How to Get More Out of Your Reading, and More From the Mailbag

16:59Rebecca Schinsky:Another tactic you might do in newsletter, Subsec has a better directory. That's what I'm saying there. They just have a better directory. But if you search for an individual book you're interested in, sometimes that will then discover, you'll discover posts, individual episodes from which the rest of it could be about.

17:17Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, this is also one of my hacks when researching the show is as I'm on a Wikipedia page for something and there's a little footnote citation next to it, go to those articles and then maybe go through the things that those articles cite. And that can get you to a critic or a publication that is doing what it is that you're looking for. Great suggestions. Thank you to Shaylee for that question. We're going to move on to some questions about reading habits. We have one from Bianca who says, how do I engage even deeper with my reading besides annotating and asking the text or author basic questions?

17:49Jeff O'Neal:They want to kind of think deeply about the text in front of them and remember more than just the main themes and ideas. I love this question. I have a question for Bianca right back. What do you do? What are you doing with your annotations? I think find some way to synthesize the thinking that you've done as you've read. So when I'm preparing for an episode of the show, I read all the books for the show in print. So I'm marking stuff on the pages. I'm making little notes in the margins. And then when I'm finished, I sit down and I go back page by page and I sort of transcribe over the notes that are useful.

18:23Jeff O'Neal:In doing that, you start to weed out which things you marked are actually meaningful and which things just seemed like they might be at the time. And then turn it into some kind of finished product. It can just be for you, but I think a reading journal is a great place to do this. Our friend and one of the original contributors of Book Riot, Greg Zimmerman, just wrote on his sub stack, which is called the New Dork Review of Books, about the 25th anniversary of his reading journal. And when he's not blogging, he just takes notes about everything that he's read. Obviously, it's ideal, like, if you can find a friend that you can have those conversations with, or the book buddy that I've pitched on these episodes in the past, like, maybe you don't need a whole club, you need one person who will engage with you about this stuff.

19:07Jeff O'Neal:But I think it's finishing the reading process and then doing something that approximates, like, a classroom of your own. Write yourself a couple paragraphs about it, or put it in a reading journal, or think about how you would describe and explain this book. You can even take the framework we use for the podcast and run your book through that. What are the essential questions or the immortal questions that Art asks? How would you rate this on the elements of the zero to well-read score? What does it feel like to read it? What are the big ideas? What do you think, Jeff?

19:39Rebecca Schinsky:Those are all great. I have a couple of additional ones, too. I would also then maybe deny the premise in which you will ever be able to fully formulate your thoughts on any of these books. That's why we're still talking about them. So I think I may live with the struggle of never really feeling like you wrapped your arms all the way around Vineland or something like that. If you come back to it 10 years later, even if, Bianca, you wrote a really beautiful 5 ,000-word disquisition on your opinions, your feelings, your interpretation, my guess is 10 years later, that's going to be meaningfully different.

20:14Rebecca Schinsky:So your understanding is going to evolve over time. So maybe don't put so much pressure on yourself to like get the answer, to digest it. It's like, here's what I take out of the Great Gatsby or what it means to me. That's going to be sort of like Heraclitus says, you never step into the same river twice because the water keeps on flowing. Now, having said that, I think capturing your thoughts, your questions, your inquiry at that time is very valuable. I maybe would turn it on his head and rather than – journaling is great. But what questions do you come out of the book with? Right? So rather than shut it down, open up.

20:50Rebecca Schinsky:Okay, I'm reading this and I was thinking this. Or I'm wondering about this got me thinking about this X, Y, or Z. And those things then you can help remember then maybe you write a little answer to that at that moment. A little why it's interesting, why you're having difficulty with that questions at the same time. I think we have been taught, and I don't know what your own educational background is, Bianca, like the five paragraph essay where you have a thesis and body, body, body and conclusion. we're not in that business anymore usually especially in the era of llms which right that way it's like one question leading to another the other thing i would suggest is put it in constellation with other things that you know about it could be a book it could be a movie it could be a tv show but like put it in context then you can start to see it through some sort of stereoscopic kind of vision at the same time but rebecca's initial thing what is my initial thing is like, okay, you've done this annotating, then what?

21:43Rebecca Schinsky:That's just the raw material. But there's other ways of capturing your feeling at the moment of time, but also not suggesting you're chiseling on a stone tablet or something like that.

21:52Jeff O'Neal:That's great. Thank you again, Priyanka, for that question. We have another one from Katie that is the most common question I've ever... We get a lot, but it's a thing that readers just always think about, and that's great. But it's just asking, how do you track your reading? Do you do Goodreads? Do you do Storygraph? Do you have the chaotic system I have? yeah and also do you use bookmarks or do you dog ear your pages like a monster how dare you katie

22:17Rebecca Schinsky:jeff you want to take this one first um i have a google doc and i've been keeping it for 10 years at this point then i have like a paper thing from before that so i don't do a lot of the more sophisticated things some people do where they're tracking like genre and page numbers and my mine is very instrumental that's just so i can remember what i've read A, so they don't try to read it again. But if I'm buying a gift for someone and we're doing a roundup on a show, just kind of keeping track of it so that I have access to it, because I will forget some of the stuff that I've read at all. Not what's in the book.

22:48Rebecca Schinsky:Clearly, that's gone. But that I even read the book is still something I need to capture at this point. It's just a Google Doc. Then I'm not in bed with one of these platforms. I know people like them, but I'm not really into that. So I don't do that at all. I think, Rebecca, you're probably similar. We don't touch the platform.

23:04Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. I also have a spreadsheet. It goes back to 2013. And it has expanded and contracted over the years. There are some years that contained a lot more variables about what I was reading. Now it is title, author, the number of pages, and then I keep track of the gender of the author and am I reading enough authors of color against my personal goals. So it's quite simple now, but for the same reasons that Jeff was citing. Every book lover has had the experience, I think, if you're at a party or someone asks you, like, what have you read lately? And it just, they all disappear from my mind. Like, books, what are those?

23:42Jeff O'Neal:So being able to pull it up, but it's especially useful for preparing things for the show or like when we're nominating our favorite books of the year for the site, that kind of thing. So it really is just for me as basic as a spreadsheet. I think I have enough social interaction around books thanks to our staff and colleagues and the bajillions of hours that Jeff and I have spent talking to each other that I don't feel the need for social networking around books. To answer the second part of Katie's question, I generally don't use bookmarks. I do dog ear like a monster or leave my pen in the book at the place that I stopped reading.

24:20Jeff O'Neal:Or if it's French flaps or a hardcover, I will like put the flap in. Yeah. But I'm not precious about my books as objects. So, and Jeff, you're doing a lot of e-reading for this.

24:32Rebecca Schinsky:I use bookmarks for zero to well-read. I use e-books because I can just highlight the quotations and export them all at the same time. And then I find that probably for me, when it comes time to filling in the what does all mean was like to read this, I'm really looking at my quote document as my raw material. So I sort of do some inductive psychological, emotional reasoning out of that at the same time too. I'm a big believer though, when it comes to something you're going to want to capture, a lot of the books I read, I'm not really trying to capture. I'm just getting through them at some point.

