How to Hone Your Reading Skills, What Makes a Good Reading Goal, and More from the Mailbag

18:23Rebecca Schinsky:Like if you, if you go, if you walk into a marathon expecting it to be easy and like, no, but most people going to a marathon know what they're getting themselves into. And the difficulty is sort of the point in a lot of ways. Um, because you can, it's a sense of accomplishment. It gives you a goal in a training situation like that. You know, so I think that would be my, my, my second vector is just outside of the coin flip. Like sometimes you should finish things you don't want to get through is if it's not serving what you want, then don't do it. But sometimes serving what you might mean that you've got to buckle up and just get through it and experience some discomfort for a little while.

18:58Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. Are you going to be proud of yourself when you've done it and that's going to be meaningful to you? Does this feel like it's going to be a meaningful experience rather than necessarily a fun one is sometimes a good rubric for me. You want to read our next one?

19:10Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. It's a long one from Olga with a lot of stuff in here about her own desire to read more diversely. And this is something we care about and have cared about for a long time. Reading diversely can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different kinds of people. Olga is especially interested in reading translated authors and books from around the world, and then also about setting goals, right? So it is how do you connect something you'd like to do with some kind of target for how you measure? I'd say this, really only pay attention. I don't have reading goals. I'm going to read this number of books a year.

19:44Rebecca Schinsky:Whether I want to read more or not, I usually end up between 125 and 150 books a year. That's just kind of where I end up. The one thing I do pay attention to, and we pay attention to though, in this show, I should say is, are we reading people that don't look like us in a percentage that we want to? And sometimes that's about our own reading desires, Rebecca. That's what we're putting out into the world. That's how we try to get more of the kind of reading we want into the world and because we like to read stuff from a bunch of different kinds of people. And we, you know, I think it's okay to, I don't mind putting this out, like, we kind of peg it at what's the US demographic look like, right?

20:27Rebecca Schinsky:That if we're kind of close to that, and again, we may have a run of three or four people of color in a row, and then we have four or five white people in a row, and then come back and forth. We're not trying to be, you know, four out of every 10, and it has to be that percentage every single time. But if you look at the whole course of the show over time, kind of like your coin flip is going to regress towards 50%, we want to regress or progress, maybe is the better word in today's day and age, towards something that looks like this is the demographics of the US. Now, you could pick whatever frame you want.

20:59Rebecca Schinsky:If you want to pick the world, I don't even know how you would figure that out. That would be an interesting project of its own. We are biased towards, focused on would be another way of putting it right now, the Western literary canon and some US cultural phenomenon right now. Over time, we will broaden our horizons as well. We also want to give some sense of like, we did a Sophocles early. That's something really old. We've done a couple of Shakespeare. We also want to look at time, right? We don't want everything that's old. We don't want everything that's new. So I think that's one thing in our feed that you're going to see different.

21:31Rebecca Schinsky:Some other feeds that do this is Twilight and Herodotus. I'm not sure Rebecca too. I mean, we haven't done Herodotus. We will have. But Twilight and Sophocles. Sophocles and Twilight. I'm not sure there's a lot of that. So we have our own interest in reading diversely that's not beyond, in addition to what we think about like DEI type stuff, which is to think about time and think about location, think about scale and import and across people's reading lives from a kid to an adult to an older person.

21:59Jeff O'Neal:One of the things that I love in this email from Olga, too, is it's kind of getting at developing your own philosophy of reading, what you're trying to do in your reading life. And she also says that she's discovered that setting a reading goal is about stepping outside the comfort zone just enough that it's still manageable, but it triggers meaningful change. I think it's crucial not to overwhelm yourself with too many goals. One or two per year are more than enough. And I think that's right on. If you are looking for a way to give yourself some structure, it doesn't need to be, I want to read twice as many books as I read last year.

22:33Jeff O'Neal:That's a really big leap. It would probably require rearranging components of your life in a pretty significant way to make that happen. But could you read 10 % more than you did last year? And then do you layer on some other thing? I'd like to read 10 % more, and I'd like to do X with them. volume by itself can be good but what are you doing yeah inside your book selection for olga it's reading in multiple languages that she's learning to speak olga is goals apparently right can't spell goals without olga really admirable uh from from olga and nice work there yes let's move on let's see this next one um is from kate from toronto um also speaking to goal related Yeah, her goal this year is to read one book a week and says, I will adjust if it isn't working for me.

23:27Jeff O'Neal:And that goal is both fast and slow. I'm a very fast reader who can read a book in one to two days, but I find that I don't remember the book very well later. So it's about like slowing down to actually enjoy the book. And she says that more interesting to me than one book a week is my simple goal to try more books, including ones I normally wouldn't think are for me, and especially to read more popular books this year with a curious mind about if they entertain so many people, then maybe I could be one of those people and see what it's all about. Here we call that things people like are good, actually.

23:59Rebecca Schinsky:Sometimes are good, yeah. Or sometimes bad. We have also, in the privacy of the Book Riot Podcast Patreon, read some things we were pretty sure weren't for us and we were not unwrong, I guess is the euphemism I want to say for that.

24:12Jeff O'Neal:We were not.

24:12Rebecca Schinsky:But I will say this is if you come to it as a literary anthropologist, it can be an extraordinarily interesting reading experience to read something and be like, what is going on with this? To pick one that's a little bit long in the tooth now, so I don't think I'm gonna hurt anybody is like Where the Crawdads Sing was a huge book a few years ago. And not our favorite book that we've ever read. We wouldn't have read it ourselves, but it became such a phenomenon. What is the deal with this? and we didn't go walk into it thinking like the point of this is we have to like it or not like it and that's the only rubric we can use to evaluate whether it's good or not but what is the deal with this like what is that people are responding to and I find that especially interesting in the giant phenomenons that seem like they come out of nowhere like the romanticies the twilights the 50 shades of grays the harry potters even something like the coloring books or Frieda McFadden, like these things, or the Dan Browns, these things that are seemingly pretty weird that are unlike things that have come before them by definition are weird.

