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Hello and welcome back to Hardcore Literature and Happy New Year. I hope you're keeping well and I hope your reading is going well, and I also hope you are as excited as I am to deep read some great books across the course of this new year.
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Now, if you're subscribed to my YouTube.
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Channel, or if you are a member of the Hardcore Literature Book club over@patreon.com hardcore literature, then you likely already saw the video announcement where I finally revealed the book club schedule, the reading program, the syllabus for 2026. But I thought it would be a good idea, as always, to put the discussion and the syllabus reveal here on the podcast for you too. And I would also 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 shar of Great Literature with me, and thank you for keeping the great books alive. And a huge thank you to all of the members at the Hardcore Literature Book Club. It has been an incredible year. A really transformative, positive and magical year. And I've heard from so many readers who have found that the great works we've read together and our discussions around them have really helped to keep them company during the ups and the downs of life. I've heard from so many readers now who have said that our Deep Reading program has led to a lot of powerful, positive personal growth and a renewed sense of meaning in their lives. The Hardcore Literature Book Club, I've said it before, is a beautiful literary oasis and we really do have the kindest, warmest group. We have members from all over the world, from all professions and backgrounds, all cultures and walks of life, and we are united by our shared passion for great stories and poems and plays. And we have befriended so many great writers together at the book club, from Shakespeare to Dante to Milton, Chaucer, Homer, Ovid, Tolstoy. We've befriended Jane Austen, George Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and many, many more. And this year, gone 2025, we've read some incredible works. We've read novels like 100 Years of Solitude and Bleak House. We've read the Sound and the Fury and Madame Bovary. We've read the dystopian novels of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. We've met the Pilgr of the Canterbury Tales and the heroes of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Metamorphoses and much, much more. And readers have also been loving exploring the extensive back catalogue of lectures and our library of read throughs too this year gone, we've wrestled with some of the most profound themes of the human condition. Together we've met some truly unforgettable characters, and we've fallen in love with the greatest storytellers who have ever put pen to pa. And in so doing we have ultimately met ourselves. And it truly is incredible just how much growth you can experience in just a year when you 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, very happy new year filled with health and positivity and filled with bookish adventures. Now let's get into the reading program for 2026 and if you would like to see the video for this discussion, you can do that at yout the Channel is my name Benjamin McAvoy? And if you are a member@patreon.com hardcore literature then we have a downloadable printable schedule for the entire year along with my recommended editions and translations for the books on our program, along with some words of reading advice. Or you can just enjoy the conversation here right now. So let's talk about the first great work on our schedule and we're starting the year off as we mean to.
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Go on strong, with a sweeping prose epic, a profoundly crafted saga, and a Pulitzer Prize winning masterwork of American literature. We begin with the novel that redefined and reinvented the entire Western genre because indeed we are reading Larry McMurtry's 1985 Lonesome Dove. I absolutely adore this novel ardently, so much so that it's become a long term ritual of mine to return to it and re read it every few years just to hang out in the world and spend time with the characters. And it has given me no end of joy to hear from so many readers who tell me that Lonesome Dove has a very special place in their hearts. This is the book that many see as the great American novel. It's often mentioned in the same breath as east of Eden and Moby Dick, both of which we've read in the Hardcore Literature Book Club and lectures are still available for those masterpieces. This isn't just a novel. This is an immersive experience that you live through with characters so beautifully, compellingly and realistically crafted that they will become your dearly beloved friends. Friends that you will laugh with and cry over. McMurtry takes us back to the 1870s and the waning days of the Old west to pokey little border town called Lonesome Dove, out in the hotter than hell desert heat of South Texas. And he makes us part of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, which is run by two retired Rangers and lifelong friends who could not be more dissimilar from one another in personality and temperament. Gus McCrae and Woodrow call. And we befriend not only these Rangers, but young, up and coming cowboys. We befriend wanted men, outlaws on the run, former Mexican soldiers and bandits. We meet prostitutes, and we spend time with those who've come to America from around the world for a chance at a better life. We spend time in the company of former slaves, now freed men, and of course, we encounter members of the Native American tribes. This dusty town gives us a microcosm of for the nation and its people. But we don't remain in Lonesome Dove because, restless in retirement and advancing old age, needing a mission and romantic sense of purpose, these two friends embark on one last great adventure together in the form of a grand cattle drive from Texas all the way up to Montana. We ride with them across the sublimely beautiful but utterly brutal frontier, and this sweeping canvas gives life to some of the most profound, impactful and perennial concerns of the human condition. We're talking about growing old and contending with our mortality. We're talking about love in all its forms, from unrequited romantic love to the love of deep, enduring and abiding friendship. We're talking about meaning and purpose and we're talking about identity in a land that is both ancient but newly changing and bears the scars