25:01Rebecca Schinsky:But if you come back around to, I'm going to make a project out of this. I'm going to write about this. I do believe in a reading copy too. I do have first editions and hardcovers that I don't want to mess up. I'll just go buy a paperback, a used paperback and I'll use that a reading copy. So that's not uncommon for me to do. But now, weirdly, unless you're really collecting things that are going to be valuable someday, what I have found immensely useful is my reading copies from when I was teaching or when I was a student now are my most precious versions because they've got my notes and shit in them, right?

25:34Rebecca Schinsky:So like, you know, I think probably, again, if you're a collector, most of us aren't collecting books that are going to be worth a whole bunch of money someday. The thing that is not replaceable is your own notations, your own thoughts, your own underlining of Seneca when I was 15, which is hilarious to go see what I was underlining of Seneca at 15. That is not replaceable. That's worth more to me than, you know, keeping the book in tidy form. I know other people do this, but the book as object does not matter that much to me except when it does. And I try to separate that. Like these books matter to me as objects.

26:09Rebecca Schinsky:I'll keep them there. but most of my library is a it's a it's an active area it's like the foyer to my house i'm never gonna expect all the shoes to be put away or all the umbrellas to be put up exactly right that is a battle zone and the best use of that is for it to be a little shabby but also for it to

26:24Jeff O'Neal:use it um so that's how i think about yeah i totally agree with that like and for the show i end up buying reading copies of things that i have already in my personal library because it's like, I'm going to mark the crap out of this book. But I've got like my copy of Sula from college that I've now read half a dozen times. I have to change pen color every time I read it. And it's fun to see that. When I took Paradise by Toni Morrison off the shelves right before we had Namwali Serpell on the show, a bunch of note cards fell out of it that had been tucked in the back since college when I was studying for the test.

27:00Rebecca Schinsky:Amazing.

27:00Jeff O'Neal:And like all that stuff is so fun to find. But yeah, I think I think of the books and like I did famously write a piece for the site several years back called Books Are Not Sacred Objects. Like I think of books as delivery devices, their tools and getting those ideas into my head. And I want to utilize every bit of that as as it suits me to to process it. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Thanks again to Katie. I feel very seen by Shannon's question, which is one posed to, I would argue, all three of us being that we all have a four in front of our age. It was like, what is your go-to reading position? They asked this.

27:36Jeff O'Neal:This part I love because it's a misconception. How does a professional reader read all day comfortably? And I was like, so funny thing. That's something you can address. But it's like, I think we're a similar age range as the two of you. Do you find it difficult to concentrate as eyes change as we age? So yeah, lots of questions about like, how do you read positionally? And then again, just bodies. Jeff.

27:57Rebecca Schinsky:I am both old and big. So I have a double whammy here. My answer is I move around. Me too. So I don't usually stay in the same position for very long. When it's nice outside, my ideal is on my porch in one of my cheap plastic chairs on the porch. I am mostly reading for this show on the iPad, which I can just, I don't have to hold it. I can just set it in my lap or I can put it into the landscape mode and I have the cover turns into a little stand where I can sit there and I can just swipe. And I find that anymore to be, and this goes to the question about eyes here, I can change the font size.

28:29Rebecca Schinsky:So it's very accessible to me to do it that way. I find it the most pleasurable, I guess, for lack of a better term, to read a hardback in my hand. That's what I think of when I think about reading. But instrumentally, it is more efficient for me to do my iPad when I'm sitting up in a chair and balancing it on my lap or on the wide arm of a chair, and I could just sit there and swipe. And then I can also highlight with one hand, and I don't have to my pen and all the other stuff like that. I do find it difficult now to find the right distance for my eyes as I've gotten older. I'm wearing my readers right now.

29:06Rebecca Schinsky:I also don't really love a progressive lens because then I end up doing this thing where you're looking down your nose at things all the time. So I do have a dedicated pair of reading slash computer glasses that I should not be driving in or watching TV in, but that's easiest for me rather than bouncing through three prescriptions in one frame at the same time. We also don't read all day. I can't really spend eight or nine hours a day reading, just even comfortably. But my kind of like a lot of things, after about two hours of serious reading, I think I'm not as good at reading after two hours.

29:40Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, the brain gets full.

29:41Rebecca Schinsky:I start to get foggy. I start to skip. I start to wander. And so I think like a lot of things, I find this true of most things, like a couple hours of it at a time and then switch context or even just take a break for a little bit longer. And this has been true of me. I don't know about you guys, but I've never really been able to sit there for eight hours straight. I could do a few three hours over the course of the day if I'm really ambitious, but I'm not reading nine hours straight in a day.

30:05Jeff O'Neal:Even when I talk about something having been a one sitting read for me, like Go Gentle by Maria Semple earlier this year was, what that really means is I read it over the course of one day, but I was on the couch for a while and then I ran some errands then I came back to it. And then I got up and did some chores, and then I sat back down with it. I need that break. Just to put some numbers to it, because we don't read all day, most of what we're doing is not reading during our workdays. I probably, on a typical day, read for half an hour in the morning with my coffee. I might, with zero to well-read, sneak an hour of reading into the workday when we don't have a bunch of calls, and then maybe another hour in the evenings.

30:44Jeff O'Neal:There's a lot of time on weekends. We have a big sectional couch, and I like to sit with my legs out in front of me and a pillow under my knees. And we got to make sure the hips are supported. And all the things that you're doing when you're not reading become really important. Also, we're just in our 40s. So there's a lot of stretching that happens in my house. But I think this is kind of similar to what we were saying in the previous question about books being instrumental. I don't do a lot of romanticizing my reading life because my reading life is so practical for my working life. It's like romanticizing my liver.

31:20Rebecca Schinsky:It's just part of it.

31:22Jeff O'Neal:Right. So it's usually like the hair is in a messy bun. There's a pen in my hair. I do have the book in my hands. We're just getting in reading time wherever we can and then taking walks and doing chores and trying to be a person who's moving around. I have reading glasses in every room of the house now.

31:40Rebecca Schinsky:I need to do that. I need to have pens and reading glasses and Advil, just like geocached around my house.

31:47Jeff O'Neal:I got tired of like having to go to another room, just buy cheap readers. And like, whether it's your coffee table or your bedside table or your desk or like I work at the island in our kitchen a lot, I just want them to be right there. And it does get difficult to concentrate after more than an hour or two also because of, you know, just eye fatigue. So take it easy, Shannon.

32:08Rebecca Schinsky:I've always been immune to sort of the aesthetic reading scenes that people like to glorify. And I don't know if it's on social, whatever, because if I'm really in the zone, I kind of don't even remember where I am most of the time, right? The timer is like my back. The timer is not like my tea cozy or my, you know, the perfect thing I've laid out. So it's extremely instrumental to me as well. I've always been able to read really kind to anywhere except in a moving car. That's a disaster zone.

32:36Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. My personal ideal is on a plane with the white noise of the plane happening all around me. And I just live in perpetual denial that plane Wi-Fi is a thing. I'm getting on that plane. I'm ignoring reality. The white noise is going to put me in the zone. That's where I want to be. I love that. I mean, I famously do romanticize reading from time to time. And even I have a two-hour romance cutoff. What does that look like, Vanessa? I'm just a person who loves a vibe. Like, I think I talked about this last time on the show, or it was on the book, Right? Mailbag. But, like, I will absolutely turn on the silly little fireplace thing or, like, music.

