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Hardcore Literature
Ep 83 - Reflecting on Reading the Great Books in 2024
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Benjamin McAvoy
Welcome back to Hardcore Literature. Your favourite book club deep dives into the greatest books ever written. Provocative poems, evocative epics and life changing literary analyses. We don't just read the great books, we live them together. We'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more. We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age. Join us as and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy on the Reading adventure of a lifetime with Hardcore Literature. Hello everybody, how are you doing today? I hope you're keeping well and I hope your reading is going well. We're going to have a little bit of a different show today because we're just going to have a little bit of a chat, we're going to have a chatty show and we're going to do some important consolidation work or at least I'm going to. And I would like to invite you to come along for the ride. What do I mean by that? Well, towards the end of every year I like to do three things and I typically take many weeks doing this. I like to look back over the year just gone. And we use our books, the books we read across the year, they scaffold on to key moments in our life and in our personal development, our psychological, intellectual, spiritual, emotional development. So looking back across a year of great reading is reflecting on all the powerful growth that has taken place. So I like to go through every single book that I have deep read across the year with the Hardcore literature book club. And then I like to take stock of where I am right now. Once I've done that, and I usually do this going into the next year, I then look forward, I start setting goals for every area in my life. Interpersonal, intrapersonal. So your relationship with others and your relationship with yourself, spiritual, intellectual, health goals, those are really, really important. So I like to plan the athletic movements, the athletic program I'm going to be following and of course I like to get excited for the year ahead. If you have been following the YouTube channel, then you will see that the Hardcore Literature Book club schedule for next year for 2025 went live this time last month and it's been a really beautiful and heartwarming response. So thank you to everybody who has shared their excitement with me. I'm really, really excited myself. It's going to be a tremendous year. We'll have the schedule come up here on the podcast very shortly, but if you haven't checked it out yet and you're curious, then you can go over to the YouTube channel, that's my name, Benjamin McAvoy or you can navigate over to patreon.com hardcore literature so at the end of each I like to look back over the past. I like to survey the present and also look forward into the future. This is very Scrooge like. And of course one tradition that I follow and I encourage readers at the book club to follow every year is to reread A Christmas Carol. And of course you may know that we also read a new Charles Dickens novel every year and at time of recording we're going to have a lecture coming out very soon on our latest Dickens. So let's look back over the year just gone. And if you followed along with the book club, if you've read some of these books, then you might want to have a little think. What occurs to you? What do you recall when you hear the name, the title, the author? And if you haven't been following along but you would like to, then all lecture series for the books mentioned today, plus an extensive back catalogue of even more bookish read throughs and guided journeys through literature are always available on demand to follow at your own pace@patreon.com hardcore literature now at the book club we've also been doing something very, very special. We've had the Shakespeare Project, which has completely swollen in size. What's the Shakespeare Project? Well, it is a project that aims to take us through the complete works of Shakespeare in a proposed chronology, my chronological order, the order in which I think the bar penned his plays. And it's a really rewarding thing to do. Personally, I think it's the most rewarding thing I have ever done and I've heard from so many readers now who have found the same thing. We split the Bard's career into four stages, four aesthetic stages. And it's so rewarding to read Hamlet, for example, or King Lear in isolation, but it's so much more rewarding when you see everything that led up to those masterpieces. It is a saga to follow Will's life, his life in the works all the way through. And at time of recording we have a few more plays to get through before we've read everything the Bard has ever penned. But why do I talk about the Shakespeare Project? Well, the guiding ethos for that project is as you work your way through the plays. I have tasked readers to grade each play A, B, C all the way down to F. Give it a grading or you can give it a rating IMDb style out of 10 I was inspired to issue this exercise by Kurt Vonnegut, because he did this with his literature students, but with the short story form. So you give each play a grading that's based purely on your own personal and selfish joy, or lack of joy. And so you're emboldened to just bring your subjective feelings to the work. How do you feel about the Taming of the Shrew? How do you feel about Henry V? How do you feel about these fantastic characters? Iago, Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth? Do you feel about them? That's what's important. But not only that, another exercise, another guiding principle as you work your way through Shakespeare, as I have encouraged readers to do, is to isolate one passage that for you is the passage you want to keep that represents the play for you. It's the passage that leapt out to you when you read it or viewed it or listened to it, or however you experienced the play. And so that's a really fun and rewarding focusing exercise because sometimes when you're doing an incredible project like that, a really sweeping, extensive project, you want to feel a sense of stability and guidance that helps to consolidate the aesthetic experience you have just enjoyed. So I've kept that principle as I look back over the year of Great Reads today, and I'm going to be isolating just a couple of insights per book, ideas that linger, that remain. We might think of this as psychic residue. So I don't have extensive notes today. I typically do work with notes of varying length. But today my notes are the books themselves, the spines on my shelf. I'm going to run my finger across my shelf. I have a very special shelf that's dedicated solely to hardcore literature, book club reads. And if you've seen my bookcase behind me, I've very recently put a new one together and will be doing a bookshelf tour in the not too distant future. You'll see some really beautiful books. You'll see the crown jewels in my collection. We've got a facsimile reprint of the first edition of the Complete Works of Charles Dickens, the Chapman and hall publication. You'll also see the Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer Adler's project that he put together with the Britannica Encyclopedia. You'll see a lovely selection of short stories. This series is called the Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, which was very kindly gifted to me by a book club member. And this is also one of the great prizes in my collection. I go to this collection all the time. You'll see my Everyman's behind me. I love Everyman's Library. They're fantastic. You'll also see my late 19th century complete works of Shakespeare with editorial commentary and introductions by the great actor and theatre director Sir Henry Irving. But I have another shelf that's just for book club reads. And these books are not pristine, they're not clean, they're not beautiful. But they mean so much to me because they contain my heart, they contain my soul. At a moment in time. These ones have their spines cracked, they are dog eared, they're dirty, they've got marginalia staining the pages, there's ink all over them. And they hold a very, very special place in my heart. So let's begin with the very first book. How did we start this year? We started this year as we meant to go on strong with John Steinbeck's east of Eden, with the hardcore literature book club. I love to kick off the year with a sweeping saga, really profound work that I think the most amount of people will fall in love with. And that's exactly what happened with east of Eden. If you've seen the schedule for next year, you will know that we're kicking the year off with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The year before this one we read Tolstoy's War and Peace. So those are the kind of books we want to begin the year with. And we started this year with east of Eden. And sometimes the year seems to go by in a flash, doesn't it? The last few years I have felt like time has just gone by like that and I couldn't believe that the end of the year was here. But with this year, it feels like the beginning of the year was almost an entirely different year. And it feels like I've lived two years in one. But that makes sense. There's been a lot of big life events happening this year for me, good and bad. The good include moving house and I'm very happy here. And also getting a German shepherd puppy called Sasha who has been taking all of my time. But one cannot complain, I absolutely love her. But we began the year at the book club with John Steinbeck's east of Eden. For this novel, Steinbeck took the biblical story of Cain and Abel from the book of Genesis. Of course, everybody knows the story of Cain and Abel. It's deeply embedded in Western culture. And as I've said before, one of the most leveraged moves for unlocking the most amount of literature is to gain an intimate acquaintance with the Bible. Also the complete works of Shakespeare. And I would also throw Milton's Paradise Lost in there too. That would give you a big leveraged move. These seismic shifts in our history, our literary history and our consciousness. You know the story Cain and Abel are the sons of Adam and Eve. And after our primal grandparents ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they fell. Yeah, this is the fool narrative. James Joyce would tell us that the fool narrative is the narrative of the world. All great stories center around a f our primal grandparents fell from grace. That was the fall of mankind. And Paradise Lost, which was John Milton's way of reading between the lines of Genesis and blowing it up to epic proportions. Paradise Lost would begin with the fall of Satan, hurled headlong, flaming from the ethereal sky, sheer over the heavenly battlements by the Lord because he dared to defy the Almighty. After Adam and Eve were booted out of paradise of they set about producing the human race. And Eve gave birth to Cain and Abel. And there are some traditions, some theological traditions that see Cain as actually the son of even the serpent, not