. So we've done a couple, but I think we'll do more in the future. The other thing is we have a bias against not fantasy, but doing the first book in a series where you kind of need to read the whole series to get the thing. you know my brilliant friend shenanigans or hot takes aside but like jemisin three consecutive hugos four books in a giant series that's a bit of a tough ask for us and for a reader like we're going to do the first one and either we're not going to read the second two so that we don't know how it ends or how to talk about it or we are it's just a huge lift but something like say left hand of darkness by ursula keoghan we will get to at some point we will get to the hobbit at some point.

32:34Rebecca Schinsky:We will get to something by most of these authors at some point, I would guess. But like Brandon Sanderson, where do you start? And Rebecca's point about how people might know the name before they can name something is super interesting as a phenomenon here. But thanks for writing in. I guess it's also worth saying, Rebecca, and this is how it works, we're not huge fantasy readers ourselves, right? Just in our own personal lives. And so that can, you know, that's just us. We're idiosyncratic in that way. So we will be dipping into a bag at some point. So we hear you, we see you, and there'll be more, but I can't promise that the worm is going to turn on like the mix, like of the ratio, right?

33:20Rebecca Schinsky:It's going to be overrepresented. It's probably be one out of 20 sounds that might be about what we would do in the future i'm not sure

33:29Jeff O'Neal:thank you and then this is a sidebar hopefully like a 30 second answer but they mentioned that you have and i guess you've we've talked about the mont rushmore of opening lines have you actually compiled any of them or would you ever do like a fun bonus for that i think we'll we will do a bonus episode on yeah at some point i know the ones that we've name checked on the show are 1984. 1984. It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were ringing 13. Beloved. Oh, no, it's Beloved is what? Oh, 124 was spiteful is the beloved one. The bluest eye is quiet as it's kept. Yes. Paradise by Toni Morrison is they shoot the white girl first.

34:09Jeff O'Neal:Fahrenheit 451 is it was a pleasure to burn. I think those are all the ones I had already. We're ready.

34:16Rebecca Schinsky:We will do this at some point, and we might be spoiling it here. I think there's actually fewer here that people know than you might think. Sure, I think so. Because we've done these, and Rebecca is a huge, incapable Morrison reader and rememberer. But beyond those, the most famous line is probably, call me Ishmael, the first line in literature. Probably something like that. Or is it truth universally acknowledged that a young man with a good fortune must be one of a wife? Yeah. Or it was the best of times. it was the worst of times from the tale of two cities but it's not like there's 50 deep i think if we did if you got into like 2023 you'd be like i don't know that line um when we was 13 my brother jem broke his arm just above the elbow that's i mean that's to kill a mockingbird that's like the book most people have read yeah but that line itself is not super famous yeah yeah and closing lines are even tougher so there's something here um and maybe it's more fun to be like okay what opening line is this really opening with?

35:17Jeff O'Neal:That's our next trivia game for Vanessa to come on and do some first lines with us.

35:22Rebecca Schinsky:Is there anything else, Vanessa, anything lines that are off the top of your head that you know? I don't want me to put you on the spot.

35:26Jeff O'Neal:No, those are the ones I was going to say. I mean, I have plenty I could list that I just don't think are more obscure. So yeah, and then Pride and Prejudice just seems to be the one that gets thrown around. Low energy, unfocused, foggy. You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero Powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body with a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration.

36:01Jeff O'Neal:Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist. I didn't like what you said, Odin pauses, about the future. This is the love story of real hinge couple Odin and Edward,

36:13Rebecca Schinsky:written and read by me, Curtis Garner. Listen to the free audiobook now.

36:20Jeff O'Neal:Well, we do have a fair chunk of questions left, and we're going to plow through these in about another 30. So let me get us going. Again, we know who we are. So this one's more about reading habits. So someone's asking, Callie is actually asking, because you read so many classics across time for Zilderwald Red, and then lots of current and new fiction for Book Riot, at least that's the perception. How has basically Zero to Well Read prompted you to read more backlist aside from homework for Zero to Well Read or do you feel it's done the opposite? Oh, it has not prompted me to read even more backlist.