33:09Jeff O'Neal:I don't like quiet, quiet. I never actually have. Like, it doesn't bother me per se, but I like a little bit of ambient noise. So I'll put on some – it has to be somewhat related to the book. Not related, but I don't want to listen to, I don't know, like, something super upbeat if I'm reading a horror book. So I'll just kind of match it because I love that kind of thing. I do love a little bit of ambiance, but even that is only like, okay, we're going to do that for a couple hours, then I'm going to get up and go for a walk. So I mean, just got to do whatever feels right to you is my general feeling.

33:35Jeff O'Neal:But man, the body absolutely dictates the position and like how long for most of that. So yeah, this is another place where like, just a quick shout out for the Spotify page match feature, which has gotten really good. Like I've tried it a couple times with nonfiction and memoirs, where if like you're really into it, but you just cannot be sitting that long, like bouncing from the written copy to an audiobook to take a walk or wash the dishes or whatever is another way to keep your reading time where you want it to be without your body suffering. Great. We have one more question of this kind of category, and then we'll move on.

34:10Jeff O'Neal:And I think we can keep this one relatively brief, and though it is like a big question, just because I think we all know how to answer this, at least I think knowing you too. And it is just asking, and this is Hillary, How do you maintain reading as a pillow of your life during a big life change? Specifically, she's asking because she just had a baby a year and a half ago. And she's like, hey, it's changed my life. And I'm trying to feel like myself. Reading was a big part of my identity. What are your thoughts on that? I'm going to pass this to Jeff because I don't have kids.

34:36Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. I had something not dissimilar when our son was born. And for me, it was making audiobooks a part of my life. That was the simplest thing for me to do at the same time. But like anything, you may have to make time for it in a way you didn't have to make time for it. I remember I said something on the BR pod a long time ago that a listener wrote back a really long email about saying, you know, I don't rewatch movies anymore. Right? Because I don't really have – well, I have the time. but I'm not choosing to use the time that way anymore because my kids have taken up gloriously and for a short time taken up a lot of my time.

35:18Rebecca Schinsky:But then you've got to find other ways to do it and you may have to be more intentional than you would before. I will say this too, if you had a baby one and a half years ago, it's not always going to be like it is right now. A one and a half year old is a lot of work and they're going to be a lot of work. They're always a lot of work, but you're going to have more time come up. You're going to have more energy and attention come up. So this is not forever where you are right now. It doesn't mean it's going to go back to the way it was. But zero to like two and a half is a pretty hard time to find time for something like reading, which is silent and still most of the time and takes a certain kind of attention and alertness that you maybe aren't having right now.

36:01Rebecca Schinsky:But you also might say, this is my time, you know, kind of like the yardbirds by way of the Bible say, for everything there is a season. And it might be for this season, you're just not reading as much. And that's okay. You might keep the fires burning, the embers aglow. You know, read for pleasure a little bit more. If you were more of a classics kind of reader, a hardcore history reader, I don't know what you are as a reader, Hillary. But you might just sort of get through this time with whatever's fun. Keep that muscle available to you. Throw on a podcast about books. We have a lot of people that don't read as much as they'd like to, but they listen to us talk about books and that can scratch kind of the same edge.

36:38Rebecca Schinsky:It doesn't do the same thing, but it can keep you feeling like you're in the game and you're not completely devoid or detached from an intellectual or philosophical aesthetic kind of experience where you don't have the juice right now. And that's okay not to have the juice for a little while.

36:52Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I think I'll just add that anthologies and short story collections are a good hack for this. They have been for me in other seasons of life where reading in an extended or more deeply engaged way just wasn't available. But maybe you've got enough time for a 20-page short story or a 10-page essay. The Best American Collection is a great place for this. You get to take in some of the best short stories and essays of the past year. You could go pick up a bunch of the past years. And then that's also a way into discovering writers that you love. And when you are ready to do book-length, detailed, long work again, you can pick up their full-length books and check them out.

37:36Jeff O'Neal:But I think flexibility about what it means to be a reader, like just because you're on a drier season doesn't mean you're not a book person anymore. And giving yourself low friction, low effort ways to reach for books or to feel engaged and connected is at least that's what's worked for me in the past. Yeah, I always say the books will always be there. It's fine. It's my big takeaway. You come in and out of it and it's OK. But thanks for that question, Hilary. All right. So we're going to move on to some different kinds of themes. We have one on genre that I'm really interested in as a person who used to not read this genre and now does.

38:11Jeff O'Neal:So they have their own opinions. This is from Jessica. But she would like to know what y 'all consider sort of relwed mandatory for contemporary horror. And I don't actually think either of you read much horror. So this may not be a question for me. I think this is obvious.

38:23Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, this is easy to me unless I'm misunderstanding contemporary horror. We've talked to enough authors that say they just say Stephen King over and over. It's so important for so many. You know, Stephen Graham Jones and like all kinds of people. So probably, you know, pick your poison. I don't know. Like, it is the one that I think people have read the most, but you can do The Shining. Like, pick a Stephen King, one of the big ones. And so, you know, I think it was Hemingway that said American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn. I think American Western English horror as we know it has come out of Stephen King and we're going to be living in the Stephen King shadows for as long as those those generations that grew up in the 80s having access at their public library and just pulling them off the shelf and scaring the living bejesus out of themselves.

39:08Rebecca Schinsky:Like most of the horror. I would be shocked if there weren't major horror writers or even middle-class horror writers that don't have Stephen King at the number one of the list of like why they became a horror writer.

39:18Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I think that's the number one with a bullet answer. And it's not just horror writers. Like, we just recorded an episode about Colson Whitehead, and Stephen King was huge for him. Like, a lot of the writers who were doing literary things but exploring genre, really anybody who came up in the 70s was reading a lot of Stephen King. I just pulled it up on Goodreads. The Shining is his most popular with 1.7 million ratings, and then it comes after that with 1.3. So those are probably your two biggest ones. But I think really, yeah, pick your Stephen King and get in there. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great one.

39:54Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. Adding to that, as far as like contemporary canon, and it's people who absolutely I've heard cite Stephen King, but you said the Stephen Graham Jones. I think Mariana Enriquez is like a really interesting because she's really representative of that wave in Latin America. Tanana Reef Du. I could go on, but yeah. So A, Stephen King, and then all the people that cite Stephen King, there's lots of great ones out there doing work to diversify the genre. So I think those are some good places to start. Yeah. I bet a Google for writers inspired by Stephen King would take you down some interesting paths.

40:21Rebecca Schinsky:It would just have all the writers. It was a list of all the writers.

40:24Jeff O'Neal:The Venn diagram is a circle.

40:26Rebecca Schinsky:The Venn diagram is a circle. A real weirdo on our next, this is a strange, this is a weird person.

40:32Jeff O'Neal:I really, really loved, I was like, oh, okay, I understand what's happening.

40:35Rebecca Schinsky:I just included that for fun. You don't have to read that.

40:36Jeff O'Neal:No, I know. And it was great fun for me. The beginning of the question, I was like, okay, cool. So it says, hey, I really enjoyed the Emily Wilson episode. I always admired the English accents. How do you invite your guests to your podcast and do most of them accept? And before you answer, I really loved it. The next part was like, by the way, so-and-so's fire damage is turning out to be more than expected. I was like, wait, because this is from Jeff's dad.

40:55Rebecca Schinsky:This is from my dad.

40:56Jeff O'Neal:Hi, dad. Hi, dad. Hi, Jeff's dad.

