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Hello and welcome back to Hardcore Literature and Happy Holidays. I hope you're keeping well and I hope your reading is going well. Now, if you are subscribed to my YouTube channel, or if you are a member of the Hardcore Literature book club@patreon.com hardcoreliterature then you most likely already saw the recent video announcement where I finally revealed that the book club schedule the reading program the syllabus for 2025. But I thought it would be a good idea, as always, to put the discussion the syllabus reveal here on the podcast for you too. And I would also just like to take this moment to express my deepest gratitude, appreciation and love for you. Thank you so much for listening to the show, thank you for sharing your love of great literature with me, and thank you for keeping the great books alive. And a huge thank you to the members of the Hardcore Literature Book Club. It has been a magical and transformative year and I've heard from many readers who have found these great works and our discussions around them have kept them company during the ups and downs of life and that our deep reading program has facilitated a lot of powerful, positive personal growth. The book Club is a beautiful literary oasis and we have the kindest and warmest group and members are from all over the world, from all professions, all cultures, all walks of life. And we are all united by our shared passion for great stories, poems and plays. And we have befriended so many great writers together at the book club, from Shakespeare, Dante and Milton to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Virginia Wolf, J.R.R. tolkien and many, many more. This year gone, we have read great novels like east of Eden and the Tale of Genji. We have read the poetry of Walt Whitman, the short stories of Franz Kafka, and the plays of Moliere. We've read Mikhail Bugakov, Toni Morrison and Thomas Hardy and many more. And readers have been exploring the extensive back catalogue of lectures and our library of read throughs as well. This year gone, we have wrestled with the most profound themes of the human condition. Together we have met unforgettable characters and storytellers, and in so doing we have ultimately met ourselves. It's truly incredible how much growth we can experience in a year when we have a great reading program and a great group. So a huge thank you to you for being part of the journey. I wish you a very happy holidays. And now let's get into the reading program for 2025. And again, if you would like to see the video for this discussion, you can do that over on YouTube and if you're a member of the book club at Patreon, then we also have a downloadable printable schedule for the year, along with my recommended editions and translations for the books on our program and some words of reading adv. But let's get into the schedule and as always, we will be beginning the year as we mean to go on strong and our grand tour through great literature begins with the epic, sweeping seminal saga of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a masterpiece of Latin American postmodern magical realism. It's the 1967 novel 100 Years of Solitude. This novel is not only one of the most important works in the Spanish language. Indeed, Pablo Neruda would say this is the most revolutionary work in Spanish since Cervantes Don Quixote. But this novel is also consistently, rightfully cited as one of the most impressive aesthetic achievements in world literature ever penned. Indeed, as one New York Times Reviewer put it, 100 Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. This is one of those books that many readers have had on there too read list for years. But it's also the kind of book where if you have read it already, you will find yourself yearning to reread it. The Nobel Prize committee were right to award Garcia Marquez the prize in 1982 for his ability to combine the fantastic and the realistic in a richly composed world of imagination reflecting a continent's life and conflicts. And indeed, I personally take magical realism to be the primary aesthetic mode of the 20th century. To understand the modern unconscious, we need to understand magical realism. And where better to start than with the absolute king of it? Indeed, over the course of our journey we will encounter ghosts, flying carpets and rain that lasts for years on end. All of this is described with the same vivid detail and fidelity to truth that accompanies descriptions of real phenomena. This captivating, dreamlike, fantastical narrative gives us a family saga that spans seven generations of the Buendia family and the intoxicatingly depicted fictional town of Macondo, which is a microcosm for Colombia and indeed even contains the history and development Latin America itself. Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses real life, civil wars and massacres as inspiration, and we see that in magic realism, writers can be fiercely satirical and they can speak truth to power in really compelling ways. And in this book we get a ferocious condemnation of political corruption and exploitation. We've seen this before with Bulgakov's the Master and Margarita, and together over the course of our reading, we are going to penetrate behind the magic and get to the core of the realism. Despite the real world parallels and commentary, we read this masterpiece for the vividly crafted characters and the lush and robust world building. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's powers of description are so exemplary that you will feel like you are there in Macondo, living in his world. Harold Bloom put it best when he said that every page of this book is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb. Over the course of our deep reading, we will be afforded the opportunity to apprehend the cyclical nature of history across generations and understand the rise and fall of civilizations. We will better understand colonial expansion and modernization, and we will be able to isolate the elements of the human condition that stay eternally and perennially the same across the changing course of history. We will also take this opportunity along the way to appreciate some great short stories and poetry from the masters of Latin American literature. And there is going to be a lot of renewed discussion around this sprawling, lush and compelling masterpiece, because very soon there is going to be a Netflix adaptation for 100 Years of Solitude coming out. So it will be very interesting for us to read this book and make comparisons with this adaptation. This book is also going to beautifully inform our next two big reads because we're going to work our way backwards from magical realism to realism, and we are also going to appreciate the writer who inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez to pen great novels in the first place. And as we work through our big reads across the year, we will also be alternating many of