36:52Jeff O'Neal:Like prior to Zero to Well Read, and I don't think it has for Jeff either. Prior to Zero to Well Read. This is our backlist reading now.

36:57Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, this is, yeah.

36:58Jeff O'Neal:And like quiet as it's kept, one of the reasons to do the show is to have an excuse to make big, great old books in with all the front lists that we pay attention to for our other work at Book Riot. So I'm reading less front list now than I have in past years because about half of my reading, like 50 books a year, is going to zero to well read now. So no. I think it has changed how I think I will read. I don't know, if Book Riot evaporated tomorrow and I didn't have to pay attention to frontlist anymore, I would be more motivated to be picking up the classics and going back and like filling in the gaps of my literary education than I was in previous years because it's been so pleasurable to do this.

37:44Jeff O'Neal:Oh, that's great.

37:45Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, same. Almost exactly the same. I have nothing to add there. I guess maybe just a yes and the thing Rebecca said, I think this probably is closer to my retiree reading mix, you know, like that I imagine someday. That is, And most people read mostly backlist. So there is something to that at the same time. I think having done this long enough and being who I am, and I'm going to break out of it the same way too, we will probably still be paying attention to the books that are coming out because we want to hear about the Marlon James and Emily St. John's or the New Tenerife Views of the World.

38:17Rebecca Schinsky:We just did the It Books of September over in the BR pod. I'm still fascinated by the ongoing conversation about literature. I do not want to get calcified in sort of museum reading with my life. But something where you're moving back and forth between what's current and what has stood the test of time feels like a healthy balance.

38:36Jeff O'Neal:A little mix. Yeah, I agree. Our next question is from Genevieve, who's been working through lots of classics over the past couple of years and is still having some time with staying focused while reading, especially with the kind of idea of getting distracted and wants to know if you have some advice for finally putting the phone away to limit distractions and really immerse yourself in your reading.

38:56Rebecca Schinsky:Can I do a close reading of this? So the actual phrase here is I put my phone in D &D and really try not to look at anything else, comma, but I find myself still getting distracted. The passive construction of I find myself still distracted here is where I want to focus on what is distracting you? Where is it coming? Is it your phone still? Is it the TV? Is it so I would really look like, OK, your phone is in D &D. It's in the other room. Let's say that's our scene of reading. Maybe that's part of it, too. In the other room or upstairs or whatever. Turn it off because it takes a while to boot that little bastard up.

39:28Rebecca Schinsky:then what is distracting you? And then you can kind of do like an elimination diet, right? Like, okay, my phone's in the room. Is it the phone? Is it the laundry? Is it that the TV is right there? That would be my practical device. Make yourself the agent of your own reading life and put yourself in the subject position, not in the object position when you say I find myself getting distracted.

39:49Jeff O'Neal:There is research that shows that if your phone is within your eyeline, you are distractible, whether it's with a book in your hand or whether it's having the phone like on a coffee table or at the dining table when you're out at a meal, like do not leave your table or don't leave your phone on the table if you want to have a conversation that you're invested in. So I think put the phone in a different room is great. I see in this letter also that the person is thinking about getting the brick and I will sing you the song of the brick all day long, like no free ads, but the brick is great. I need to be reachable by family for, you know, aging parent reasons right now.

40:26Jeff O'Neal:So like phone fully in D &D in another room is not completely available to me. So the thing that I have is a combination of customized D &D settings on my phone where like only a couple numbers can break through and send me notifications. I turn the phone upside, like face down. I sit it away from me where I could hear it buzz, but I'm not actually seeing it. The screen can't light up. And then I have the brick set where like if I were to pick up my phone to do something random, I can't access the random things that would distract me without walking into another room to unbrick my phone. And at that point, it's not worth it.