40:59Rebecca Schinsky:Dr. Lynn O 'Neill piping in. How do we invite guests to our show? So this is both, I think he was listening to Zero to All Red, but he's also heard us on the BR pod at the same time. How do we do this, Rebecca?

41:09Jeff O'Neal:It happens in a couple of ways. Typically, we have landed on somebody that we think would be interesting for a reason. Like we knew the Odyssey was coming out. We knew we were going to do an episode on it. We thought it would be fun to talk with Emily Wilson. And we are currently working in a mode where rather than have an author on while we are analyzing their book, we want to have them on to be an expert about something related to their book. So it was like, well, let's talk about how to approach those kinds of books. In the nitty gritty, I email someone at the publisher if I can get directly to that person's assigned publicist and say, here's what we're looking for.

41:46Jeff O'Neal:Sometimes it goes the other way around where the publishers know about the show and they will say, hey, this is going on. Do you want to have this person on? For instance, Namwali Serpel had her own podcast called Passages on Morrison that was coming out that Penguin Random House was promoting. And the podcast person over there emailed me and was like, hey, this seems like a good fit. Would you like to have her on the show? And of course, we were delighted. In terms of do most of them accept, we have not issued that many invitations for Zero to Well Read because the show is so new and we're figuring out the ways that we want to incorporate guests.

42:22Jeff O'Neal:But most of the ones we've invited have said yes. The ones who have said no are very, very fancy. And I have not taken it personally that they've said no. And then for the Book Riot podcast, almost everyone that we invite over there says yes. And we're tending to invite people that are subject matter experts on certain topics that on that show, it's more like, oh, this is just really interesting, this work these people are doing, and we think our listeners would be interested in it as well. There's a little bit more flexibility.

42:49Rebecca Schinsky:it's funny br is to the the place where it is and it's it it we can get almost everyone we would want except the ones we can't uh right like there's like the very like most famous authors or that like proper celebrities that have a book may not be available to us but there's like there's some people that are doing in a new yorker profile or they're doing the new york times or they're doing the Today Show or something like that. So we've had a few say they're too busy. Some people come back around. We also don't do that much of just wanting to talk to an author of a book. We'd rather just read the book and talk about it, honestly.

43:26Rebecca Schinsky:For first edition, when I was doing that, I would say I'd get about 85 % of the people that I was interested in, but I was also kind of self-selecting a little bit at the same time. So there are some people that we've read and loved and talked about their books, which I've invited, and they've said, not for us. I won't name their names because it doesn't matter. But it's kind of like 95 5 % of the people we could get, I think, at this point. But there's 5 % that might be tough.

43:48Jeff O'Neal:I think that's about right. Like, this show is a big fish in a pretty small pond. Like, Zero to Well-Read is pretty consistently in the top 10 books podcasts on Apple. We're one of the essentials. It's trending. Our downloads make us, like, in the top 1 % of all podcasts. All podcasts, not just book podcasts. But that top 10th of a percent are huge shows doing, like, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of listens per episode. And those shows can get the tippy top of authors who are going to go on to, you know, like Armchair Expert or Ezra Klein or NPR Fresh Air, that kind of thing. And often the folks at that level, like they're busy doing those kinds of things and they don't have space in the calendar for something else.

44:31Jeff O'Neal:Maybe we can get them when the paperback comes out. Maybe we can get them in between books. Like we're kind of playing with that. Can we get somebody when they're off cycle? But yeah, in terms of like a straightforward author interview, you don't hear us do those because everybody else does them. and we're really looking for a fun way in.

44:47Rebecca Schinsky:Vanessa, I did you dirty. Let me do the next one here because it's a nice big long one because I had a specific thing I was going to pull out and I realized I didn't do it for you. So this is from Betsy, writing about my brilliant friend. And her critique is that we didn't read the whole series, all four of the novels in the series, that we were close to getting it and to get the whole thing, we need to do a whole thing. Again, I'm not going to tell you to feel differently about it. Here's my thesis statement on why to take it as one and why I don't feel the need to do all four at the same time.

45:17Rebecca Schinsky:A, she could have written all in one volume. War and Peace exists. Moby Dick exists. If you wanted to take them all as one, you could make that artistic choice or you could have fought your editor or whatever to make that artistic choice. So we're going to read them as presented. The second one is, that was the one that gets read the most and it was number one on the list. It wasn't number two. It wasn't number three. It wasn't number four. And take it as it is. Now, does that mean I have completely in my mouth the whole project? No, but we weren't talking about the whole project. We were talking about that single book on its own.

45:47Rebecca Schinsky:Does it change if you read them all? Yeah. Does Huck Finn change if you read Tom Sawyer and Connecticut Yankee and the King Arthur Court? Yeah. Does your understanding of any one particular book change if you've read everything else? Yeah. But I think I'm going to take it as read for this particular one. If you're going to write a novel in parts, it should say part one. I just am going to think that way. And it doesn't. So I'm taking as it is.

46:10Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I think also I've seen some comments on that episode about My Brilliant Friend where people like they should have brought on someone who really loved the book. Like, we don't know where we're going to land on it until we read them. I think you had read My Brilliant Friend first. I had not read it. We are reading and then we're recording an episode. And these shows are trying to do something different than the like, let's all just celebrate this for people who love it. You can hear it in the Twilight episode, too. I think in many of them where we're like, here is what it feels like to read this.

46:39Jeff O'Neal:For me, especially with my brilliant friend, it was really challenging to get outside the weight of expectation from all of the accolades that that book has received. And that's something that a reader who's going to it today is going to run into. They might not have run into it when the book first came out, but we're going to talk about our experiences of it. If we both really hated something, I don't think it's going to make the list, but we could make an interesting episode. We've had interesting conversations about books that we both really hated before, but the goal of the show is not to explain ourselves or validate why people love a particular book by going out to find somebody who loves those books when we just happen to be like, I think we both really appreciated My Brilliant Friend.

47:24Rebecca Schinsky:My Brilliant Friend. I don't think it's the number one book of the century so far, but that's one man's opinion.

47:28Jeff O'Neal:Right. Neither of us was in like all caps, exclamation points, Muppet Arms mode about it. But that's just not what we're trying to do here. And I understand it can be a bummer if you loved a book and you don't hear one of us reflect that back. But that's not the goal that we're working towards. Yeah.

47:46Rebecca Schinsky:And we talk about Gilead or something like that. Like we're taking the book on its own terms and that's a book that we love, but we're not like, you've got to read all four of them because it stands on itself. That's something that's just part of the authenticity of it, personally. Yeah. I think we're, even something like, I think probably the hardest book for us to get through jointly, Rebecca, Tomovara was Wuthering Heights. It was.

48:05Jeff O'Neal:Man, I suffered.

48:06Rebecca Schinsky:But we're looking for some way to engage with that's interesting, enriching to our own experience and helps other people have some context to like get something out of it, understand for themselves, even if they're not ever going to read the book by themselves. And it's just not going to be the case. We're going to love everything. And I think also inherent to that is a thesis statement about what we understand to be well read means, which is you're going to take seriously things that aren't in your comfort zone, that aren't your cup of tea and do something other than I didn't like this. That also means you're going to do something other than I love this.

