What We've Learned Returning to the Great Books

20:49Jeff:Yeah, you know, I mean, the oldest thing that we read this season was Oedipus, Aeschylus, like more than 2 ,000 years old. And then we also read Hamnet, which is only five years old. Granted, set a couple hundred years ago. But in more than 2000 years worth of fiction, there are these common threads that it was kind of grounding to be like, oh, humans, like, we just are who we like humans just are who we are. There's not that much that has changed about the core questions, the issues people face, the universal experiences of being a person. And watching great writers deal with that over 2 ,500 years worth of writing has been, that's felt expansive and exciting to me.

21:37yeah I guess at the same time much like that there is so much more available context and supplementary material that is so easily accessed now like even when I was a student and again I feel like myself it's been that long but it's been 20 years since I was a student of a real kind but the digital age had sort of happened already and there's a lot to bemoan about the internet but I'll tell you what being able to find video interviews with authors and scholars

22:01Jeff:on YouTube is not one of the things that's bad about the internet. There's rabbit holes within rabbit holes you could go down and it's very tempting. And that's one of the things we want to link to in the news. Stuff that we found that maybe we took one thing from, or maybe we didn't watch, but can you believe this exists? You can create yourself a reading list within one of these or a watch list or a scroll list or whatever, but there's so much that's out there. there's also a lot that's not available like in paywalled or libraries which is no different than how it used to be you can find that it exists but like you can really get into the secret history and fans and tarred and essays and so much of it's available that it's frankly a little daunting to try to figure out where to stop how much to do I mean those have been interesting emails to get from listeners or messages to get of like how could you have talked about this book and not have talked about this component or this thing or this like element of the book's fandom and especially the more modern stuff like there is just too much these episodes would be seven hours long yeah yeah and it's just a google away for most of you and ignore gemini that's when it gets stuff wrong so often especially when it comes to this kind of documentation that's it's amazing how wrong it is there what else before we move on from the reflections rebecca that's true i think that's it for me i'm ready for you've got some structured categories for us.

23:25Yeah, you know, superlatives, questions that I was just, these aren't really rankings, but we have gone out of our way to not judge. But now that we have a few in our rearview mirror, I think it would help like what kind of sticks out is how I'm thinking about this. What was the biggest surprise? And does that be that you liked it or whatever, just like the big, the thing that felt like it was the biggest surprise to you? And I guess we should limit to the things that are out. We've recorded some things that aren't. We can include Christmas Carol, because that will have been out at this point.

23:52But of the things that we have covered by December 23rd, Rebecca, what sticks out to you as being a surprise?

24:01Jeff:A couple of things. First, I think the biggest one was how fun the big unruly books can be when you're reading through the lens of trying to make sense of it, especially Pynchon and Rushdie this season. It was fun, because I wasn't sitting down expecting to just like, flip through something and have it be easy reading on a Saturday afternoon. I wasn't like, this is my vacation reading, I'm sitting on the beach. But I knew that I was going to be doing some work and doing the work for it was fun. And just how in awe I was of some of these writers for like, the ways that their brains work and the things that they create.

24:37Jeff:Also, how differently Gatsby hits as an adult really blew my mind. Like, it's, we read that book when we're 16, because that's when high schools have us as captive audiences. But that is a book for you are old enough to have some regrets. And you're old enough to have seen people do things that people do. And reading it in my early 40s, what like that, that really, really hit. I think if you have not approached these books since you were a teenager, bringing your adult self to them will be gratifying and exciting in ways that you haven't expected. But it was Gatsby and Gatsby and like Roosti for me, I think.

25:18Jeff:What about you? I think Oedipus, not because I didn't know sort of it's Titanic Wade and there's the first mover element of like inventing the third, like let's add a third actor. Let's just add a third actor. We can still do this. I taught Oedipus a few times and it always went okay, but I was a little apprehensive of it being like a museum piece. And I don't know if it's just the way we approached it or seeing with fresh eyes how revolutionary and strange it is and how far we are from like the moment of the performance and how different the idea of culture is. I don't know. I guess it just, it had more depth to thinking about Oedipus and then this like what Aeschylus was doing and how the Greeks did or didn't think or how we can, I don't know.

26:05I just found it to be transporting and the closest thing to time travel is we really have access to to try to imagine a third of Athens showing up and letting people out of jail for the day. And it's only performed once and there was something about contextualizing it and imagining the people who knew the story, but this was a take on it, and it's some blend of politics and art and religion, it feels, I don't know, it feels like what if you got to see a T-Rex, but you actually kind of do for a moment? I don't know, that was the biggest, I keep thinking about that. Yeah. There. Okay, here's one.