41:03Jeff O'Neal:So that's been that was a game changer for me this year. One of my goals was just to try to break the habit, just the unconscious habit of when I pick up my phone to do something useful, doing the useful thing and then ending up doing something unuseful. and the break has been really helpful for that.

41:22Rebecca Schinsky:One last thing on that. I would expect that for the first N units of time, it's going to feel like you're getting distracted, right? It's like a detox situation where it's not going to go. Just because you stop doesn't mean it's going to feel fine all the way. I don't even know. I wonder if there are studies out there, Rebecca, around people trying to do a digital detox where their active sonar for what might be going on their phone, even if it's in the other room sort of becomes quieter in their mind.

41:49Jeff O'Neal:I'm sure there is. I'm sure there's data on that. Cool. Next question here. Noel asks, how do you get so much reading done? How many pages are you reading in an average day? With all the different books you're reading, do you assign yourself segments of various books to finish each day or are you reading one book straight through? How do you do it, Jeff?

42:07Rebecca Schinsky:I have no plan. I don't know how many pages I read in a day. With zero to well read, I find that if I've, I usually start it three or four days before we're going to talk about it. And I read up until, I like to have it really fresh in my mind. So I'm reading up until really the day before, the night before. And then, you know, I put my notes in. I look at my highlights. And then the morning of, generally, I'm synthesizing the notes and making some observation. Rebecca does the lion's share of the agenda prepping. So outside of what do I need to get this done by the Thursday night before a Friday recording is really the only planning I do.

42:48Rebecca Schinsky:And depending on the length of the book, it could be shorter or it could be longer. We're in the middle of a real chunkster right now, so it gives me a little bit of time. But then for the other front list reading, for the Book Riot Pod in our front list, unless we're doing a book club episode, we don't have assignments there. That's not how we do coverage. And so that just filters into the other parts of my reading life, reading at night or in the morning or kind of as per usual. So I don't know if that's a sign of a mature reading life or a naive one, but that's how I get my reading done.

43:21Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, mine is also relatively unstructured. Like, I structure the show. I try to be pretty mindful about that so that if we've got a really big book, the thing we read after it is pretty short. So like, we'll go from, I don't know, Arushdi into Bartleby the Scrivener or something like that so that we have a little bit of a break and those breaks on the zero to well read reading give us more space to do whatever we want in front list. That's really going to get put to the test this fall when the front list is just totally stacked. There are so many books coming out this fall. But I do a little reading in the morning.

43:57Jeff O'Neal:I do most of my reading in the evenings and on the weekends. When we have quieter workdays, I never was a workday reader before Zero to Well-Read, but sometimes I'm sneaking in an hour with Steinbeck this afternoon because I don't have a call, and that book is 600 pages long, and I am but one woman. So it really just depends. But I think it's the same. Like, we don't have any secrets or any magical powers that anybody else who cares about books doesn't have. Like, we're looking for the spaces in our days, just like everybody else's. Well, Lisa is wondering what you actually do with all these books that you're buying for work or for pleasure.

44:35Jeff O'Neal:Talks about how, you know, Rebecca often discusses the way she annotates in her copies. And so they're wanting to know, like, do you keep the books you've written forever? or like she's actually asked, is it okay to donate books that I have like marked up all kinds? Yeah, it's totally okay to donate books that you have marks in. Like Goodwill or wherever you're donating them will decide what to do. Like a used bookstore probably doesn't want something that's super annotated. Yeah, but you can donate them like, you know, women's shelters, shelters for unhoused people, like little free libraries.

45:07Jeff O'Neal:There's a ton of places where like folks don't mind if there are some notes in there. that book is yours to do with what you want. I do most of my reading digitally. I read most of my front list galleys for work digitally. And then if there is a new release that I love and I know I want to have on my shelf, I will buy it in hardcover. So the books I'm reading in print are really just the zero to well read books. And I'm keeping those in different shelves because who knows when I'm going to want to refer back to something or pull out my pinch on and see what my notes were. But I don't really feel that attached to the book as object.