our lectures with some classical and medieval works, and we will be grappling with writers who caused seismic shifts throughout the tradition of literature. So who's the first ancient classical writer in this series of cornerstones? Why, it is ovid? And alongside 100 Years of Solitude, we will be reading Ovid's Metamorphoses. This will be intensely rewarding and illuminating for all kinds of readers. But this will also provide a serious payoff for those readers who have been enjoying Shakespeare with the book club, because if you scratch the Bard, you will uncover Ovid. You will uncover his metamorphoses. Indeed, to familiarize yourself with Ovid is to familiarize yourself with all the great writers Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe. And I believe that this is a work that could use a lot more love and attention today when it comes to the classical works, because this is a treasure trove of more than 250 mythological stories, these interconnected myths of gods and heroes and mortals. You might want to think of this as like an Ancient Story anthology. It's going to be so rewarding and such a leveraged move to meet these incredible personages. We will meet Pyramus and Thisbe, the archetypical lovers behind Romeo and Juliet, their precursors. We're going to meet Daedalus and Icarus, and we're going to talk about the psychological lessons we can learn from the story of flying too close the sun. We're going to become acquainted with Narcissus and Echo, Daphne and Apollo, Orpheus and Eurydice. We're going to see the works of classical music, these stories inspired. We'll appreciate the paintings, the artwork of great artists like Bernini and Titian. To joyfully tear through or dip into Ovid's Metamorphosis is to pull deep psychological insight out of myth. And our reading will connect us to the past and make us more fully aware of our rich heritage as human beings. At the heart of the metamorphoses is the theme of transformation. So when we say that William Shakespeare is thoroughly Ovidian, what we mean is his characters ceaselessly change. That's what he learned from Ovid. The stories are about transformation, but they're also about love and heartbreak. There's comedy and there's tragedy, and ultimately, these are surprisingly immersive and strikingly visual tales. As well as being incredibly poetic, we'll explore different translations together, like the very translation that Shakespeare was inspired by, that's the Arthur Golding translation, which is one of the greatest works in English. Ovid's Latin rendered into English. It is a marvel. It is a sumptuous feast of language. And indeed, there must be something Ovidian in the air, because I've heard from so many readers who have decided that 2025 is the year they are going to breach of his Metamorphoses. So let's do that together after that. Next up for our big reads, moving from winter into early spring, we'll be moving from mythology and magical realism to a groundbreaking, revolutionary masterpiece of pure realism with Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. And this has long been considered a perfect work of fiction. Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera would both say that Flaubert took the novel from entertainment and elevated it to the condition of poetry. And this truly is one of the most influential works of literature ever penned. If you want to understand Tolstoy, if you want to understand Kafka and Chekhov, you need to go back to Flaubert. Indeed, James Wood would say that novelists should thank Flaubert the Way poets thank spring, it all begins again with him. We have read a lot of influential novels together at the book club, but this is one that I have been looking forward to since the very beginning. We are long overdue to crack Madame Bovary together. Now, Flaubert famously searched always for Le Monte, just the perfect word. And that's why Walter Pater called him the martyr of style. Every single word, every sentence is a marvel. It's perfect. His works are painstakingly crafted. Like James Joyce after him, Flaubert would spend weeks at a time on single pages, writing in intense solitude. And when we read this one together, I will be imploring you to slow down and really appreciate the craftsmanship that has gone into every single sentence. Now, Madame Bovary is the tragic story of the unhappy marriage of Emma Bovary, who Flaubert famously, iconically, would say was him. We see that Emma's romantic idealism clashes up against the mundane reality of her everyday life. This psychologically complex story continues to resonate with readers today, but it also gives us a time machine back to provincial 19th century France. And we get to experience what it was like to be a woman in an unhappy marriage back then. And indeed, this compulsively readable story caused a scandal in 1857, leading Flaubert to be tried for immorality. We see that many trailblazers in literature often find themselves at the centre of obscenity trials. We've seen this with James Joyce and Ulysses. We've seen this with D.H. lawrence and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Indeed, we've seen this with Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleur de Mal, the Flowers of Evil, which, alongside our reading of Madame Bovary, we'll be taking a little foray into. I'll be recommending some poems, some censored, banned, dangerous poems to complement your reading. And we'll be comparing realism with great symbolism. Flaubert's depiction of infidelity and erotic desire and his critiques of bourgeois society were shocking to the reading public when this was first serialized. Now, the obscenity trial made the story and its author famous. Flaubert was ultimately acquitted and this became a best seller. If you want to give a book the spotlight, then slap a censored or banned sticker on it. It's a very good marketing move. What I find really interesting about Flaubert's trial was that his realism was a key piece of evidence for his obscenity, because the lead prosecutor would argue that not only was the no and its substance, its content its subject matter. Not only was the novel itself immoral and indecent, but realism in literature was immoral too. It's very interesting. We take realism for granted today. Flaubert would say that an author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. We take such attitudes, such approaches to fiction for granted today. But this was revolutionary back then. Writers had to fight for the right to be realistic. And we're gonna have more banned fiction a little later in the year. But let's move on to our next big read. And Flaubert will make a great preface to this writer, this next novelist. This is the novelist that inspired Gabriela Garcia Marquez. Heck, he didn't just inspire him, he didn't just inspire south and North America, he inspired the entire world. We're going to be talking about another titan of 20th century literature. And we'll be moving up from Colombia and Latin America. We'll be moving