26:48If you had to pick from one of these for someone getting into great books or back into great books, which would you pick?

26:57Jeff:The Secret History, but it almost feels like cheating. Why is it cheating? I mean, it's just so good and so sticky. And it has the like, you know, like they've murdered their friend and you find out on page one. And like, so you get kind of the mystery element. It's very suspenseful. Also, it's just like booze and drugs soaked. Also, it's packed with book nerd stuff. but you don't lose anything really if you don't pick up every book nerd reference that she's making and it's a 450-ish 500-page book that you plow through it's just like imminently readable and such a great time that i mean that feels kind of like cheating to me gatsby is maybe the other answer here because it's short it's not it's so much juicier than you remember like i just remember saying on that episode, it's messy as hell.

27:51Jeff:And I did not remember that and just like how fun that is. I think you're right on both counts, but maybe for a slightly different kind of person getting back into quote unquote, great books, which is if you are a reader, but you're coming from, I don't know, some other kind of reading, maybe especially genre reading or more straight up pleasure reading. The secret history is ironically a gateway drug into maybe more complexity and depth because it's there, but it's also Donna Tartt, we talked about in the episode, she wants to write a great story that people get involved in, but she also wants to have, you know, references to ancient Greek stuff.

28:26And then I think if you are not reading at all, and you really want to make it a part of your consistent practice or life or whatever, I don't think I can recommend it because it's so long. And I think if I go from there, I think it is Gatsby because you will, you will get references. There are modern adaptations. The lines are good. It'll feel a little bit more familiar. I think we don't yet have the pick yet out there. I don't think anyone's of them is a home run. And I don't know what a home run looks like. I'm not sort of satisfied with either answer, I guess is what I would say right now, which is okay.

29:00It was okay.

29:01Jeff:I would like listener emails on that. Like what just from the wide, the wide ocean of great books. If you've got to pick one that helps somebody get back into reading or start reading this kind of thing, what are you recommending them? Zero to well-read at bookriot.com. Most memorable scene, Rebecca. A scene itself that sticks in your mind. They can blur. We've done a lot. We don't, we think about, we think about scenes, we tend to think about ideas and passages more than individual scenes. That's how we've proceeded to some degree. But having said that, is there a moment from any one of the books that you can latch on to if you scan through them quickly or you think about - What's yours?

29:41Jeff:I want you to go first on this one. I keep thinking about Marmee. Oh, damn it. That's not out yet. I can't even say that. Spoilers. Spoilers. If you know what that is, you deserve to do that. So that's one that stuck with me. And again, that's been a few weeks. Outside of that one, I do think about Hamlet, of course. Always am thinking about Hamlet. But because of the Hamlet... You are always thinking about Hamlet. That's just true. I think because we did Hamlet as well, and that's already out.

30:20The wonder of Shakespeare and the moments where, and I said this on the show, there's a part of me that wants to imagine that Hamlet realizes he's in a play. And he goes, he sort of shuts it down once he kills Polonius. and he's like, there's special providence in the fall of a sparrow, the readiness is all. I think about the readiness is all a lot. And I'm not even sure I know what it means, but Hamlet moving from where he feels like he may have some control over events and he also doesn't give up. This is not him giving up. Like I'm just, you know, whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen. But it's also, I find myself beguiled by the readiness is all.

31:05and I don't know what to do with it and I think that's why it sticks with me. I feel like there's something there but it's inexhaustibly interesting to me to think about the most creative, the most inventive character by the most creative and most inventive playwright at the moment in which they have a realization of some kind, it is to sort of step outside of themselves. But I don't know what to do with that, Rebecca. So that's why I keep coming back to it. Is that gibberish? Did anyone follow that? I have no idea.

31:32Jeff:This is why Hamlet still hits. This is why we're still reading Shakespeare for us. hundred years later is that feeling exactly that's right i think for me it's more of an image than a scene or there's multiple scenes of it but jamie and the jamie hanging out on the porch of the shop in their eyes are watching god and the like the banter and the storytelling and how sharp those moments are that like you can feel like the southern night air i really loved that they're like, it's tied. There's a three way tie, though. The other ones are the after the summer afternoon when everybody's drunk in the hotel in Gatsby.

32:10Jeff:And you're just like, this is the what are these people doing? We can have a power ranking of drunk in the hotel because there's a wonderful drunk in the I mean, the denouement of the secret history is also drunk. And then the scene in Midnight's Children where Salim Sinai is hiding in the laundry basket. Yeah, And his mother comes into the bathroom and he sees all kinds of things happen, but he describes her butt as the black mango. And this encounter that he has with the black mango like shapes the rest of his life. It's just so it's like vivid and wild and zany and just funny. And you're like, is this happening?