of colonial expansion. McMurtry's aim with lonesome Dove was to demythologise the West. So to call this book a Western is to do it a disservice. This isn't the kind of Western that John Wayne would swagger through or that Howard Hawks would direct, although, of course, there is a real Rio Bravo feel to the camaraderie. Nor is this the kind of spaghetti Western that Sergio Leone would direct and Clint Eastwood would pioneer. Though, of course there is gritty, bloody, brutal realism in this book, which is going to be a challenge. By the way, as we're reading this book, we're going to have a film appreciation component, so we're going to be discussing some great movies. Alongside this book, we're also going to be bringing in complementary works of literature from the American tradition. But McMurtry has essentially given us a long critique of the Old west mythology, its tropes, its generic conventions, and has given us something real. And such is the magnitude of his influence that what he is doing in this novel has now become convention. And as you might expect from a screenwriter who has brought us some of the most profound films of our time, we have jaded protagonists. We have critiques of expansion. And in addition to women's voices in this male world, we also spend time with men that turn the traditional strong, silent stereotype on its head. These are men who feel fear and who shed tears and who desperately, in the bleak desert of nowhere, want to be loved. And since its publication 40 years ago, Men and women alike have fallen in love with Lonesome Dove. And indeed, I've personally not seen a novel have the consistent power to move readers like Lonesome Dove. This is one of those books where if you put it in almost anybody's hands from any background and you tell them to keep reading, they will come away utterly in love with it. Now, Larry McMurtry, who sadly passed away quite recently, he was very harsh on this book. He told us that he was trying to craft a Dante's Inferno, but instead gave us a Gone with the Wind. And he would declare that Lonesome Dove is not a towering masterpiece. Now, it's true that we don't get the aesthetic challenge of a western like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian from the same year, and indeed, we have a lecture series on that in the book club. And of course, you can tell that this was originally designed as a film script because it's intensely cinematic and the dialogue is very, very rich. But I would say it's not true that this book isn't a masterpiece. Yes, it has that quality of popular fiction, but it absolutely has the Dante esque running through it, too. Perhaps it's due to the book's eminent readability that elitists and academics have often looked down upon it. And there's a really big debate which we will get into around this book as to whether this is great literature or whether it is popular pulp fiction or whether it exists in some strange, liminal space between the two. And even if it does, we might ask, well, what's wrong with that? Yes, this is pretty easy to read, and yes, it is popular fiction. But I would contend that the greatest writers of all time have almost always been popular fiction. And we see that McMurtry, in this novel, is able to deliver something subversive, beautifully drawn, unforgettable, genre redefining and philosophical in a manner that all can engage with. Read this book with a friend, read it with a parent, read it with your children, read it with one of your siblings, and read it with us at the Hardcore Literature Book Club over the course of the winter season from January through February, and you will have the most unforgettable ride of your life. And everything that we learn about the hero's journey, mythology versus demythologisation and the human condition will inform many more of our reads across the course of the year. And you may know, if you've been a reader with the hardcore Literature book club, that when it comes to bigger works, we often like to alternate with another reading project at the same time, but in a different mode and in a way that will prove to be complementary. Across the winter season, we will be alternating Lonesome Dove with a curation of great ancient Greek tragedy. As is perfectly suiting for the cold, bleak, harsh season, we will be cathartically enjoying some of the greatest masterpieces of classical literature the world has ever produced. This year gone, we spent time with Homer. We read both of his epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey together. We also enjoyed Ovid's Metamorphoses. In previous years, we've brought ourselves to Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost, the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer, all of whom were influenced deeply by the ancient Greeks and Romans. And so we're going to build upon that now by drawing deep from this original wellspring of storytelling. Our very first theatre appreciation of the year will be for the Oresteia by Aeschylus. The Oresteia is the only surviving trilogy of plays from ancient Greece, and indeed only seven of Aeschylus plays survive, out of almost a hundred. So we have a great loss and we should be thankful for what remains. Plays used to come in trilogies. They'd come in a three and then you'd have a lighter satyr play at the end. And these plays would be performed at the city Dionysia, which was this grand festival open to all the citizens of the land. And they would run in sequence over the course the of of a day, from morning to night. And you had a panel who judged the plays. So the plays were in competition with one another, very much like the Olympics. So we see that the Spirit of Agon contest runs through great art. That's what forces masterpieces into the world. Great writers need to compete with one another for top spot. And the Oresteia won first prize. The story, which was inspired by some subtext in Homer's Odyssey, follows the return of the general king Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. And we see that his wife Clytemnestra has been having an affair while he has been away. He is murdered by her and her partner. And so his son, Orestes, swears vengeance. It's absolutely phenomenal, tragic, bloody fun that deals with fate, justice, revenge, and how society should deal with those who transgress. So we'll be discussing the entire Oresteia, which isn't too demanding. It's quite slim, as you can see. But we'll be giving options to two levels of reader for newcomers to classical literature who might just want to enjoy the first play, Agamemnon, you