away from France, and we'll be making our way to Mississippi in the United States and Yokna Pottafa county, and we'll be meeting another Nobel Prize winner. And we will be discussing William Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury. Now, Yokna Pottafa county is one of the greatest fictional heterocosms ever committed to the page. It's up there, in my estimation, with Thomas Hardy's Wessex. And we've just been enjoying Thomas Hardy together at the book club at time of recording. But if you're a first reader, when it comes to Faulkner, I know there will be many rereaders. If you're a first reader, what we're doing is introducing you not just to a work or a writer, but to an entire world. Now, I'm going to make no bones about this. The Sound and the Fury is an intensely difficult work. Don't let the slim size fool you. This will definitely be one of the most challenging works of the year. And so what we're going to do is we're going to get this win under our belt very early on. We're going to get this great achievement, and we can feel good for the rest of the year. This is one of the most difficult books that the club will have read together. We've read Gravity's Rainbow, we've read Infinite Jest, we've read the Brothers Karamazov and Ulysses. This will be up there. And if you're a re reader of this novel, you likely fall into one of two camps. Either you furrowed your brow and you abandoned the work relatively early on because you found it too disorienting. And the fact of the matter is, the opening presents such a sheer amount of difficulty that no one could blame you for abandoning this work. You either fall into that camp or you fall into the camp where you think, yes, this is difficult, yes, this is a challenge, but my goodness, I am in love with Faulkner's prose, his world, his fictive power. You think, wow, what an aesthetic and cognitive achievement. If you have abandoned this work before, we're going to get you through it. The book club has a great reputation for getting readers through difficult works. Not just getting through these works, but coming to love them and appreciate them on a very deep level. We make these works not just comprehensible, but life changing. Now, the Sound and the Fury is often cited as a Faulkner novel that one should not begin with, but I am not going to let that stop us from appreciating the novel that was the writer's favourite. This was Faulkner himself's favourite novel. Why did he love it so much? Well, at time of writing, Faulkner was 31 years old and he was feeling bitterly disappointed with publisher rejections. This was his fourth novel. But he was getting so tired with the publisher turning him down or not accepting his work that he decided to abandon writing what he thought people would like, what he thought would sell. And he decided to write something that he wanted to write. And so he set about penning a series of short stories that blew up into this novel. And when he finally gave it to his publisher, he implored them to keep it exactly how it is. Do not put any punctuation, for example, in for clarification. Faulkner dared to write the experimental narrative that he was born to write. And after some years, when he shot into the spotlight, an interviewer brought a very interesting question to him. Some people say they can't understand your writing even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them? And you can probably guess Faulkner's reply. He said, read it four times. We will be baking our rereading in as we go. And not only that, but as part of our read through, we'll also have a little film appreciation component to the club. And along the way I will be recommending great films that you can treat yourself to private screenings of. You may know that William Faulkner was actually a great Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote over 50 screenplays, he adapted heavily Hemingway to the big screen, and he also wrote the script for Raymond Chandler's the Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. So along the way we'll be getting acquainted with Faulkner's filmography, his screenwriting career too. But the Sound and the Fury is perfect Southern Gothic. We'll have an example of British Gothic later in the year, around the time of Halloween. This book centres around the Compson family, a really psychologically complex family of unforgettable characters, deeply flawed, tragic protagonists. And the Compson family are former Southern aristocracy and they're struggling to deal with the decay, degradation and dissolution of their family. I've said that magical realism is the primary aesthetic mode of the 20th century, but I also feel as though the Gothic, in all its forms and flavours and variations, the Gothic is the most informative genre in all of literature. It reflects the dark side, it brings our shadow into the light and tells us something about our psyche. Now, why is the Sound and the Fury so difficult? Well, it's due to the groundbreaking prose style, it's due to Faulkner's stream of consciousness. We get to see the world from the interiority of his characters, from their mind. And this is particularly difficult at the beginning because our entrance into the world is through the mind of a 33 year old, intellectually disabled man called Benji. Phenomenal character. And you might note that the title is an allusion from Shakespeare's life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. So that's instantly a hurdle. But there is a further difficulty in the fact that Faulkner gives us a non linear narrative. So this isn't just a reading experience. The narrative becomes a puzzle and you have to concentrate significantly to make sense of it. You also have to read it with a group. And I contend that if you can get through that difficult beginning, you will come across some of the finest, wisest and most astonishing prose ever written in the English language. Simply put, your hard work will pay off. To learn to appreciate Faulkner is to see what is sublime in so many of our favourite writers. Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy. They have a high Faulknerian strain in them. All of these writers we have read together at the book club lectures still available. Along the way, we'll be talking about those writers, we'll be talking about the modernists like Joyce and Virginia Woolf and T.S. eliot. And we'll also do some comparative exercises with one of the other most influential writers of the 20th century, and that's Ernest Hemingway. These two could not be more different in style and we'll see how they butted heads. And we'll compare the Faulknerian to the Hemingway Esque. I have been wanting personally to talk about Faulkner for the longest time. As you may know, he was one of the writers I first fell in love with when I was getting into reading for the first time. And I have heard from so many readers who have said they want to tackle Faulkner, too. He might be the writer whose name I've heard the most over the course of the last few years. So we're going to do it, and we're going to breach an intensely difficult but intensely rewarding masterpiece. And that brings us to another cornerstone writer, a real classic. And I hope you're up for a challenge, because going into spring, our next seismic shift in literature will involve an appreciation of Geoffrey Chaucer's the Canterbury Tales. April time is a time of sweet showers, when folk long to go on pilgrimages. Don't feel too daunted because Chaucer is surprisingly comprehensible and will have a modern English translation option available. We have tackled so many titans of great literature together. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Goethe, Tolstoy. And lectures for all of these are still available. We have tackled so many great writers, we absolutely can and will handle Chaucer. Now it's time to see the influence behind the greatest writer of the English language, Shakespeare. As we said, if you scratch the Bard, you'll find Ovid, but you'll also find Chaucer. You will find Chaucerian personages lurking behind Shakespeare's greatest protagonists. The Wife of Bath, for example, is something of a precursor to Sir John Falstaff. Together we will navigate the difficulties of Middle English, which I promise you will swiftly overcome, as we take a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral in Kent and the shrine of the martyred bishop, St. Thomas Becket. We will begin in the Tabard Inn in Southwark, London. We'll enjoy a tankard of ale and we will meet a host of unforgettable personages, which are tasked with a story competition. To pass the time on the pilgrimage, these incredible human beings will entertain one another with a series of tales. Today, such a journey won't even take an afternoon. But back then, to go there and back, it would take just under two weeks. And so we need some distraction, we need some entertainment. Chaucer is interesting because he writes English poetry in a time when English, the language itself, was undergoing enormous change and transformation in how it sounded and how it appeared. This was a time in which you would write in French or Italian or Latin, not the common tongue of English. And even more interestingly, Chaucer was not a writer first and foremost. He worked for the King, he would write his fiction at night once the day was done. But during the day, during a real turbulent time in English history. This was the time of Richard II and Henry iv. And we'll be talking about this together. I'll be recommending some history to dig into to really understand this. He was sent on missions across Europe and as he traveled he would hear these brilliant stories, these Italian stories and French stories, and he decided to bring them back to English and put them into the English tongue. Against a backdrop of feudalism and Black Death, the plague, the peasants revolt and great societal turmoil. The format of the Cantaby Tales is you have a speaker who has a prologue where they introduce the tale they're about to tell and then they give you their tale. Now, the prologues are typically more interesting than the stories themselves because you learn about the storyteller. This is one of the greatest metafictional frame narratives in all of literature. But we also, with the tales, get a treasure trove of all different kinds of stories. From bawdy fableau. These are comic tales filled with sexual and scatological humour, the kind of obscenity that we might find in Boccaccio to courtly love quest romances to pedagogical sermonizing, moralising, teaching tales to seriously proto feminist discourses. We get deep allegories and light hearted satire jostling side by side. And we'll also discuss the gulf of distance there is between Middle English and Old English, like what we find in Beowulf, for example, and the difference between Middle English and the English of the Renaissance. That show we are going to curate the tales we focus on. And I will embolden you to read the entire thing over the long term and we'll make mention of all the different tales, but together we're going to pair specific complementary tales together so we can get the most leveraged move into Chaucer. And ultimately, the thing that I love about this work is that it just injects joy into my life. It's great poetry, it bounces along beautifully and we get a great representation of humanity. But ultimately, the Canterbury Tale never fails to lift my mood and put a smile on my face. It also tickles and activates the part of my brain that lights up when I speak or learn another language. So we're going to be joyfully appreciating Chaucer together and that leads us into our next big read, or should I say big reads, because we're going to pair two works together. After the linguistic and cognitive challenge of Faulkner and Chaucer, we will pull back into more readily comprehensible fiction and we'll be doing something that we haven't done before. This is going to be really exciting. This is a book club first, like in the old days, where you'd go to the cinema and you'd see an A movie and a B movie. We're gonna do the same thing with our books, except both these books are A books and we are going to have ourselves a dystopia double bill. Keeping with the most influential works in literary history, we're going to be reading George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. These books are frequently seen as inversions of one another. Indeed, in Amusing Ourselves To Death, the prophetic social commentator Neil Postman stipulated that whilst we often talk of living in an Orwellian dystopian nightmare, with Big Brother watching our every move, Doublethink and Newspeak controlling our thoughts and words, our reality actually looks a lot closer to Huxley's vision. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. We're going to be finding out together what it means to be living in an Orwellian dystopia versus a Huxleyan world. And we will be starting with Brave New World, because that actually came first. This came out more than a decade and a half prior to Orwell's book in 1932. And Huxley was an overt influence on George Orwell. Indeed, he was his teacher at Eton College. And Orwell would review Brave New world in the 40s very favourably, except he would say that he did not believe that it addressed the brutality of totalitarian regimes like Stalin's Soviet Union and the Germany of Hitler and the Nazi Party adequately. And then, indeed, upon publication of Orwell's work, Huxley would say much the same thing, praising his work but saying, no, the future will resemble my dystopia. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot on the face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power. And these are the ways I've described in Brave New World. In Brave New World, we see that people are controlled through pleasure, consumerism, hedonism and distraction rather than through fear and force. Huxley was concerned with overindulgence and instant gratification. Orwell was concerned with state propaganda and the erasure of truth. Huxley's novel is set in a futuristic world state in the year AF632 and that stands for after Ford, and yes, that is Ford, the car manufacturer. This would be AD 2540 in our calendar. And in Brave New World we get an expression of anxiety over the assembly line, mass production and homogeneity and consumption. We see in this book that citizens are kept peaceful, that is placated and sedated by a happiness inducing drug called Soma. And they are also subject to brain teaching which brainwashes them into compliance. We can see Huxley's influence upon Margaret Atwood's the Handmaid's Tale in the state control of reproductive rights, because in Huxley's novel, natural procreation is abolished and replaced with artificial reproductive and citizens are engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programs place people into predetermined social classes. Almost a hundred years ago, this novel explored the dark side of consumerism in a really powerful and prescient way. Huxley managed to predict a world where artificial happiness rules and thus robs us of our humanity. We might ask if everyone was walking around in an elated but medicated haze, what would we lose? We discover that in Brave New World, and in addition to meeting Aldous Huxley, who's a great writer, there's so many great books from him that are well worth checking out. We'll also be taking this opportunity to appreciate some science fiction because Huxley inspired great writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury. But we'll also unpick his influences like the stories of H.G. well, Wells. After we've read Brave New World together, we will move into 1984. The title of that book itself has entered common parlance and Big Brother has become a byword, as has Thought Police and Thought Crime Doublethink. All of this has entered our public consciousness and informs us people don't even need to have read 1984 to understand what this means. Winston Smith and Room 101 have become legendary, but as always with these things, it is endlessly informative to go back to the source and see where they originated from. And as Anthony Burgess pointed out, and indeed Orwell was a great influence upon his A Clockwork Orange. Burgess would point out that Orwell wasn't actually making a full comment or a Prediction about the future. He was actually putting his finger on the pulse of what the world, or indeed what post war Britain had already become. He was expressing intensely contemporary anxieties. And that's what why even 40 plus years after the proposed dystopian date and 80 years after writing, these themes still continue to resonate. We have evergreen fears and perennial concerns packaged up into this novel. We get a universal commentary on totalitarianism, mass surveillance, censorship, state propaganda and repressive regimes. We will see together that if you can control what people say, you control what they think. We'll talk about the linguistic theory of relativity, the idea that language influences thought. And we'll think about how much freedom we would give up in return for so called safety. We'll ask ourselves, what if every move we make was watched and tracked? How would we feel about that? People often say, hey, if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. Is that true? However, Huxley has the world state, whilst Orwell has Oceania. And returning to 1984 in adult. Having read it as a child, I've been instantly struck by two things. One, of course, I'm struck by the relevance, it's always relevant. But two, I'm ultimately struck by Orwell's world building. Yes, there's political commentary, yes, there's commentary on totalitarianism, and we'll be pulling in Hannah Arendt's philosophy on that when we talk about Orwell. But ultimately, even if you do not consider that, which of course you have to, but if you don't, what we get with 1984 at the end of the Day is a thumping good science fiction book. Orwell often gets flack for not being a great prose stylist, but we do not read Orwell for the same reason we read Flaubert. And we'll see that this year. The story takes place in a future in which much of the world is at perpetual war. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, one of three that rule the world. Led by Big Brother. The image, the front for the dictatorial party that lurks in the shadows. The party, which is an omnipresent force concerned and focused on rewriting history. And our central protagonist, Winston Smith. He works at the Ministry of Truth. He hates the party and dreams of rebellion. And his first act of rebellion is to keep a secret diary and begin writing in it. He begins a relationship with his colleague Julia, and both of them together want to be part of an underground resort resistance against the Party. We'll dig into the philosophy and psychology of totalitarianism, but we're also going to pick apart the subtext, the hidden history of the world. We're going to see where our timelines diverged from Orwell's. Along the way, we'll be supplementing our readings with films and programs and documentaries. We'll also be talking about Yevgeny Zamyatin's we and the totalitarian state described therein, because this work inspired both Orwell and Huxley. I'll also be pointing you to some of Orwell's other works, his great essays and his Animal Farm and his memoir works. We'll also be supplementing our reading with some recommended viewings of Black Mirror. And this will take us into summer. And for me, summertime is the season for epics, for sweeping romantic and sublime sagas that you can really get lost in. The days are longer in the summer, which gives us more light to clock more pages. And when it comes to the epic, the western tradition finds its most significant influence in Homer. Now I thought for a moment we would read just one of Homer's epics. My personal favourite has long been the Odyssey, though I have a deep appreciation for the Iliad too. And the collective favourite often change changes from era to era depending on what's been going on. We see in times of relative peace, in rather boring times, readers often prefer the Iliad. But in turbulent times, times of war and trauma and difficulty, people en masse often prefer the Odyssey. Because the iliad recounts the 10 year long battle at Troy between the Trojans and the Greeks. The Achaeans. The beautiful Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships, is stolen away from the Greek Greeks. The Trojan Paris stole her away from King Menelaus, igniting a sustained amount of bloodshed. And it's not just this conflict that we read for, but for the inter camp conflict as well, between iconic personages like Agamemnon and Achilles. All of this has enraptured readers for centuries. But in times of real world conflict, a lot of readers gravitate to the Odyssey because the Odyssey has a completely different tone and message. The Odyssey is about returning home. We follow Odysseus, the great strategist, on his return to Ithaca. He wants to get back to his wife Penelope, who is beset by suitors in his absence. He wants to return to his son Telemachus, who needs to come into his own manhood. But he is blown off course. And so his journey takes 10 years. 