32:55Jeff:Like, is this really what's happening right now to this character? just I'm going to be thinking about that forever like when I'm on drugs for some medical procedure someday I'm probably going to be like uttering gibberish about the black mango and the laundry basket study and play come together on a windows 11 pc and for a limited time college students get the best of both worlds get the unreal college deal everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller.

33:32Jeff:Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college pc. Ready to soundtrack your summer? With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end DJ, a road dog, or a trail mixer. Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit redbull.com slash bright summer ahead to learn more. See you this summer. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels.

34:12At Blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50 ,000 five-star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure. Right now, get up to 45 % off with minimum purchase. Plus get a free professional measure at blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply. You know, the one that I think about a lot too is from a never let me go when they finally go to sort of confront the administrator's teachers and they sort of ask them the truth and they tell them the truth.

34:50and I think any moment when truth telling happens, I'll have to save this for another one because there's another scene where the truth actually have it out. We must have it out. I may even be quoting that directly. Anytime people have it out, it's Secret History or Gatsby, but this moment where they actually go confront their childhood teachers who are part of this bio-industrial complex and they have to reckon with the truth and all of their invented mythologies fall away. It's just unbelievable. I mean, it's -

35:23Jeff:It's so heartbreaking. I think that's the book from this season that I've read the most. Yeah, yeah. And that scene is really sticky. How about characters that jumped off the page? Characters that stuck out in the moment. They could be forever characters. I've got one, but I can lead off again. You want me to go first? yeah take it Atticus Finch is a weirdo like in a great and like in a way better way than like than you were standing for Atticus Finch in that episode well I'm not even but like that he sits by himself and he's a weirdo outlier sort of barely not an outcast like he's weird he is not I don't think he is the version of Gregory Peck and it's been a while since I've watched the version of that which is more like kind of almost like a Martin Sheen, Josiah Bartlett, like a paragon of like everything that's good and fantastically great about a certain kind of male liberal positionality.

36:26But he's pretty odd. He doesn't fit in. And it's because, and I think it's because of that he does what he does. But I keep thinking about how strange Atticus Finch is. That's one that keeps, I keep coming.

36:39Jeff:Scout Finch was on my list here too, that she's so much funnier than I, that I remembered. I hadn't read to kill a mockingbird since like early in education, seventh, seventh grade, ninth grade, something like that. And it's just, she's charming and funny and so much sharper than I recalled. And I loved Zoid Wheeler in Vineland. Yes. And folks like if you have been scrolling in the zero to well-read feed and you have seen Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and you're like, why are they doing a Pynchon book? I've never heard of. that's the book that inspired one battle after another that's out right now gonna be up for a bunch of oscars and that the opening scene when zoid is like he's gotta go do his annual transfenestration jump through a window to demonstrate that he's still crazy so that he can get the government support and all of the reporters are gonna like show it just it just sets the scene for okay you're in for a ride here what's happening i had never read that before i'd never read Pynchon before.

37:37Jeff:And it was a real like, that was also a buckle up moment. But I loved Zoid in that moment. And, and really through the whole book and the seeds of him that are in Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Bob in one battle after another are really fun to trace. Scenes about making a scene are always fun too, because you get a lot of that in Hamlet, you know, when he puts on his antic disposition. And then as we talked about with Hamnet, the last 10 or 15 pages of Hamnet, which she's going to the play, and then sees the play. And And he sees that Will has trained the character playing Hamlet to have the man.

38:08I mean, come on. Yeah. Come on. Let's see. What kinds of books and authors are you more or less interested in adding to the show lineup?

38:19Jeff:I mean, I think a lot of the stuff that we read as teens, but that's really meant to be for adults, that feels like the richest field of exploration to me. I keep thinking about Perks of Being a Wallflower. Yeah. I know that's an important book to you, and we've talked about that, I think, over the years. I see it show up way higher up on most rated. That book still hits. I'd be so curious to see it, because it's kind of like the secret history for tweens a little bit. It kind of is, yeah. Or the Great Gatsby for Gen Alpha, but I'd be curious to do that. That kind of stuff. I'm interested in doing some more drama.

38:54Jeff:We did Shakespeare this season. We did Oedipus, but doing some more plays. I obviously want to do a stopper. I mean, that's clearly the answer. Yeah, yeah. And doing some poetry. I think one of the things that I'm excited to do as we transition into knowing that this is going to be a weekly thing and not just like in a couple seasons through the year is more diversity of format. And like, for it to be interesting. We have more at bats, Rebecca. So we can swing at some weird pitches. Yeah. And it'll give us like, you know, if we're reading a 500 page book one week, we can do a play or we can do some poetry the next week and give ourselves some variety in that way too.

