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- [00:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
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- [01:49]
Jeff O'Neill
This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff o', Neill, joined today by Rebecca Schinsky and Vanessa Diaz. We're getting the Pals crew back together to talk about, I guess, the book of the year. Question mark. Vanessa and Rebecca so far, before we get into our reactions, we've all read the book. We're going to do it this way. We're going to discuss, you know, what the book is, our impressions of it. We'll give you a spoiler warning because then we do want to get into specifics there. Sharifa was going to join us. She isn't feeling well. I think that's just a cover because she needs to start on her Magnolia Kripke costume for Halloween and She has to start right now and she doesn't have time to podcast.
- [02:29]
Vanessa Diaz
Van, I think you might be onto something.
- [02:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
Sharifa was so bummed. Terrible timing for the flu household with little kids. She did tell me this was her favorite novel of the year to date. So we'll just have to have the aura of Sharifa with us today.
- [02:47]
Jeff O'Neill
It is extraordinarily Sharifa Kaur. I'm not surprised. And we can get into some of the reasons.
- [02:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
If you've like boiled the person of Sharifa into a book, I think it would come out as Katabasis.
- [02:58]
Jeff O'Neill
Rebecca, why don't you give us, as best as you can an overview of like up till release day. What is the story of Kwong Katabasis? Why are we doing this pod today apart from whether our reactions to the book?
- [03:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
Well, R.F. kuang, one of the hottest young writers, I think, in American fiction. She came out of the gate hot with the poppy wars. It did better, I think, than anyone expected. Babel Award winner, award nominee, great literary science fiction. And then Yellowface, where she was exploring a white woman taking credit for a woman of color's manuscript in a really like fun, kind of gossipy book that managed to be political and provocative. And then Catawba says, this was announced last year, I believe, and the pitch was like Dante's Inferno meets Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. It's a story about a graduate student who has to make a journey into hell. And that was kind of all we all needed to get really excited about it. Kuang is consistently great. Every one of her books has done something very different, and they've all been successful and pretty fully realized. But she's getting in my reading, getting better and better, and one of the most interesting writers to watch. And she's managing to churn out like a book every two years while also having multiple master's degrees and she's in the middle of a doctorate. And the announcement for Katapasis comes out last year with a big like in the middle of the height of romantasy with it's this young woman and she's going on a journey into hell. There's a dude along the way. Will there be a romance? The synopsis doesn't really tell you. We can talk about that as we get into the show, but it was clearly packaged, angled for those kinds of customers. It has spreadges. There's some foiled stuff happening on the COVID Like the publisher rolled out the kind of splashy announcement that says this is going to be a big book to watch and then as the 2025 book releases unrolled, nothing ever eclipsed it. In what looked most exciting. We have not had a book of the summer. We haven't had a book of the year yet.
- [05:01]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, I mean, this is. Maybe I'll throw to Vanessa to figure this out, because we did have a Yaros in in February, and it sold a billion copies. That snow globe is big, but contained of, like, the hardcore romantasy kind of readers, and that's broken out to some degree. Vanessa, from where you sit, talk to me about this case I made to Rebecca the other day about, like, Katabasis. This book, this packaging, this author feels like the pinnacle of some constellation of trends we've seen over the last few years. I mean, what's your sense of, like, what. Where Katabas and Kwong sits in the reading culture. Like, you're managing editor. You deal with contributors all the time. There's a bunch of stuff on the site today. You know, new releases, Sharifa's favorite book, most anticipated. Like, what is your sense of it? Like, it's not just Rebecca and I. Right. Like, we're not the. The picking up on this vibe.
- [05:50]
Vanessa Diaz
This was my. One of my most anticipated books. I think I put it on the list earlier this year because it felt like a melding of a lot of the things that I love and I think people love. So you just mentioned, you know, that it came out during sort of the romantasy craze. And it definitely does drop a few of those notes where, like, oh, there might be that, but, like, dark academia is another one of those trends that's, like, never fully gone away. You had that teaser. You had RF Guang bringing into the table, so you just knew the type of fantasy you were gonna get into as far as, like, your feelings would probably not be spared.
- [06:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Right.
- [06:17]
Vanessa Diaz
There's some darkness in there. So again, you're kind of just pull in lots of different audiences into this one package that I thought was really, really smart. And not that I would expect anything less from Ro Kuang, but again, you don't really. You think you know what to expect, and then you don't. There's just a whole lot here that.
- [06:31]
Rebecca Schinsky
Feels like the trend, one of the ultimate end points or evolution points of this journey between literary fiction and genre fiction. The melding and the blurring of the lines between literary fiction and genre fiction. I think this is upmarket commercial fiction that rewards some literary reading.
- [06:50]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, it was a brain on book is what I've seen the youth calling it.
- [06:53]
Jeff O'Neill
Wait, wait, what was that, Vanessa?
- [06:55]
Vanessa Diaz
Youth are calling it these brain on books. Basically like books where you have to think. I'm always here to bring you all the social media rabbit holes. You know, this is what I come here for.
- [07:04]
Jeff O'Neill
I appreciate that. I'm not sure that it is as much as it seems to be, but.
- [07:11]
Vanessa Diaz
We can hear that.
- [07:12]
Jeff O'Neill
We can hear the review there.
- [07:13]
Vanessa Diaz
Yes, yes, yes.
- [07:14]
Jeff O'Neill
In a second.
- [07:17]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
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- [08:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
Now here we go. Here, here.
- [08:48]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
The ghosts come from the afterlife. Ethan's parents, Tag and Amanda watch as Nicole's hidden addictions and the public fascination with their story threaten Ethan's safety. Amanda's grief turns into a dark obsession. Ethan belongs with her and she will do anything to reunite with him, including killing Ethan. After she learns to possess the living, only Tag can stop her risking everything to protect Ethan, even if it means never seeing his wife or his child again. Now this is some messy ghost drama I never knew I needed. Make sure to check out what the Dead can do by Peter Roche. And thanks again to Crooked Lane Books for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Amazon. Christopher Franklin is the proud and only son of New York literary royalty. From birth he is built and destined for nothing less than greatness. But one day, out of disappointment, he makes a dangerous decision to change and turn into something he is not. How does he do this, you might ask? Well, he consciously decides to entangle his life with a miserable soul. I mean, who hasn't entangled their lives with a miserable soul from time to time, right? So years pass by and Chris settles into his life as a taxi driver and the miserable soul is still around and has believe it or not, gotten even more miserable. Well, one night without warning, a triggered chain reaction will take Chris on the ride of a lifetime and nothing will ever be the same. Lies and secrets will be uncovered. But not just that. Things are different now that he has two daughters. And the question becomes, can he protect them once he's at rock bottom? To find out, check out Intrinsic by whb. And thanks again to Amazon for sponsoring this episode.
- [10:33]
Jeff O'Neill
Let's go into the plot a little bit. And then so it is, as Rebecca said, a it's set in another magical academy, it's Cambridge. But Magic with a K is a real study. It's a real course of study. It seems to be not all powerful. It is a little bit more in the Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Like, it's there, but and it can turn the tide of a war, but only like sort of because the flasks can get replenished. It's not like dragons flying around in wars with wands kind of stuff. So it's it's around and it's available and it's just presented sort of one course of study. Like, you know, the two main characters get turned onto it early, but it's as viable. It's not any more special than like biology or anthropology is one of these lines that go in. It's set in Cambridge initially, and the two main characters are advisees of Professor Grimes, who is a brilliant, abusive tyrant. And we can talk about some of those ways that we, you know, that informs the book and he expires and they, because they need golden, recommend like he is their meal ticket to their whole rest of their academic career. And so they decide sort of together, sort of not to venture into hell and try to bring him back. So to be of service. And the hell of Kwong's hell is a hybrid mishmash chimeria chameleon of multiple religious and philosophical traditions. That's one of the great joys of, for me, the singular, not the singer. The greatest of joys is to see Kwong, who is better read than I am and smarter than I am and have encountered these texts more recently. I am just pull books off the shelf, references, paradigms, if you're into analytic philosophy, paradoxes. Have I got a book for you by the way. And to see her reference Chinese mythology and all the Western tradition is in her bag, plus some other things going on there. And then see how she recombobulates reforms like one of the early chapters. We get that they, they have done research into hell by reading the wasteland, by reading the Inferno, by reading sacred text from around the world and seeing them all as versions, missives of the same maps of the same territory, but told through slightly different things. And that is one of the great fun bits about it. Rebecca and I think you were talking on the podcast last week about how much more there is. If you have many, most probably not all, for most of us mere mortals that are not Rebecca Kwong's references at your disposal.