48:36Rebecca Schinsky:So that's what we do. Yeah. Nope. But I hear you. If you read them all, I guarantee my reaction would be different if I read all four of them. I'm not guaranteed it's a bit better, but I'm willing to entertain that like, you know what, now that I see the fatality of the thing, I love the whole series better. But I am going to stick to my guns in this regard of like, it was one book, and it was presented as one book. And as one book, it is what it is.

49:00Jeff O'Neal:yeah and this is my person by the way who genuinely loves the podcast which i appreciate so yeah it's just that's the way it goes i can part of my appeal to the show and why i volunteered to do more work to do on it is because it is a very authentic approach to reading which is this like if the only reason you're reading a book is because you're convinced you have to love it and that that's just never going to be a good like i think you're going to be

49:19Rebecca Schinsky:frustrated with the you're going to be frustrated with the quote-unquote great

49:22Jeff O'Neal:books if you do that yeah like you're just going to be like what do

49:25Rebecca Schinsky:people get out of these things i hate this book Am I broken or are they? And the truth is, neither is true. Legally, we can't say drinking Storm makes you smarter and more focused. But with zero sugar, 200 milligrams of caffeine, and immunity support, you're smarter and more focused for drinking Storm. Storm, good energy in, good energy out. Energy for life.

49:47Jeff O'Neal:Well, the rest of our questions are definitely from folks who all have, again, either some, not feedback, but suggestions for read-alikes that are either asking for read-alikes or are offering read-alikes. from our many, many, many episodes. The first one is, I don't think we have a name for this person, but they asked specifically about braiding sweetgrass, saying they really, really enjoyed that one, that it resonated with them, and that they loved a book about the Canadian forests called When the Forests Breathe, saying that it's not like an exact comp, but that it does spend a lot of time, you know, engaging in some of the similar themes.

50:16Jeff O'Neal:So is there anything else you'd want to add? They did want to put at the end as a shout to Rebecca that they also read the overstory and thought that they were unique in their opinion, that it wasn't that interesting. So yeah. Yeah. Any other thoughts on Braiding Sweetgrass? Richard Powers is overrated. Fight me. Ooh.

50:30Rebecca Schinsky:Ooh. And maybe we can... Oh, go ahead, Rebecca. You go first.

50:34Jeff O'Neal:I was going to say, I just appreciate this recommendation because I remember having read Braiding Sweetgrass a couple of times and then talking about it on that episode that it is one of those books that's really difficult to find read-alikes for. It does something pretty singular and unique. It's hard to find another book that is set up in the same way that combines the kinds of perspectives that Robin Wall Kimmerer is combining. And that weaving of indigenous wisdom into nature writing is really compelling. And it sounds like When the Forest Breeds has that note as well. So thank you to our unnamed listener for writing in with that.

51:07Rebecca Schinsky:Well, down, I think down the way, we have another Braiding Sweetgrass one. And they recommended the Cosmos series, the Carl Segman series from like the 80s of like how everything is connected. I'm not sure I would have made that connection. I clearly didn't make that connection myself. But I thought that was pretty fascinating. What are these other efforts to integrate different kinds of ways of understanding? I was also thinking of The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. Can I look at this thing in a different kind of holistic way? So I thought that was fascinating. I am especially interested in here.

51:38Rebecca Schinsky:Here's a meta note for everyone on not necessarily books in that vein, but there are other works of art. a painting, a ballet, music, or opera, or a movie or TV show, because I know a lot of the books that people mention, and that's fine. But what I don't know are these other domains as well. So I'm especially interested in like, oh, this is something that's similar, or here's an adaptation, or here's something that takes up a similar kind of question or artistic mode. Because I consider myself barely well-read in this field, but whatever the well-read equivalent is in most other art forms, I'm a neophyte at the very, very best.

52:12Jeff O'Neal:It's hard to be an expert in more than one thing. famously. We had a listener who really enjoyed our 1984 episode, so they couldn't agree more with the comps to Andor. That is a show I absolutely need to watch. People who I know who are like vehemently opposed to most things, Star Wars, also love Andor. Yeah, so I think it's finally time. The best comp that they wanted to share with the people for 1984 is Yevgeny Zamatyan's We. Are you all familiar with this one? I'm definitely not. Yes, I am. Yes, yeah. It came up in the research for 1984. Yeah, it says it inspired him, so it's great. They love specfic sci-fi, kind of shouting out the Parable of the Sower, Never Let Me Go episodes, and specifically have the first of a few questions about, will you consider covering X?

52:54Jeff O'Neal:So, do we have any plans to cover Ursula K. Le Guin? We do someday.

52:59Rebecca Schinsky:Plans? I don't know if plans at Rice level of plans. Intentions?

53:04Jeff O'Neal:Long document of ideas? Just this morning, I was going through the master list of all the books that we might talk about someday and putting in their publication years so that I can start to do big anniversary kinds of sorting. And there are many Ursula K. Le Guin books on there. I believe The Left Hand of Darkness, Wizard of Earthsea, and The Dispossessed are all on that list. Which one we do first and when we do that is a question. I would anticipate we'd get to her within the first few years of the show, but that's as far as I can go.

53:36Rebecca Schinsky:We're looking for some reason to talk about in particular week a lot of the times. Like, why now? Is there an anniversary or an adaptation or is there a new critical thing coming out or an anniversary? We're also looking at mix at the same time. I think Le Guin is an interesting case where if you read books, you know. But if we were doing a people on the street that care about books that maybe really read 12 books a year and we gave them a list of 100 authors and say, have you heard of this person? I think probably a lot less name recognition than someone like I would be thrilled to see. So that's always hard to know at the same time.

54:11Rebecca Schinsky:And then which of – because she also writes across ages, right? Wizard of Versity is kind of a middle grade book. Some of the other stuff is much darker. She has nonfiction. I think another thing that's difficult with Le Guin is there's not one to hang your hat on right away. I don't think. If you're going to do Le Guin, you can even hear what we're talking about. We're saying, do Le Guin, not do this book. Where really, I think, as we're getting through this sort of first wave, it's even less that author, I think, Rebecca. It's like that book is one that people know about. They see it on a bookshelf.

54:41Rebecca Schinsky:They didn't read it in class. They heard someone talking about it. And Le Guin doesn't really rise to that level yet. Now, completely worthy of talking about and make a good episode. but I think we're in the low-hanging fruit stage. We're like picking apples off the ground right now, and there are apples all over the place. We've got too many apples. We can't eat them all. But I think Le Guin is a bit of a reach-up into the tree, which we'll do.

55:04Jeff O'Neal:Because I can already hear somebody be like, what do you mean Le Guin? No, we're not saying Le Guin isn't the great that she is. It's just, again, we're at a different stage in this particular phase of the podcast, but someday maybe. Cool. Potentially. We'll see. I'm sure we'll get there.

55:18Rebecca Schinsky:We, I should say by Semi-Otten, if anyone's interested in reading, it's been a while since I've read it, so my memory is fuzzy. It's pretty impersonal. Like, they're robots that have, like, digital names. Like, it feels a little bit more like a thought exercise to me, my memory of it. one of the things that's amazing about 1984, how like personal it is with Winston, like there's this love story and like, what would an actual like squishy human body be doing in this sort of situation where with we, it is like, it feels it's maybe more terrifying. I don't know which one is more terrifying, but there's like a totalizing vision in that in, in 1984, there is a little bit more of an affordance for the human perspective.