39:30but I'm really excited to do that.

39:33Jeff:Yeah, we have something. Oh, go ahead. And also just to see how listeners respond. Looking at the download stats for this season has also been kind of interesting and surprising of which episodes, as far as those are a measure of what books people are interested in visiting or checking out has been really fun. What's on your list? I mean, I think I'm the one that made a case to include Oedipus or something from antiquity because just thinking about what people think about, I was like, I think people are gonna, they want or they may want that because that's what we think about when you like you know look at a great books course and like the greeks and i think again it it's certainly possible all of these works are singular in a way but they're kind of singular in similar ways as we find i i would like more i want to go back into the deep older vault because if you look at sort of the median age of what we've done it's younger than you might get from a normal thing and that's fine there's nothing wrong with that but i think that episode and our experience of it suggests that we could look at you know katolis or you know we could look at this the meditations of marcus aurelius or seneca or montane's essay and sophocles and yeah so we're gonna i i want to do more than i think we can mix it in but i also think i like something you said about mixing in different kinds of work i you know we have on the document i don't want to spoil it here, things that are not literature in the conventional way of looking at it, speeches, other kinds of documents.

41:03I think there's stuff we could do around those moments of language, I guess, is a way of thinking about that, that you probably wouldn't read in a literature, literary history course, but certainly are works of language that are worth looking to for their language moments, but then also have historical and political contexts that are super interesting as well. Maybe you can guess what we might be doing a little bit that way. I guess I am, we weren't sure how the Twilight experience was going. There were certain some people that didn't like just the idea that it would be in the feed. And I think people noped out about it.

41:35And I don't care about that. That's fine. I am very interested in taking on the big cultural works that would never appear in a great books course and dealing with them on their terms of what they meant and what they do and don't do.

41:45Jeff:And one of the things I've been thinking about for that is how much time to let pass or to wait to require has passed before a cultural moment, like makes it into the zero to well read threshold, because it's hard to tell when a phenomenon is happening, that, like, it's actually going to be something that's important to readers 10 or 15 or 50 years down the line. And Twilight is 20 years old and has stayed in the conversation and stayed relevant. So I've been thinking about, like, what are other things that are about that old or that had big cultural moments before that that we might fill in the gaps on but that was that was fun and like one of the interesting pieces of feedback was someone saying i wish they had had like a real twilight fan on it because i think some folks felt like by virtue of the fact that none of us were super into the book we were knocking on it and that wasn't my experience at all i i hope we're going into all of these trying to genuinely ask why was this book important what did it do and there are plenty of other big like pop culture moments that we can have those conversations about if you're looking for like and we loved this or here's your fan representation that this is probably just not the right i think we're gonna play as it lays like we're gonna see how the golf ball lays and hit it the best we can to make something interesting out of it i i saw i thought that was interesting too and i can see how some people might want that i think for a book like that, I was perfectly open to the idea of, you know what, I really vibed with this.

43:17I didn't think that was going to happen. But we ourselves are fans of other kinds of popular literature that certainly wouldn't appear on the page. We eventually will probably do the Da Vinci Code, for example.

43:29Jeff:Oh, we will absolutely do the Da Vinci Code. But I think we are who we are, and we have who we have. And I think you could probably find fans of Twilight elsewhere. Yeah. I think it also can be hard if you are truly sort of a fan of something to do what we do with some of these works. Am I a Shakespeare fan? I guess insofar as a thing could exist. But I think when someone says a Twilight fan, they're thinking of a different kind of relationship. Yeah, I mean, I think fandom is a different thing than like appreciating or finding value in. It's related to, but it has a different quality. I love a lot of the books that we talked about this season.

44:05Jeff:I'm not sure that I would call myself a fan. Like in all the ways we, like, I don't know, there's a weight and like a certain connotation, a context to fandom, yeah. Yeah. I'm sort of not a fan of everything in my DNA. Like I just, I don't participate in that kind of enthusiasm. It's kind of weird. Yeah, you really don't. I don't like that. And that's not, it's just not right for me. A favorite episode that we've done so far? I'm really proud of the Bluest Eye episode. That was one of the harder ones to do just because the subject matter is so difficult with Toni Morrison and what she's wrestling with.

44:40Jeff:It's also one of the only ones that I made myself listen back to the whole episode after we did it. Wow. Why? I don't do this. I hate listening to myself. I can listen to you, but I don't do it myself. I just wanted to know. I gave it a couple weeks, and then I wanted to know, how do I feel? Did we do our job there? We're going to talk about Morrison again at some point on the show. So that one just, it felt, and also I really want to do right by Tony. You know, like we can't mess up Tony Morrison's legacy, but her work means a lot to me. And I really just wanted to do right by it. So from meaningful, it was the bluest eye.