25:16Rebecca Schinsky:But what often it's that strange is that's compelling. And sometimes you'll find some virtue of that book is the thing people are there for. And some of the other stuff is really pretty not good, but it doesn't matter because the thing people are there for is so compelling that they'll forgive a lot for it. And I'm like this with a lot of my own reading as well. So that's one thing I really like about reading quote unquote popular books that are not for you because I'm like a snobby like look at my hat you can hear me look at my glasses like you can probably get some sense of the kind of reader I am not the snobbiest but um let's just say that not all the books at the end of the grocery store are for me but I always find it interesting and not in the look how dumb these people are way I don't think that's fun or cool to do but like what is it about this book that people are responding to because it shows you something with the lack of that representation Colleen Hoover is what I'm thinking about in this regard, like this kind of representation of a kind of like domestic violence and the complexity of it, especially in it ends with us, like there wasn't seemingly something for a lot of people's attention, care, interest, experience to latch onto.

26:15Rebecca Schinsky:And that became a thing for a bunch of people to latch onto. Yeah.

26:17Jeff O'Neal:I love this literary anthropologist phrase. I wish that we had come onto it like 15 years ago, but we, now we have it. It's with us. And I think the combination of what Kate is talking about, this going into it with a curious mind, like one of the patterns that it's not always true but one of the things as you're saying that's happened sometimes when we go into these like big pop culture phenomena is we are going in with the like is this actually good and whether it's good or not what are people into about it and on the occasions where we conclude this is not for us i don't think this is actually a good book folks can get kind of upset by the deck like by our opinion of this isn't a good book and think that it must map on to like, therefore, there's something wrong with you for liking it.

27:01And separating those two

27:03Jeff O'Neal:things is really important, like going into it with the spirit of curiosity and not with I'm trying to shit all over this thing. And I think we try to take special care in this didn't work for me. And I thought this sentence was especially bad. But like, people either don't care about that, or the rest of it is so compelling to them that they're not even noticing. And that's interesting too, because there are lots and lots of bad books that do not become phenomena. And trying to figure out what it is that that's driving those things can be really satisfying. If you're like in a book club, or you're casually seeing people at your kids, you know, softball games or soccer practice or whatever, and or like, I've had the experience of sitting getting my hair done and seeing two or three people reading the same book at the same time.

27:47Jeff O'Neal:And you just want to know that spirit of like slowing down and paying attention, that curiosity can get you a long way.

27:54Rebecca Schinsky:This is another one about goals and reading intentionalities from Carol. Thank you, Carol. I'm going to pick out a couple pieces here. Carol reads a lot already, 140 to 200. So she's reading at the top end or more than I do. And that particular reader, and I'd say we are both of this, is we are not wrestling with how to read more necessarily, but how to, for lack of a better term, optimize or be choosy or get the most out of the reading. we're going to do already. And Carol has this interesting idea of having intention of doing more immersive reading where you read a fiction book in conjunction with a nonfiction book or interview an article or some other media on or similar theme or topic every book.

28:37Rebecca Schinsky:And for Carol, that's a challenge because she's not a nonfiction reader, typically, but have found that other people have done this have found this. I mean, essentially, what you're doing is like doing a little short course, right? Okay, what can how can I connect with something in the larger world? I really love this.

28:52Jeff O'Neal:I really like this idea. And especially as she's saying that she's not usually a nonfiction reader finding maybe the way to do it is to find nonfiction that you are interested in. And then you can work backwards to find a novel. We've only done one nonfiction here on Zero to Well Read so far, but it was The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, like magisterial work of nonfiction. If you have not read it, it's super readable. Sharifa, our colleague described it on that show as reading like fiction, the story is really compelling. From there, you could go to a couple of the things that we've talked about here on Zero to Well Read, you could go right into Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is set in the Jim Crow South, around the same time as the story that Isabel Wilkerson is picking up begins.

29:35Jeff O'Neal:You could also pick up James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, which is the next generation of folks who had moved to New York in the Great Migration. And we read Isabel Wilkerson after both of those. And I felt myself like retrospectively adding color to those reading experiences now having the nonfiction fleshed out. So I think that might be one way to do it. And you might also expand your idea of what the nonfiction is here, because I like, you know, read an interview or an article or some other media, I guess, captures it. But a lot of times you can find the author on podcasts like George Saunders has been on every big podcast in the last two months promoting vigil.

30:15Jeff O'Neal:And he's talked straight up about the creativity and the aspects of writing the book. But just as an example, he's also been on like a meditation podcast. He's been somewhere talking about like, what is sin and revenge? He did a really interesting conversation with Ezra Klein. So you could take the fiction book and find if the author is big enough, you should be able to find them in conversation with someone where they're going to get into more of the ideas and the scaffolding of the book rather than having to like just pick up a straight nonfiction if that's a struggle for you.

30:47Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, it's a great idea. So best of luck, Carol. That sounds like a cool reading. We're already into Mark, so maybe you've done some of this already. Feel, feel to write in and let us know.

30:55Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I'd love to know your parents.

30:57Rebecca Schinsky:This one came from a reader who really liked the Bartleby the Scrivener episode. This is more just a I guess a listener education hit here for the standard eBooks project. And basically the idea is as a repository for getting eBooks, especially of things that are in the public domain, this person has done some volunteer work for the project and has found it to be like really invested in the mission. So if you want to read a high quality eBook copy of one of the classics, either online or a Kindle or Kobo, you're going to have a better experience with the standard ebooks edition than anywhere else, including from commercial stores or everywhere else.

31:35Rebecca Schinsky:It doesn't have everything. It does have Bartleby the Scribner. It has a Melville short collection, standard ebooks.org. It has Wuthering Heights in there. I think this is cool. I've looked at this. I need to spend like six minutes figuring out a workflow to get it onto a device I want to read, but I really like having this resource. And it sounds like a little more elbow grease goes into to each individual book than something like Project Gutenberg that has so many that it's almost, it's a great project, but it is, a junk drawer is not quite right, but it's not curated in a little bit more of a way like the standard ebook project is.

32:11Rebecca Schinsky:We do cover a lot of public domain things. We're going to cover more. I would, my thought was here is I should shoot an email over there. Can we have a zero to well-read page on standard ebooks? We could click on it and go find the digital copy you want to get. That'd be cool. In addition to checking out ThriftBooks.com, of course, if you want a print thing, but if you are a digital reader, there's really no reason to pay$8.99 for a digital version of a book. I've found the audiobooks for classics, of course, because they're recorded by a living person, generally speaking, and so it's still subject to the performance copyright you still have to pay for.

32:47Rebecca Schinsky:I'd be curious to see, I think Project Gutenberg or someone else, shoot us an email, zero to wellread at bookriot.com if you know. But I think there are some public domain audiobooks that are pretty good quality coming into availability. So I didn't have anything else to say there. I just want to make people aware of standardebooks.org.