10 years of fighting. 10 years to return home. And the Odyssey speaks to those who need to return home in their hearts, who need a sense of healing and a sense of unity. One of the many things that I love about the Odyssey is it's like a storehouse of stories like Ovid's Metamorphosis. We get these beautiful set pieces and these really iconic exchanges and characters. Homer Alongside reading the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare and Milton's Paradise Lost, reading Homer really is an incredibly leveraged move to unlock literature, the entirety of literature. So with all this in mind, I thought to myself, why pick one? So we're not going to. We're going to read both of them this year over the course of summer, we're going to read the Iliad. Then we're going to have a little break and we're going to go back to a novel. And then after that, we will return to the Odyssey. To read both the Iliad and the Odyssey over the course of a couple of months will be one of the most life changing and exciting and informative reading experiences of your life. You will know Homer by the end of this and you will have been on the ringing plains of Troy, seeing the clash of burnished steel on steel, the bloodshed in the sand. And then we will take a trip together. We will thread between Scylla and Charybdis. We will spend some time with Circe on her island. We will dodge the Cyclops and avoid the Sirens before we return home with Odysseus to sort those pestilence suitors out. These epics are ancient, but they touch on universal themes that constantly endure. The Iliad is about war, honour and the human condition at the heights of conflict. We will talk about rage, love, pride, and the price one pays for pursuing glory. The Odyssey is about cultivating resilience in the face of setbacks. It's about adventure and it's about survival against the odds. This is the quest narrative from which all great quest narratives descend. To read Homer is to begin a lifelong love affair and to be constantly treated to some of the best storytelling ever committed to the page from any age. Thank goodness for the sage, wise scribes who took these orally related tales which were often sung. And thank goodness for them getting it down. And thank goodness for the great translators which are spoiled for choice when it comes to translations of Homer. Now I said we will be dividing up our reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey. We'll have a little deload and we'll have something a bit more modern. But from the 19th century to break these epics up and to give us some time to digest the ideas, to let the story gestate and percolate. So what great story are we going to be diving in to break up, Homer? Well, we're going to be keeping the swashbuckling. With Alexandre Dumars, the Three Musketeers, we will have seen realism from Gustave Flaubert and remaining in France, we will now see romanticism. We have read the Count of Monte Cristo together in the book club and at time of recording there's just been a new film released. I'm personally very excited for given that release. Many readers have said that they are now very keen to enjoy many of Dumas other works. And there was also a great film adaptation for this work in the pre year. You are absolutely spoiled for choice when it comes to Alexandre Dumas. That man was a fiction machine. Unlike Flaubert, he was massively prolific. He was pumping the novels out. Alexandre Dumas was also not a prose stylist. He wrote suspense filled, adrenaline pumping, sensational page turners. And the Three Musketeers is a phenomenal example of that. And he actually wrote this one at the same time as the Count of Monte Cristo. What we have here is an adventure filled with sword fights, love and romance and intrigue, daring escapades and thrilling escapes. Duels at dawn and top secret missions. And we befriend the most unforgettable characters. This is a timeless tale of friendship and loyalty. The thing I love about the Three Musketeers is the historical backdrop. This book takes place in early 17th century France and and it is filled with court politics and royal intrigue. It's riven through with political scandals. And even though it is a page turner, even though it's a rip roaring adventure read. Dumas also makes political commentary that we find as usual to be rather perennial. You might think at first, if you've not read it, that this is a children's book. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, it is a great children's book, but what you'll find is if you've read this in childhood, your childhood edition was most likely abridged. When you read the full version, you'll see that the themes can become very adult. I absolutely love spending time in the company of Alexandre Dumas, who himself was a fascinating figure. He could have been a protagonist in one of his own novels. He would write his way across Europe, leaving a trail of creditors and mistresses in his wake. We'll be explaining the history behind this book, and I've really fallen in love with history over the course of the last few years. It's my favorite thing right now. We'll be explaining the history, we'll talk about the serialization, we'll get to know the characters, and we'll also be enjoying some tremendous adaptations along the way. And the page turners don't stop there because by the time we reach the autumnal season, we will be aligning our reading with the seasons. I love to do this. I love to pick my books based on the season and autumn. Autumn is the perfect time to enjoy some more Gothic with Daphne du Maurier's 1938 Rebecca, and it'll be interesting to reflect upon the wide variety, the different styles that the gothic genre can house. This work has a brooding, ominous atmosphere. It's an incredible psychological thriller. Yes, it gives us a gripping tale of romance, but with great tension that subverts it that will keep the pages flying by. Even though Rebecca is an atmospheric slow burn to begin with, you will find it to be compulsively readable. I always find Daphne du Maurier to be a great comfort read indeed. I've binged through her works during my first year of university and since then I frequently return to her works in the autumnal period. And Rebecca's my favourite. And it's not just one of my favourites. Rebecca is a book that has been loved the world over and has long been a particular favourite in broad Britain. Back when the BBC ran their famous big read in the early noughties, Rebecca ranked very, very highly indeed. Many of the book club reads made it to that list. We see Tolkien, Austen, Orwell, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Tolstoy, and we see Daphne du Maurier. This haunting tale of love, jealousy and secrets follows an unnamed narrator who marries a wealthy widower and moves into his impression impressive estate, Manderley. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again and here the shadow of his first wife is a lingering, looming presence. Our narrator struggles to compete with the seemingly perfect deceased wife, but uncovers some dark secrets around her life and death along the way. As per usual, we will be pairing complimentary viewing exercises adaptations of Rebecca, both the 1914 Alfred Hitchcock version and the more recent Netflix adaptation. I will also be encouraging you to explore some of her other works like the Birds, and when you read this book you will understand why it had to be Hitchcock who adapted her works. This is the perfect book to read beside a roaring fire or curled up in bed. And if you want to know what to expect without giving the story away, then you might find it interesting to know that commentators have drawn parallels between this work and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. And as for Dame du Maurier's favourite writer, when she appeared in Desert island discs in the 70s, when asked what book she would take to a desert island, du Maurier herself said, the collected works of Jane Austen, Specifically, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Emma. And that will lead us into our next autumnal big read in a moment. But come the Halloween season, we will also have a Halloween One shot and a deep, exclusive special appreciation of a great work. We've done this before with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We've read, indeed, Bram Stoker's Dracula together in the club. And now it's time to embrace a very short novella that you can enjoy across a weekend, and a work that Stephen King placed up there with Frankenstein and Dracula as one of the most influential and important horror stories of all time. Yes, if the gothic haunting atmosphere of Rebecca was not enough, we will also be discussing Robert Louis Stevenson's the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The author himself was so horrified by what he had penned, he cast his manuscript into the fire and then furiously rewrote it in a burst of creative and dark demonic inspiration. This is the classic story of the monster residing within us and demonstrates in fiction what Alexander Solzhenitsyn knew from real life, that the line separating good and evil runs right through the centre of every human heart. We will talk about the shadow self, identity, morality, what makes one good or evil? Are we responsible for our base and dark desire? And we will get a peek into the Victorian era as this short, impactful gothic mystery packages up the era's anxiety about dodgy doctors and the dangers of scientific advance. By this point, we'll be quite close to the end of the year and I will also be doing another special exclusive discussion on what I believe to be the most difficult work of literature ever penned, and that is James Joyce Finnegan's Wake. As a reward and an extra challenge. But as a reward for getting through all of these great books this year, we'll be talking about how you might embark upon reading Finnegan's Wake, this most difficult of all books. I'll be arming you and giving you the tools and resources to make your way through this masterpiece. And yes, this is absolutely a masterpiece. Finnegan's Wake is not just a novel, it's an experience it's like spending time in a playground, a linguistic playground, and you have to get yourself down to the unconscious level in order to comprehend it, in order to access the dark comedy running through it. This is the Mount Everest of literature for a reason, because every single word in the book has multiple meanings, layers and layers upon meanings. And Joyce plays upon dozens and dozens of different languages and blends etymologies and allusions and coins new words with a ferocious intensity not seen since William Shakespeare. We'll talk about the structure of this book and what you need to know to get to the heart of the story. It's not incomprehensible, though it may seem so. It's not nonsensical. There is a story. There's a grand mythology. We'll talk about Giambattista Vico's cycles of history. That was the structure that Joyce used in much the same way that for Ulysses, he used a Homeric structure. You need to understand the Odyssey to get a greater appreciation of that work. He used Giambattista Vico for his Finnegan's Wake. We want to think about Viconian cycles of history for several of the books on our schedule. I want to give you the key to unlocking this book and kicking off a lifelong reading romance with it. You'll find that this is an inexhaustible, endlessly fresh linguistic feast. It's a masterpiece. Now, as I mentioned Jane Austen just a few moments ago, we will have for another of our autumnal big reads. As we go into winter, we will have another one of her masterpieces with Emma. Now, my aim is to get you through Jane Austen. My aim has been to get you through Shakespeare. And very soon we will have multiple lectures for every single thing Shakespeare penned. My aim has also been to get you through Charles Dickens. There are some writers who are so great that you cannot simply read one of their works. You don't just read Hamlet, you read Shakespeare. You don't just read Bleak House, you read Dickens. And at time of recording, we have read four great Charles Dickens novels together. And this year we will add a fifth to our collection. And now we're going to read our third Austen. We've read Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice, and now with Emma, we will receive an injection of lightness and comedy and love and exuberance and verve in the new year to counterbalance all the darkness, all the weight, all the trauma in the world. As you may know, doctors used to recommend the novels of Jane Austen during the world wars, and they would fill their bibliotherapy libraries with her novels. Austen, like Shakespeare, like Dickens, has an incredible power to heal. She's incredibly healing. She heals the rift between men and women. She heals the hurt in our hearts and makes makes us feel whole again, makes us feel warm and nourished. So, to be completely frank with you, yes. My aim is to get you reading all of Austen. Now, her oeuvre is not as extensive as Dickens or Shakespeare's, so it's very easy to make this dream a reality. Austen's perfect for swallowing up or steadily reading and befriending, deepening your friendship across the years. And although each of her books deals with romantic comedy, she's of Regency rock, who deals with affairs of the heart, love and men and women and friendship, even though that's the subject matter. What I love about Austen is each of her novels is so different. And that's because each of her heroines, by design, is different. A reader's favourite Austen novel reveals a lot about the reader. Which heroine you gravitate to or see aspects of yourself in, whether you're a man or a woman will reveal a lot about