45:17Jeff:I think I had the most fun with the secret history. That was going to be mine. We just, we had a great time that day. I think that was the most fun. I also think it, I think we were, we had a few reps at it. and we had one that we knew was going to be fun to do. And it straddles the classical antiquity, great books and patronry pulp stuff in a way that I think we both find pleasure. Yeah, and it gave us the moment of you imagining Miss Piggy committing murder, which iconic, apparently. She would do it. Got a lot of messages about that. Piggy's not going to beat the rap. She would. Piggy's ruthless.

45:54Yeah. If you could snap your fingers and get listeners to read one of the books we have covered, which it would be? Which would it be? Gosh. There's a weird question.

46:03Jeff:It is a weird question. Yeah. Because the podcast exists to get listeners to read all of them. Yeah, but like you could say, okay. I mean, Jeannie, and people will read that. Maybe never let me go. And I don't know why. It's just the feeling I have right now. I think maybe for the same reason we enjoyed the episode, which it kind of does. It does do a lot of different things well. Yeah. I mean, he has a Nobel Prize for a reason. And it feels like that. just really in good hands. Yeah. And it's a living doc. This is a living author. This is a segue maybe into my next one. Like this is in our living room.

46:38The premise is fully realized. I don't know the answer to that. I think if I do a wrinkle on my own, I would like people to go see a Hamlet production, like a theatrical. I mean, the movies are good and they can do a thing. But if I'm going to be genie myself and I can snap people into a Royal Shakespeare Company or the Oregon Shakespeare Festival or like a serious good production of Hamlet. And for people that haven't done that, again, you may not vibe with it, but it's kind of like the seven wonders of the world. Like you go see the pyramids if you can. You go see Shakespeare if you can sometime in your life.

47:20So that's me. Think aloud time. Speaking of Ishiguro, we have done episodes about the work of living authors. We have not yet considered including them in some way. We have more on the docket and will in the future. The living authors that we've gotten are kind of tough ass. Donna Tartt, Thomas Pynchon, maybe the hardest ass there is in Ishiguru who's won a Nobel Prize. But not all of them will be that way. There are books on our list in the future where we could conceivably get them on the horn for all or part of this. and I think it's a testament to what we enjoy doing about that. It's not a fait accompli that we're going to.

47:56We should. We're not trying to do it from like prestige versions. On the other hand, it seems sort of dumb not to talk to 25 minutes. You hear what I'm getting at, Rebecca, here. It's like, what would that look like? And are people interested in that? That's sort of for the listeners to let us know. But what do you think about this? I think, well, I think the show as it is,

48:15Jeff:I love this format and having these conversations And it would be very awkward to have this whole, like a whole conversation about a book with an author sitting there. I agree with that completely. We can't do the whole thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want to be like, come sit next to me while we talk about your book for an hour. We need some distance, yeah. Yeah. But something that brings the authors into the close reading, maybe you've done a bit on the first edition podcast before where you've like pulled out one great sentence from the book and use that as a jumping off point for a conversation with an author.

48:44Jeff:I think something like that or like a close reading with the author of a line or a scene would be the place that I would be interested in going. I think I'm thinking along the same lines, maybe slightly differently. Certainly, we don't want them for the full 90 minutes. We want to be able to say things about, again, we're not slagging anyone, but we want to have a conversation amongst ourselves with the teacher outside of the room. That's an important part of the process. but they do, they could give us things that maybe we would uniquely be interested that don't exist elsewhere. I mean, about the origins, the influences, the, you know, what was the hardest part, which is the part you, like I think the actual moment of creation of these stories and these characters and these ideas, we can find an interview but we can also do the perfect Zero to Well interview that we then reference into the, so I almost think that maybe we could do an interview with them about like the big bang of this particular work and then incorporate that it's somehow, you know, use clips or maybe we use the whole thing or an edited version of it.

49:46It's like, okay, how did this thing come to be? Well, we have Dan Brown with us. Okay, Dan, come in.

49:53Jeff:Speak that, Jeff, I need you for the next two minutes to believe in manifesting for a second so that we can get Dan Brown to come talk to us. Well, but there's a lot of people and, you know, people I've interviewed in other places that could come to. And that's one thing I was super nervous about when I first doing it. But I find authors to be extremely interested and humble about talking about this thing that became something. If you're interested, I talked to Colette Hosseini about the Kite Runner. I was just going to reference that. And I love that conversation. And he was so warm and generous too.