33:06Jeff O'Neal:It's a great resource. Thanks for writing that in to us. We are now entering the portion of the mailbag that I'm calling, Are You Ever Gonna Do X?

33:16Rebecca Schinsky:Yes.

33:17Jeff O'Neal:The first question is from Anne, who really enjoys the podcast. Thanks, Anne. And wants to know, will we ever, or do we think we'll ever launch a book club tied to the books we're discussing?

33:29Rebecca Schinsky:I also responded to Anne saying, so what do you mean, Anne? And Anne was very kind and said, I'm not really sure, but what if it was X, Y, or Z? So let's play this game out for five or 10 minutes, Rebecca, because we do get this question a lot. And people think, when I tell people we're doing the show in my civilian life, so it's like a book club. I'm like, well, it depends on what you mean by a book club necessarily. I think what Anne and some others are wanting are more than just listening to 90 minutes of us talking about the book or different than that, because we do a lot. So more, I'm blanching at the idea of more, like that's a lot that we put into a particular episode, but a different kind of experience around their book where a book club, I think, is relational, right?

34:10Rebecca Schinsky:Anne could put something into the book club that someone else in the book club to get something out of. And that to me is the definition of what a book club is digital. Otherwise it's like, do people participating in it contribute content of some kind? Whether that's your wine book club where you can just contribute that you didn't read it, right? Or you hated it or something like that. That's your contribution to the content of the show. That's not what we're doing here. So if you picked book X, if you picked Herodotus as the history and we're going to do a book club version of that.

34:38Jeff O'Neal:I love that Herodotus has become our go-to example today. Well, I like Herodotus.

34:42Rebecca Schinsky:I want to get there someday, but like, you know, I'm just picking it because it's, it seems so silly, but like, what would that look like? And the thing that I think gets in our way, Rebecca, is how would you manage the number of people wanting to contribute and what that, what that contribution would look like? And not for nothing, is there a business around that? Is it just more time that we're spending doing stuff because this is part of our jobs and we're trying to figure out to keep this game going? Having 14 people in a zoom for two hours, once a month, Unless they're paying a couple hundred dollars.

35:14Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, I'm being honest with everyone out there. Like, we'd rather make another episode of this, you know, and put that out and make it available for other people. So that's, I think, where we get stuck, Rebecca. If we had ideas, what else do you think? What should we tell people about who are interested in this, what to let us know or brainstorming about this?

35:28Jeff O'Neal:We've been doing Book Riot for almost 15 years now. And for as long as we've had it, the how do you have a good online book club has been a question. I know that there are podcasts who have this successfully in Discord or Patreon or Slack, you know, some some form of that. One of the things that we feel really strongly about related to that is content moderation and keeping ourselves and our staff safe. And we've had some experiences in the past because we're people who work on the Internet and we write about, you know, literature and issues of diversity and all of the kinds of things that literature talks about.

36:03Jeff O'Neal:where moderating comments has been challenging. Now, I don't assume that anyone listening to this show would come into a book club and be a jerk, but we have to be prepared for like, how are we going to manage and moderate a conversation? The Patreon is a place where this can happen. Like the Book Riot podcast Patreon has a larger community now, but that happens when we do a book club. We even call them book clubs. You and I book club something that we've read together over there. And folks who have also read it will drop their comments and they'll chat with us and with each other in those comments.

36:37Jeff O'Neal:It's not formal. It's not a like on this day, everyone is going to come and have this conversation. I'm open to this. I have not seen a version that I find to be really compelling. I tend to think that what's under these questions from people is just a desire to have more places to connect about books.

36:56Rebecca Schinsky:Yes, I agree.

36:56Jeff O'Neal:And I think that like in person is a great way to do that. Like, I would love to hear about folks using Zero to Well Read to structure book club selections for their own things. Like, we also get questions about, are you going to tell us what we're reading in advance so that we can read along and be there on the day the show drops? We do some of those previews, but also these episodes live forever in your podcast player. They're always there waiting for you.

37:20Rebecca Schinsky:Right.

37:20Jeff O'Neal:You can decide, I'm going to bring Herodotus. Like, oh, the Herodotus episode dropped today. I'm going to save it. go read Herodotus, build my own book club, which is all a long way, I think, of answering this question that we're open to it, but we don't have any solid plans to make it happen. And also just like a little how the sausage is made content strategy around this is that to maintain to build audience and maintain a large audience's interest, which we're so grateful to have, having content that moves along and offers enough variety for people is really important. So the a structured, like, we're going to do one quarter of this big book each week for four weeks in the main feed is not something that we're likely to do, because there's a lot of people that aren't going to be interested in that book.

38:07Jeff O'Neal:And you don't want to lose a chunk, a big chunk of your audience, because you did four episodes in a row that they weren't interested in. So all of these are things that are in the mix that we're thinking about.

38:17Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I mean, one version that you could do is, again, there's a, how does it, how does it worth our while? And that's, there's no reason you all should care about that as listeners, but there's something we care about, right? Because the replacement value for us is doing just a regular episode, doing, you know, two episodes that week, or it's already a lot of work to do one book a week. We have thousands of people that listen to this show. Only some subset of them could you get into a book club like environment and have it be a good experience where people think they're getting some, what would you charge and what what would the experience be?

38:50Rebecca Schinsky:I don't really know the answer to that. I love the idea of like a seminar, right? But people would have to pay quite a bit of money to have a seminar. I don't think people, I don't the sticker, I mean, we're not talking like undergraduate tuition or something like there, but it would have to be a couple hundred dollars per unit of some kind to keep it to 20, 25 people, which my experience is about as many people as work in a seminar-like environment. anything other than that is like a message board and you're going to dwell and linger I just that doesn't that doesn't move the needle for me I don't find that interesting I feel like I find myself not wanting to make that so I mean I think this is also part of the reason why

39:28Jeff O'Neal:the big celebrity book clubs are just called book clubs but they're actually just they're just a celebrity declaring a thing that they like unless you're Oprah and then you're also interviewing that author for content that goes even that's not a book club it's not a book

39:42Rebecca Schinsky:club different places. That's not in any way where people understand it, like Anna's asking about it. Right.

39:45Jeff O'Neal:I could imagine maybe some future episodes where if we're doing a contemporary book and we have access to the author, maybe we might build to a place where we offer a companion episode that's an interview or a conversation with a select group of authors. Certainly something we're open to that we've kicked around. But this is, it's really hard. Like it has to be at scale to make it worth our while as a business. but doing it at a big scale makes that intimacy of book club really difficult.