Adam, the son of the tempter, which in the Genesis story is not overtly stipulated as being Satan, though we take it of course to be so. The serpent in the garden must be Satan. And Cain and Abel are two very different people, Very, very different. Abel makes an offering to God and God is very pleased. He sacrifices his firstlings, the first of his flock. Now Cain offers some of his harvest, some of the fruits of the ground. And we take it that the offering is not the best he could have done. We take it as a little bit lackluster because God is displeased with him. And that leads to Cain being very upset. But the Lord says, essentially, why are you upset? Why are you angry? If you were to do better, I would be happy. So in effect he's saying, just do better, okay? Don't give me second best. And then be resentful because your brother did not. Because Abel gave an offering that actually meant something. Now, instead of actually doing that, setting about mending his ways and doing better, Cain slays his brother. He rises up and he slays him and he cuts him down. He kills him. Cain is the first murderer of mankind. And we get this really famous line from the Bible when God says to Cain, where is your brother? And Cain says, what am I? Am I my brother's keeper? And it's interesting because people always quote this without the context. People will say this in a non ironic way to literally mean, well, I'm not my brother's keeper. And many people say this strangely blind to the fact that they're quoting Somebody who's just killed their brother. And God says, the blood of thy brother Crieth from the earth. And so what does he do? He puts a mark on Cain because he sends Cain forth into the world, into the land of nod at the east of Eden. And he puts a mark on him because Cain says, look, when people find out who I am, they're going to want to kill me. Why does God put a mark on Cain? Why does he give him the scar? Well, because he wants to let other people know that you are not to kill this individual. So he actually gives Cain a little bit of grace. He gives him another chance. And this is an idea that's really hit upon in east of Eden in the same way, as I said, Joyce thought all the great stories were ordered around a fool. John Steinbeck thought there was only one story, the story of good versus evil. And it's interesting. That's something I've been thinking a lot about. I suppose we can reduce everything down to that, but I'm not, not sure. I've heard from readers who absolutely adore Steinbeck who have asked whether this is too much of a reduction. Reductions can be valuable, but it's a valid point. Are there seven basic plots, as Christopher Booker would say? Are there two stories, as Kurt Vonnegut cheekily suggested? Or is there just one story, as Steinbeck claimed? Are there dozens or hundreds of different stories? To make the one story thesis work, we may find we have to play with some mantra and we have to designate some impulses about the human condition as just good versus evil. But it's an interesting way to think as a great artist. If you want to pen great plays, if you want to paint great paintings or make great music, if you have that underlying paradigm that it's all about good versus evil, then what you're going to produce is something sweeping and biblical and sublime. And John Steinbeck absolutely does that with east of Eden, which is my personal favorite of his books. Now, I think the Grapes of Wrath might be the better book, but I love east of Eden so much. I absolutely adore that book. And it was really great reading it with everyone at the hardcore literature book club. And lectures are still available, so if you didn't read it with us live, you can access the lectures on demand at any time, and you can read it through with my commentary at your own pace. Now, I do love that idea of there being one story. And I do think great writers typically have one story that want to tell their personal story, and it kind of manifests time and again, they'll keep telling the same story, but with variations, riffs on the same theme. And in the Western tradition, we can trace so much of our great literature back to the Bible. The Bible is not just one book. It's a book of books. It is a compendium. It's a sublime storehouse of stories. It's a storehouse of myth and archetypes and wisdom and beauty. Absolutely. Some of the most beautiful poetry you'll ever read. You'll find it in the Song of Solomon, which we read as well this year. Or some of us went and investigated that because we read Toni Morrison's great novel beautifully erotic yearning packaged up into great poetry. Or you'll find great songs that come from the bottom of one's heart in great turmoil or great pain. In the Psalms. I love the Psalms. I return to them all of the time. I also return to the Proverbs. You'll find so much wisdom there. You'll find great world building in Genesis. If you want to know how to create a compelling heterocosm in your novels, then you go back to Genesis and you study that. And of course, we get some of the most powerful life advice in the Gospels with the parables of Christ. What's really interesting when we're thinking about the Bible and we're also thinking about literature, is to read great literature in a way that's really rewarding, spiritually and emotionally nourishing. You are to read great literature the way you read Scripture. Now, I've said this before, but what does that mean exactly? Read books like east of Eden and Anna Karenina. Read the Brothers Karamazov like Scripture. What does that mean? It means essentially that you read it with great care and great attention and with great alertness. Being alert to the fact that there's wisdom there for you, not only in the lines themselves, but between the lines. So you learn like a student or like a disciple, we might say. You really bring yourself to the work. You live in it. Ignatius of Loyola gave some fantastic advice for reading the Gospels. He said you had to engage all of your senses and really see everything, see what's described on your mind's eye. We've spoken before about the theatre of the mind. I love One of my favorite things of all time to do is sit down of a night of an evening with a volume of one of Shakespeare's plays and just off all distractions and produce the play. In the theatre of your mind, you clothe the characters, you cast them, you make the decisions, the aesthetic decisions. That's so much fun. Treat them like closet dramas. So if you do that, but you do that for literature, that means when you have a great book written by the likes of Steinbeck, when you have the poetry of Walt Whitman before you, when you have the Tale of Genji open before you, my goodness. We'll talk about that in a moment. That is pure scripture right there. You take your time. Yeah. You don't speed read the great books. You read slowly. You reread as you go. And over the course of your life, over the years, you read aloud. Yeah, we used to read aloud. And silent reading, when it first started to happen, it kind of took off with the rise of the novel, people started to read by themselves and not even moving their lips. This was actually seen as sinful and naughty. People didn't understand why you would do that. For the longest time, reading has been communal. And this is why I don't get when people kind of hate on audiobooks a little bit. I love audiobooks. One of my favorite things to do is to read a book and have it before me and listen to it read aloud by a great narrator at the same time. Sometimes I'll pause and I'll read it aloud or I'll share it with the people in my life. I absolutely love to do that. For the longest time, reading was communal. And that's what's so great about the hardcore literature book club, is you can read a section of a book, and then you can come, you can listen to what I have to say about it, but you can also see what other readers have to say about what you've just read. And there's a real great feeling of camaraderie where you're working your way through the book, but you don't feel alone. So even if it's a difficult work, you know that there will be other people there to help you make sense of it. That's beautiful. This is what we mean by scriptural reading. We treat our reading as work, but the kind of work that Kahlil Gibran would call love made visible. Now, of course, deep reading is work, but it's also play. It's joyful, joyful play. And the moments in which I've wrestled most ferociously over my works, the parts of novels that have made me furrow my brow the most, often intersect with the times in which I've had the most fun. Something so rewarding about feeling that growth. I love it when I don't instantly understand a work of literature, a poem, a short story. I Love that. I love working upon it like a puzzle. And you can actually feel the growth. So that's what we mean by scriptural reading. Make it communal and take it seriously and bring yourself to it. And in east of Eden, the thing that I absolutely love is the fact that we have a guide in the book as to how to conduct scriptural reading, how to embark upon an exegetical analysis. We have the fantastic characters of Lee. What a tremendous character. We have the character of Adam, and we have the character of Samuel Hamilton, who was based on John Steinbeck's own grandfather because he took his family history and transmuted it into fiction. And all great writers do that to some degree. We're reading, of course, Dickens at the moment at the book club, and we're going to see how he did it. How did he clothe up the real facts of his life into fiction? And you may know the saying that fiction is a lie that points to the truth. That's so true. So we see Sam and we see Adam, and we see Lee in the book poring over a passage from the Cain and Abel story. And they're pouring over the different interpretations, the different translations and the interpretations that can come off of a different translation. And it all hinges around one word, a very famous word. Lovers of Steinbeck have tattooed this on them. The word is Tim Shell. And Lee, after navigating all the different ways that that can be translated, comes to the conclusion that this does not mean thou shalt, but rather thou mayest. And this phrase comes in the context of God speaking to Cain after he's killed his brother. And he said, says thou mayest choose to rule over sin. The difference of a modal verb, it makes a huge difference. Is God speaking to him deterministically, or is he giving him an option? Is he essentially saying, if he says, you may, he's saying, you have the option to choose between good and evil. So never feel as though you do not have free will. You do. You have that option. And it's quite a liberating message. But what I love about east of Eden is the attention and the care given to these three men wrangling over this biblical passage. East of Eden is a tremendous drama. It's a soap opera. There's so much in there. I mean, my goodness, the character of Kathy, she keeps us reading. She keeps us feverishly reading. And I'm very excited to hear that. Ilia Kazan, who adapted the movie with James Dean and got rid of some