- [13:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I marked the references that I got as I was going through the book. So when I was making my notes for our recording earlier today. Like she's got Dante, she's got The Wasteland by T.S. eliot, as you mentioned. There's Sartre, there's the Aeneid, we get Merlin stories, the cat is named Archimonde Medes, you get Socrates, Aristotle and Nicomachus, Alice in Wonderland, and the main character's name is Alice. There's references to the Odyssey, to Aldous, Huxley, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Foucault. I had to Google who Leibniz was, but he's the guy.
- [13:32]
Jeff O'Neill
Whoa. He invented calculus, baby. Calculus is very important here so you don't get caught in infinity paradox, which is always fun.
- [13:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
Calculus is important. I also learned what Zeno's Paradox is. And then you get good ethics and philosophy references to the Trolley problem, the Monty hall problem, the Hangman's paradox, and those are just the ones that I got that I read through and was like, that's a real person and that's a real reference. And the magic of RF Kuang is that all this stuff is in here. She has put it all into the mix and synthesized it so well that it's fun. It's understandable whether you know that that is a real person or not. You get like what she is saying. And there are made up magicians and made up philosophers throughout these texts as well. So Socrates and Aristotle sit along them. And I think that's part of the trick of it is that you could read this and have no idea who, who any of these people were, that any of them were real. You can read it as if they're all imaginary. And you can still have a great time with the story. But having some of the reading background does make it really fun. And like, damn, is she impressive. It is so impressive how you can put how she could put all of this into a book and still have it be a great time.
- [14:43]
Jeff O'Neill
It's one of the few times, Vanessa, that I think a hyperlinked digital book may have been the optimal reading experience so that you could click me for self.
- [14:51]
Vanessa Diaz
Because if you are a person who has like ADHD borderline tendencies and also just like hates not knowing what a thing is and you are like, I went through the book and also recognized everything Rebecca just mentioned. But because there were fictitious things thrown in there too, my brain at all clips needed to know, is this another one that's fictitious? Is this one?
- [15:09]
Jeff O'Neill
I just don't know. What do we do? Is that a real. I need to know.
- [15:11]
Vanessa Diaz
Oh my gosh. So I was googling every three seconds and it took me twice as long to finish the book. Book. Because of that I fully admit. Still great time. But I just will admit that that while brilliant, was also a thing that for people like me who have a tendency to go down a rabbit hole, like, is this one. Is this. Is this a Nietzsche?
- [15:26]
Jeff O'Neill
The book even mentions one of the characters going down a rabbit hole in the text. Like, you know, it's not just subtext like this sort of. And it's part of the critique of academia and the academic mind, which we certainly get into because I think that was the real surprise for me is this is less a exploration of morality in the afterlife. That is a searing indictment of the academic establishment writ large and all who dwell therein.
- [15:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
I would say like hell is literally a campus.
- [15:50]
Jeff O'Neill
Hell is other academics, I guess, to paraphrase Sartre in that particular way. Yeah. So I think it really would reward an annotated version. I can only imagine a deluxe version that has like on the facing sides or an appendix or a glossary of some kind. I'm a little surprised there for the brain on readers that they didn't include that or some because that would have been a lot of fun to like go back like, okay, La Pace's dream and like the demon. The demon. I love the demon makes an appearance here. It was so fun to be reminded of the things I once knew as a sharper and more learned person and see those along the way.
- [16:24]
Rebecca Schinsky
The description I gave in today in books this week, which I think I might have said on the POD briefly, was I feel like this is for people who like dark academia and also wanted to like loved the Good Place. Like it's also very funny and I don't want to gloss over how difficult that is. It's hard to be funny in fiction just in general. And it's really hard to be funny about a story set in hell that's about academic work and like serious research and in which you're just casually dropping references to Aristotle like Nicopikean ethics. It's really, really hard. And she does it just beautifully. Like you get the grad students that they run into in hell who say that they would rather stay in hell than be in than be reincarn. Because what if we get reincarnated by someone or something that lacks for self examination and an unexamined life is not worth living? It's a good bit, just skewers them. But it's really funny.
- [17:20]
Jeff O'Neill
It's a really good bit. The Socrates was put to death for being annoying. I laughed at that. I think I probably also made that joke when I was teaching Socrates back or something very like. Because it's true and also not true. Of course it is quite funny at.
- [17:33]
Rebecca Schinsky
Times as they trav. As they are watching people traverse through hell or they're following the shades, the souls that are in hell. They find out that the way you journey through hell and you maybe get reincarnated is you like have to pass an exam. You have to pass a test to get to each level of hell. And you have a transcript.
- [17:50]
Vanessa Diaz
Yep.
- [17:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Just so it's.
- [17:53]
Jeff O'Neill
So it's really fascinating to see. So I, I. We all like the book. Let's the. I'm not going to pour. What? I'm not going to pour water on everything. But I'll say what the limitations are in, in my reading. I think commercial, upmarket commercial is where this is. There is a version of this book that is much more literary. That is much.
- [18:13]
Vanessa Diaz
I agree.
- [18:13]
Jeff O'Neill
And I think the part that I liked better trended away from the commercial romance sort of on trend elements. The Peter, Alice, back and forth, Peter being the. I don't know, there's sort of the tropes course here at the beginning of the two main characters feels very familiar. Sort of the uptight overachieving young woman and then like the very loosey goosey can do whatever guy with the. And like she tries to problematize that. But like I think on the character level it feels more commercial. On the reference level it's more literary. Like the characters here are. They're not bad but like, you're not going to write home. And like, remember Alice, remember her characteristics. Or Pete, like they're more figures than character, fully more literary characters. I would say that that was my experience of it. And then the relationship to each other is okay. I think the relationship to ideas is more interesting than a relationship to each other. And I thought Alice thinking about what she wants, Peter thinking about what he wants is more interesting than this. Very obvious. Like, I. There's this thing in some of these in romances where the interior of the characters are not honest with themselves, like everyone are. There are people's interior lives really that dull that some of these people have, I always think in these early stages of a romance. But it's just to extend the. Will they. Won't they kind of element expectations. Jeff Yeah, I don't know. But like, so that part was less successful for me. I also think that there were a couple places where the beginning is weird. The beginning is a little disjointed, to be honest with you. Like, they could have. She could have started 12 pages later and it would made a lot more sense. And then backfill. I don't really understand that. But I thought the frame. It took me 80 pages, honestly, to really sort of get on board because, like, what are we doing here? And I didn't care. I don't care about the main romance. I didn't need that. That's. And Rebecca and I, we talked about that is not something we were looking for. So my shoulders were up and remained up. And then it kind of fell into the background for a while. And that's when I was happiest. Rebecca so what did you think about this idea of romance being central? But it's a. It's a pillar of this.
- [20:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think the way the love story plays out here is illustration that RF Kuang is one of the smartest writers about the business of writing and entertaining readers. That it starts off, we know that Alice and Peter are in hell together. And this is complex. There are hints about, like, nights that they've spent together in the past. And so my notes in the margin are like, are they Exes? And then 80 pages later, something else happens and it's like, okay, maybe this is their relationship instead. Like, we'll get into spoilers later on. But she's not clear from the outset what their history is with each other. So there's that question. And trying to figure out who they are to each other and what it will or won't become, I think is a very. Canny way to do this. Like, you really don't know from most of the book, is it going to end up that there is a love story of some kind?
- [21:07]
Jeff O'Neill
I guess that that's the signal difference in my reading experience is I felt pretty clearly early on what. How this was going to play out, at least generally now. Now that could. It felt more inevitable to me than maybe it was. Maybe it was more of a chance. Right. But from the beginning, I was like, oh, okay.
- [21:20]
Rebecca Schinsky
And there is a chunk of the book, like, more than 100 pages, I think, where it's just Alice by herself for a while. And that was. I was so glad that that happened that we got to just spend time with Alice by herself. And it made the ending of the book feel more earned to me. Like, some of this is. I'm trying to separate my taste from what I think the book does well. Because my taste would just be these people have this wonderful platonic working relationship where they care for each other and they go on this adventure and, like, look at them do collaborate. Like, good collaboration porn that we never get, other than, like, Don and Peggy. Like, just more of that, please. So I, like, my shoulders were also up about, is there going to be romance? But that's me. That's not the. Like, there's. Well, that.
- [22:05]
Jeff O'Neill
We're doing me. We're doing me. That's what, you know, that's what our own reaction is. Vanessa, where were you on. I mean, me?