45:42Jeff O'Neal:I went through a big purge several years ago and got rid of like a thousand books when we took some bookshelves out of our house to make space for some other things. And I kind of like that my collection is limited to how much bookshelf space I have now. So I go through every couple months and pull some stuff off. And I'm like, I've had that book for 10 years and I'm actually never going to read it again. And let's be real. And I will pull stuff off, just like weeding your closet to make space for a new shirt or a new pair of shoes. I'm weeding the books to make room for new ones.

46:15Rebecca Schinsky:I'm kind of the opposite. I do most of my zero to well-read reading digitally and most of my front list reading in print, either library or books that I bought. The reason for the digital reading is I have found no equivalent to the workflow of I'm reading and highlighting sections of the book for zero to well-read. I export the whole thing as a big document with 50 or 100 quotes, and I don't have to transcribe them or do anything else. They're just ready for me to rock and roll. So I have an embarrassment of riches to choose from when it comes to our favorite quotes. I usually look at that to go back and fill in the portions of our agenda that's about what's it like to read this, what are the big ideas.

46:50Rebecca Schinsky:I'm working inductively from what I've pulled out that way. It's much harder to do by hand. I wouldn't do as much by hand. I don't have the time to do it that way. Yeah. And then most of the books I have already. And then for front list, I like to have, again, my front list reading now is precious enough to me that I like to have the book on the shelf. But I will, like Rebecca said, go back and weed through stuff, donate to library, sell back to a used bookstore. What am I going to do with my 13th most favorite book of 2011? you know yeah at some point you know unless you're kind of the person where every book is special and like the whole the idea of even giving one away is a problem for you i think you'll find over time that maybe some of those you could let go i would also say this i think the question behind the question about donating your annotated copies is it's also okay to recycle books if it's really banged up if it's really recycled it is okay to put it in the recycling um because i quiet as it's kept to quote the Morrison that Rebecca quoted, most of those books that you're going to donate to Goodwill or to a little free library, they're going to go there anyway.

48:04Rebecca Schinsky:And that is okay. That is not the same as Fahrenheit 451, people. It is not the same. Right. And libraries do it. Free thyself.

48:11Jeff O'Neal:And bookstores do it with mass market paperbacks. They've got to go somewhere, guys. They've got to go somewhere.

48:15Rebecca Schinsky:So it's okay to let it go.

48:17Jeff O'Neal:You won't be struck down by the book gods. It's going to be okay. No, you won't. Kristen, I just wanted to say thank you for sending in your question. And it was about how, you know, Jeff and Rebecca's reading habits have changed since reading for the podcast. And I think we've answered that in a couple of different ways. So we're going to go ahead and go that one. And I hopefully that your answer, your question got answered in a few different other questions. So Justin then asks, how do you feel about spoilers? Basically, we're really appreciative of that delicate balance and how difficult it must be to want to communicate these important parts about books, but also not give them all the way away.

48:48Jeff O'Neal:how you know something like Shakespeare is a good example where like they don't care something is spoiled because it's more about the execution so just how in general do you feel about spoilers both I guess in like how you spoil content for people or how you feel about spoilers for yourself

49:04Rebecca Schinsky:well I'll go first on this Rebecca because I think I'm of multiple minds about this I know that'll shock everybody to hear that um if it's something I haven't encountered before if I haven't seen the movie or the play read the book I really don't want to know the spoilers because the experience of it is that was sort of the original version of the reading experience for people would be to go in and not know what's happened and the surprise and you know Rebecca reading the road I think it mattered it would matter to you if you knew what the last four pages were yeah if you were reading the whole thing 20 years keeping myself pure for the road right pure for the emotional the emotional impact of what does or doesn't happen and that's an extreme example, but I think that can be aluminum in its own way, is part of the reading experience that you can only have once.