56:00Rebecca Schinsky:Again, I think it's been 20 years since I read Wee in graduate school. So take that with a grain of salt. Cool.

56:06Jeff O'Neal:We had someone else, Nikita, write in about the Jimbo Lahiri episode about Interpreter of Maladies, how they have kind of been chasing that short story high since 2017 and really appreciated the perspective we gave for understanding why it felt so different to them and asked if we have ever considered doing a podcast on short stories in The New Yorker. And I can't remember, Jeff, you kind of teased the idea of like, not that we would do an episode, but you talked about doing something like this for a book club when we reread Bartleby the Scrivener. But anyway, that was a question that came up.

56:33Rebecca Schinsky:We had such a good time with Bartleby. And again, it's hard to know if that's the exception that proves the rule, Rebecca, like not every short story is Bartleby. But we could do a meaningful episode on individual short stories. I think I wrote Nikita back directly, and I'll repeat what I wrote back to her here. I don't see us ever sort of focusing on the short stories of The New Yorker. But having said that, so many of the titanic works of 20th century short fiction first appeared in The New Yorker.

56:59Jeff O'Neal:That's what I was going to say.

57:00Rebecca Schinsky:That you may de facto do it anyway. So, you know, it's another one where the Venn diagram might be a circle, but I think we have a couple of novellas that we're doing soon. I think probably, I asked the question, I think we've got some response about like what short stories have people heard of, but like A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O 'Connor or The Gilded Sixth Fix by Zora Neale Hurston or The Lottery by Shirley Jackson or Telltale Heart. None of those appear to the New Yorker, but once you really get, I think it's really once you get into the mid-century, earlier in the century, the New Yorker, I believe, started in 1926, but it wasn't really until after the Hiroshima piece in 1946, where it became a national magazine.

57:41Rebecca Schinsky:In the 20s and 30s, it was the Saturday Evening Post. That's where Hemingway and Fitzgerald and a lot of these people were writing the short story. So it kind of moved right around mid-century, but certainly in the Updikes and the Roths and those kinds of people, and Alice Munrose, like those people were writing into The New Yorker. So there may be a themed like short stories of the 70s, right? Like you could kind of look at those together might be interesting, which would be kind of a de facto New Yorker episode in a lot of ways.

58:12Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I think also just so many of the writers that are doing short stories today, as you were saying, Jeff, like we on the Book Riot podcast interviewed Louise Erdrich about her new collection, And Python's Kiss, many of those were originally published in The New Yorker. Lauren Groff's collection Brawler, which came out earlier this year, many of those were originally published in The New Yorker. A lot of Zadie Smith's essays start off in The New Yorker. So The New Yorker is like the feeder system for a lot of the books and the kinds of writers that we are concerned with. And we have thought about doing some like starter packs kind of episodes, a starter pack of short stories, a starter pack of, I don't know, transcendentalist poetry.

58:51Jeff O'Neal:But I think some of those more granular things will come in later seasons of the show after we've picked up all the apples that are on the ground.

58:59Rebecca Schinsky:I think Brokeback Mountain was originally in The New Yorker, which if people don't know, that's a short story within a larger collection.

59:04Jeff O'Neal:So kind of in a backwards way, it seems like we're sort of accomplishing this maybe one way or another.

59:09Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, it's just that that's where if you could get your story published in The New Yorker, that's what everyone would pick. That's their number one draft pick for where I could place my short story in America, at least in the last seven years.

59:19Jeff O'Neal:We have the, sorry, in our next question is the most respectful way to ask this question. This person was like, I hope I'm doing this right. I hope I'm not out of line. Would you ever possibly consider this book? Thank you so much, which I just appreciate you because that is not how most internet discourse goes when people are asking us to do a thing. Our emailers are very polite. Yeah, so polite. I was like, I'll look at you. Like, I want to show you what my inbox can look like sometimes. But this person wrote in and said, you know, have we considered covering something like Angel Down by Daniel Krauss, which just won the Pulitzer.

59:48Jeff O'Neal:It is a very different feeling kind of book to have won the Pulitzer. It surprised a lot of people. But they said that to them it felt like a spiritual sequel to McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which I hadn't heard someone say before. I also haven't read Angel Down yet. But yeah, questions about stuff like that, which maybe we answered with the like apples on the ground, but just some thoughts. I mean, we have been toying with how to do like late breaking news kinds of things on Zero to Well Read. Somebody wins the Pulitzer or say a writer who writes in English or has been translated into English wins the Nobel.

1:00:17Jeff O'Neal:Like how and when does something rise to the level of a crash episode and how to handle that? Because behind the scenes, there's the reading, which takes time, and the research, which takes time. But also our editor, Chika Onyadike, needs time to edit this podcast and make it good. And we could crash episodes, but it would require rearranging several people's working lives for a couple of days to do it. So we would really need to believe that it was worth it. With something like Angel Down, I'll speak for myself, I haven't read it, I'm sure I'll read it at some point. That's still not name recognition enough to me to cross the line of, oh, we should just like, let's drop what we're doing.

1:00:59Jeff O'Neal:We should read that book tonight. We should record an episode in two days. Let's get it out there. My dream is that eventually we get to the place where people are winning the National Book Award and the Pulitzer and the Nobel that we already have episodes about, and we're able to surface those. But Daniel Krauss seems to be really announcing himself as a comer in American letters and someone who is being taken seriously and will continue to be taken seriously between the receptions of Whale Fall and Angel Down. So I wouldn't count either of those out, but just know that we're having those conversations behind the scenes as major book awards happen about what to do with them and when something rises to the level of stop the presses, put this episode in, make it happen right now.

1:01:44Rebecca Schinsky:I didn't put every email we got into this document. I put this one here for a couple The books and then talking about – did you get to the McCarthy part of that, Vanessa? I was thinking about it. Yeah, yeah. Did you mention it? Okay. I'll get to that. And secondly, I kind of think if we were to do it, it certainly would be for the Pulitzer and the Nobel. Like I think it might be worth us thinking about putting a hole in our schedule. We know when these things are announced, luckily. That's one thing we do know that makes this a little easier. If someone dies or there's a big announcement, that's going to be even more of a crashing kind of a situation.

1:02:11Rebecca Schinsky:But I think for – not just because people are talking about, but I think it would be good. It's an interesting intellectual exercise because they're by definition going to be current. They are not going to have the weight of critical whatever. And we've heard about them and they've got a big, not necessarily, right? Daniel Krauss is a good example. I've read Well Fallen, I've read Angel Down, but I'm not dealing with all the stuff I've read about people reading Daniel Krauss, or on a syllabus or something else. So you get maybe one of the first cracks at the pinata, frankly, in something like, is there a big intellectual review of Angel Down out there somewhere.

1:02:44Rebecca Schinsky:I don't really know that there is right now. Not that's necessarily what we do. And then we get, you know, something kind of undriven snow to sled across and let our intellectual chips fall where they may. The Nobel kind of comes from the other version, which most of the time, the Nobel winner is completely, literally and figuratively foreign to us. And that's its own kind of proposition. We may be doing sort of reader listener service of here's what this is about. You heard them coming out. So I think I would argue, and I haven't really, but I guess I'm arguing it for now. Put a hole in the calendar, and we just know we're going to crash one of these, and hopefully it won't be someone that writes 1 ,100-page novels, and we have to do something like that.