- [22:10]
Vanessa Diaz
I am. I was gonna say I am an avid romance reader and I don't need romance in all of my fantasy. Like, Romantasy is great, but I just, like, don't need it all the time. And I actually didn't necessarily think it was inevitable. Like, it was doing enough stuff with their interiority that I thought, okay, maybe we won't actually get there. So I kind of appreciated that. Yes, there's romance. It did feel earned to me. There was still some stuff on the page that felt maybe, like, a little too meh for, like, the overall tone of the book where I was like, oh, we don't really, like, maybe need to go with the, like, dummy, he's in love with you sort of thing.
- [22:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
Spoilers.
- [22:43]
Vanessa Diaz
But. But again, there's enough other stuff. Yes. That I was like, she's having fun with it. I think she was having fun with the teas and with the, like, sometimes you're just really obtuse when you're too concerned about yourself as the main character. I don't know.
- [22:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
I found it to be really canny. And I, like. I wouldn't give many authors that kind of credit, but I think it's. I think it's Kuang kind of showing her bona fides to readers that, like, she has read some romance and she knows, like, there's an only one bed trope, but it's only one blanket, you know, like, there are some familiar beats. And it starts, like, are they exes? To, like, is this a second chance romance? Is it enemies to lovers? Like, what is the vibe here? But she sort of drops in these moments that show you, like, it could be this trope. It could be this other trope. Look, the woman behind the curtain here, pulling all the strings, knows all these tropes that are in the mix of the kinds of books that you like. And you're here for something like this. Maybe. So let's find out.
- [23:37]
Jeff O'Neill
Is Surprise Night Boner. That's really a trope. That's something I need to be aware.
- [23:40]
Vanessa Diaz
Of and seen the amount of times.
- [23:45]
Jeff O'Neill
I think I blacked out for a minute. He spent two pages apologizing for his.
- [23:48]
Vanessa Diaz
I was going to say the two pages. I was like, okay, well.
- [23:50]
Jeff O'Neill
But okay, yeah, turn the other way. Like a gentleman. Anyway, I do wonder. I mean, I think, Rebecca, you're on this. I don't know. I don't know if she would answer this. Does Kwong want to have a central romance here? Because I felt her interest be in more other areas. Is it. Is it the. I don't want to psychologize, but I just wonder. And this could be projection that. Is that a story she wanted within this? Or is she more interested in the academic going to hell and doing the satire of academia, but also reveling in the sort of intellectual history of the world? To be perfectly honest, it just felt like. And again, could be me projecting the book would have worked great without it, but would have sold without it is a separate question, right?
- [24:36]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like, if it's just a satire of academia set in hell, there's just no Peter.
- [24:41]
Jeff O'Neill
What if the book is no Peter?
- [24:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
The potential audience for it is lower. I think it's much harder to market, if that's what it is. And this way you can enjoy the romance part of it. You can enjoy the adventure and the fantasy and their connections with each other and all of the, like, overcoming of obstacles and Alice coming to understand herself and Peter coming to understand himself. You can enjoy all of that if you've never been to graduate school. And if you don't get a single one of the academia jokes. And I think that's essential for lowering the barrier of entry if you want a book like this to be a commercial success. Like the more literary version of it. Maybe wouldn't have had the romance storyline, but would have been for a much narrower band of reader who is going to get some of these academic, like some of the reading references to real classical canon sorts of things. And also knows what the joke is when all the professors are like sitting around worrying about which participle version of a word to use. Yeah.
- [25:43]
Jeff O'Neill
Because I think to get the most out of it, you probably need to appreciate all the pieces. And so that's why it's maybe not an A for me, it's probably a B plus for me because I found I like a love story. But this didn't do anything especially interesting to me for me in terms of a love story at that regard. On the other hand, I wildly enjoyed her library of pride. I wildly enjoyed her sort of manifestations of different versions of familiar things, you know, sort of familiar representations of kinds of things in hell. The most fun she seemed to be having was to have a avatar of a academic type show up and she plays with them for a few. That's the one. That's when it seems like me, the book was having the most fun. That's probably not what's going to be the most sellable. And I guess that's a. That's a trade off you're willing to make, especially if you probably got a seven, mid seven figure. I mean, who knows what money was invested in this. There's a part of me that wonders if the book, you know, which came first, which was the chicken and which was the egg. And I think Rebecca's point is they probably came together as a package. Vanessa, I want to ask you this question. This is a long book, 540 pages, you rabbit holed along the way. So maybe it's a little unfair to ask as a reading experiencer, is this a page turner? Is this a sit and get enveloped in like, what would you think people should expect in terms of reading experience? Yeah.
- [27:05]
Vanessa Diaz
So I'm gonna bring Sharifah back into this for a second. Who, you know, keeps her enthusiasm at like very moderated levels. And if you go look at her on the book riot page, her eyes are like bugging out of her head when she's talking about the fact that this got an adaptation, which is like a ringing endorsement. And she described it as a page turner. And when she said that, I was like, oh. Because I didn't find it to be a Page turner for, I'd say the first, like 25% of the book. And maybe that's because we were just really establishing like the ground rules of what this particular version of hell looks like and what all these paradoxes are and how they each came to their maps, et cetera. So I didn't necessarily find that to be the case, but if you sit with that and just let RF Kuang teach you some stuff or teach you the lay of the land, once it got to a point, then I was like, okay, this is a page turner. Even though I did have to stop every few pages to do a Google. And if you are a person who enjoys this particular kind of satire, if you like a little bit of a love story, just spending time inside characters heads. And really, again, just watching her go for the jugular on the institution of academia, there's enough payoff. Like I said, little funny one liners and just maybe over the head, maybe overwrought, but still like really blatant metaphors about, like, how obsessed we are with the concept of prestige in academia, that it pays off. And then I was like turning those pages.
- [28:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, yeah. That the pride level of hell is a library.
- [28:19]
Vanessa Diaz
Correct.
- [28:20]
Rebecca Schinsky
And they're getting the tour of the, of the library of hell. And the, like, demon who's guiding you through it is pointing out the residents of this library pride level of hell. And he's like, that guy's here because he reminds people that Dartmouth is in the Ivy League.
- [28:36]
Vanessa Diaz
That's right.
- [28:37]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, shots. The Dartmouth alums. I'm so sorry. You caught a stray, you got a sniper stray right to the head.
- [28:45]
Rebecca Schinsky
And everybody over there is creative writing students.
- [28:48]
Jeff O'Neill
And they all come in groups.
- [28:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, they come in groups. That calls himself a communist, but he hasn't read Das Capitao. And my favorite was. And that one had more of a comment. Not really a question.
- [29:01]
Vanessa Diaz
Absolutely. This is when I started having a really good time.
- [29:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like, it feels good in a moment when a book, when a part of a book is made for you and you and the book see each other.
- [29:11]
Vanessa Diaz
Correct.
- [29:11]
Jeff O'Neill
I think that, I mean, when I was trying to teach Dante and then I was getting taught how to teach Dante, one of the things they taught, they were suggesting is like, you say you have to imagine Sisyphus happy. You have to imagine Dante having fun in the Inferno. Right. Because like, and the stuff he's doing with the Pope, with popes is very much in line with what Pong is doing with academics here. Like, it's not nearly as vicious as Dante is There's a lot less corporeal punishment in the lower rings in Dante's Inferno. It gets, it gets pretty bad pretty quick. There is no pride library that you're just sitting around in a workshop for eternity, which is really great when you'd come to Dante on that side too. The other thing in yellowface, in Babel 2. I think both of those books are more slyly complicated around bias, feminism, social justice. They're not straight readings. They have their commentaries on commentaries here. And we get a really fascinating scene here in which Alice has. She has kept capital F feminism at arm's length through her academic career because she didn't want to be one of those girls, for lack of a better term, that, you know, people dismissed because of whatever. And then she, she gets a real, not just microaggression dose of the patriarchy. And then she goes to another professor, a female professor, and is looking for support or, or recognition, and she gets something else other than that. And that to me, was one of the most interesting. And I, I wasn't really sure to make it readers and I'll include myself. Our first blush is to try to locate the authorial voice. Which of these people does the author represent? And I think in this situation it's helpful to think of. Everything's under indictment. Alice is under indictment. All these things are indictment. But that, that to me was harder to parse than most of, like, the literary reference stuff because that felt the most contemporary. What to do with that? Rebecca, what was your take on.