of the best characters, Elia Kazan's granddaughter I think is now putting together a Netflix adaptation for east of Eden that's going to see the work from Kathy's point of view. So I'm very excited about that. But in this really dramatic work, the thing that remains with me is the exegetical analysis of these three men as they pour over the scripture and apply it to their lives. So you read east of Eden and you get a little guide as to how to read everything else you're reading now. After east of Eden this year, we then proceeded to some Russian literature, and we read Mikhail Bulgari, the Master and Margarita. What a tremendous work. This was good fun because with the club, we've read a lot of Russian literature because some of the greatest works ever written were penned in Russian. We've read Tolstoy, we've read Dostoevsky, we've had conversations about Chekov and Turgenev. And I think people going to Bulgakov were expecting something like Tolstoy or something like Dostoevsky. And so many people were completely flabbergasted at what they found. Because although Bulgakov is gleefully indebted to both of those writers, and there are homages to both of them in the work, both of them get name dropped, and there are Tolstoyk and Dostoevsky and allusions in that work, he's actually nothing like them. Bulgakov is pure magical realism. And I've said before that I think magical realism is the primary or dominant aesthetic mode of the 20th century. So it'll be very interesting to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez with members of the book club going into next year. What stays with me when I reflect upon the Master and Margarita? Well, it's a modern work, and Bulgakov was penning it in the earlier half of the 20th century, though it would not be published until quite a few years after his death. In the later half of the modern era, because of censorship, he was writing in the Soviet Union. He was writing in the Soviet Union of Stalin. And what he was writing just couldn't be published because he was speaking truth to power. But when I reflect on this work, I come to the conclusion that with modernism, the writer's real life drama is frequently inextricably bound up with the fiction. And so we can see the work in the writer's life, if we know something of their life, not just the life in the work. Bulgakov had to write this book secretly, and so many writers during Stalin's reign had to do that. They would memorize their book, and if the secret police came knocking, they'd have to get rid of their works. They would burn their works. And Bulgakov actually did burn his manuscript. He tossed it into the fire for fear of being persecuted if he was found with it. And everything was conspiring against him during his writing career. He was not one of the Soviet realist writers. Now, there are elements of it in his work, but essentially, writers and painters and poets were given guidelines on what their art should be, what it should look like. So we see some tremendous paintings from this place in this era of Soviet realism, where you have propaganda interwoven with great art, because there were really talented artists, but they were under the boot of oppression, and so they had to balance their artistic prowess with the state propaganda. The message, your art had to essentially show the proletariat marching arm in arm, comrades, into the utopian socialist future. And if it didn't, then you were. You were doing something quite dangerous. Bulgakov cast his manuscript into the flames, and he was actually going to kill himself. He put a gun to his head in a moment of despair, and suddenly the phone rang, and when he picked it up, it was none other than Joseph Stalin himself. And he gave him a job as a theater manager and essentially saved his life. Now, as far as Bulgakov was concerned, the devil saved his life. And so he rescued his manuscript, he started rewriting it. And we see Stalin in the Master and Margarita as the sort of Mephistophelian devilish figure Volund, who says the iconic line, manuscripts don't burn, and that's a really famous line in Russia. It means it doesn't matter about state censorship. A good idea endures. Great art cannot be stifled or suppressed forever. Manuscripts don't burn. And so he ended up writing what he considered to be a fifth gospel, but the Gospel of Satan, in effect. And he gives us this really fantastical work, indebted to Goethe, very Faustian work, which is a real sumptuous feast to tuck into. It's really visually striking and sparkling, and it's funny as well. So what do I recall from the Master and Margarita? Well, I am left with the profound lesson that great art often needs to go underground. And great art springs from great pain, from great suffering. That's the fertile soil from which we get so many great works of literature and other works. And great art will endure, even if it has to go underground, and especially if it comes from great pain. It will survive. Now, at the beginning of the year, what else did we read together? We also read the poetry of Walt Whitman, and we focused on some of his great poems in Leaves of Grass. Of course, we spoke of Song. Of Myself. Walt Whitman continues to be one of my go to's when I'm in need of an uplift. In fact, I have just recently treated myself to a Wordsworth paperback edition of his works, even though I've got tons of copies, tons of editions of Whitman. And I say treated myself, even though the Wordsworth paperbacks are very, very cheap, because the Wordsworth paperbacks mean a lot to me. And when I was going through some difficult times many years ago, I stocked up on Wordsworth paperbacks of all my favourite poets. Shelley and Wordsworth was in there, and Byron and Keats. And I just lost myself in the work. And I think these editions are perf. They're beautiful. They're just so wonderful. I've got a Wordsworth paperback edition of Walt Whitman on my bedside table right now, and I read it every night. Even though I've got so much of his verse committed to memory, I read it every night and he uplifts me. Now, here's the thing that probably you have found. I've definitely found, as you work your way through great literature, a lot of the greatest works can be a bit of a bummer. And that's because, as we said, great art springs from great pain. There's great trauma. Yeah. The human condition packaged up into a poem or a play. Of course we're going to be thinking about our mortality. We're going to be thinking about death and unrequited love and all of that. The really most devastating, heartbreaking things that can happen to us, we find them in the great works of literature. Because reading literature is the human condition distilled. But when I go to Walt Whitman, I feel uplifted. Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman encourages me and says to me, you can contribute a verse. That's his philosophy. Life is a grand pageant. It's a grand procession. And you can contribute a verse. What will your verse be? Yes, this is very Dead Poets Society, one of my favorite movies. If you haven't seen it, I encourage you right now to give yourself a little screening of it as soon as possible. It's fantastic. I read the poetry of Walt Whitman and I'm encouraged with the sense that even though we are mortal, even though the time will come, even though sickness may fall upon us and we will die, we are not in the grave yet. That's what he tells us, you're not in the grave yet. So that's something that's worth taking deep into Us. The great thing about Walt Whitman is that he always considers who he is addressing. That's us. That's you and me. He's always writing to somebody. How do writers become so beloved? Well, they love you. This is why Dickens was so popular, because he loved his readers and he felt them to be his friends. And Whitman, I think, is one of the most intimate writers of all time. He's very tactile. He puts his hand on your shoulder and he says, come with me. Come out into nature and look around. He embraces us, he kisses us, and I absolutely love that. So when you're dialoguing with Walt Whitman, you're not just reading a poem. You're in the company of somebody who loves you. And perhaps one of the most liberating things that I've taken from his poetry is when he says, towards the end of Song of Myself, look for me under your boot soles. As we spoke about in our lectures, when Walt Whitman titles his volume Leaves of Grass, he's entering a very long scripture and literary tradition that aligns grass with flesh. We see this in the Psalms, for example. We see this in the poetry of Percy by Shelley, where the breath of the west wind scatters his thoughts across the universe. But leaves, there's a double meaning. Leaves, as in pages, because printers would refer to pages in a book as leaves, a sheaf of leaves. And so when we read his Leaves of Grass, we're actually touching the man himself. And if you consider that we all go to the dirt and we are reborn back into the world, and we are, as Hamlet tells us, part of everything. This was Hamlet's great anxiety, that it didn't matter how great a man you could be, even the great Alexander would end up being part of a cork and stopping up a beer barrel. He found this to be incredibly distressing to contemplate. But Whitman finds it liberating. He knows that this is a rebirth. And so when you go out into the world and you look down at your boot soles and it's caked with mud and grass, you think. Think of Whitman and you're reminded that we do transcend death and we will be reborn. Here's the very end of Song of Myself, which I absolutely adore. It goes like the spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untransmitted. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last Scud of day holds back for me. It flings my likeness after the rest. And true as any on the shadowed wilds. It coaxes me to the vapour and the dusk. I depart as air. I shake my white locks at the runaway sun. I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean. But I shall be good health to you nevertheless. And filter and fiber your blood. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search for another. I stop searching somewhere, waiting for you. So after Walt Whitman this year, as we moved into spring, we then moved into some light works. So we went from Whitman and then we went into Jane Austen and the plays of Moliere. For Jane Austen, we read a book that has become very, very special to me and that is Pride and Prejudice. And you've probably heard me talk about how I have read this book from covers to cover, back to back, many times over. Over the course of one year I read it three times. I got to the end and I started it again. I talk about rereading a lot, but typically when I reread, I'll zoom through some passages and I'll alight on the ones that mean the most to me and spend disproportionate time with my favourite passages. So re reading is more important than your first reading, but you can be a bit more selective with it. With Pride and Prejudice, however, I just wanted to keep living in the world. The reason why this is so special to me is because it reminds me that that which you abhor at first, that which you are averse to, can be something that turns into a deep, deep love for you later down the line. Because I was introduced to Jane Austen at school and what a difference a teacher can make. Because I had two English teachers and I had one who was an incredible influence and he was responsible for teaching us Shakespeare. And my goodness, did he help me get into Shakespeare. He also got me into Dickens as well. He was fantastic. He would sit on the desk and he'd give life to all of the characters with their distinct, individualized voices. His classes were an absolute joy. I had another teacher who I just didn't gel with. And in that class we were dealing with Austin. And I ended up developing a real aversion to Jane Austin. What a shame, however, because in recent years she is one of My favorite writers. She forms one of my holy tetrad. Jane Austen's in there, Shakespeare's in there, Dickens is in there, and Thomas Hardy's in there. These four mean so much to me. They really do. Jane Austen offers us healing. I feel like she heals the rift between many and women and she heals the rift in our hearts. She's got a great sense of humor, it's very, very dry and there's a lot of subtext, so you might not apprehend it at first, but her books are so revolutionary. We take her works for granted today because so many works, so many works of romantic comedy are really just based on her. She pioneered the free indirect discourse narrative style. What does that mean? That's when you're relating the narrative, you're telling the story, story in the third person. But that third person account is tinged with the interiority of a character. And in Pride and Prejudice, she does this for dozens of characters. So you're reading the story and you think, oh, this is how Mr. Collins feels, or this is how Mr. Darcy feels. Oh, this is pure Lizzie Bennet right here. This is her thoughts. It is absolutely genius of her that she pioneered this and we take it for granted today. I absolutely adore Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen reminds us through mystery, Mr. Bennett, that life, if it's for anything life, is for us to laugh at our neighbours and have them laugh at us in turn. Shakespeare has a very similar philosophy, so you can see why I gel with both of them. What's fantastic about Austen is that the men and women always get their match. They get their perfect match. They ultimately find the person that is them, their reflection and most suited to them. Austin is so healing a writer that she was actually prescribed by doctors during the world wars for shell shocked and traumatized soldiers. Her novels would stock up the bibliotherapy libraries. And it's interesting that today it's mainly women, I think it's fair to say. I don't think that's a stereotype. It's mainly women who read Jane Austen. I have made it my mission to get as many people as possible, both men and women, reading her, because that's how it used to be. She was very popular in the 19th century, very popular at the beginning of the 20th century with men who had to go to war. They would get a real incredible amount of escape from some really painful and traumatic experiences in her books. And escapism's brilliant. It is an incredible gift. It's not just about escaping from this world. It's about escaping into a more vivid world so that we can bring everything we have learned back with us into this world. If we escape into a world where we find some psychological healing, that means it's going to be a boon in our day to day reality too. So we read Pride and Prejudice together and you may know if you've checked out the schedule for next year, that we have another Jane Austen on our schedule. We'll be reading Emma, another favorite of mine. My aim is to get you through Dickens and read all of Dickens, to get you through all of Shakespeare and to get you through all of Austin. Around the time that we were reading Austen, we were reading the plays of Moliere. And I found this to be incredibly complementary. We've got an English novelist who writes comedies of manners, and then we've got a French playwright who writes comedies of manners. And what I think when I think of Moliere is I think one must have the heart of a tragedian to write great comedy. And perhaps that works the other way too. If you want to write great tragedy, perhaps you've got to have the heart of a comic, a comedian, a jester, a joker. Why do I say this? I say this because Moliere, when he was beginning his career, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, when he was beginning his career, he wanted to be in tragedies. He wanted to write tragedies and perform in them. There are only two genres, really. There were shades and permutations and stuff. But writing in the 17th century in France meant you were really confined by a lot of rules. Yeah, generic rules. You had to write in comedies according to the classical unities of time and space and incident. You had to write in a really tight knit way. And so this is why Shakespeare, believe it or not, although he was popular with common everyday people, people like you and I, although he was common with so many people, academics and the scholarly and the university educators, men and women, not so much for a little while, because he defied the classical unities. My goodness, if you read Anthony and Cleopatra, that is sprawling. It sprawls across time and space. And you can see what it would be like if that play was written according to the classical unities. If you read John Dryden's version of it and you can see there's a real difference. Moliere wanted to write tragedies, and as they're always, there was tragic elements to his life. But he wasn't popular as a tragedian, but he was very popular as a comic. He could get People laughing. And he wrote for two kinds of people. He wrote low brow humor, you know, kind of smutty, naughty humor. He would have characters who were cuckolded husbands that he based on himself. He would write for low, bawdy senses of humour. And there was a little bit of slapstick in there, there's a lot of farce in there. But he also wrote for the elites, the more educated. Again, he's kind of like Shakespeare and yet these two are absolutely nothing alike. When we say, how would we convey his greatness to somebody who hasn't read Moliere? We say, well, he's like the Shakespeare of France. Well, he's not like Shakespeare. They're very, very different. But we just say that to give you a sense of just how great he is. His eminence, that's absolutely true. The French language itself is referred to as la longue de Moliere, the language of Moliere. So he wrote for two audiences, Moliere, and this got him a lot of flak. People thought it was wrong to write naughty, silly comedy, but mix it in with the more elevated. He also wrote comedies about everyday people, like domestic comedies. The problem with this, however, is he typically, because he was a satirist, he typically took aim at specific types of people and specific individuals as well. And this got him in a lot of trouble. He took aim at the so called elites, these parlors where the highly educated and refined would gather to discuss high ideals. He wasn't really part of that crowd. Yeah, he wasn't really part of the intelligentsia mix. And so he took aim at them and they didn't like that. He took aim at religious and political corruption and that got him in a lot of trouble. One of his most famous plays, Tartuffe, was banned for years and years and years and my goodness, there were people even wanted to see him burn at the stake. Tartuffe, of course, is about religious hypocrisy. And one of my favorite plays of Moliere has to be Les Misantropes, the misanthrope. And one of the greatest characters in all of theater has to be Alcest, who is a very misanthropic individual. If you want a really rewarding reading exercise, I encourage you to read Moliere's Misanthrope or see a production of it next to Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, because both of these plays together give us a real understanding of what misanthropy, hatred of mankind is. What is misanthropy? Well, in Every misanthrope there is lurking someone who was once a hopeful idealist. Why do people hate mankind? Oh, I hate people. It's because you think the best of people. You think that they could be good. And so when they fall from your high ideals, you turn bitter. The misanthrope is an interesting one to read periodically over the course of your life because you want to see where your yardstick is. How thoroughly do you align with Alcest? And then maybe another time you might find yourself giving Alcest advice in your mind and thinking that actually, this is not how I want to be. It's a really medicinal play. It's really, really beautiful. It's very, very funny. It's Moliere on his heights. And we read that and a good few others together at the book club. And then as we worked our way into summer, we read one of my favorite books of all time, Murasaki Shikibu's the Tale of Genji or Genji Monogatari. With the Tale of Genji, we went from the west to the east and we went, went back a thousand or so years to the Heian era of Japan. So we're talking medieval Japan. The first thing that occurs to me upon recollection is just how thoroughly indebted we are the world over, west and east, to women for the genesis of literature itself. And I say Genesis deliberately with a little bit of an awareness that there are theories that the world of Genesis and some of the early books of the Bible, Exodus, for example, were actually written by a woman, a high ranking woman of the Solomonic court. Harold Bloom has a fantastic book called the Book of J that goes into that. But it's interesting because over the course of history we have, until relatively recently, historically speaking, we have many more male writers, two women writers. And the women writers typically take a male pseudonym. At least they did in Europe. George Eliot, we think of. George Eliot, for example, wrote under a male pseudonym. Rather than her real name of Mary Ann Evans, we think of the Bronte sisters. They were Curragh Ellis and Acton Bell. There are too many examples to name. I find it interesting though, because we really are so thoroughly indebted to women for the literary tradition. And women historically have been unjustly held back in so many areas to our serious detriment, not only when it comes to basic rights, but also the advancement of human thought, feeling and aesthetics. Why do I say this? I say this because in the Heian period of Japan, women couldn't do what men could do. They weren't Allowed to. They had pretty boring lives. They kind of stayed at home and just stared at the walls or stared out into space. If you read, say, Shonegun's the Pillow Book, you get a sort of diary, a series of entries about what life was like for a woman of the court, of the Heian Court, that era. And you see that mental health issues were rampant because their life was typically quite unfulfilling. You know, they couldn't hold the positions that men could hold. And yet in Heian Japan, women were used as political