49:51Rebecca Schinsky:You cannot do that again if you knew this before. You're never going to have that experience. So I want to preserve that as much as possible. I think what we try to do on the show is as we move through the episode, if you're sticking around, you kind of know you're wading in deeper waters. And if the spoiler chart gets you at minute 51, that's on you. Because as you say here, Justin, to talk about what a book does, we're trying to address multiple audiences. Some people have and some people haven't read the book. And maybe some people that never will, but they want to know what the deal is anyway.

50:22Rebecca Schinsky:You are inevitably going to go into spoiler territory. But for anyone that is thinking about reading this book in a serious way, I think not knowing what happens, use this new meme of spoilers, whatever, not knowing what happens is part of the reading experience for something. That's just part of it. And I want to preserve that for people and for me.

50:41Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. I mean, my personal preference is the same. And to go back to the movie question from earlier, if I'm going to go see a movie or I've heard it's interesting, I want to go see it as early as possible, experience it, you know, sort of it's raw in its raw form, and then kind of synthesize it myself and then read and listen, like read some reviews, listen to people talk about it, try to make more sense of it. But I do think there's value in like we most of the books we're talking about are pretty old. And when we're talking about a book that's 20 years old, like I don't think spoiler alerts are part of the conversation anymore.

51:16Jeff O'Neal:Like this book has been out for 20 years. You can Google it. People talk about it. Even Gone Girl. Like you can't talk about a book like that without talking about what happens. But we acknowledge in the conversation. This is the big twist. It's like you can sort of preserve your own purity around it if you want to. But I think it's interesting and really it's been fun to hear from listeners who find their way into books that they never thought they would approach because they heard the spoiler-filled conversation and that unlocked something for them of like, oh, maybe this will be interesting for me.

51:47Jeff O'Neal:Maybe it will be accessible for me. So I think it's important to talk about the whole thing. But as a listener, I would wait until I had read the book. Great. Teresa has a question that we can hopefully give a short-ish answer to so we can also answer others because you kind of already answered this, Rebecca. Right, right. Is that basically asking how do you approach, and this is assuming, again, that you want to approach it because I know how Rebecca feels about books she doesn't dig or doesn't like the premise of. But how do you approach a book that for whatever reason you've already kind of formed a negative opinion about?

52:19Jeff O'Neal:They were shout out to the fact that they too had feelings about the Ferrante because I guess the cover really put them off and they feel like they bounce off of books when they have those preconceived notions. I mean, life is short and there's no list of books that you have to read. So I kind of feel like if a book has put you off for some reason, it's fine to just stay off of it unless or until you run into a compelling reason to try it. I don't think that we really need to spend our one wild and precious life talking ourselves into reading things. If you hear a conversation about My Brilliant Friend, I don't know, an episode in this very podcast that makes it seem like, oh, it is beyond that.

53:01Or maybe that's a place where you can challenge it of, you know, you're just stuck on something like the cover.

53:06Jeff O'Neal:So go read a couple reviews or get some data that will either confirm your suspicions or challenge them. And then if it challenges that, you could think, oh, maybe I do want to try that. Maybe it's just a book with a bad cover. But this is just not something that I would spend a lot of emotional cycles on, I don't think.

53:26Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, since there's nothing that you have to get to, you can always pull the ripcord. But here's what I would say. This is a you problem, not the book problem. The book did nothing wrong here. So what are you interested in trying to do? Because if you're interested into it sounds like you're interested into being a more capacious reader of like sloughing off this and getting through to the other side. In my experience of dealing with my preconceived notions about a book, I think I'm not going to like the best cure for it is to read the damn thing because usually they're going to frustrate them.