- [31:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
This episode is sponsored by if Looks Could Kill by Julie Berry from Simon and Schuster's Children's Publishing. Stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook book edition. It's autumn, 1888. Fleeing England, Jack the Ripper escapes to New York City seeking new victims. But a primal force of female vengeance has had enough. With serpents for hair and a fearsome gaze, an awakened Medusa is hunting for one Jack. And other dangers lurk in Manhattan's Bowery. Salvation army volunteers Tabitha and Pearl's brittle partnership is tested as they team up with an aspiring girl reporter and a handsome Irish bartender to rescue a girl they once helped. Now forced to work in a local brothel, only to find their fates entwined with Medusa's and Jack's. Again, stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition of if Looks Could Kill by Julie Berry, provided by our sponsors at Simon and Schuster's Children's Publishing.
- [32:06]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
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- [34:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think everything is under indictment feminism here. Yeah, everything is under indictment feels par for the course for me with RF Kuang. I remember feeling that way about Yellowface as well, that like the protagonist does not get off scot free and the bad guy also doesn't look purely bad that she's really interested in complicating our understandings of morality and of the decisions that people make. I think the cool girl discourse is very much in the room where academic.
- [34:47]
Jeff O'Neill
Cool girl is a different kind. But it's here. Yeah.
- [34:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. That Alice quote, thought she'd learned to inhabit the impossible ideal. The girl who was eminently fuckable, but unreachable and therefore virtuous and perfect. And then later on, favoritism was all right, so long as it benefited her. She adored Professor Grimes power, except when he used it against her. And that Alice has to face down the reality that she is not special. Like, my favorite thing about how the characters are presented in this book is that there's no manic pain, Pixie Magic Girl. There's no Alice isn't like other girls. Like, this is the thing I bump up against the most in the big romanticies. It was like, one of my hardest points about reading Fourth Wing. Alice is exactly like other girls. Like, she's insecure. She's. And she's in this academic setting that is engineered to make a person insecure. This is not like a personal flaw of hers, but she's insecure and she wants to please. And she doesn't know, like, really what the ground is that she's standing on. She's just trying to be. Be successful. She's so scared it's all going to be taken away from her. And she's caught inside these power structures, but she doesn't think of them as power structures that she's caught inside because she thinks she's accessed some of the power. And I think that's what Kuang is getting at, is that, like, if even when you think you are benefiting from the power in a power structure, you are being harmed, you are possibly doing harm, and the people who have the power are the most harmful. Like, that is why all the professors like Grimes are in the deepest part of hell. These, like, people who had the ability to really make or break someone's life and who promised them things and betrayed them.
- [36:21]
Jeff O'Neill
Tyrants. Right? Those are the tyrants.
- [36:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
And it's like the step past tyrants almost.
- [36:25]
Jeff O'Neill
Right? Yeah. On the doorstep of Yama's Court. Right. You're sort of at the very end there. And, and. And one of the things, you know, any representation of hell that I've encountered in literary history is also a commentary on the real world. Right. Like, of course. And one of the big points here is that as segmented, as regimented, we get multiple maps. Even the maps are under contest. But the thing, the characters, the mortal characters, have the hardest time understanding who journey into hell is that the rules are actually not cut and dry. Like that is the single thing that gets in their way. Because if we just play by the rules, I can win, win. And I think that is the, the parallel mapped on to what Rebecca was just talking about in terms of power structure. If I can just play by the rules, I'll win. But sometimes the gods decide to play by different rules. They change the rules, right? So there is no play the game straight, keep your shoes buttoned up, show up on time, do everything correctly, I guess respectability, politics for academia, for lack of a better term, and you can survive and achieve. But like, no, it doesn't. It might work like that for a while. Some even might get all the way through that way. But if you're going to ride the dragon, or I guess it's the, the frog and the scorpion is the better metaphor if you're the frog on the scorpions back, it's not fair. But you maybe shouldn't be surprised that you get stung, that some people get stung riding the frogs back. And that's where, you know, I think that is her ultimate critique of academia and, and maybe culture writ large is if you could, if we just knew what the rules were, we could play, we could say all these things definitively, one or the other. But that's not the way it works. And anyone with a definite answer or thinks they have a definite answer gets obliterated in this book. Right? They have to learn to not have a definite answer or they end up, you know, wearing bone armor or, you know, made of butterflies or else something else like that. Okay, anything else we want to say? Do you want to do you know, Rebecca and Vanessa, I didn't give you a chance yet to you give a qualitative take or review like how much you liked it, what you want to say, who's not going to like this? Vanessa, what else do you want to tell people who might be considering reading this right now that you can think of?
- [38:36]
Vanessa Diaz
I really liked it and this is my first time reading R.F. guang's fantasy. Like I think I mentioned on one of the last podcasts that like I've been meaning to read Babel forever just keeps not happening. And then poppy war, I didn't get around to either. So because this was my first time reading fantasy and it's funny, I just came off of, you know, Rebecca Danica and I read Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. And this is not by any means only Rebecca's thought, but I've been thinking a lot about the trend towards literature doing a lot more telling than showing and there were big portions of this book where I couldn't tell if I just had that thought too much in my head and RF Kuang was giving me too many sentences or if that was a part of RF Kuang's genius, that she's like, trying to do this for a very specific purpose. But there were times, and it's not like it's not even a first person narrative.
- [39:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
Right.
- [39:23]
Vanessa Diaz
And that's the part that sometimes I do see that in first persons, but this wasn't. But we were just getting, like, there was the point, and then sometimes there was just more belabored kind of extensions of that point that I was. I couldn't. That was. The part that gave me a little bit of pause was like, this book maybe could have been a teeny bit shorter, but there is enough. Again, evisceration. Like, the evisceration was my favorite part. That really delicate balance of something being really funny and really searing is like, oh, just a white spot, white hotspot for me. So for that, I think, again, if you just sit with it, it's a good payoff for, like, most fantasy readers, especially if you like a little bit of snark.
- [39:54]
Jeff O'Neill
It's not scary. I guess it's. It's a little bit gory. It's kind of weirdly not.
- [39:59]
Vanessa Diaz
Oh, yeah.
- [39:59]
Jeff O'Neill
At the same time, it's. I was hard to do with that. Rebecca, how was gory?
- [40:03]
Rebecca Schinsky
Grossly gross. Yeah. If we want to do, like, content warnings for folks, like, there is stuff around sexual assault. There is some animal cruelty. Bad things happen to cats in hell.
- [40:13]
Jeff O'Neill
Rats, other rat lovers are contained.
- [40:17]
Vanessa Diaz
I'm just sorry for you. Like a rat.
- [40:20]
Rebecca Schinsky
Sorry. I also. I really liked it. You know, I think more literary readers will find a lot to enjoy here. I appreciated that. It's not heavy world building. Like, we understand that they're moving through these levels of hell, and there is some conversation about, like, the physics of hell and the geometry of how it's put together, but, like, it's a million percent fine if you don't track hyperbolic space.
- [40:45]
Jeff O'Neill
Let's go.
- [40:46]
Rebecca Schinsky
You don't. It's totally fine if you don't track any of that. Like, I did not suffer for not for not really having a map in my head of where these characters were, where they were physically located.
- [40:57]
Vanessa Diaz
You're right.
- [40:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
So if you're not a super hard fantasy reader, you'll be fine here. The moments of Alice and Peter, like, collaborating with each other, the flashback to them in the lab, those were some of my Favorite parts of the book. Alice reflecting on like, it was too lovely to watch a mind at ferocious work. Like, that stuff is where I want to live with these characters. I could have really taken or left the love story components of it. But the literary canon references are really fun. The send ups of academia are really fun. It was very hard not to text you, Jeff. As soon as I started realizing what she was doing with academia, because I.
- [41:36]
Vanessa Diaz
Knew you, I would be like, yeah, yeah, same.
- [41:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
I knew that you had a God.
- [41:40]
Jeff O'Neill
In terms of the satire, let me just say no notes on it. That's all. And I'm saying that is person who presents in this particular way. I can only imagine. Yeah.
- [41:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I think it makes sense too. Like this feels 100% like what should be Sharifa's favorite novel of the year for like the expertise that she has as a reader. The kinds of what's in her wheelhouse. I really liked it. I think I liked it more than I expected to because I did spend the first time chunk of it really worried it was going to be more like fourth wing than I wanted the book to be. More like a classic romantasy or a typical romantasy. And once that settled down, once I let go of that and was like, all right, we're not going to be doing Dragon Riders who Bone. It's going to be okay.
- [42:23]
Vanessa Diaz
Going to be fine.
- [42:24]
Jeff O'Neill
An extraordinarily chaste book on the whole.