bargaining. They were essentially hired wombs. And so one status was tied to which woman you were with and who were your consorts and so forth. And yet, who's responsible for developing Japanese literature itself? We have to thank women. We have to thank women like Lady Murasaki Shikibu, who penned masterpieces like the Tale of Genji. Now, we don't actually know her real names, so there's some anonymity in there. We know that she was a woman of the Empress's court, but Shikibu was the name of her father's position and Murasaki was a name of her character, one of the most fantastic characters in all of literature who appears in the Tale of Genji. Readers loved this character so much that they affectionately nicknamed her after her. The Tale of Genji is a real saga. It's a sprawling, sublime soap opera filled with anti heroes. And we see that she wrote this Murasaki Shikibu. She wrote this story that follows, for the most part, the shining prince Hikaru Genji over the course of his life. And then it moves on to his descendants. It follows his adventures on of essentially sleeping his way through the women of the court and women of different stations and so forth. And we follow his heart aches and heartbreaks, and we follow his loves. This came out essentially in serial form and it came out over the course of years, just like a television show. So you read it today and it's 1500 pages or something, 1300. It's very, very long. And that wasn't how the original audience read it. Murasaki Shikibu would write the latest installment, then she would bring it with her to her ladies and they would read it aloud or they'd read together with their own little copies and they discuss it and they'd wait fervently for the next installment. And you can see Murasaki would actually put things in there based on what she thought her audience would like, like Charles Dickens over in England many years later. So. So the thing that Strikes me when I recall the Tale of Genji, which is so beautiful. It's one of those books that you just want to live in. And once you've read it once, you can drop in to your favourite passages and you can just hang out. You get to know the characters, like with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace, as Vladimir Nabokov would say, old Russians would consider Tolstoy's characters as friends and family. I feel the same way about the Tale of Genji. The thing that strikes me when I recall this is the fact that the long form is king, and it pretty much always has been. Yeah, we can go back to the Homeric epics, for example, to prove that. And I say this because today there's a lot of talk about pivoting into the long form. People being tired of the frivolous and the dispensable, the disposable, the short form, the ultra short form. And that's true. And there was a period where we were inundated with short form media, and we continue to be so. But long form then developed as a reaction to that. Podcasts that last for hours on end. But this is not a new phenomenon. The short form, the ultra short form was the phenomenon for a moment. And then we went back to what we yearn for, what we need. And we've always loved long running sarts. We love that because we understand that literature is life, it's an extension of our life. And we want to get to know the characters and we want to live with them and we want to grow alongside them. And this is also why television TV shows have taken off and movies have started to dwindle, because since television has become more cinematic and novelistic. I'm watching the Sopranos at the moment and I just think, my goodness, this is like reading a great novel. And since television has become so great, I think a lot of people are not quite seeing the point of a lot of films. I say this as a film buff, I absolutely adore cinema. But it's a different thing. A lot of people think, well, if you're going into a movie and it's an hour and a half, then you get to know these characters, you get the exciting incident and that's it. And then you leave them. Look at the most popular movies of all time. They're long. Yeah. The Godfather, the Lord of the Rings, the long. We want long form. So typically people will say, ah, I want to watch a TV show, I want to binge a TV show. A TV show. With 30 episodes a season and 10 seasons. And I want to stay with the characters. This has been something that we have always wanted because we want connection. We want connection over the long term. And we don't just want short and dispensable and throwaway. We want something meaningful. And typically there is a relationship with length and depth, because sometimes, and this is why I'm so impressed by the great short story writers, Turgenev, Chekhov, short story writers, to give you a sense of an entire world in just a few pages have to be geniuses of an incomprehensible nature. I think that's an absolute marvel. That's a miracle that you can create a whole world and confine it to five pages. Pages, for example. But typically that's really, really hard to do. To really get to know characters like real people, you have to stay with them over the long term. How many people do you know now with great depth, where if you think back to your first meeting, your second meeting, you are astonished at just how they were essentially a different person, weren't they? It takes time to get to depth. And ultimately, I think a book is great in direct proportion to how fully you can reread it and drop back in and hang out with the characters. And great books are time machines, not capsules. And I say that because when I reread the Tale of Genji, I'm right there. And that reality has come into my reality. Now, over the course of summer this year, we kept with the long form, we kept with the sprawling, but we came back to the west, and we came back to the modern day, and we read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. And this is a fantastic dystopian novel. If you've seen the schedule video for next year's reading program, you'll know that we've got a dystopian double bill and we're going to be reading Brave New World one after the other with George Orwell's 1984, because these books are seen as inversions of one another. This will also be very rewarding for anybody who read Infinite Jest with us because David Foster Wallace fills that book with Orwellian allusions. He also fills it with allusions to Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. There's also Joycean allusions in there, Shakespearean, Dostoevskian and so forth. Infinite Jest was a fun one because it's one of those books that has a reputation for difficulty. It's one of those books that people often abandon. They'll Buy it and then they'll abandon it and not persevere with it. Similar to Gravity's Rainbow, which we also read the year before. This one, that's a book that did really well. It became a bestseller. It did really, really well. But the amount of people who bought it and then read it all the way through are very, very small. The interesting thing about postmodernism is postmodernist writers want to be pop culture. If we're talking about modernism, so that's the first half of the 20th century and postmodernism is the second half. But these definitions are beginning to fall down and become quite meaningless. This can be a whole discussion unto itself. Modernist writers, I'm talking T.S. eliot and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Ezra Pound, they kind of built a hedge around their works. They wanted a readership, but they wanted a small one and a relatively elite one. They wanted a very highly educated readership. Whereas postmodern writers, I'm talking David Foster Wallace, I'm talking Cormac McCarthy and Pynchon. I'm talking Toni Morrison and I'm talking Don DeLillo and John of and Franzen. They want lots of readers. And so they'll fill their books with classical allusions, Homeric, for example, Shakespearean. But there will also be pop cultural references to TV shows and products and food and drink and songs and films and so forth. There's tons of that. In Infinite Jest we get one of the protagonists, Hal Incandenza's essay on the TV show Hawaii Five O and the Hill Street Blues, we get that interpolated. And in talking about that show, he posits this idea that the postmodern hero will be a hero of non action heroes used to be very active, highly active. And this is very true. The postmodern hero is rather passive. Things happen to them. They perceive and they observe and they receive, but they don't do a whole lot. We found together at the book club that Infinite jest is actually not that difficult when you read it with. With a group and when you know what's going on. So when you have a guide who's explaining what the story's about, essentially it's not too hard. Yes, it's a challenge. Yes, it's a lot of work. But David Foster Wallace wanted that. He wanted his books to be pleasurable work. And what a tragedy. He took his own life. He was a very unhappy individual. And I remember when I heard the news, I was reading him with my friend whilst he was still alive. And he was a writer that meant a lot to us. We talked about him with great admiration and we were devastated when we heard the news. He really was quite prescient and predictive when it came to where the culture was going. Even before the culture had descended into, well, what it's become, the dispensable, the frivolous, the throwaway. And in his book, he's kind of predicted Netflix streaming. Now there's some elements of VHS players still involved. And, you know, it feels like when you read a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, of course, you know, Ray Bradbury, they're going to get things a little bit wrong because it's going to be of their time. But he got so much right. He got the general feeling of our time right. And how hilarious that he saw a dystopian future in which the years would be sponsored by corporations and named after products. The book is funny and that's one of the reasons why it's worth persevering with so much. Yes, it's tragic. Yes, there's a lot of heartbreak in there, but there's a lot of humour too. And perhaps that's why it's so effective, because it does both. Ultimately, what am I left with when I reflect upon Infinite Jest? I'm left with the profound impression that the novel is a communication device. This whole book is about communication, or lack of communication. One of the central dramas follows a father and a son. And the father is deceased. That's James Incandenza. The son is Hal. And it's about the fact that he could never truly communicate with his father. If you've not read the book and you don't want any spoilers, just skip forward 30 seconds. And his father essentially made this compelling tape called Infinite Jest, the entertainment. When people put it on, they get sucked into it and they can't stop watching. Very Ring esque, if you ask me. They can't stop watching and they watch it and watch it until they die. And he made that tape to communicate with his son ultimately, because he wanted to communicate through the artistic medium. And the real tragedy about David Foster Wallace's life is he felt like no one was listening to him or like no one could properly listen to him. This really is quite a tragic phenomenon that we probably all familiar with. It's very difficult to truly communicate. That's why we go to great books, because as David Foster Wallace said, you can talk about things in a book that you can't normally talk about face to face with another person. And so that's one of the Many blessings of deep reading great literature is we get to communicate truly and at a depth that we might otherwise not be able to communicate at. Now, side by side, with Infinite Jest, we also explore, explored the short stories of Franz Kafka. And this was an incredibly complementary exercise because David Foster Wallace was deeply inspired by Kafka. He was inspired by so many great writers that we have appreciated together at the book club. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Joyce. But he was inspired particularly by Kafka very deeply, as was practically every great writer in some fashion, directly or indirectly in the 20th century. And you know you are influential when your name becomes an adjective and enters common parlance. Kafkaesque. We got to see what that means. What does Kafkaesque mean? We learn exactly what that means by analyzing great stories like the Metamorphosis, A Hunger Artist and In the Penal Colony. Kafka's stories are unique because they are bizarre, absurdist night nightmares that ring true. A man who works himself to utter exhaustion for his family one day awakes to find himself turned into a giant vermin. What rings true about that? What's relatable about that? Another man starves himself to death for his artistic craft, his vocation, which no longer draws any attention. Kafka himself wrote that story as he was starving and dying. What's relatable about that? The relatability in Kafka's stories is that life sometimes does feel like a nightmare. Indeed, it can be a nightmare. And it can feel like we are a cog in an unfeeling, uncaring machine. It can feel like we have become less than human or that our greatest efforts are neglected. The really genius thing about Kafka is that he literally the metaphorical. And learning to read Kafka is learning to apprehend really insightful and powerful figurations, metaphors. If you learn to read Kafka, you can learn to decipher the symbolism of your darkest dreams. And that, unpleasant though it might be, is one of the most instructive things you can do for your self understanding and self development. And there is an overlap skill when it comes to reading your dreams and unconscious desires and fears and reading great novels, short stories and poems. Now, after that, and right after infinite Jest, we moved on to another American postmodern writer with Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and again returning to Solomon. I have the impression importance of returning to Homer and the Greeks and returning to the great Roman writers and the Bible impressed upon me to really understand our central protagonist's development That's Milkman dead, who very much exemplifies for the first half of the book what David Foster Wallace's Hal Incandenza said about the hero of postmodernity being a hero of non action. To really understand great books like Song of Solomon, we have to go back to the old epics. Because what Toni Morrison is doing is she is subverting a tradition. And she's delighting in reversals and negation and being defined by negation. We get a really strong Homeric strain running through the Song of Solomon. And we once again get a hero's journey. And the journey is about identity and it's about finding oneself. And I think all great epics and stories from Homer up to the present day are about identity. It's about finding out who you are. There's an ostensible objective. I need to get home. I need to get the Holy Grail. I need to get this, I need to get that. I need to find the answer to a riddle. But along the way, you learn something important about who you are. Steinbeck said that there was one story, and that was good versus evil. I think we could also say that the story we tell again and again is the hero's journey. We tell that in many different ways. The thing that remains with me after Song of Solomon is the key image of flight in the novel. Toni Morrison was inspired by African slave mythology. The folkloric stories of Africans flying home to Africa. And this myth, this folklore, this story has its origin in a real tragedy. The Igbo people were transported, transported across the Atlantic to America to work on slave plantations. But the Igbo people had a reputation for being ferocious and being strong willed and adamant. And they adamantly refused to be subjected to slavery. And they would have rather died than be made slaves. And that's exactly what happened. They took control of the slave ship. This was back in the early 19th century. They took control of. Of the ship. They drowned their captors, and then after that, they drowned themselves. There was a mass drowning. And out of that tragic historical incident developed this oral narrative of one's ancestors literally growing wings and flying home. Now we talk euphemistically, we talk with figurations. We talk metaphorically about things that are too difficult to talk about directly. So we get that idea from David Foster Wallace again. And a great work of literature is just simply a grand figuration, isn't it? So we don't say somebody killed themselves. We dress it up. We say it in a different way because it's too Painful. And so we can see where mythology originates from. We can get a sense of the truth lurking behind the great myths, behind the great stories. Toni Morrison would say that she wasn't interested in the idea of flight as metaphor primarily, even though of course it was. We get this idea in the book that if you want to fly, you have to leave what weighs you down so we can think about flight in so many ways. Flight as being true to oneself, flight as escaping from a bad situation and embracing freedom, finding liberty. She was interested in the literal story, the phenomenon, the literal flight phenomenon. And that makes for a very interesting reading experience, particularly when you get to the end. But I'm going to stay away from that, just in case you haven't read it. If you want to read Song of Solomon, then I encourage you to check out the lecture series in the back catalogue of the book club@patreon.com hardcore literature. Then when we hit the autumn period, which at time of recording, we're making our way out of soon and into winter, we aligned our reading with the seasons, something that I absolutely love to do. And we descended into the depths of Dante's Inferno, and we must descend in order to ascend. That's what I'm left with when I recall Dante. Now, as you know, Dante's Inferno is just one part of three parts of the Divine Comedy, although Dante himself just referred to it as his Comedy. It was Boccaccio, who was a great fan, who dubbed it divine La divina Commedia. It's one part. You've got the Inferno, which takes us into Hell. Then you've got the Purgatorio, that's purgatory. And then you've got Paradiso, Heaven. What's fascinating about this is Dante casts himself as a protagonist. So you've got Dante the writer, the poet, and then you've got Dante the pilgrim who literally goes down into hell and who guides him. It is virgin. Virgil wrote the Aeneid. Yeah, you can see the tradition of epics as a tradition of call and response. So Homer calls out, Virgil responds, and he subverts and he twists and he delivers his own epic. Virgil calls out, and then Dante responds. Dante calls out, along with Homer and Virgil and the Bible, and Milton responds. And so anybody who wants to pen a great epic today needs to go back to this stable of master writers, master storytellers. So he takes his influence, Virgil, who wrote the great Roman poem in Latin, and he casts him as a character as well in his Italian poem. This was not the done thing to write in the everyday vernacular, the Tuscan dialect, which formed the basis of standing Italian today. This was not the done thing. Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio made it the done thing. They were the masters of their language. They made their language in the same way that Shakespeare made the English language. And Dante Alighieri was il sommo poeta, the supreme poet. So he takes his influence and makes him a character, and together they are going into the bowels of hell. And then they get to Purgatorio and. And Virgil hands the reins over to Beatrice at the end of the Purgatorio, who is divine love and had a real world inspiration. And Beatrice had tasked Virgil to take Dante through hell, and then she takes him up to heaven. We must descend in order to ascend. Because what is this poem all about? It's an allegory. That's why it is so difficult, because it has many layers of meaning, multiple meanings. Going down into hell essentially means taking a moral inventory, searching through everything that you've done that you've done wrong, and looking your darkness in the face. Now, heaven and hell are states of mind, or they can be interpreted as being so. I find that very useful. And if we think about that, we'll think about hell as a state of mind in which you're punished and tortured. Why is one in hell? Because they have done wrong and not owned it. We find, as he descends the nine circles of hell into the bowels of the Inferno, the sinners time and again do not take responsibility for their actions. Oh, it wasn't my fault. Somebody else made me do it. Oh, you should understand why I did it. Can you not understand? You stay in hell if you refuse to own your wrongdoing. But if you look your wrongdoing in the face and you accept it, you recognize it and then renounce it, you can then purge through it and you can then ascend. You can atone for it. And that's what stays with me when I reconsider Dante's Inferno. And this, along with Milton's Paradise Lost and the Works of Shakespeare, was one of my favourite reading projects with the book club, and lectures are still available. I have made serious efforts to appreciate Dante in the original Italian. I've listened to some glorious narrations and audiobooks. I have followed the original with my arm and I've looked aside to see the English as well. There are so many great English translations, but even the best ones, which are marvels, they are absolutely amazing. If you want a great academic one, then go for The Hollander. If you want a great poetic one, then go for the Ciardi. Time and again, I'm reminded when I fall in love with literature in translation, that I need to go back to the original source. And so this is something that I'll be doing in the future. I'll be learning Italian to read Dante. Can you think of a better reason to learn Italian? Well, maybe there are a few. Maybe your partner's Italian, or you're going to be living in Italy. But I really think one of the best reasons to learn a language is to then appreciate the original in literature, because even at this stage, I can tell it is extraordinary. And then we're getting quite close to the present