you. And the fantastic thing about any Emma is Jane Austen said that she was going to write a heroine who no one but herself would like. And this turned out to be completely incorrect because readers, since this was first published, have absolutely adored Emma. And that includes me. Indeed, when you ask Austinites what their favourite book of Jane Austen's is, you typically hear Pride and Prejudice or Emma. Now, everybody will have their particular favourites. Different people will like different novels, but these are the two that you typically see battling for top spot. And it's because of that central protagonist. Emma Woodhouse is complex and she is beautifully flawed. She is a really charming character who plays matchmaker and gets it wrong. She meddles in the affairs of other people and we experience her journey, her growth, her way to maturity as our own. She needs to learn to become more self aware, as do we all. And. And the reason why this story is so hilarious is because it's so relatable. I love how she misjudges people and social situations. I love her arrogance and I love her blind spots and I love seeing her overcome them. And here we really do have Austin on top social satire form. Is there anybody who does small town gossip and small town personalities better than Jane Austen? Another thing that I really love about Ed Emma is the prose quality. It is so beautiful, it's crisp, it is gorgeous, it's full of life and verve and joy. It is just Such a pleasure to read. You feel full and also light after reading it, simultaneously nourished. But you feel like you've got a bit of a bounce in your step after reading Emma. This is pure escapism. And you'll find that you get completely lost in the world of Highbury and Jane Austen's vividly crafted characters. And because Jane Austen offers so much healing and because that's what we need right now, we cannot let another year go by without experiencing another Jane Austen masterpiece. And then, as we get into the festive season, as you may know, we have a tradition. We have a ritual each and every year in the hardcore literature book club, where we enjoy the festive period with a reading of another classic by Charles Dickens. We reread A Christmas Carol and then we clock another work by Dickens. And so far we have read Great Expectations, the Mystery Of Edwin Drood, which is incomplete and it was fun to think about how it might have ended. We've read A Tale of Two Cities. And this year at Time of Recording, if you want to find out what we're deep reading together right now, then navigate over to patreon.com hardcore literature. Next year, we will have another masterpiece from Mr. Charles Dickens. And in much the same way that we cannot let another year pass without some more Dickens and some more Austen, we will also be reading Shakespeare together. Our Shakespeare project, our adventure, our journey through the complete works of Shakespeare in a proposed chronology has swollen in size. It's blown up. It's become bigger than I ever could have imagined. I thought this project at the beginning would be rather niche. I thought it would be a project that only I would love, because, you know my love for Shakespeare. But it's been tremendous to see how many readers have fallen in love with the Bard and have either worked their way through the complete works in chronological order with us, or dipped into some masterpieces here and there and picked and chose a few favourites to focus on. We're getting close to the end of this project. We've been following along at a monthly pace and we have a few more plays left to experience at time of recording, we'll be reading Cymbeline. After that, it's the Winter's Tale and the Tempest and the Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry viii. But that also gives you lots of time, if you haven't read Shakespeare with us, to go into the back catalogue to check out that project. And you can either get up to speed with the project or you can jump on with the remaining plays and treat it as a play of the month or indeed you can just take the project at your own pace. And for the rest of our reads at the Book club, the lectures will be coming out on the weekends, typically on a Sunday as they have done throughout this year. The lectures are long, they're meaty, they're absolutely packed with information and they are designed for multiple listens re listens. They're designed for really deep engagement and to keep you really busy. We'll have page prescriptions as we go through so you can guide your reading. We'll have a recommended pace, but they're also designed to be taken at your own pace pace and consumed the way that best suits you. Over the course of our reading we have recommended resources, recommendations for rich side avenues and rabbit holes to explore. And we have discussion questions to provoke really deep thought and introspection. And you can use these questions as a jumping off point to journal on the great books. Or you can join the conversation in the reading threads underneath each lecture, which I must say are the most inspiring, thoughtful and fun threads I have ever seen around the great Books anywhere. Truly, we've cultivated a really special atmosphere at the club and I really appreciate everybody who makes all of these reads so special, who brings their insights great and small to us and makes it just such a beautiful experience. I do really appreciate you. So there we have it. That's the Hardcore Literature Book club schedule for 2020 and I would like to take a moment to say again a huge thank you to all patrons, all members of the Hardcore Literature book club@patreon.com hardcore literature if you're a newcomer to the Hardcore Literature Book club then becoming a member through the Proust tier will give you instant access to a huge library of bookish discussions, talks, guides and read throughs for the great books. And we have more more ongoing and coming out all of the time and the discussion for all of these great books is always there. My recommendation for newcomers is to focus on what intrigues you most right now, which book sparks your curiosity and piques your interest? If you like reading multiple books simultaneously then I recommend picking one book from the back catalogue and joining us for our current live reading read and you'll be warmly welcomed by me and our lovely members. And very shortly there will be a downloadable printable schedule for the reading year for 2025 at the book club. That's at patreon.com hardcoreliterature I'm so happy that there are so many readers who have this thirst for reading and self scholarship and appreciate working through a deep reading program that aims at making making us more fulfilled, happier, more mentally robust, and improving us as thinking, feeling human beings. I hope the schedule has made you as excited as I am. And here's to another great reading year. I'm Benjamin McAvoy from the Hardcore Literature Book Club, and thank you again. Happy reading and bye bye for now.