- [42:28]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. I think that's maybe worth talking about that if you're coming in from the romance world where there is like a lot of the value of those reading experiences is placed on how spicy the books are. This is a very mild level of like the surprise morning boner is about as spicy as it gets.
- [42:45]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Yeah.
- [42:47]
Vanessa Diaz
That's about all.
- [42:48]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I think.
- [42:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
Aren't you so glad you gifted us with that phrase?
- [42:52]
Vanessa Diaz
I am.
- [42:52]
Jeff O'Neill
I did. It's just there. That's what he said. Anyway, I think Shareef is sort of the ideal reader because she has this literary experience. Like she's a literary reader as well, but also love genres. Very conversant. And I think that's the ideal reader. I wonder if we're to be very sort of reductive here and have sort of two other camps who are primarily literary readers or primarily romantasy romance commercial readers. Which of those camps is gonna have a better time? Are the people coming to the other. Which. Which person sort of making a sojourn into the other camp is gonna.
- [43:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think it's the literary.
- [43:24]
Vanessa Diaz
I think. I think if you're coming in for, like, capital R romance.
- [43:28]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't know that there's enough for you.
- [43:30]
Vanessa Diaz
No, I don't think there's enough here for you. Like the end maybe, which I'm trying not to spoil, but I still don't think the payoff is there. If that's what you're really here for, I think that the literary folks will have a better time personally.
- [43:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And I feel like I should hide under my desk from the Internet before I say this sentence. But I think Kuang is interested in too many different ideas in this book for it to appeal to, like, the typical, very commercial romance reader that she is. An interrogating these systems of power. But also, there's a lot of this book that is devoted to memory and forgetting and how the value of memory, the value of forgetting. How we need to forget things in order to survive.
- [44:09]
Vanessa Diaz
Go on.
- [44:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
What memory does like the roles that it plays in our lives, the fear of losing memories, how it connects to who we are and our understandings of ourselves. And then Alice and Peter each have these constructions of each other that as they journey through hell, we get to see their backstories. And eventually they get to tell each other what was actually happening. Happening. Here's how I remember you. Well, here's what was actually going on. And some of that feels romance tropey to me, like, kind of similar to the conflict that you'll see between main characters in a romance who then resolve things. But it felt deeper. There's more substance here than. At least in my very narrow experience with romantasy. Please do not send me your emails about the very emotionally deep romanticies you've read. I believe you that they exist.
- [44:57]
Vanessa Diaz
I believe you they're there.
- [44:58]
Rebecca Schinsky
But this is more of a novel like Kwong can write a novel of ideas. And I think that this is not fully a novel of ideas because she's also doing all this genre stuff. But it is more of that. There's more of that literary internal stuff that she's doing than you get in a romantasy.
- [45:15]
Vanessa Diaz
Is there a romance in Babel or the Poppy Wars? My reason for asking is that, like.
- [45:24]
Jeff O'Neill
My memory of Babel is. There's. It's. It's kind of of. It's more like this, in which there are relationships, but they're not.
- [45:30]
Vanessa Diaz
Okay. Like, they're not just pointing.
- [45:32]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't think it's a spoiler to say. And this is a way of answering Vanessa's question. If you just pick this up, it is not a romance using the Elder law of. You need to know that there's going to be a happy ending. Right. You don't know that. It is a capital. It's a. There is a love story in there. Yeah. So I think that's. That's my memory. It's been several years since.
- [45:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Romantic. Not romance.
- [45:50]
Vanessa Diaz
Not romantic.
- [45:51]
Jeff O'Neill
Romantic.
- [45:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [45:51]
Vanessa Diaz
The reason I ask is because there. There were points in the. I started to again, I was getting maybe spun up in, like, the RF Kwong of it all, but I was like, is she. Is she also eviscerating some of these tropes? Like, that was the part that I was sitting with for a bit when I was getting frustrated with parts of the romance. Like, one of my. And it's not that this doesn't exist in romance, because it does, bro. I was like, just talk to each other.
- [46:10]
Jeff O'Neill
I want to hear that. But let's. Let's turn on the spoiler warning, because I think in order to finish that thought, you may need to. To do something. If you don't want any more spoilers. I hope we haven't done too much, but we like the book. It's well worth talking about. If you're interested in giving a shot, that's all you need to give it a shot. That's. I'm not going to try to talk you into caring about it if you don't. But if you're wondering, I think give it a shot is where I agree.
- [46:31]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. If you're wondering, give it a shot. And I like that Vanessa's taking us into maybe RF Kuang is Percival Everett territory.
- [46:38]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, I mean, what. So I hadn't had that thought, Vanessa. So walk me through where you saw maybe the breadcrumbs of. Is also one of the things under an examination here is the romantic trope. I mean, I first thought romance is a trope.
- [46:50]
Vanessa Diaz
I already kind of got to that place where I was like, oh, this is kind of funny. When they were like, the one bed trope was like the one blanket. And, like, how much time we were sort of spending on the surprise boner. And, like, where I was like, oh, she's like, again, was she being cheeky? Is this just things she's doing right? Is this just like a romantic interlude? But there was enough. There were enough big moments of like, if you had just said the one thing to each other. If you just stopped living in your own brain about assumptions. And that happens in real life. I'm not saying it doesn't, but there were enough bits. And then the. The ending in which, again, we already said spoiler alert. But where, Surprise. Peter's not really dead. And that I kind of saw coming. But even the way they reunite with this very like. And then they kiss and stuff, where I was like, that part felt a little tonally what I was not expecting. Where I was like, is she doing this on purpose to mess with us a little bit? And I can't really decide if she was or if it is just a. I was doing a whole lot in this book. And, like, this is how that came. And I didn't. I didn't hate that. It's just that it made me sit and go, is she.
- [47:46]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's interesting.
- [47:47]
Jeff O'Neill
I love that idea of as we're going through the cycles of hell, we could be going through romance tropes at the same time, but I don't. Yeah, I don't think it quite did that, but.
- [47:56]
Vanessa Diaz
Because I don't think. I don't know either.
- [47:58]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, there's the satire, such as it was. Was not subtle.
- [48:03]
Vanessa Diaz
No, that's true. Yeah, she's not. And Song is subtle.
- [48:06]
Jeff O'Neill
It's not a really kind of a subtle situation. I say aside from that feminist bit, which I think was a little more complicated, that was maybe the most complicated contemporary issue in the whole book. But if she was going to satirize Capital R romance in the way you suggest, I don't think you'd wonder. But that's.
- [48:21]
Vanessa Diaz
I think you're right. No, I think you're right.
- [48:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
Upon further reflection, a testament to how good she is, though, that it's even on the table to consider that she was working on a level that we might not have known she was working on.
- [48:34]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. On the spoiler side, this gets pretty damn weird, especially after Peter dies. Right. As often, the deeper you get into hell, the less sort of objective. The less objective reference there are. It's more like feelings and whirling masses and moaning and, you know, all that kind of stuff that goes on. The part where I felt the book dragging and I don't know, and I don't want to assume, but this. This final battle with the Kripkes, I was like, okay, just, she's not gonna die. I mean, there is plot armor around here. We know she's getting to. She's going to have a confrontation with Grimes, Right?
- [49:15]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah.
- [49:15]
Jeff O'Neill
Like, it's going. It's going to happen. So I just found myself sort of dragging through the plot stuff. I was fine to linger in the rebel citadel as she's, like, imagining this world. And so I didn't Find myself sort of plot anxious or plot excited just to move through. But anything where I'm like, I'm not really sure what's going on here, it felt more. The places where I felt the plot the most I was least interested in. So that was one of the strange things I found myself dwelling in.
- [49:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think that's a good way to put it. I felt that way a lot too, that when she. Or when Alice and Peter were both having these encounters with like, Elspeth or the woman that they see on the Weaver Girl. The Weaver girl, Yeah. I just kind of let those encounters wash over me because it felt like this is not what the book is actually about. There's plot here, but it's almost like, what is it that Lauren Graham used to say when she was learning medical terminology? Yeah. For a medical.
- [50:10]
Jeff O'Neill
Blah, blah. Or medical, medical, medical, medical.
- [50:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
When you're learning your lines for an ER type show, you just go, medical, medical, medical. Like, I felt some moments of Kuang being like, fantasy plot, fantasy plot, fantasy plot. And I was like, that's not. We're not ultimately headed towards, like a reckoning of the rules of this fantasy world or something where. Where it's really gonna matter what happened in this encounter with this one fantasy person or like one fantastic character. So for me, that was the same. I wanted her to keep moving through hell, keep having these revelations about the world that she had lived in, this idea that she had constructed about what was important for herself. So much of this book is Alice coming to understand that the things she thinks matters in life, getting her PhD from this professor, is not actually important.