50:24But to know about, they can tell us stories. And other people haven't asked about, what was it like when you saw the book? What was the moment you knew this was a thing? like what piece of criticism and maybe we wouldn't use it all but I think there'd be a lot there for us and the listeners as well. So that kind of thinking we're not we certainly can't do it for all of them nor do we want to but I think there's a that's a club that we could get out of the bag.

50:45Jeff:Yeah I think that could be fun and special. Yeah. Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in Scotland. The sweep of wild coastlines quiet locks and untamed landscapes fresh cuisine that feels rooted in the land come experience the kind of stillness that stays with you long after you leave plan your scottish escape today at expedia.com slash visit scotland girl winter is so last season and now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang on the patio sundress.

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52:09Jeff:Download the State Farm app or go online at statefarm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Mailbag time, Rebecca. We're going to try to blow through some of these. Thank you so much for listening. I guess we'll take turns reading. Yeah, the first question is somebody who's wondering if the content warning puts you off of the bluest eye, what's the best starting place with Morrison?

52:32I mean, it's not a lot better, Rebecca. I mean, there's not, I don't know. It might be the most intense, but there's not a Christmas carol, but for Morrison, it just doesn't exist.

52:43Jeff:Yeah. I mean, the content warning, I wish that I could email this person and be like, tell me more about the parts of the content warning, because the broad content warning with the bluest eye is sexual assault, but it's very specifically child sexual assault. And so like there are some like if it's there's some shades to like, could you read this? Could you not read this other thing? I think Sula is the safest. That's exactly what I was going to say. But it is not safe. Just because it's the safest does not mean it is safe. Yeah, you're still in the land of Morrison. But Sula, I think, is the safest.

53:15Jeff:And it also it's her second novel. it's after the bluest eye the most accessible like she's starting to do some morrison weird stuff but you're not in the land of like a really challenging read yet it's relatively short but like do your own due diligence do your googles and find out a little bit more about the specifics of those content warnings but i think i might even suggest recitative because i mean it came out and it's a short story you can get his own at least it's quick you know it still deals a lot of morrison things, but you're not going to dwell for 10 pages in chattel slavery like you're going to do in Beloved.

53:50Or really the most difficult scenes to even talk about now, I think, are in the bluest eye that we've tackled so far. Recitative gives you a little dip of Morrison, and the current version has a Zadie Smith introduction, which is wonderful. So again, short stories are often a good place to start, and Morrison just has the one, so you could start there as well. This is from Jen. Are you considering covering any longer books? Go the other way. I know time is limited, but there are so many long classes. I would love to hear you discuss and analyze. Moby Dick, Bleak House, Ulysses, Karamazov, Quixote, Middlemarch, et cetera.

54:24I mean, we've done some long books, but this is even, I think it's not even just the number of pages, because the longest book we've done so far is... Midnight's Children. Midnight's Children, which 600. I don't think Karamazov's that. Is it 800 pages long? The rest are, we're trying to figure this ourselves because we cannot do Quixote in one 90 minute episode. We cannot do Ulysses in a lifetime. There are book clubs that read Ulysses.

54:53Jeff:It took them like 20 years. We have some ideas. There are books, there are long works coming out that warrant more than one encounter. We are thinking about this. Yeah. But to do 90 minutes on war and peace is a fool's errand. And fools we may be, but we know enough to wonder about that. Yeah, I think the thing that I'm chewing on for that is that breaking the books up into like Bleak House Part 1, Bleak House Part 2 or something is the way that you would do it in a class or a book club, but doesn't actually lend itself super well to podcast episodes or to like a serialized sort of conversation.

55:39Right.

55:39Jeff:I imagine that it's probably more of a like context and setting conversation and then an episode that gets into like specific scenes and quotes and then I don't know, something else about like the influence and impact of those works down the line. I feel comfortable telling listeners we're considering doing something around the Odyssey for next summer. And we are actively trying to figure out the way that we want to approach it. And that would be fun and interesting and well-rounded. But compared to Moby Dick or Quixote or Ulysses, the Odyssey is a spinning rack page turner in terms of length.

56:22Because it's true. You can get the just number of hours to prep is hard for some of these others. Again, I think this question is understandable and one we're having. And certainly to do a lineup of like, if you got all the books we're going to do for the whole course of the run and put them next to each other and they were missing some of these, you would notice the omission. But how to include them as a logistical and critical question that's difficult.