40:15Rebecca Schinsky:Right. Okay. Let's see. We skipped one. I'm going to go one back. This is about being well-read. This is from KDB.

40:24Jeff O'Neal:This is the same person. This is the end of the remarks from the person with the standard e-books recommendation.

40:30Rebecca Schinsky:I am sorry. It was the same idea, but as for being well-read. So I'm a lifelong reader, but I don't feel well-read because that's just not how I'm choosing books. And I only sometimes read literary fiction, but I'm feeling more tempted now to reach into classics to get more of a foundation of what current books are referencing in reaction to and in discussion with, which I guess is the real point of being well read. I mean, that is a point of being well read. I think there's a lot of versions of it, but like anything with a history, which is most things, knowing something of that history informs its current state of being.

41:03Rebecca Schinsky:So that's, I think that makes a ton of sense. There's something to get out of it, just sort of a generic, I want to be well-read because then I get to wear the well-read pin. Doesn't exist, but no one cares.

41:13Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, you're not going to get a trophy descending from the heavens. Much as I love a trophy, it's just not something that exists for us. She also points out that she's more of a sci-fi fantasy reader and said that she tried reading a few of the classics from like the golden age of sci-fi, but put them down really quickly because she didn't find that it was worth it to get through the misogyny, which can be very real in older books of all genres. And she's correct in saying that right now we're in a damn good age of science fiction and fantasy. That's a case where like, if you know that this contemporary sci fi writer is building on the ideas of a previous one, you can listen to a podcast episode or watch some YouTube videos that give you the foundation of, I don't know, Heinlein without having to dip into an extended reading experience that feels gross to you.

42:02Jeff O'Neal:There's, you know, nobody needs to, you don't need to suffer in that way. Next one down from Steven. Yes. You want to take us there?

42:11Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. So we're just going to, I included some people giving us titles and we could just react in real time. The default answer is if you suggest something that anyone's ever heard of, we will consider it. So just take that as our standard answer. But we could talk specifically about a couple of these here. Stephen asked specifically about Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Here's also something you might keep in mind as someone, if you're going to be a well-read feed prognosticator, if there's a major adaptation of something coming out, I would ratchet up your calci bets about whether or not that's going to show up in the feed actually don't do prediction markets.

42:55Rebecca Schinsky:I'm just joking here. But like that is something we are looking at. Are people going to be wanting to think about Wuthering Heights? Are they going to be thinking about Project Hail Mary? Are they going to think about some of these things? So if you're paying attention to what agitations or you see news on Netflix or movies coming out, those things are going to jump the queue a little bit as well. We also like anniversaries and birthdays and other kinds of celebratory moments. So that's just something to know about these at all. Where are you at on the Scarlet Letter, Rebecca? What was that in your bag.

43:22Jeff O'Neal:I'm so glad that this was in the notes today. I love the Scarlet Letter, or I did in high school. I haven't touched it since, but I loved it. I still remember the paper I wrote about it. I just had like, and I think when we go back to it, because we'll definitely go back to it at some point, the big exercise for me will be, do I actually like this book or did I just have a good English teacher?

43:43Rebecca Schinsky:Which, listen, those two things may not be as different as people realize. I don't think they are. Like, shouts to Mr.

43:50Jeff O'Neal:Hunsley. I had a wonderful experience. Just a terrific teacher. I loved almost everything that we read that year. So I will be really happy to do The Scarlet Letter at some point. To speak back to the Frankenstein question, especially in what you were saying about adaptations, one of the kinds of math that we're doing for this that is weird and I'm delighted to have this problem is there are so many adaptations. and we don't want this show to just be about books that have adaptations so in the first season we were kicking around Frankenstein we settled on Vineland by Pynchon because one battle after another was getting so much heat and then we did Hamnet as well and Hamnet was not in our original plan but once it became such a hit and people were so excited about it we were seeing the like questions about the book rise in popularity we thought it would be a good listener service to do an episode about the book.

44:44Jeff O'Neal:Frankenstein was third on that list. Like if we had not done one of those other two, we would have done a Frankenstein episode. I'm sure we will get there at some point, probably in an October when we're doing spooky reading. I was curious, and of course, we'll do Pride and Prejudice. Listeners are concerned about me saying that I don't like Jane Austen. So we're gonna have to have that experience together. I'm curious from you because he also asked about A Tale of Two Cities. There is so much Dickens to choose from. We did A Christmas Carol. But if we were just going to start with a Dickens, where would you want to start?

45:16I mean, this is my sense of it.

45:20Rebecca Schinsky:And I didn't look at Goodreads ratings and for public domain stuff and stuff that's not fair, I don't know. I think of Dickens as there's Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are the three big ones, like the three big novels. And then Christmas Carols off to the side is like this weird novella thing. I think a lot of people don't even know that Dickens wrote Christmas Carol. It also doesn't do the Dickens thing when we use the word Dickensian. There's not a lot of Dickensian in it because it's short. And when we mean Dickensian, like there's a lot of characters. It's exaggerated.

45:50Rebecca Schinsky:There's a lot going on.

45:51Jeff O'Neal:All these threads and they come together. Yeah.

45:53Rebecca Schinsky:The Christmas Carol, a Christmas Carol is like a side quest in a David Copperfield with some supernatural spookiness thrown in. I like Tale of Two Cities. This goes back to your point you made a second ago. we read the whole thing aloud in my eighth grade class, Miss Wilbur, who was elderly then. And I can't imagine that 30 years she's still around. But if she is, she has to Miss Wilbur. And I was the reader of one of the two main characters. So I read a lot of that book out loud to my eighth grade peers, which was fun and terrifying. I was about to ask. It guaranteed that you read it, right? Because we were reading it together in class.

46:30Rebecca Schinsky:It took the whole year, right? So we did a few pages a day for the whole year. The whole year, damn. It's the best of times, the worst of times, the ending. It's a far, far thing that I do that I've ever done. It's a far, far better place that I go than I've ever been. I know this stuff in the back of my head. But having said that, I think from a listener service, I think I have to do David Copperfield or Great Expectations. I think one of those two are the things that people have heard of. And when they think of Dickens, it jumps right to mind. but I could certainly have my arm twisted or something like that.

47:03Rebecca Schinsky:I don't know, Rebecca. Is my Dickens power ranking grossly correct to you?