- [51:00]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah.
- [51:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
The coming to terms with what really matters, which is sitting in the sun.
- [51:04]
Jeff O'Neill
And eating cinnamon rolls. As best I can tell.
- [51:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
That sounds great.
- [51:07]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, listen, who among us. I. I don't disagree, but it was one of those, right? Yeah. And I think Vanessa's point to the. If there is a indictment of the romance, satire satires are different than Diamond. I think she's using the Just say the thing as another way of satirizing academia. Because the thing that's getting in the way of them having a real connection is the prestige games. Right. To make themselves. Because Alice's biggest fear is vulnerability. And why is it vulnerability? Because it might be exploited and she might be brought down because someone finds a chink in her armor and she can't let that happen. And to confess, admit it, reveal, hazard your emotional being to another person, especially one who you're in direct competition with for the limited spoils, such as they're offered. Like, that's a real blocking character moment. Like, to quote William Ems, like, that's a blocking character kind of a situation that has real. That's an indictment of a system. Right. This thing is so bad, people can't fall in love like they should. Like, what else are we here for? Won't even let him get in that way. So I think rather than the romance element being under indictment, it's just. It's another satirical lens or another indicting lens of the system, the structure that's been put in place here. Satisfying ending. Vanessa, what'd you think about the end?
- [52:24]
Vanessa Diaz
I did like the ending. I also, yeah, once we got. This is all sort of the ending. But, you know, when we got to the part where she's gonna kill the Kripkes, I did very much sort of laugh at what, again, felt like a little bit of a tonal shift where she's like, I'm so sad. Everything is awful. I don't know what the meaning of anything is. I feel like killing something. She's like, I'm gonna kill this cat. I'm gonna pour my. It's blood all over me. Like, I am woman, hear me roar. Like that, like, tonal shift felt a little funky.
- [52:55]
Jeff O'Neill
Where she murders, slaughters, and wears a tiger's body.
- [52:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like I think that Kwong is doing. She's saying something interesting about embodiment there. There are a couple mentions throughout the story of characters that functionally wish they were just heads in jars, that they hate having bodies or they hated having bodies. I know that's an impossible sentiment.
- [53:15]
Jeff O'Neill
I didn't like that. I didn't relate to that at all.
- [53:18]
Rebecca Schinsky
And Alice gets her power when she comes to this form of embodiment. Like it does result in. I'm gonna kill these people. And by the way, the Kripke was also a famous logician. I Googled, like, is there something going on here? But when she's like, let me kill something, she's never been in her body before. And there's like, this doesn't say that.
- [53:37]
Vanessa Diaz
Right?
- [53:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, yeah. This is where your power actually is located. It's not this world of your head where you're caught up in perception and ego and competition, but just tangible, a fully realized being in the world that.
- [53:52]
Vanessa Diaz
Is up your nose.
- [53:54]
Jeff O'Neill
Jack Daniels is proudly served in fine establishments, questionable joints and everywhere in between. So no matter where you go in every bar, you'll always know someone by name.
- [54:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
Jack.
- [54:08]
Vanessa Diaz
Jack and Coke.
- [54:09]
Jeff O'Neill
Shot of Jack.
- [54:10]
Vanessa Diaz
Jack Daniels, please.
- [54:11]
Jeff O'Neill
Right away. That's what makes Jack, Jack, please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org Jack Daniels and old number seven are registered trademarks. Copyright 2025 Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume 80 proof.
- [54:24]
Rebecca Schinsky
On top of building this fake volcano for months, I give my daughter smarty pants vitamins to support her brain health. So her science fair project sounds more.
- [54:33]
Jeff O'Neill
Like.
- [54:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
And less like. And while I may say it's not a competition, of course it's a f ing competition. Choose Smartypants vitamins to support your kid's brain health and save the science fair. Shop on Amazon smartypantsvitamins.com or at target today.
- [54:53]
Vanessa Diaz
Mom, dad, you should shop Amazon for back to school and save some money. See, I'm currently obsessed with superheroes and need all the superhero stuff. Superhero launchbox, superhero backpack.
- [55:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
But next year it'll be something else. Maybe dinosaurs.
- [55:11]
Vanessa Diaz
I don't know.
- [55:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
I'm not a fortune teller, but I can tell you not to spend a fortune and shop. Low prices for school on Amazon.
- [55:18]
Vanessa Diaz
K. Good chat Amazon. Spend less smile, more power for all things.
- [55:25]
Jeff O'Neill
So the key to surviving hell's vibe.
- [55:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
The chalk. Sounds like fun.
- [55:28]
Jeff O'Neill
Doing chalk, cocaine, and a lot of knife play. That's how you get through hell as far as it can.
- [55:34]
Vanessa Diaz
I did laugh very hard when she got clocked in the job with a bone. Like, I did laugh like a hard.
- [55:38]
Jeff O'Neill
Magnolia just rips her own arm off and chucks it at her. It's like, I didn't see that one coming.
- [55:43]
Vanessa Diaz
Like, I don't want to go down with a bone to the face or something like that. Like she was having fun in this little scene. We did feel like a tonal shift. I did appreciate it.
- [55:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
If you can't do your hard drugs during your big boss battle in hell, when are you gonna do them?
- [55:55]
Jeff O'Neill
When my chalk doesn't work. And else was like, have you considered snorting it? And I'm like, wow.
- [56:00]
Vanessa Diaz
Like, that's the way to go.
- [56:01]
Jeff O'Neill
I know there are academics out there like that in grad school. You got to stay up, man. Sometimes the double latte is not enough.
- [56:08]
Vanessa Diaz
Not enough.
- [56:10]
Jeff O'Neill
I also really liked. It's a small bit, but the identity politics around what kind of chalk you liked.
- [56:16]
Vanessa Diaz
Yes.
- [56:19]
Jeff O'Neill
It doesn't have a direct analogy into any one particular narcissism of minor differences in academia. It sort of encompasses the whole whole. The vibe. Whole thing. I've got this question for you. So is. Is magic itself an analogy for something like they're all studying magic and they all say magic is the only thing that like, that's eventually Professor Grimes central crime is he prioritizes the study of this thing over all else. Human relationships, fairness, justice, his own body, what, other people's bodies, whatever. But could it be any, could it be any field of inquiry? Right. Like let's say they were literature professors who just found a magic portal and they wandered in. Does it matter that the, the, the field of study here is this fantastical one?
- [57:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think it does. I think she's doing something with magic that, you know, we always ask, is this book actually about art writing?
- [57:19]
Jeff O'Neill
You were right where I was going.
- [57:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
And it's like I've been in this class before that they say straight on the page that magic is the act of telling lies about the world and that the magicians have to be able to suspend their belief of whatever the thing is in their pentagram that they've drawn in order for the magic to work. And we talk about good art as having done the opposite of that. That good art tells the truth about something in life. And I felt like Kuang was taking us somewhere around. What happens when the thing you have to do to be successful is lie about the world, suspend your engagement with the truth? What the cost of suspending your engagement with the truth is in order to get what you think is the benefit of prestige or success or, or whatever. It's subtle, but I thought that that was kind of where she was trying to take us there.
- [58:10]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, I started to feel like, yeah, this is not. I don't know that it's the point, but I think there's, you know, we all bring our own subjectivity to books. It's like to some degree, I was feeling a way about the concept of like faith and spirituality as being a stand in for the magic for all the reasons Rebecca just said. Like you, depending on how you grow up with this stuff, will be very, very convinced that you know the one truth, but that there's always a bigger truth. And it's this constant circle, right. Of like there's an all knowing being, but the rules will change. But the rules are sometimes the same, but not for everybody. And like you're always pursuing the truth, even when someone points out a logical hole. But no, it's great as long as it benefits me, but not for me, not for thee. And some of that was really baked into the concept of magic. I don't. That's the only read. I think there's more to it than that. But she's just seems to be, yeah, like playing around with the idea of you looking for some big universal Truth. Whether that is a part of your academic study, whether it's a part of your religious, like, faith that you could. Depending on the reader that you are, you can glean a lot from.
- [59:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think that's a great point to pull out. Like hell is a fundamentally spiritual or religious context.
- [59:13]
Vanessa Diaz
Context. Yeah.
- [59:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
To put people in.