53:57Rebecca Schinsky:You say here that you're going to start nitpicking them. Okay, well, what would we do in sort of behavioral therapy? Look for what's good. right sort of write down for yourself what you think the thing is going to be get that out of the way and then as you go highlight the things that surprise you that that confound your expectations because i think what the question behind the question here is can i get out of myself enough to enjoy these things that have baggage that they didn't necessarily earn but it's also a wonderful task for you yourself to do can you do this can you sort of shed the the sort of the weight of your ego, your expectations, and get to another side.

54:36Rebecca Schinsky:One reason people have transformative reading experience in a course is because they have to get through the damn book, right? That's true. It's a good point. There's something to have to get through the damn book that will surprise you. And how are you going to grow as a reader if you're just reading things that are frictionless to you? I don't know the answer to that.

54:52Jeff O'Neal:Maybe like an anthropological lens. I do this a lot with the big pop culture phenomenon that we take on for the Book Riot podcast where I'm pretty sure I'm not going to like where the crawdads sing. But some people really loved it. Enough people really loved it that we needed to talk about it. And so then it becomes a task of what is there in this that makes people so, like, what are people excited about? What's interesting here? And maybe you will just find that your preconceived notions are totally wrong and you discover something that you love. But maybe even if you don't love the book, you still end up with a skill set of what is this doing?

55:25Jeff O'Neal:I like that. Also, try reading it with a friend sometimes because then at least you can kind of spill tea about it together. I felt that it's helped me. So anyway. So now we're getting into the getting kind of personal section, which is only a little bit that way. But Heather, if you can, I don't know if we've ever answered this anywhere else, but basically we wanted to know a little bit about both of you and how you got Book Riot started and what your careers looked like before.

55:45Rebecca Schinsky:Oh, man. This is a whole. We've done this other places. I wish we could link to it. I know. Do we want to do this? Is this office hour territory?

55:56Jeff O'Neal:Okay.

55:58Rebecca Schinsky:The synoptic queen. Do 60 seconds on this.

56:01Jeff O'Neal:I think the 60-second version is Jeff was a literature professor. I was supposed to be a clinical psychologist and had dropped out of grad school. We were both writing book blogs in the early 2000s when book blogs were huge. And we became friends through that online. We were commenting on each other's blogs and then chatting on Twitter. In 2010, he and a college friend, Clint Kabler, who's our COO, had the idea to get a bunch of book bloggers together and put a business model behind it. So they came up with the idea for Book Riot. They started tweeting that this thing called Book Riot was coming.

56:37Jeff O'Neal:I did not know who these people were or what they were doing, but it sounded like something I wanted to be part of. And I DM'd them and was like, hey, maybe you want to hire me.

56:45Rebecca Schinsky:One of the great raise your hand, just raise your hand moments I've ever personally been witness to.

56:50Jeff O'Neal:And then through that, found out that Jeff was part of it and that we knew each other online a little bit and had met, I think, one time in person at Book Expo. And Book Riot spun up and kind of the rest is history. I'm going to stop anyone from answering more because I'm going to say if you are a Book Riot person in any way and follow the stuff we do, we are coming up on 15 years of Book Riot this year. And you may or may not be getting more of this flavor of content. soon. So that is my, yes. Vanessa, yeah. I know how easy it is to say that. Oh, you might have been talking about Rebecca. I'm just being shady.

57:26Jeff O'Neal:Let's move on. So this one kind of already got answered, but maybe quickly is just wanting to know how many books y 'all have in your personal collection libraries. I think we kind of got to this based on like the, I try to keep a limited shelf and that's what fits on it. Any other thoughts? I have no idea. No idea. Couple hundred. You've got a few boxes of them sitting at the office.

57:45Rebecca Schinsky:I got some, yeah, stuff. But I've got a huge wall of book, a bookshelf wall in our great room in our house. And that's, I've got, I try to, I don't like a jammed up bookshelf sort of aesthetically or ontologically. I like to have some room for new stuff. So I try to keep some of that open. I actually don't, I don't have any idea how many are up there. That's a great wall, by the way. Yeah, it's quite beautiful.