47:07Jeff O'Neal:I'm looking at Goodreads because I was just curious. A Tale of Two Cities has more than a million ratings. Great Expectations is 879 ,000. Okay.

47:18Rebecca Schinsky:Maybe I'm wrong.

47:19Jeff O'Neal:And those are the two highest by a long shot. Poor Bleak House down here with 114 ,000.

47:26Rebecca Schinsky:That's where the real heads, the Dickens nerds love Bleak House. Nicholas Nickleby with 47. I haven't read Nicholas Nickleby. I don't know.

47:33Jeff O'Neal:I haven't either. I would be inclined to do Great Expectations because I have a large, like just basket of affection in my heart for Miss Havisham.

47:42Rebecca Schinsky:Yes.

47:43Jeff O'Neal:But I'd be, I'll be happy to do any of them. I think they have pretty similar name recognition. And I don't, as you were saying, don't fully trust Goodreads as a measure of people's interest in these because they are so old and have been read for so much longer than before Goodreads was around. But the answer to this question is yes.

48:01Rebecca Schinsky:I'm surprised that Tale of Two Cities is number one, but yeah, for sure.

48:03Jeff O'Neal:It might also just be more frequently assigned. I don't know. We read Great Expectations before we read Tale of Two Cities in my educational experience.

48:11Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, Great Expectations and David Copperfield, they blend together in my head. I have a hard time keeping them. I mean, Oliver Twist, of course, has one of the great musical adaptations of all time that also age very strangely i love this when i was a kid i still refer to like i'm getting seconds or something

48:28Jeff O'Neal:i'm like i know this adaptation can i have some more yes like i do this all the time yep and hot

48:33Rebecca Schinsky:sausage and mustard yep yes i know that part of the furniture um yeah to scarlet tale of two cities i don't know a big adaptation of that i mean i'm sure there's a bunch of these for all of these

48:44Jeff O'Neal:but i don't there's a really bad scarlet letter adaptation with demie moore oh yes where she's

48:49Rebecca Schinsky:Tester Prynne.

48:51Jeff O'Neal:So bad.

48:52Rebecca Schinsky:That came out in the 90s. I think like when I was in high school.

48:55Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. When we do Scarlet Letter, I will be making a full throated pitch for Easy A with Emma Stone.

49:00Rebecca Schinsky:I like that.

49:02Jeff O'Neal:So good.

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50:28Rebecca Schinsky:New Maybelline Serum Lipstick.

50:30Jeff O'Neal:Maybe it's Maybelline. All right.

50:33Rebecca Schinsky:Margot is pitching us a few things. Middlemarch. I don't know what it is about middle march because the middle march stands stand hard like it's the greatest novel of all time i don't know if i don't know if you it's like infinite jest for grad students the way people stand for middle march like they just really want you to read and i like middle march a great deal i i didn't resonate to me where i'm going to like put a middle march book cover on a banner and like march into into war with it but there's so many people i know that is very close to their hearts absolutely will be something we do someday.

51:12Rebecca Schinsky:Someday, yeah. It is not one that I'm going to have a lot of Jeff energy to bump up. We'll get to it eventually, but I'm like, I like Middlemarch fine. You know, it just doesn't, it's not one of mine.

51:23Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I like the idea here that Margot has of reading it one book per month. It was originally serialized and into four parts, I believe four parts. So she's saying, I'd love a series of shorter bonus episodes that do those big books in that style. Probably what we'll do is we approach really big books. The first one is going to be the Odyssey that we'll do in July, is we will give folks a heads up about when a big book is coming. So if you want to break it up yourself, you can. And at some point, I think we probably will try something like this, like in the run-up, where we might record some shorter things or break some stuff up or come up with some kind of supporting material for people who are reading it.

52:01Jeff O'Neal:Like, you know, how are we going to tackle war and peace someday is a similar kind of question. but I will experiment with it. And the bonus episodes, the stuff over in office hours on Patreon is probably the place where those experiments will happen. Yeah.

52:16Rebecca Schinsky:Beowulf is Margo's other pitch, Seamus Haney's version. Yeah, I like Beowulf. My son read it in English class this year and he really liked it. I, in grad school, had to read it in Old English and do translation side by side. So I've got some trauma scars from Beowulf myself. It was very difficult. my first semester in grad school. It was a real journey. So there's a lot of different choices we can make. The Haney is the best known. I am not sufficiently schooled to be like, what are the virtues and weaknesses of that versus the other? Availability bias will be a real thing in picking a Beowulf translation.

52:52Rebecca Schinsky:What's out there that people can buy and pick up?

52:54Jeff O'Neal:It's probably the Haney. That would be my pick as well. Although a couple of years ago, Maria Devana Headley did a translation that's in modern English, and it's kind of a feminist retelling and I remember listening to it on audio and then it opens with like, bro. So you really have to be ready for contemporary, a contemporary experience with it. I'm a little bit of a purist with Bay of Wolf. That is not what I'm looking for either. We'll do it the old fashioned way, but we'll talk about that as a retelling. Definitely on the list, as is from our listener, Joan, the diary of Anne Frank, Joan's writing in said that she recently revisited it for the first time since reading it in middle school, which was decades upon decades ago, and found it so much more poignant as an adult from what she remembers.

53:41Jeff O'Neal:She said, the book had a profound impact on me and others my age way back in the 70s. I'm not sure if it will fit your criteria and certainly understand if it doesn't. However, I found it to be a powerful and meaningful insight into the mind of a young girl going through extraordinary circumstances. I think it would ring every zero to well-read bell.

53:57Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, of the things that have been presented, I'm more interested in this for a couple of reasons. One, it's been a long time like Joan since I've encountered Diary of Anne Frank. I think I read it in elementary school myself, and I don't know I've revisited since then. Though, I was at the bookstore not too long ago looking for stuff. I think it was last summer with my kids, like looking for stuff for them to read on the summer break. And I picked up a copy of Diary of Anne Frank and was flipping through it and just reading a few sentences. It is not, I think there's a lot of people who read it a long time ago or haven't read this, who don't really know, and I've forgotten how sophisticated this book is, she is explicitly thinking about in the course of the diary, people may be reading it letter - She's precocious in ways that are shocking.

54:40Rebecca Schinsky:The publication history of it, the effect of it's fascinating. I think it's extraordinarily well-suited for a sort of full-spectrum investigation like we like to do on this kind of show. So if you were placing a - Go ahead.