- [59:15]
Jeff O'Neill
And people put themselves there in this context when they kind of have mistaken the rewards of the pursuit of the thing with the thing itself. Because one of the passages that really stuck out to me and I resonated with when Alice was sort of. She was trying to figure out why she liked this so much, like why she. She's an award. She's a gold star seeker, to be sure. But it's not just that she wants that because ultimately she finds that if I get enough gold stars, I will be allowed to do the thing I actually want to do.
- [59:44]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah.
- [59:44]
Jeff O'Neill
Which is sitting. Sit and think and consider and explore. And everything else is just the. The sleight of hand and the showmanship and the demerit and merit scorekeeping that allows me to get to the place where I can finally do that. I think one of the indictments here is people don't stop once they. Once you're tenured, people don't stop doing that because there's always a corner office to get to. There's always a better conference to go to. There's always the promotion or the endowed chair. Like, there is no end. There is no enough. There aren't enough gold stars. Johnny, the Johnny Ringo of gold stars in academia does not exist. You got all you got. We all got a hole in us so big we can't fill with gold stars. So what you need to do is remember or find those moments where you are happy in the end itself. Right. It's not a means to an end. And I think that's. That was the thing. I think I'd like to have seen a little bit more of that, honestly. Because by the end, it was more about Revenge of Grimes and going back and eating cinnamon rolls, which is fine. But I kind of was more interested in a return to. You know, they go back to. They go back and they're sitting and they're having sitting runs. They're not just on the river, but they open up a couple of books and sort of sit side by side and like, do the thing. Right. I felt that's kind of where it was.
- [60:54]
Vanessa Diaz
We got more of that one paragraph, right. Where she's like. I can't remember any of the bits from it, but it's like just a rainy day in the. In the quad or whatever. It's like I wanted to see more of that.
- [61:02]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [61:03]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like those lovely moments where they were, like, having late night studying together. And it's that they're mutually in that place and that they understand that and about each other, and they're internally motivated.
- [61:13]
Jeff O'Neill
Right. They're not doing it because Grimes is making them harvest colons or whatever. They want to be there of their own accord.
- [61:17]
Rebecca Schinsky
But what that is to be so, like, functionally flow. To be so pulled into and interested and engaged by the thing that you're studying and the questions that you get to ask and that you actually get to seek answers to these questions and how satisfying that whole process can be, how enlivening it can be. That's what they. I think that's. That's the sunset I see them sailing off into together. Let's just have conversations about interesting things forever. I think Vanessa will get an answer to. Is she skewering romance if they announce a sequel to this?
- [61:48]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah. No. Yeah. I hope there's not.
- [61:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
I hope this is, like, Stands by itself.
- [61:54]
Jeff O'Neill
I want this to be it because one of. I mean, again, it ends as Dante's Inferno ends with stars. She doesn't say that's a reference. But, you know, if you've done that, you know, but this hell has heaven and. And purgatory baked in. This is more of purgatory than just Dante, because people are working through the system. And there is no heaven in this eschatology here. Right. It is reincarnation. Or you. You. You walk into the river and you're just sort of d. Whatever de. Sold. You become one with the river and your memories float away. So I was wondering, about halfway through, I was like, okay, I wonder if there is a sequel, but I don't know where it would go.
- [62:34]
Vanessa Diaz
Know.
- [62:35]
Jeff O'Neill
Right. Because there is no afterlife left to be explored. Everything else we're told is there's the veil, and everything inside the veil is being and nothingness. And there's no, like, plot to be. There's no plot to be had. Wherever else you're gonna go.
- [62:46]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think this is a whole book by itself. Yeah, I think.
- [62:49]
Vanessa Diaz
I think.
- [62:49]
Jeff O'Neill
I think so.
- [62:50]
Vanessa Diaz
I think leave it where it is.
- [62:51]
Jeff O'Neill
Any other notes we want to say notes you had or the takes you wanted to get out of you before we wrap up here today?
- [62:59]
Vanessa Diaz
I think that's it for me. I really enjoyed it.
- [63:02]
Jeff O'Neill
Project Vanessa, you. You. You may have to be on the sideline for three minutes as Rebecca and I hear parse what Sharifa has yielded in terms of fantasy league here because now we have the thing, right? We worried that this would be a runaway freight train. I find myself less worried as a runaway freight train today. What is your sense of it?
- [63:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
So much of our fantasy league points come from award nominations, and I don't think we're seeing award nominations from this. It's not that literary.
- [63:32]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't think so. Now, this may be a flaw of the game is we do not have Hugo, Nebula, Edgar. I was about to. Not something we should probably consider in the future.
- [63:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
But for the purposes of Sharifa not winning this year, which is actually more.
- [63:47]
Jeff O'Neill
Important to me than anything as long as I'm in the game.
- [63:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
Me not winning this year is more important to you?
- [63:52]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, actually, the most important thing is Michelle's not winning and she's not playing, which is I, you know, I've already won. I've already won that. But I. I do think now, could it be on the hundred best notable? I think it's possible.
- [64:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [64:05]
Jeff O'Neill
For like the New York Times. Good enough.
- [64:06]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, I think so.
- [64:08]
Jeff O'Neill
It would be an Obama pick. I don't think that kind of stuff. I just don't know. It would be unusual for him. It'd be unusual.
- [64:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
It has crossover potential. But this kind of crossover would be a surprise from Obama also. I think too fantasy and too, like, leads a little too far into the highbrow components for a book club pick. And usually you get the book club pick before the book or right as the book has come out. So I think if that were happening, we would know that already.
- [64:32]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's too. I do wonder that the romance piece is a little bit sidelined to be a huge seller. I think this will sell very well initially, but does it have enough of the stuff that commercial readers want to pass it on to other commercial readers? I'm not sure about that.
- [64:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like, I will be watching the Goodreads reviews very eagerly.
- [64:57]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, they're probably coming in today, right? Or they probably had.
- [65:00]
Vanessa Diaz
They've already stuff going on started to come in. Yeah. I think that there's enough RF Kwong draw for it to do something on its own. Just on that. Based on the reviews that I was seeing, there's enough people like fanning out over like a book talker that I follow whose name is Marines. Marines posted something very vague that was just like, these fandoms are about to come for me for my review of their book. And like, it was just, you know, the 4th Wing fans, ACOTAR, etc. And then she said RF Kuang readers. And they were absolutely RF Kwong readers. And they're being like, why did you just put Garf Kuang in the ca. You know, just then. So anyway, there's. There's enough of a hive there, if you will, that I think it'll. But I also don't know that it's going to be quite. Because it just doesn't give that romance satisfaction if that's. Readers are coming forward.
- [65:40]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't think that it does. And I don't think it's sort of like, like plot forward enough. It's not like plot forward enough. Like, what's going to happen? Because it's.
- [65:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, it's not. Will they? Won't they like. No, that's a question. But the book is not about will they or won't they.
- [65:55]
Jeff O'Neill
Hot take at the end. This is. I, I. I'm putting this in a box of I don't really believe this take only to protect myself. Grimes, a bad guy grime. I'm just saying. A bad guy. To live your life as a. As a lump of goo. That was the plan. That was what's good. That was gonna be his torture. Too much. Too much for Grimes.
- [66:18]
Vanessa Diaz
And that's just a lump of goo. But like a. There's this really controversial episode of the X Files where there's, like, a person they keep under the bed.
- [66:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [66:28]
Vanessa Diaz
That is literally what I was envisioning when she, she even said, like, you know, keep you beneath the floorboards kind of thing. This just like. I was like, but were you just gonna open up the drawer and just, like, poke it?
- [66:38]
Jeff O'Neill
Very toxic.
- [66:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
How many times has she watched Weekend at Bernie's?
- [66:44]
Jeff O'Neill
I think keeping a half alive organ pile for eternity has some downsides she may not have considered.
- [66:52]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, true.
- [66:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
Wow. Your description phrases are really today, Jeff.
- [66:58]
Jeff O'Neill
And I'm going to be thinking, I'm going to be trying out logical paradoxes on my kids that I have remembered and then some I didn't like for, like, the next 10 dinners.
- [67:06]
Vanessa Diaz
Oh, my God.
- [67:06]
Jeff O'Neill
So when does this pile of sand seems to be a pile of sand? It's gonna blow their tween minds.
- [67:11]
Rebecca Schinsky
Please FaceTime me in for the Monty hall problem, please.
- [67:15]
Jeff O'Neill
Did we get the Monty hall problem in this? Yeah, I must have glanced.
- [67:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
There's a reference to the Monty hall problem and then there's a reference to the trolley problem. The trolley problem is too serious for family Dinner time. We should go Monty Hall.