58:08Jeff O'Neal:No, it is. I've wanted to steal things, but I have not. I probably wouldn't notice. I know. So two fun things to take us out because we're running short on time here. One, I just wanted to share this as more of a feedback. Not even, well, yeah, feedback. So Hailing or Hailing, I'm not sure how to pronounce my apologies, but just noted that they were listening to the Hitchhikers episode and that y 'all were pondering how other languages might handle made up words like Pandalactic Gargle Blaster. Oh, I remember this conversation, yes. And so that person is a native Chinese speaker and essentially went and figured out like what an equivalent might be and then approached, like if I didn't speak English, like how would I translate this word?

58:43Jeff O'Neal:and it would be translated as Pan Galactic Mouthwash Dynamite. And I really like that. That's almost better. Yep. So that's just, thank you so much for that.

58:52Rebecca Schinsky:Mouthwash Dynamite is the name of my first EP that I'll be releasing.

58:56Jeff O'Neal:That gargle turned into Mouthwash. Oh man. That's a real,

58:59Rebecca Schinsky:it sounds like a Beck lyric from, Beck lyric from like 1997.

59:04Jeff O'Neal:Bless a nerd. That's incredible work. That's an amazing, amazing. That's like when one of my, an author that I love, she had a book called Gross Anatomy and then the Russian translation translated to body trash. And I just really loved that. Felt similar. Shout out to Mora. And then if we have time for this one, maybe squeeze it in this last one. And this is from Rebecca. Her name is Rebecca for Rebecca and Jeff. Borrowing from the New York Times. If you had a fabulous dinner party with wine flowing, chill tunes, and a Michelin star chef, which I don't know why that matters, but I do dig that the food's going to be good in this scenario.

59:34Jeff O'Neal:What writers would be on that guest list, alive or dead? Anthony Bourdain, Tony Morrison, James Salter Marilyn Robinson how many people are at my table? Is she Guru? Colson Whitehead? Can I come? I'll serve the hors d 'oeuvres Jeff is over here staring into the ether I don't know what this says about me but I don't want to do this I don't want this

1:00:03Rebecca Schinsky:I had money on that being your response I really don't want this I mean there's a lot of people I'd like to read In my experience of going to a book event or something, the value over replacement time of just reading their shit versus hearing them talk about it or be interviewed is a negative value proposition to me. So unless I'm getting to like Homer because I know they exist or something or like Shakespeare, what's the deal with you? It'd be journalistic rather than the hang.

1:00:30Jeff O'Neal:Shakespeare, what's the deal with you? Come on down to dinner. I don't know.

1:00:35Rebecca Schinsky:We're going to Rebecca's house. I don't like that. I don't like that. That's my answer. Is that weird? I don't like that about me.

1:00:40Jeff O'Neal:I think we all knew it was going to be.

1:00:45Jeff O'Neal:Well, that is a lot. We got to almost all the questions. I feel the ones that we didn't, I feel like we did organically kind of get to them in other places. So I feel like I've done my duty for the day. Thanks, everybody, for writing in.

1:00:56Rebecca Schinsky:You do it, Rebecca.

1:00:57Jeff O'Neal:I'll do the closing. Yeah, you always have to say zero to well-read 400 times. I do. It's like semantic satiation at the end.

1:01:02Rebecca Schinsky:It doesn't mean anything anymore.

1:01:04Jeff O'Neal:As always, you can go to patreon.com slash zero to well-read for our guided readalongs. We are just kicking off the East of Eden readalong. Get in on that. Other membership options and special bonus content, you can follow us on the socials at Zero to Well Read Podcast. Email us, zero to well read at bookriot.com. Thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season. And as always, Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Thank you all for an incredible first year.

1:01:29Rebecca Schinsky:Thank you. Thank you, Vanessa. Of course.

1:01:37Bye.