56:48Jeff:I think like whatever the book is on your personal wish list for this show, We want to know the books that folks are interested in. Please do email us. But in terms of answering all of those specific questions, just assume it's on the long list. Yes. And the long list is long. I would also think from a listener, I can understand this. And I would understand this as a listener myself. But our principal goal is to make good episodes. And we have plenty of books we can make good episodes about that don't include these. So that's another weird way of thinking about it as well. But the lack thereof would seem odd given enough time.

57:25Jeff:We will figure something out. I think we'll all figure it out together, honestly, how we're going to do these big ones. All right. I think the next one is yours. From Jessica, she's wondering if a different kind of episode might be something in the future, like a top five or top 10 of a genre or a podcast version of a reading journey. Or we call them reading pathways at Book Riot. So you want to get into Toni Morrison. Here's your reading pathway. I don't I am very much not interested in top fives and top tens in this particular space I agree but I can see doing like maybe we do a run of yeah like like a mini season of like sci-fi books in a row or we incorporate a bunch of like the best romances over the course of a season we I think the best version is to just sprinkle those through I think that that at some point we work in a groundbreaking work of science fiction at some point we do one of the big you know blockbuster romances that took romance mainstream yeah we do a big groundbreaking mystery but i would like to just thread those into the fabric of the show rather than setting them aside i also think part of our ethos at book riot and part of the ethos of this show is that genre, like the greats of genre are just part of the great books.

58:45Jeff:And they have not got they've gotten short shrift, they have not been given credit for that historically in the way that we talk about great books, but we definitely want to do that. We didn't do those big genre hits in the first 12, you know, episode season here, because we were we're trying to set a foundation. But I do anticipate that we'll do those and we'll thread them through. Also, logistically and sort of listening experience too, just to come at it from the other side of the mic, is if you did a run of five in whatever genre, you would lose listeners because there are a certain percentage of listeners that don't want that.

59:19And after five weeks of it, they will forget to come back and look at it. It's much more sustainable. It's like we would assume that everyone's not listening to every single episode. But I don't want you to go more than one or two episodes without like something that can grab you, which means we need to kind of move around. and we need to do a different kind of a dance that moves to a different beat than just episode to episode continuity might make sense. You know, if we were done this two years ago and we were coming into Jane Austen's 250th birthday this year, I could imagine just doing like a year of Austen, which we cover like six over the course of the year, but we wouldn't cluster them for that reason.

59:55You know, there might be other reasons to do special events, stuff like that. Would you consider, this is from Benji, or Benj, would you consider reading The Golden Complice? is the beginning of a series, which probably takes away from the appeal for the show, but it was and still remains a staple in books and literature. This is an obvious yes, we will consider all of these. Yeah. Yes. Twilight was the beginning of one golden compass didn't hit the heights in terms of mass appeal. But golden compass is very much in the wheelhouse of what we'd like to do, right?

1:00:23Jeff:Yeah. And I think I just want to correct the assumption that being the first in a series takes away from the appeal for the show that like if the series has been important, it's the first book that we're going to talk about here. Even if the adaptation that's coming out is an adaptation of the fifth book in the series, or even if we're like, the publishing is marking the publication of the seventh book in a series, we will take the moment to talk about the book where the series began. It's much less likely that we're going to be doing the first, second, and third books in a series. I think the beginning book of, I mean, things that are coming out next year, you know, Gerwig's Narnia, Sunrise at the Reaping, those are wonderful times to like, let's take the first one of these, because that's where the context and how those things can be applied there.

1:01:05Doing the third book in the series after you've done the first two, for us is probably not something we're gonna do even if the third book is, I'm trying to think of an example, like something in the Sherlock Holmes series or one of those other series where people care about them. But we're just not gonna probably be talking about Mockingjay by itself, but we probably will do The Hunger Games at some point.

1:01:25Jeff:Yeah, the where it all began and how this thing that started in this place grew into being an important series or a cultural phenomenon or whatever. The starting point is always interesting. Yeah, I think the next one's you. It's from Amelia. What are things to consider when choosing between different translations for works that are not originally written in English or for finding annotated versions or guides for older or reference heavy works? For example, I'm interested in The Tale of Genji and I picked up a beautiful two-volume hardcover, but the translation is older than Jeff and I are. And while it has some footnotes on the allusions in the poetry, I would love more explanatory material.

1:02:03Jeff:This is a really good question. I mean, I think Amelia's onto it. Like if you want one with more, get one with more if they exist. I mean, Thrift Books has sponsored us, but go look at used online sites to see what all the different possibilities are. This is one where going into your local bookstore might be great, but you might not be able to find things that exist without going online and looking at one of the big, Thrift Books has everything, you know, the Amazons of the world. But go look because for things, There have been dozens of editions of all of these. Well, not all the books, but certainly something that's been out like Tale of the Genji.