1:03:25Rebecca Schinsky:But I think, and again, I don't have to be that weak, but maybe we say, okay, when it comes out, we're going to know that in two weeks, our episode is going to be on that book. It has to be overnight.

1:03:34Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. I mean, and I think in the case that it was an 1 ,100-page novel, if we wanted to take it on, that would be a good candidate for a read-along where we could pass over to the folks on Patreon. Like, we're all going to do this. Everybody go grab your copies. Like, we're diving in ASAP. So we can put a spiritual hole in the calendar for November when the Nobel comes out. We have no idea, you know, who that might be. I would love for it to be Louise Erdrich this year because I have her in the fantasy draft. But we'll see.

1:04:02Rebecca Schinsky:This is, I'm going to throw something back at Vanessa because I think I know Rebecca's answer. So Cormac McCarthy is, of course, on the list. We will get to Cormac McCarthy probably sooner rather than later. I think the big three for me that people know about, Vanessa, I'm not saying they're the best one, are Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Is that kind of your sense of it? Like those are the three? I would have, like verbatim, I was in my head clocking them with you. Have you guys read all three of those or any of those? Where are you at on McCarthy, Vanessa?

1:04:30Jeff O'Neal:I've only read No Country for Old Men, and that was after watching Have You Had a Bout of M Terrify? the absolute crap out of me in the film adaptation. If I saw that man on a dark alley, I'd run still. But yeah, so that's the only one I've read.

1:04:41Rebecca Schinsky:The scariest bad haircut in American cinema. That bowl cut. I see it. Yeah, it's memorable.

1:04:46Jeff O'Neal:Seems like a lovely human, but oof. Anyway. Yeah. I've also read No Country for Old Men and Sutry. I've not read The Road, but spoiler alert, that'll be changing soon. And The Road is the number one on Goodreads by five times. It has more than a million ratings and No Country for Old Men comes in two at 263 ,000. One million to 260.

1:05:11Rebecca Schinsky:When I do the which one is number one to talk about, I'm not even saying best, but like where's the one to like, the trophy one to talk about. I end up like Vassini in The Princess Bride where I'm just sort of going back and forth. I'm sort of ping-ponging between Blood Meridian and The Passenger and Stellamaris together. Those are packages and one thing just for all of you, the Neapolitan people out there, they came in one thing. We knew to read them together that way. They were part of the same thing. And then No Country for Old Men. I don't know. In the road, like you hear me right now, I'm in a tizzy.

1:05:43Rebecca Schinsky:This would be the greatest way to get me sort of stuck like if I'm a robot. Like ask me which Cormac McCarthy should we do for Zero to Well Read, and I will just be paralyzed by analysis. That in my back pocket.

1:05:53Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. The way that I've threaded the needle for some of those authors, especially in these early days of the show is looking at like, we want to get this author on and either what is like, clearly the biggest one that the most people are familiar with. Or is there one that has some sort of anniversary hook to it where we can make it something timely. And sometimes those are the same things. Sometimes it's just we like this one better. Like we started with the bluest eye for Toni Morrison because that is the first one. I wanted to do Sula. We kind of went back and forth about it like, like, no, let's start at the very beginning.

1:06:26Jeff O'Neal:And then Namwali Serpell came on and said that we should have started with Sula. So we'll get there. You can't win them all. And of course, Beloved is the one that everyone knows Toni Morrison's name for, but that's also the most difficult. And we didn't want to come out of the gate in the third episode of this show being like, here's the most difficult traumatic book you're ever going to read.

1:06:45Rebecca Schinsky:I think I have to reframe it as there's not a wrong answer. There may not be a right answer, but there's not a wrong answer of this particular.

1:06:51Jeff O'Neal:I like that framing. So another listener specifically was listening to Midnight's, the Midnight's Children episode and wanted to know what your thoughts are as a comp for James, if you think this is a comp, James Elroy's American tabloid, or if you have anything else that you think are spiritual comparisons to Midnight's Children, of course, is by Salman Rushdie. I don't know American tabloid. I don't either. Do you know it, Jeff?

1:07:14Rebecca Schinsky:I put it on here because I was trying to think about the James Elroy of it all. Probably best known, I mean, clearly best known for L.A. Confidential and the Black Dahlia. He's an American crime writer. I don't have a sense of crime fiction is difficult to jump from a really good career in that genre into the kind of space we're talking about right now. Because it's not like an Agatha Christie situation where it's like the queen of crime sold a billion, like kind of changed the game or like a Stephen King or something like that at the same time or a romance writer that, you know, really broke the seal and like open it up.

1:07:54Rebecca Schinsky:James Elroy is a wonderful practitioner at the highest level within, I still think, sort of American crime writing. But I don't know. I'm interested for feedback on the feedback people are like, zero to well-read listeners, James Elroy, do you have any sense of him as a in this conversation is all? So forget the comp piece for a minute. I think that's interesting. American tabloid is not one that I know. I've only got a few James Elroys under my belt. But I think what I wanted to highlight here is how deep the bench is for people that are writing really interesting and good books that may not be a great fit for the show.

1:08:28Rebecca Schinsky:It doesn't mean they're bad. It doesn't mean these are better. But they just aren't quite in circulation in the way even a Twilight is. Right? It's just not. It's just not in the same circulation. It doesn't have the same. I am going to understand something different about American culture by wrestling with this in the way that a Twilight or something else is going to. Yeah. Yeah.

1:08:48Jeff O'Neal:I mean, for Midnight's Children directly, the things that I think about as being similar are the other postmodernists. Like we talked about Pinchon, you know, we did Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

1:08:59Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, those are the two right there.

1:09:02Jeff O'Neal:Those like really messy, unruly, loud worlds of fiction where you feel reading it the way that the characters feel living inside the world. But I love it to see these like the creative lines that folks can draw between. It would never have occurred to me to think about James Elroy or crime fiction at all as a connection for Midnight's Children. Me neither. Even just that, like everybody's own little mental maps of how books are related to each other is so interesting. Now I really want to think about a crime fiction book that could land. And I have access to these spreadsheets, so I could just go check things.

1:09:35Rebecca Schinsky:Well, it would probably be noir, right? It'd be like the Maltese Falcon or Mildred Pierce or something like that kind of originated the noir. and Elroy's writing in that tradition and bringing sort of the LA Hawaiian shirt vibe to it. That sort of, frankly, Pinchon is vibing on Inherent Vice, right? He's sort of doing a James Elroy. So like, I don't know. It's hard to say.

1:09:54Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. And like Devil with a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley is one of those sort of legendary works of crime fiction that's on the list. So that's kind of the direction I'm thinking. Ooh, I'll definitely be listening to that.

1:10:07Rebecca Schinsky:This next one's just a fun story. So that's why I put it here. I love this one.

1:10:10Jeff O'Neal:And this is from Marissa, who was listening to our episode on Forever by Judy Blume, which is a book that her mom got for her fifth in fifth grade for Christmas because her family didn't read. So they just bought this for her back in 1977. They're like, same, Rebecca. But then she got her copy, Notes at All, which like we said, this is to us some of the most valuable forms of, you know, reading copies of stuff that's got that ephemera or what have you. She spread it around to her sixth grade class in 2006. So then being a bonding experience between her and the students in her class. So I thought that was great.