- [67:28]
Jeff O'Neill
I'm still not sure that everyone's not wrong about the Monty hall problem, which was. Which everyone says about that. Like I still. That's one where I just can't.
- [67:34]
Rebecca Schinsky
You're the one who cracked it.
- [67:36]
Jeff O'Neill
I just. Are we sure? Are we sure that's right? Go look at the Montale.
- [67:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
If you guys watch the Good Place, everyone should finish.
- [67:44]
Jeff O'Neill
Frankly, that is our last like important to us series that we haven't watched with them. We've been kind of holding that for a snowed in weekend or something in the winter.
- [67:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
I've been seeing like the trickling of content around. If you like Katabasis, read and watch these other things come out. And I am waiting for someone and I'll just do it here to make the case for the Good Place because it's a funny satire of the Bad Place.
- [68:08]
Jeff O'Neill
It really is. Well, the other thing that Kwong, it's interesting like the hellfire and brimstone evangelical Christian of hell. Even the Dante. Like she's very careful to be like, these people kind of want to be here. That was one of the. Or.
- [68:23]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah.
- [68:24]
Jeff O'Neill
They don't know they're in Hell was maybe the most interesting place. Like they. They are doing things they would do normally, but just at an extreme. They don't know they're in hell. They kind of. Their flaws are such that they kind of don't want to leave. It's amazing throughout how little the characters she meets are actually interested in proceeding.
- [68:44]
Vanessa Diaz
I was going to say there is a fire section where I was like, oh, everybody going burn. They were like, burn me please. I want to feel something.
- [68:50]
Jeff O'Neill
I want to feel something.
- [68:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay, cool.
- [68:53]
Jeff O'Neill
Great.
- [68:53]
Vanessa Diaz
We're all just really concerned with our.
- [68:55]
Jeff O'Neill
Big 2021 energy I would take out of. I just want to feel something. I just want to feel.
- [68:59]
Vanessa Diaz
That's one of my catchphrases around my friend groups. So yeah, I was. I felt seen.
- [69:04]
Jeff O'Neill
All right.
- [69:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, well, she probably was drafting this.
- [69:06]
Jeff O'Neill
During COVID I don't know. Now I guess. Let's get on this. What is Kwong gonna do next?
- [69:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's Taipei.
- [69:16]
Jeff O'Neill
Is that right? I didn't know that.
- [69:17]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, there was something in maybe one of the videos. And then when I was checking in with Sharifah this morning of what do you want us to make sure people know was your take? She said she can't wait to. To this like mysterious Taipei book that. But that's all I know.
- [69:32]
Jeff O'Neill
Interesting. Interesting.
- [69:33]
Rebecca Schinsky
I'm in like, oh yeah, I'm going to give it. I'm definitely continue to be down for whatever RF Kwong wants to do.
- [69:39]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't, I don't think I said this, but I think this met my expectations and they were pretty high. They were pretty high. I got, I didn't know of course exactly was going to be but tonally sort of shape wise I think I got pretty much what I was bargaining for here.
- [69:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Yeah, I really liked it and I think you thought I was like putting cold water on it when I said that on the show last week, but I really liked it. It's not my favorite of the year. I didn't, it didn't blow my hair back. But I am glad I read it. I have been widely recommending it to all sorts of readers. I think it's not quite a four quadrant but pretty close.
- [70:11]
Jeff O'Neill
It's not, I don't, I can't say that it's generally recommendable. I can't for people who just I need to know a little bit of something about you and that's, that doesn't mean it's bad. I may like it better than some that are more general generally recommendable. It's just that's the case. Vanessa thank you for joining us. Rebecca, as always. We'd love your takes on our takes on the book. PodcastRiot.com talk to you later.
- [70:37]
Rebecca Schinsky
Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you'll enjoy this audiobook. Excerpt from if Looks Could Kill by Julie Berry, provided by our sponsors at.
- [70:45]
Audiobook Narrator
Simon and Schuster's Children's Publishers, Whitechapel, East London. Jack has thoughts upon reading the morning papers Autumn 1888 I was kinder than I could have been, kinder to each hellcat than she deserved. It isn't pain that pleasures me, nor am I mad, unless we all are. Their suffering was brief. They felt only a few moments of fear. I gave these loathsome women better than they deserved when I freed them swiftly from their wretched lives. How much better do you treat the beasts you consume? Eat your breakfast bacon, you shopkeepers and clerks, you mistresses and mothers and gossip about the Whitechapel horrors. Enjoy the entertainment with my compliments. Disease and drink and poverty were killing them before your eyes. And did you lift a hand to help? How easily you looked away as they died by the score. Now, thanks to me, you cannot look away, not anymore. You who gasp at morning headlines. I laugh at your hypocrisy, you men who avail yourself of these wretched women's disgusting delights and pay less than the price of a loaf of bread. I know who you are. Far more are you scavengers of flesh than I. Since they are cattle to you, I'll be your butcher. You churchgoers who want the streets cleansed of these wicked whores. You propose no better solution than to raise the rent. But come, be reasonable. Their bitter lives were fated to expire soon, existing as they did on Djinn. Mine is a life of grander stature. Nature fashioned me. Rare, unique. Mine is a deeper cunning, an intellect more refined. If offering fallen women upon an altar can preserve me, humanity is better served. They were poor. I am rich. They were loathsome. I am pure. They were ignorant. I am a man of learning. They were hideous. I am beautiful. They were female. I am not. Where is my sin? I am an angel of mercy, gently hastening a few across the valley of death to leave their mortal woes behind. What happens to their corpses after they die? What of it? I'll decompose eventually. I mold their clay into truer sculptures than those you jostle an cue to pay to see at your waxworks and dime museums. Behold the true anatomical Venus. A once living woman opened for scientific study and aesthetic pleasure. My fleshy handiwork. Their carcasses are my canvas to show the filth, the taint, the reeking excrement behind whoring, seducing womanhood. But even so, I am not cruel. Only when they were quietly gone did I set about my work. So write your screeds, you moralizers, but do not pretend you care for those women. You wanted these demons off the street as much as anyone of sense. Do not think you can know me. I walk among you daily with a seraph's face. I sleep in peace when dawn approaches and I lay me down at last. The Bowery Lower east side, Manhattan Tabitha. THE FIRE OF the Spirit Autumn 1888 Funny thing about the fire of the spirit. It burns hot in army meetings when the captain's preaching. The singers are singing, the guitar playing, the tambourines jingling. And the people on either side of you are receiving Jesus dancing for joy and saying, praise be Hallelujah. I'm a new woman. I'm alive in Christ. And they're begging to enlist in the Lord's army. It burns bright and hot when they say to you, sister Tabitha, are you ready to give your life to the Lord and take up your cross and march all the way to Babylon? Even though it's actually a train to New York City? I, for one, am not walking. Are you ready to enlist in God's army and carry his banner into war? Are you ready to leave home to Go save souls. Are you ready to rescue sinners and snatch them back from the jaws of a dreadful fate? Are you? Are you? All that hot? Spirit fire. It's the kind of thing that makes you say yes. And possibly also the image of the absolute conniption Aunt Lorraine will have if you say yes. Gives the idea a bit more sparkle. And you do feel something. Just maybe not what everyone else means by feeling the spirit. Right in the middle of all that noise, there comes a quiet. You feel a warmth, a glow that fills you up from the inside. And all of a sudden, your eyes are pricking and you feel as though beams of light are shooting out your fingers and toes. And it speaks to you. Tabitha, beloved daughter, here I am. I am with you and I always have been. Come with me, dear one. I need you to go find my other daughters who are lost and lead them home. You can't really argue with that, can you?
- [77:40]
Vanessa Diaz
You?
- [77:40]
Audiobook Narrator
Not when all that love is pulsing through you till your bones tingle in the meeting with all the tambourines. You're pretty sure home means the heavenly kingdom, the pearly gates, the celestial city. But when you get to Babylon, or in this case, the Salvation army headquarters in the basement underneath Steve Brody's saloon on the Bowery and you see some of those lost daughters through smudgy saloon windows, you realize maybe home is a mother and a father back in Poughkeepsie or Scranton or West Springfield weeping over their girl who followed a liar to Gotham and disappeared, never to be heard from again. Because she isn't typing anybody's letters or bringing up the misses's breakfast tray. And she isn't weaving cloth in a wooden mill. If only she were. She is a prisoner on the Devil's Mile. One of the forgotten girls of the Bowery. Behind the bright lights and tinkling ivories, the laughter and the liquor, there she is. Behind a beaded curtain, behind a painted face. Neither her body nor her broken heart belongs to her anymore.