moment, because, keeping with the alignment of our reading with the seasons, we then read Thomas Hardy together. And we read Far from the Madding Crowd. And with that book, we found poetry in prose. As E.M. forster said, Thomas Hardy as a novelist was essentially a poet who conceived of his novels from a great height. And this is so, so true. We get a pastoral, elegiac novel about love and the natural world. I'm still very close to this book as we've literally just wrapped up our reading of it at the Hardcore Literature Book Club. This is one that I've read many times over, ever since I fell in love with Thomas Hardy at university and then went on to read everything he produced. But what stays behind for me when I think of Hardy? Well, of course, it's Wessex. It's his distinct world, it is his heterogeneity. You don't just read Hardy, you live in his world, you live in his Wessex. Now, who else did we read over the course of the year with the Hardcore Literature Book Club? Well, we read some really foundational thinkers, and we read the essays of Michel de Montaigne. We read Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we read Machiavelli's the Prince. And at that time of recording, we actually have one more foundational thinker left in the year, and that is Sigmund Freud. And we will be reading his Interpretation of Dreams. Of course, we also read Shakespeare. We continued our Shakespeare project, which is now, at time of recording, nearing its end, and that is incredibly bittersweet. What did we learn from Montaigne? Well, Montaigne, as I've said, was the father of the personal essay. And it's always valuable to keep in mind the etymology, do a little etymological excavation, a little dig for meaning in the words we use. What does the word essay mean? It means to attempt Something. And this is worth keeping in mind when you write an essay or you write a book review, or you embark upon a project that is personally meaningful to you, you are attempting something, it does not need to be perfect. It, it is your attempt and that will free you up. And Montaigne wrote essays on absolutely everything. The most profound and weighty themes of the human condition, life and love and death and meaning. But he also interpolated all of these weightier essays with essays on really frivolous things. So one moment he's talking about Stoicism and his favourite Stoic writer and philosophers, and the next he's talking about history, he's talking about Julius Caesar and what we can learn from the great men of antiquity. And then the next moment he's talking about his favorite smells and just things that occur to him over the course of his day to day experience. Why did he put the profound and the frivolous side by side? And it's worth bearing in mind that out of frivolity springs profundity. If you free yourself from up to not be perfect, not be deeply wise, and have a lot of really important things to say, then sometimes you do land on some really interesting insights. He did this because he wanted his essays to be all of him. His book was him. The book was the man himself. And the essays were like leaves or limbs, boughs of a tree, and the entire structures was the trunk of the tree. He infused his works, his essays, with Whitmanian multitudes, before Walt Whitman. And I think he is required reading or should be required reading for anybody who wants to pen great nonfiction, great works of autobiography, great articles. Anyone wants to be a great journalist, he will inform you endlessly. But the thing that I get from Montaigne ultimately is simply having the big book of essays. It's a doorstopper of a book, just having it on your bedside table alongside the poems of Walt Whitman and the plays of Shakespeare. Have it as a resource that you return to and dip into over the course of your life. Montaigne has become a dear friend to me. He is very, very intimate. He's very, very personal and he's very, very funny. And he also helps alleviate anxiety about death. The essays were partly born from a near death experience. He had retired from public life and he wanted to live a leisured life and he wanted to read great books and enjoy some solitude. He was thrown from his horse, however, and he thought that he would die. In fact, he was thrown from the horse and he couldn't remember anything. And to everybody around him, he was vomiting blood, he was convulsing. It looked like it was the end of him. But when he came to properly, when his consciousness returned a few days later, he only remembered a pleasant, peaceful floating sensation. And he realized that death is not something to be feared. Death hurts those who survive it. The death of other people, your own death, is nothing to be feared. And over the course of the essays, and you can split the essays into three significant stages of Montaigne's life, you can see because he rewrote the essays, you can see where the older Montaigne intrudes and rewrites. And it creates a really complex, layered feeling to it. Over the course of his life he wrestled with death and he came to terms with it. He came to terms with the Stoic idea of memento mori. Always remember that you will die and fix it in your mind, because that helps you to truly live. But he progressed beyond that. And towards the end of his life, he came to the conclusion that when death comes, it will come. And I'll know how to take care of it and how to behave, how to act, how to prepare my myself for it when the time arrives. And I need not over prepare now. So Montaigne is a great friend to me. And as I said, we read Machiavelli's the Prince, or in the words of Tony Soprano, Prince Machiavelli. Very funny. I'm watching the Sopranos at the moment, which I have to say must be up there for me with the symphonies of Beethoven and the tragedies of Shakespeare and the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci is one of the great pinnacles of human achievement. I think it is incredible. That show is like a novel. But what do we learn from Machiavelli? Well, we talk about people being Machiavellian, don't we? To mean they are villainous web spinners, they are manipulative schemers. And we see the greatest villains in literature. Literature are Machiavellian. They are Machiavels, like the great Iago from Shakespeare's Othello. And what you find with Machiavelli is one who advises you that a leader should be feared. And by feared, I take him to mean respected. Ultimately, he should be feared, but he should also be loved. And I think people settle on the you should be feared aspect of the Machiavellian philosophy to the detriment of the other half of the formula. Great leaders are both. They're respected and they are loved. The book is filled with advice, advice that actually can heal those who are going through heartache and pain and all of that in their personal lives. Machiavelli advises us not to get even, if you want to call it that, not to get even with other people and take revenge unless you're gonna go all the way. You must crush your enemy totally or break bread with him, make peace with him and leave him behind. What I love about Machiavelli, ultimately, isn't the advice in there, because I don't think it's good to operate in a Machiavellian key. I don't think it is good to go through the world with a sort of manipulative paradigm and thinking how to use people and how to get ahead with that. I just really love his case studies. The book is filled with these wonderful historical case studies that really bring history alive, military history alive, and the great men of antiquity. We can understand them better through Machiavelli's analyses. And it would have been wonderful if Machiavelli had written even more, if he'd gone on and done a sort of Plutarch's Lives, that would have been fantastic. Plutarch, of course, was a huge influence, not only on Machiavelli, but Michel de Montaigne. And we read Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche has meant a lot to me personally for a very, very long time. Thus Spoke Zarathustra quite felt, famously, is often cited as a Nietzsche that you should not start with. And even Nietzsche said this himself, even though he told his publisher that he was accessible. The publisher was saying to him, look, no one's going to understand this. And he was saying, no, no, this is accessible. He knew that. He really wasn't. He's dense, he's complex, he's challenging. And he followed Thus Spoke Zarathustra up with two more works, Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy of Morals, that explicate what's going on in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But I think this one's a great one to start with, just because it's so poetic. And he wrote it in a real rush of joy. This was his favorite work because he had so much fun writing it. It's musical, it's beautiful, it's allegorical. We follow this Zarathustra figure, who, of course, is taken from the religion of Zoroastrianism, but he has contorted the prophet and put his own thoughts into his mouth. It's sublime and it's a really cutting, fascinating, complex lambasting of Christianity. He takes apart the love one's neighbor attitude of the new Testament. I think this one's a great one to start with because it's a storehouse of all of Nietzsche's ideas and I think it's beautiful. I think you read Thus Spoke Zarathustra for the same reason that you read great and master imaginative literature, because indeed it is that it's a philosophical novel. When one thinks of Nietzsche, perhaps one thinks of the iconic line God is dead. Has any line in all of philosophy been so misunderstood, maligned and maladapted? What did Nietzsche mean when he said this, when he sounded the cry out God is dead? What he was saying was essentially the old systems of meaning, the traditional systems of values, like we get with religion, with Christianity, with the Church, they no longer hold meaning. And the 19th century felt a real cloud of nihilism and atheism looming over it. This was the age of Darwin and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche wanted to provide the antidote to nihilism. God is dead. And we say that to our detriment if we do not follow up with what Nietzsche was imploring us to believe. Therefore, we must forge on and we must create new meaning, our meaning, personal meaning. We must be the hero of our own lives. And one returns to Nietzsche when one needs to arm themselves for their next quest. Indeed, life is strung together with quests, ups and downs and sallies and heartbreaks and battles, loves and joys too. But we go on this hero's adventure that is our life. And Nietzsche sharpens our sword against his. He implores us to embrace our own will and to do better, to become a superman, an ubermensch, the thing that stays with me me the most from Nietzsche. It's not the iconic line God is dead, but really it's the thought experiment of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche had this thought experiment where he said, if a demon came down to you and told you that from here on out, that you forever, for eternity, are going to relive your life as you've already lived it, and it's going to be exactly the