54:52Jeff O'Neal:I would say anytime that the idea of a book has eclipsed the actual reading of the book itself, we're interested in getting in there. Yeah.

55:01Rebecca Schinsky:This one is from a reader, a listener in Cincinnati. And this is another cool thing to tell us about. And I had not heard of this. Me neither. The Wuthering Heights Manuscript Project. Apparently the original manuscript was lost. I didn't know this. And this project gave 10 ,000 visitors to write one sentence into a large manuscript volume. Cool. So you go and you just transcribe one and it becomes a manuscript of a whole bunch of other people.

55:28Jeff O'Neal:To Hayworth Parsitage where Bronte was raised.

55:31Rebecca Schinsky:So I think that's cool. I don't know. Is that a lot of sound and fury adding up to nothing? I'm not sure. I like the idea of it. Kind of an exquisite corpse, but you know what you're going to get at the end. I think that's cool to see at the same time. Yeah. Also a recommendation for James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. James Shapiro is a longtime scholar at Columbia University. and he's written several. They are meant for a general audience, but like, as you might imagine, a general audience for the Shakespeare is not your general audience, but he's written several. 1599 is my favorite of them about his exquisite year, 1599, a year in Shakespeare's life.

56:08Rebecca Schinsky:I think that's what this one is too. I could be confused. The one we recommend here is a year in the life of William Shakespeare. I think that super title is 1599, but there's a whole bunch of other ones and he is terrific and much more readable than Stephen Greenblatt. taken astray out here and not as pompous double shot double tap boy i really am watching the sopranos so there so there you go i i will second secondly recommend the work of james

56:33Jeff O'Neal:for people want to read more about maybe a nice companion too since that's about the year that hamlet was put up a nice companion to hamnet if you've been following that uh next one comes from melissa we're going into project hail mary land yes melissa heard us on the episode where we couldn't remember if Rocky's gender was ever discussed. And Melissa's letting us know, we were told Rocky is neither. His species is what we might term hermaphroditic and says that when two parent Iridians love each other very much, they each make an egg and they bury them together. I love this parenthetical from Melissa that I imagine this with like a sea turtle for some reason.

57:09Jeff O'Neal:Me too. Then the two eggs emerge and a new Iridian hatches. Ryland Grace has no way of knowing this when he first met Rocky and was learning to communicate with him. And he felt weird about referring to Rocky as it. So he decided to use masculine pronouns as a placeholder. Melissa says, as a person somewhere on the non-binary spectrum, I really liked the idea of a planet where your sex or gender doesn't necessarily play a key role in your life. And, you know, we talked on that episode about how Andy Weir says, my books are just supposed to be entertainment. If you see any politics in them, like, that's just you, man.

57:44Jeff O'Neal:But there is something important about this. Like this exists in science, of course, and in biology and nature, that there are creatures born who can either change sex or, you know, have a more evolving relationship to sex or gender. But I don't know, maybe even if Andy Weir wasn't thinking some reader is going to relate to this, this exists in the text and is meaningful. And I'm sure that Melissa is not the only listener, the only reader of Project Hail Mary that found it, found this to be a meaningful and interesting idea. So thank you for sharing that with us. Very cool.

58:17Rebecca Schinsky:It's also a good micro example for people who, and I don't know a lot of listeners of this show fall into this camp, but maybe some people do of thinking, why does everything have to be political or whatever? And we say all reading and writing is political, even when it's not overtly or intentionally political, because you think about it this way. And I think this idea is, thank you for writing in and reminding us of this particular. What were Weir's choices about if you wanted to give more anthropology, biology of how Herodians are, he's got really three choices. One is that they sort of conform to something like gender as we know it.

58:55Rebecca Schinsky:Two, they don't. Or three, say nothing. Just not talk about biology. All of those are loaded. All of those represent a different kind of—you can't escape it in this kind of situation, too. so I think it's a really interesting one to see at this time Weir may not be saying something overtly and who knows what the actual thoughts are but by making this choice to represent this other sentient species with a complicated cultural structure and advanced technology that gender is not central, important, or even known to them and yet they still should be considered people of value in being and Rylan Greth says that by sacrificing his own life to go help save them so it's there, Rebecca I'm not trying to be overt here but like you don't have to look very far in these books.

59:39Rebecca Schinsky:Like this is not something where people are bending over backwards to make it political. It's there on a plain text reading of so many things. You just have to the kind of eyes to see how obvious it is.

59:48Jeff O'Neal:This is what the personal is political means.

59:50Rebecca Schinsky:Yes, right.

59:51Jeff O'Neal:That everything about our daily lives is described and circumscribed by politics and by what exists in the political landscape. And we bring ourselves to our reading. So there are plenty of people who read Project Hail Mary and didn't think about it at all. And that's fine too. But readers who exist outside of the traditional gender binary are bringing that experience to this book and they're seeing something that resonates with their experience. And that's what an author is ultimately setting out to do is give readers something that they can connect to and whether we are intended this particular thing to be something that is, as you're saying, a choice that he made.

1:00:29Jeff O'Neal:And those choices all have impact. So I guess this is really for the writers out there. pay attention to all those choices that you're making. And to go back to our questions earlier in the show, this is another way into evaluating a text. Like what are the choices that the author had to make in order to write this book? How did they make them and do those choices?

1:00:49Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And what choices do they avoid? Sometimes you can suss out what they were trying not to address or skate around. On the Project Hail Mary tip, this is a read-alike. I've heard of this book, but I've never read it. Children of Tide by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Eileen thank you for writing in it's got space comas space spiders science dude who keeps waking up not knowing what the heck is going on and it's really fun so that sounds like a real good read-alike Eileen so for all of you including me out there I am putting that on the list that doesn't really exist but sort of does I just did it you see right there it's up there it's in the ether

1:01:21Jeff O'Neal:yeah this will go into my immediately for my husband who's a big sci-fi audiobook fan

1:01:26Rebecca Schinsky:yeah Bob can report back to us on how it goes

1:01:29Jeff O'Neal:speaking of Bob No one has written in to ask us if we're going to do master and commander someday.

1:01:35Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, Bob can write in, shoot him an email. He can submit. Mr.

1:01:40Jeff O'Neal:Zero to well read. Yeah, right. 123 at gmail.com.

1:01:44Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah.