1:02:35You can find all kinds of stuff. I think for translation, I think it's very interesting to look for the most recent translation there is.

1:02:45Jeff:I agree. Now, that doesn't mean you have to do that one, but you might read them side by side if they're available on your Kindle or library or something else to see. The more modern translations tend to have more explanatory material. and they'll just have more of the telescoping nature of time to tell you what's going on in the life of that work. I think this is also a place where reviews can be helpful. Goodreads might even be helpful of what do you get from this annotated version versus another annotated version. Tale of the Genji might be a little obscure to find ABC comparison articles, but for other things like For the Odyssey, you can easily find articles or blog posts where someone does comparisons of the Fitzgerald translation versus Emily Wilson's translation versus somebody, Fagel's, whoever else.

1:03:38Jeff:So sometimes looking for that is helpful. But like, if you can get to like your local bookstore, and you're looking at something that they have different versions of, I think being able to like hold the books and flip through them and look for yourself is, is super helpful. But for anything else like I would look online to try to figure out how useful was this for other readers what kind of annotations are you looking for but then you can kind of like a work this old you can also roll your own supplementary material pretty easily by like follow the rabbit holes from the Wikipedia page look at who like whoever did the annotations or the introduction actually this is a shout out for Penguin Classics because like half of the books I read this season I read the Penguin classics edition of like, read the introduction and then look at the bibliography for the introduction and pull like some of those go to some of those articles or some of those books.

1:04:29Jeff:And you can just sort of like follow that as far down the path as you want to. But I like your suggestion to find that something really old find the newest translation is a good starting point. Another idea and I know budget can be a thing and you decide, but there's no reason you need only one edition. I have multiple editions of Whitman, because they have different things and he published a billion different editions. But if you have one that you like the translation of but has no good supplementary stuff, buy that one and then buy the one that has a good supplementary stuff. Yeah, or you know, like this person is mentioning they got this original book at the Friends of the Library sale.

1:05:02Jeff:Like you could request a bunch of different editions from your local library, do the inner library alone, spread them all out, look at what you want to find and then buy the one for your home library that rings the most bells. Yeah. We're going to end with an email from my dad who emailed me personally. He did not email into the Zero to Well Read. I love this email. Your dad is a great beloved figure in a great universe. So my dad is a wonderful reader. And a lot of the reasons I'm the reader I am today is because he cared about books and reading. And I remember distinctly, for no particular reason, he picked up Plutarch's Lives to read it when I was a kid.

1:05:36He wanted to do, I think a lot that's in the spirit of this is have an encounter with the great books and he cares about ideas and history. And so a special place for my dad's email to me, I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I'll read some of it. I just listened to Zero to Well Read on Hamnet. Really good. Also, I saw the movie last Sunday. Fell asleep in the first fourth of the show, but was blown away by the last 30 minutes. Jesse Buckley must get the Academy Award for leading actress. She was excellent. Also, I had trouble hearing the dialogue, but the director, Chloe Zhao, said she didn't catch all the words either, as the actors were so good that you didn't need to hear all the dialogue.

1:06:12And she was right. Happy holidays. Love, Dad. Thanks, Dad. An amazing email for my father.

1:06:16Jeff:Thank you. I think I saw or read the same Chloe Zhao interview that your dad was referring to. Yes, it went around. Michelle sent it to me. A couple people sent it to me. So I have seen that. It's a good thing. She's basically saying... Oh, go ahead. You can... It's a good discourse on Shakespeare. Yes. Like when Shakespeare is performed well, you don't have to know what all of the vocabulary words mean because the meaning comes across in the way that it is performed in the intonation and the rhythm of the language and the actor's carriage. Like Paul Meskel doing Hamlet is stellar. or doing, he's playing, you know, Shakespeare playing Hamlet's father, but it's really incredible.

1:06:53Next week, we have one more non-title episode sort of in this holiday window here. We'll return with a fully formed, really fun episode for January 6th. I think it turned out for both of us to be a lot more fun than we were even anticipating. In the meantime, we can wait for that. You can all go to patreon.com slash zero to well read for detailed show notes, free newsletter and other membership options. You can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at ZeroToWellRead. Just look in your podcatcher right now. The links will be right there to the Patreon, to the YouTube, TikTok, and other places.

1:07:27You can shoot us an email, ZeroToWellRead at bookrat.com. ZeroToWellRead is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, good work and thank you. This was fun. I enjoyed this brief look back, a pause and looking over our shoulder for what we've done.

1:07:43Jeff:Little semester evaluation for ourselves. That's right. There's coffee here on the table for everyone. We have scones. Enjoy and happy holidays. Thanks for being here with us.