same, minute by minute, second by second, every detail that the same. Would you despair? Would you groan and despair and feel as though you had been condemned to hell for all eternity? Or would you say, yes, would that be liberating? Would you feel joyful and excited? Would you want to live the same life over and over again? I find this to be a really life affirming paradigm. This thought experiment helps us readjust and change our course if we're going off course a little bit. Because if we think, oh, No, I wouldn't like to live my life over again. Then we might need to change something in our life and we want to make our life thus, that we would say yes to that question, to that idea of eternal recurrence. And that doesn't mean everything is joyful. That doesn't mean we're in hedonistic pleasure all of the time. It means we. We accept the good and the bad. We embrace the storms of life because they lead up to who we are today and where we are today. And Freud, we have literally just spoken about Freud and the interpretation of dreams in depth at the hardcore literature book club. So go check that out if you're interested. What do we get from Freud? I love returning to Freud because he is in the tradition of great essayists. He's actually got more in common with Michel Montaigne than he does the great psychologists like William James. He is a ferocious and really perceptive art critic. There are so many ideas that occur to you. When you hear the name Freud, perhaps you think of sublimation, yeah, Directing your libido, your sexual drive into something productive, into civilization itself. We direct our sexual energy into our creative projects and we can harness it as a positive force. Interestingly, Nietzsche also spoke about sublimation, and then Freud spoke about sublimation. We think of the Oedipus complex, do we not? Which indeed, we might say Freud actually learnt from Hamlet first and foremost, more than Sophocles. Ultimately, I like to return to Freud as a refresher for how to deep read the great books. Because when Freud talks about the unconscious, when he talks about how dreams are made up and how they're comprised of manifest and latent content, that helps us decipher great poetry and novels and plays too. Manifest content is how it appears, the visual, the symbolism, whereas the latent content is what it represents. And you have to unpick the manifest to get to the true meaning beneath. If you can learn to read your dreams, you can learn to read great literature. And that can be one of the most powerful forces, the most powerful things you can do in your life. What a great tool to be able to get to the heart of a great poem. Now, let's end off by talking about Shakespeare, because we have been reading the complete works of Shakespeare in the club, and at time of recording, we have just four more Pokemon plays left to go before we finish the project entirely. And we will then have lectures for every single thing the Bard produced. This is the project that I am most proud of and I've been Most passionate about Shakespeare has been my constant companion for many years. He was one of the first writers that I went to when I was young. It was Shakespeare, it was Dickens and it was Tolkien as well. I've learnt from my reading of Shakespeare that I don't ever want to not be reading Shakespeare. So every year I will be returning to Shakespeare again and again. And I mean the complete works of Shakespeare in a very unique and different way. Going into 2025, I'm going to be re reading Shakespeare. After the Shakespeare Project, I'll be re reading Shakespeare myself, but following the first Folio division. And if you know what that looks like, then you'll know that they divided the plays into three and they divided the plays generically. You've got comedies, you've got histories and you've got tragedies. And it's a really curious combination and progression of plays. Because it's not chronological, this progression will see one reading the Tempest first. And what's really interesting is you get this grouping of plays so they all bounce off each other a little bit, they all inform each other. But it's also very interesting to think, hey, would this play really be in the comedy section? Would this be a tragedy? And you start to think about genre and you start to apprehend just how significantly Shakespeare bent and subverted and blended generic explanation expectations. He was an absolute master. For me, over the course of the Shakespeare Project, the thing that has astonished me the most is falling in love with the histories. Now, when I was younger, I didn't really like history that much. It wasn't my favorite topic. But recently, thanks to Shakespeare, I have fallen in love with history in a very deep and powerful way. And we talk about the tragic procession. Yeah, that's, that's the burst of plays that followed one after the other. In the Jacobean era, whilst Shakespeare was In the early 17th century version of lockdown, it was during plague and he wrote Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra one after the other. And to read them all together is to experience one of the most profound reading experiences of your life. Up there with the tragic Procession, I would put the Henriad saga, the sweep of plays that follows from Richard II through to Henry IV and Henry V, that's Prince Hal and onwards, closing with Richard iii. If you want to see this really powerfully realized, then I recommend the Hollow Crown TV series. It is so rewarding to follow that saga through. I love what Shakespeare has to say about rule, about being a king or a queen, about tyranny. What's interesting, however, is that Shakespeare is the supreme writer, the supreme poet and playmaker who manages to be endlessly profound and perceptive and prescient. Because he is an intensely visionary writer. He manages to put his finger on the human condition, on these evergreen truths, and he does so without moralizing. Try to find Shakespeare the man moralizing in his work and you will not be able to do it. You might find it here and there, and there'll be some instances and we'll be able to see why. He wrote some plays to commission. You can see some plays, his heart wasn't in it. And that's one of the most amazing things about reading the complete works is because it's a journey. There are peaks and troughs, there are highs and lows, there are mountaintops and valleys. And the highs are all the more high because you've experienced the lows. You might find some moralizing here and there. Most likely, if you do, it will be in the mouth of a character because he creates a heterocosm of individualized, distinct people. These are not characters, these are personages. These are real people and they are inexhaustible. Indeed, A.C. bradley would say that the four most inexhaustible characters are Iago, Cleopatra, Hamlet and Falstaff. Harold Bloom would contend that Shakespeare's Psyche was half Hamlet, half Falstaff. One is the ambassador of death, to use a G. Wilson Knight phrase. The other says, give, give me life. I'm often asked where one should start with Shakespeare. Well, if you have read some Shakespeare before and you're interested to get to know him intimately, then I recommend reading all of Shakespeare in the chronology that I've set out at the hardcore literature Book club. If you haven't read Shakespeare and you just want to dip in, I recommend going to the tragedies, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth. And I also recommend going to my favourite his plays, Henry iv, Part one, Part two, Henry V. Those are fantastic places to start. He creates a world of individual characters and he clearly cares very deeply for them. But he does not bother us with moralizing. And we do not find Shakespeare the moralizer because we do not find Shakespeare the man. Or at least that's what many contest. Jorge Luis Bohemian Hess once said that Shakespeare is everywhere and nowhere in his works. And of course when we say this, the emphasis is on the nowhere we can't find him. And this is true. Up to a point. Up to a point this is true. But I promise you, if you read the complete works of Shakespeare all the way through, over the long term, you will see Shakespeare the man emerge, or do you perhaps see yourself? Do you find only what you put there? It's a fun adventure nonetheless, trying to find this incredibly evasive but endlessly informative writer. Very soon I will be putting together a very special video where I will be ranking the complete works of Shakespeare, ranking and ordering all of the plays and the poems. And this is a video that I've been really looking forward to putting together for the longest time. If you know me, you know I love a good ranking. So this is going to be a lot of fun and I'm going to leave it there for today. But what did you make of the great books that you read over the course of this year? If you read the books on the Hardcore literature syllabus, I would love to hear from you over at the Hardcore Literature book club@patreon.com hardcore literature I would love to know what was the number one book for you this year gone? Why did it stand out? And how are you going to continue your relationship with that writer going forward in your life? Why did you love that book so much? I'd also be interested to know which books posed a difficulty and was the difficulty pleasurable? Was it rewarding? I'd love to know the highs and lows. Have a little reflect around this festive period. It's a really good time of year to take stock and look back over the year, just gone. And then once you've done that, you can then look forward. But take a little moment to reflect. Think about what you've achieved this year. What have you done well, what have you accomplished in all the different domains in your life, but your reading life, That's a good place to start. What book are you most proud of having tackled this this year? And again, if you haven't read a book mentioned today, but it piques your curiosity and you would love to dive into a great story, then you can do exactly that with the Deep dive lectures over at the Book club. In addition to the lectures themselves, which are packed with information, we also have resources so you can follow up on the literary, historical, psychological and philosophical avenues we go down along the way. We have questions to help your journaling too, and we have the best discussions in the reading threads that I have seen anywhere because we have the warmest, most loving and most passionate reading community and if you want to join us, you'll be very warmly welcomed and we would love to have you taking this reading journey with us. And that's at Patreon and I'D love to say thank you so much for listening today and thank you so much for reading with me. Thank you for continuing to keep these books alive, and thank you for sharing your deep love of great literature with me. I hope you've had a fantastic year. I hope there's been a lot of growth for you and I want you to know that I appreciate you deeply and I hope hope you have a wonderful day and a wonderful festive period. Happy reading and bye bye for now.