1:01:44Jeff O'Neal:Got a nice tip also from Kristen, who said, I was wondering aloud during our episode about their eyes are watching God about how the audio production is. And she said the audio is fantastic. She had a copy from Libro FM and listened to it as she read her book along. Cool. You know, picked it up after listening to the episode and thinks that it would be worth it for listeners and for me to go back and listen just so you can hear how Ruby Dee, the narrator of it, handles the dialect in the book. That's one of the things that we talked about. Kristen's also reading Midnight's Children with Simon Hazel's Footnotes and Tangents group, which is not something that I've heard about.

1:02:21Jeff O'Neal:but he does slow reads and posts something every week about the reading including links and other information so that might be something to check out i think they're also they you know they've done war in peace they're doing the wolf hall trilogy if you are looking for a little bit more like a steady drip drip drip and then we'll be here for you with the full episode when you're

1:02:40Rebecca Schinsky:done with that big reading experience yeah um and we got a couple of joy luck club anecdotes so you So glad about these. Some of these came out. This is from Suzanne saying she thinks of the movie first, but then later read the book and enjoyed it. But the story here was Suzanne went with her husband and watched it in a theater one night on their honeymoon at a local shopping center. She loved it and he was bored out of his mind. So you know what? Two people. Art is different. People are different. You don't know. That's terrific there.

1:03:12Jeff O'Neal:I mean, it's such a mother's and daughter's story. I can understand a male viewer feeling less connected to it. That's fair.

1:03:20Rebecca Schinsky:I guess on that point, Karen wrote in to say, on that point, we were asking about generations and Gen Z, Gen Alpha, she read it along with her daughter and had a great time. Kids are loving it. I don't know what to say. Kids are loving it. Yeah. This person, Karen, I don't want to say too much, but they are around our age and grew up in Leawood and worked at the Barnes and Nobles in high school. and you and I have a lot of affection for the Barnes and Noble and the Plaza in Kansas City. Who knows, Karen? Who knows? If you saw a tall kid with bushy blonde hair and pleated khaki shorts and a braided leather belt, could have been me.

1:04:04Rebecca Schinsky:Could have been me.

1:04:06Jeff O'Neal:Oh, lots of candidates for that one. But thank you for the shouts, Karen. We've also, I was wondering aloud on our episode about 100 Years of Solitude, which has sold 50 million copies. How many copies actually got read? And this is one of our great unanswered questions about all books, but especially a book that is this popular, this weird, and this difficult. Like, I imagine the phenomenon was huge, and people picked it up. And this person wanted to give their personal anecdata about it. They say, in my family of four, we had one copy, and every member has read it. It's one of their all-time favorites.

1:04:39Jeff O'Neal:So I later, they later bought their own copy. four people have read that copy. And then said, I'm sure that there are similar dynamics happening everywhere over the years. She's also found it in local libraries of Melbourne, Cape Town, and a small Swiss village. All of the copies were well-worn and stamped. So thank you, who is a Swissie living in Cape Town.

1:05:00Rebecca Schinsky:Very interesting. These books that become like this definitely have what did we learn in COVID in our value and are greater than one. And I don't mean this as a slog to any of these books that have achieved this escape velocity because they are doing something different. There's a reason that they are even eligible to get that R plus one value. But you reach a certain escape velocity. I'm going to continue my orbital mechanics metaphor. And you continue to stay in motion, right? People then think of it because people think of it. I also think it matters. It has a memorable title. I don't think we talked about this.

1:05:35Rebecca Schinsky:like 100 years of Toledo feels like a challenge. It's super memorable at the same time. I was overhearing in Powell's the other day, someone talking about, I don't know why everyone just thinks of things fall apart as the canonical African novel because I have some others that I like. I stopped listening. It's a great title. But also this just happens sometimes. It becomes a thing. It gets recommended. And then other people recommend it. It just becomes a thing people recommend. It's self-perpetuating. That usually is built off. Yeah, it's usually built off a foundation of quality, interest, and pleasure, whatever.

1:06:08Rebecca Schinsky:But then it just sort of rises to the cream of the top. And then it gets to traffic in a different stratosphere and pick up different currents that can keep it aloft for a long, long time. So it happens. There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem with a lot of these books that become international, multi-decade, canonical hits. It's like, is it famous because it's famous or is it famous because it's good? well, it has to be decent and interesting enough to be eligible to be famous, but at some level, you start staying famous because you're famous. And that's one reason the canon can be problematic over time is that it doesn't allow room for other things or it's circulating in ideas that we're not as interested in.

1:06:47Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, people are still checking it out from the library. So I totally understand that these copies of 100 Years of Solitude are like well stamped, but still, how many of those people actually read that copy that they checked out? I hope It's a lot of them, but that book is so much more than if you've just heard about it, what you think it might be about.

1:07:04Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. A lot of little women love. I think what I didn't understand was how many people read it, not own grade school and middle school, but then performed versions of little women. And like, you know, it makes for a wonderful play because there's lots of costumes and it's dialogue and there's like three settings, right? Like you can easily move around your 18th or 19th century stuff. and then yeah i just that hadn't occurred to me then it becomes used as a text for other kinds of performance experience in the middle grade school and middle school experience this makes

1:07:36Jeff O'Neal:me feel a little bit better because one of the things that we've been saying reading little women is like we used to be smarter because the kids are performing hamlet for fun learning defense to perform him yeah but this listener katie says that after she read little women as a kid playing little women immediately replaced playing house among the neighborhood kids. And it gave them framework to grow and learn and play. And she feels so grateful and sentimental for those days. And then she notes, our Beth usually died a more dramatic death with a face painted with sidewalk chalk. It was mostly pretty wholesome.

1:08:11Jeff O'Neal:I just love this. Thank you for sharing this with us, Katie. Katie also wanted to let us know that the secret history was her actual literary fiction awakening. I don't think you're alone there, Katie. But she said she was traveling for work, her roommate tucked it into her carry-on, and she just devoured it. And the next few that, this is a good roommate. The next few the roommate gave her were The Sellout by Paul Beatty, Commonwealth by Ann Patchett, and Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. I miss her bookshelf. You should, Katie. That's a great roommate.

1:08:40Rebecca Schinsky:That's a really good one. Also, Katie supported along another historical fiction recommendation that gets out of the World War II bubble. She's recommending Lisa C. So the Snowflower and the Secret Fan and the Island of Sea Women. I don't know anything about that, but I wanted to pass that along as well. Doing a listener to listener service there at the same time.