1:10:42Jeff O'Neal:She took the copy that her mom had and then shared it with her class. I just love that story. Love to hear it. And she says that she and her mom listened to the Forever episode together, which is super fun. I love that story. So thanks, Marissa. Appreciate that. And our last one on the list is someone who said thank you so much. You know, Zero to Roll Red has helped them remember how much they love reading. that grad school, which entails all this time, it feels like they kind of zapped their love of reading there for a long time, which is definitely not an unoriginal thought. We've gotten that from folks a lot.

1:11:11Jeff O'Neal:So they appreciate that the show gives them the scaffolding for how to remember to read and think about books. And their comment specifically was on another Mailbag episode, and it's about Jude. They said they recall reading it in high school, that they kind of dragged their way through it until they read, basically, the way they described it was the book that I loathed until I loved it. So I don't know if you have any other thoughts on that particular. I didn't listen to that.

1:11:33Rebecca Schinsky:I put this here because I wonder if you guys had a book where, you know, two thirds of the way through you really turned around on it. I don't ever remember having this experience. I don't remember ever having experience where I was really drag assing my way through a book and the last act or something saved it for me. But I don't know. I wonder how common that is. I think there's books that I've liked better with time on a second reread, but it's pretty unusual, I guess, to the exclusion of all my reading experience to have one like, oh, I actually like this now when I didn't like it for the first.

1:12:05Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I was trying to think about things I read in school that I didn't love, but that I couldn't put down because I had to finish them for school. Because in my personal reading, if I'm hating it, I'm not making it two-thirds of the way through. I'm not going to wait for it to turn me around. I don't know. Like, Faulkner, I think I had a really hard time with until a teacher opened it up the right way, and then it blew my mind. But when you just sit down and try to read As I Lay Dying, it's a truly like what the fuck experience. But I think that's about the magic of a good teacher and not necessarily a book turning you around on it by itself.

1:12:47Jeff O'Neal:But I have not had this. If it's not working for me and I have the option of putting it down, I just put it down. And I think I'm open to the idea of coming back around to something. like for me it would be more likely that like if one of y 'all loved a book that i had put down in the past and you're like no dude really it's worth it i promise it will turn around and for how well you know me and know what i like to read i would go i would conduct that experiment and like and hope that it would that i would have that experience but i haven't had it i can't there's nothing at the top of mind like it sounds pretty cool i want to have this experience of like i I loved it till I loved it.

1:13:24Jeff O'Neal:I think I've felt that with TV or with movies, especially where you're like, it's only a two-hour investment. I don't know where we're going. And then all of a sudden, it's great. But with a book, it's a lot harder for me. It's different. Yeah, I'm definitely more of a – like, sometimes a book just doesn't grab me at the right time. And so I've had to go back and, you know, keep reading something that I had originally bounced off of. And then it worked out well for me. But I am like, to steal a phrase from Rebecca, like constitutionally opposed to a lot of hype, but also to whenever someone's like, just keep going.

1:13:54Jeff O'Neal:Like, I swear something gets better four episodes in at the two hour mark. And where this case like 70%. I'm like, I don't know, my brain is wired in a way that I need it to grab me a little sooner in most cases. Like I got one wild and precious life. Yeah, exactly. And granted, I know that this, like it has paid off for me precisely two times that I can think of in recent memory. And those memories were succession and severance where I was like, I don't like these people. I don't want to keep going. And then I'm glad that I eventually did. But with most other things, like there's 2 ,000 pieces of media vying for my attention right now.

1:14:27Jeff O'Neal:It's okay if I just bounce off this. But I don't know. Yeah.

1:14:32Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I think the only comparable kind of experience I have is like sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what a book is trying to do, like to sort of read along with it. So it's not really even about liking it or loathing it. That's different. I don't have purchase on this. I remember my first reading of Beloved, like it took me a class, but also it took me 100 pages. Yeah. You know, Faulkner, you know, is very similar. Like some of that, and in talking to Nomali Srapel, some of that is intentional, that disorientation and trying to rewire your reading brain a little bit. And that can be quite cool at the same time.

1:15:06Rebecca Schinsky:And anytime you go back to something that's really outside of your cultural understanding or sympathy, like it takes a while to get back into reading like Oedipus. It takes a little bit of time to get back into reading The Odyssey or Don Quixote or Moby Dick or The Tale of Genji or something like that because you are having to almost literally time travel out of space and time. And that reentry is not easy. And so I've learned to give myself a lot of grace for I'm not getting it. I don't know what's going on here. I don't want to read this. Because I think if you will go along with it, it'll push you in the right direction.

1:15:45Rebecca Schinsky:You won't get all the details, of course, if you are an expert above the same time and place. But I've had that experience more that something kind of unlocks where I start to be able to see it, where sometimes at the beginning of a book that's really difficult or foreign to me or I have a lot of experience in the genre or the cultural tradition, I'm fighting for – I'm thrashing. I'm doing the thing where I'm just trying to stay above water, but eventually I find a rhythm and I can sort of doggy paddle my way through it. But I have that experience quite often, but I don't have a really a my my thumb turned around quite so radically.

1:16:19Jeff O'Neal:That articulates it really nicely. I think that for me, it's rarely a question of do I hate this? It's more a question of am I do I just not know what I'm doing? Right. Do I need to get my feet under me? And like Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pinchon are all examples of that from the backlist of this show. It just is slippery, and it's slippery by design, and the slipperiness is part of it. And giving yourself permission to splash around in the water, or really just to stay in the water and get acclimated and let what's going to make sense start to make sense, and let the pieces that aren't going to land for you not land for you has been part of it.

1:16:59Jeff O'Neal:Which, now we're way off of Jude the Obscure.

1:17:02Rebecca Schinsky:Have you read Tess or Jude? Have you read Hardy, Tess or Jude? No, Hardy is a blank spot.

1:17:08Jeff O'Neal:I never got assigned Hardy, and it was never compelling enough for me to go back. I actually always wanted to retest, but I just haven't.

1:17:15Rebecca Schinsky:And, you know, time. I wonder what we were talking about that brought up Jude the Obscure in the last...

1:17:21Jeff O'Neal:On that past mailbag episode? I don't remember.

1:17:23Rebecca Schinsky:I can't remember. Yeah, anyway.

1:17:25Jeff O'Neal:That's a thought for past us.

1:17:26Rebecca Schinsky:Yes. Thank you, Vanessa, for navigating us through this. It makes it a lot easier where we're not trying to answer and transition and be objective all at the same time.

1:17:35Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, it's fun getting to pull those little levers. And I thank everyone for your questions. Yeah, all these questions and our thoughts on them are fair game for your emails and feedback for the next mailbag episode.

1:17:45Rebecca Schinsky:It's an infinite feedback loop.

1:17:47Jeff O'Neal:Right, so zero to wellread at bookriot.com. Again, you can find Patreon stuff at patreon.com slash zero to wellread. That's our office hours and bonus content. Read-alongs, what the one we're doing for the fall will be announced soon. smash the five stars on whatever you're listening to this podcast app what else jeff thank you to thrift books for sponsoring this season and zero to well read is a proud member of the airwave

1:18:14Rebecca Schinsky:podcast network oh you did without an agenda off the dome rebecca well done i've heard it you know a couple dozen we'll be back to do in a regular old book next time something weird and unruly and timeless rather than us talking about whether we doggy or shit or not but that's fun thanks

1:18:29Jeff O'Neal:everybody. Thanks, everybody.