1:09:01Jeff O'Neal:We love that. This one is next directly for you. You had a stray thought during the Little Women episode, wondering when swimming pools became, backyard swimming pools became a thing. And our listener, Kelly, who must have been listening to the Book Riot podcast and knowing that you cannot resist a single subject narrative nonfiction is recommending for you a book called Contested Waters, a social history of swimming pools in America by Jeff Wiltsey. And if you are not watching this episode right now, you can't see that Jeff just copy pasted that title and is searching for it.

1:09:35Rebecca Schinsky:No, I had looked at it before because it's kind of expensive. It's an academic title. I'm looking on thriftbooks right now, thriftbooks.com sponsoring the show. I can get a very good paperback for 20 bucks. I was hoping for like five or six, but I think because it's a small thing and people get it for their own library, but I am definitely interested in this, no doubt.

1:09:55Jeff O'Neal:This person really has seen you, so I hope you're feeling that.

1:09:59Rebecca Schinsky:I think as I've gotten older, Rebecca, I must say that, am I sure I don't want a long New Yorker thing about the person who invented swimming pools as a luxury item in like 1911 or something like that. I mean, I almost always want a long New Yorker

1:10:13Jeff O'Neal:thing.

1:10:14Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. It will blow my mind and break your heart and make you boil with rage, which I've got to say was not on my bingo card for a book about the history of swimming pools.

1:10:23Jeff O'Neal:I love that we now know you're not alone because someone else has also read a book about the history of swimming pools.

1:10:28Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. For those of you who don't remember me, didn't listen to that episode, they don't mention laying around by the pool in the Great Gatsby, though they're very much pool laying next to kinds of people and modes. So I was like, when did this become a thing where if you're of leisure, now you can't open your Instagram without seeing someone who wants to pretend or actually be rich next to a swimming pool. It's so fascinating how do people... We're just going to do this again right now. No, we're not doing this right now. Last one for us today.

1:10:58Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, this is from Sebastian and this kind of brings us whole circle. Sebastian and his wife found our podcast because they were talking about reading more classics this year. And in listening to our year-end episode, they realized that we were fans of The Secret History. And he said, I felt vindicated hearing your enthusiasm for it. I read it two years ago, and it took me a bit to get through it. But since then, I've come to love it and love it and more, more and more as I get some distance from it. My wife ridicules me for it. She says, you hated reading that book. How can you say it's one of your favorites?

1:11:29Jeff O'Neal:But for real, this book has had such a slow burn for me and is now truly one of my favorites. I put this at the end because it does connect back to things that people were asking at the top of the show about a reading experience that maybe you don't like while you're going through it, but you end up being really glad that you read it. And sometimes a book does grow in your estimation as you have more time to marinate with it. The Secret History is totally a book that that's possible with, but you kind of never know what the book is going to be. So thank you for sharing that with us, Sebastian.

1:12:00Rebecca Schinsky:We always find too, this goes back to what we were talking about, even the discussions we've had of books we didn't necessarily anticipate liking and maybe even didn't. I always find the book more interesting after talking about it. And I would love to hear from people if they found their own relationship to a book changed by just hearing other people talking about it. It could be us, it could be your book club, it could be a class that you had. But kind of like they say, hunger is the secret ingredient in good food. I think having a chance to think about it or hear about it or just spend some more time with the book outside of the actual reading about it, to almost 100 % likelihood, will make you appreciate that book and read the experience more.

1:12:44Rebecca Schinsky:I cannot remember a time where I ever taught a book, I was taught a book, or I talked about a book in which I was less happy to have read or thought about the book.

1:12:54Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, you know, it's one of the reasons that I was so excited to do this show. And it's one of the things that got us excited in our initial conversation about doing this was that we have had such great experiences, even talking about things that we didn't like we and that's it's always enriching. I always appreciate a book more after we've talked about it. It kind of makes me think about all the the folks wanting a book club, like some of this is personal bias. I'm a terrible book club member. I don't want to be told by anybody else what to read. I don't really trust anybody else's book selections.

1:13:26Jeff O'Neal:And like a room full of 10 people. I'm not confident that there's going to be like that much interesting stuff coming from such a big group. You can't get that deep with a lot of people in the course of like one or two hours, but you can with one other person. And so maybe you don't need a book club. Maybe you need one reading buddy.

1:13:43Rebecca Schinsky:A book buddy.

1:13:44Jeff O'Neal:And if we could do anything, that might actually be the thing that I would do like in some future version of something, just help people match up with one book buddy. Because these, like, you know, 60 to 90 minute conversations that we have about books that we've agreed to read with each other, where we show up in the appointed day, and we've done the homework, but we haven't talked about it really at all before then, are surprising and fun, and they're challenging. And I come in sometimes thinking that I understood something one way, but your perspective will either sometimes I get further entrenched in my perspective.

1:14:18Jeff O'Neal:And sometimes your perspective shifts me a little bit and that like that give and take and the well we were we just recorded that much ado about nothing episode so the merry war of intellect is is such a pleasure and if you can find that like trying to find it with 10 people in a book club just seems impossible to me but if you can find one good reading buddy like i don't i'm not having these kinds of book conversations with 15 other people in my life we do this together and our colleagues come on and do this with us sometimes, but if you can find one buddy and maybe you just do one a quarter, you know, like even one a month could be a lot.

1:14:53Jeff O'Neal:You can have some really -

1:14:54Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, one a month I think with two people would feel like a lot. And maybe you want that, but it could feel like a lot.

1:14:58Jeff O'Neal:Yeah.

1:15:00Rebecca Schinsky:Well, this was fun, Rebecca. Thanks so much for everyone for listening and for writing in. Let's keep them coming at, what is our email address again? Make sure it's zero to well-read podcast.

1:15:08Jeff O'Neal:Zero to well-read at bookriot.com.

1:15:10Rebecca Schinsky:At bookriot.com. Boy, oh boy. I'm going to get this right at some point. Eventually you can sign up for the newsletter or become a member to hear about our office hours episodes or get early ad-free access at patreon.com slash zero to well read rebecca thank you so much it was fun

1:15:27Jeff O'Neal:and as always we are a proud member of the airwave podcast network

1:15:35Rebecca Schinsky:two teams one cup the primetime stage is set for the tgl presented by sofi finals Los Angeles Golf Club vs. Tigers Jupiter Lynx. Keep up! It's playoffs! Tune in Monday, March 23rd, 9pm Eastern on ESPN2, and Tuesday, March 24th, 7pm Eastern on ESPN and on the ESPN app.