can absolutely do that, and you can enjoy it as a standalone and still enjoy the discussion. But if you want a little bit of a stretch goal, a little challenge, a little advanced assignment, then read all three plays and appreciate the sweep. The character arc, the development, the saga. It's incredibly rewarding. And what we have with the Oresteia, just like with Prometheus Bound, is one of the aesthetic peaks in the literary tradition. And we have Aeschylus to thank for the creation of character. It was in his plays that a single character stepped forward from the chorus. We're going to be watching some stellar productions together and talking about those ancient theatrical traditions, because without them, we wouldn't have Shakespeare. We can trace a line all the way up to Shakespeare, but they're very, very different from what we have today and what we're used to. So that's going to be a challenge. We're going to talk about Nietzsche, we're going to bring in his Birth of Tragedy, but we're also going to be applying Aristotle's poetics and talking about Catharsis. We're going to talk about the Hamasha, the fatal flaw of tragic protagonists and the arc of tragedy. So Aeschylus gifted us the second actor stepping forward from the chorus. But who introduced the third actor? Well, tradition holds it that it was our second playwright. For our appreciation, Sophocles, because after the Oresteia, we are going to be reading together Oedipus Rex. Now, Sigmund Freud said that this was one of the three greatest works of literature the world has ever produced, alongside Hamlet and Dostoevsky's the Brothers Karamazov. We've read Hamlet and Dostoevsky's masterpiece. Now it's time to dig into Oedipus Rex, which has a reputation that precedes it. It's about a king who murders his father and marries his mother, unknowingly, of course. And so the theme of fate and inevitability looms over this endlessly influential drama. We'll be talking about Sophocles, Theban plays but focusing on Oedipus Rex after Sophocles, we will then treat ourselves to some Euripides. These are the three great tragic playwrights of ancient Greece, and we will be enjoying his Medea. And if you read Ovid with us this year, you might recall Medea, who was the princess who became the wife of Jason, of the Argonauts, who went after the Golden Fleece. And Medea takes vengeance upon Jason when he leaves her for another woman. And over a thousand years before Shakespeare, we will see a striking instance of deep interiority and psychological complexity rendered on stage. Euripides competed at the city Dionysia with this play, which was part of a trilogy which we don't have. He competed with this play against the son of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and he came in third place. But we will be asking you, which of these plays do you prefer and why? For this reading project we're very fortunate to have single volumes of these plays that include everything that we're going to be reading together all in one book. We're very fortunate to have some great translations, but of course you can get single editions of the plays as well if you are particularly keen to do a deep dive to all these writers. As always, in our introductory how to reads over the course of the year, I will be giving you my personal translation recommendations for everything. But if you want my translations right now for all the books that we're going to be reading together over the course of 2026, then there is a downloadable printable document which has the whole schedule, my translation recommendations and some tips on deep reading over the course of 2026 available at patreon.com hardcore literature it's at the very bottom of the post of this video so you can see all the volumes I recommend in one place up front. Now before we move into our next big read and complimentary appreciation, let's talk about another very special feature of the Hardcore Literature Book Club. As well as reading through some great works of fiction and appreciating great poetry and plays, we will also have a special long term reading project where on a quarterly basis across the seasons so winter, spring, summer, autumn, we will enjoy a special standalone and exclusive discussion that seeks to open up some of the key works outside of imaginative literature. Some of the greatest works in world thought, civilizational cornerstones we might call them. And we're going to have a special lecture each season that serves to introduce you to four masterpieces of non fiction writing which you'll be able to bring in to your big reads and which will help explicate the great books. Last year we did this with the writers Montaigne, Machiavelli, Nietzsche and Freud. And this year we're pushing beyond the Western tradition and introducing some ancient Eastern thought. And our very first foundational work will be the Art of War by Sun Tzu. Now we're going to dig into the work of military philosophy that the iconic Anthony Soprano favoured. What we get with the Art of War is a slim but endlessly profound manual on strategic thinking. It's composed of 13 chapters, each dedicated to a different skill or different realm of tactics when it comes to warfare. And it's composed in short maxims that are very minimalist in form but can be meditated upon endlessly. Our reading assignment will involve taking single lines and mulling over them all day and then seeking pragmatically to apply them to our lives. This is how you read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius too, by the way. And make no mistake, whilst this is a military manual and it helps us to understand war and the psychology of warfare as a fundamental fact of human experience and reading it will lead to greater insight and an ability to see the true state of affairs in real world conflicts. And we will be analyzing this book and applying it to actual historical battles during our discussion. Whilst this is a military manual, the Art of War is ultimately a great text on self governance and mindset that has helped athletes, business people and has also helped people just in their personal lives too. This is a book about supreme excellence and supreme excellence comes when you win the war without fighting. And the greatest form of warfare is when the enemy does not even know they've been beaten. And the last thing one wants, we're told, is a long drawn out war, because war is a fire that burns all involved. And so there is a great anti war sentiment running through this text. It's like with martial arts, people will learn how to defend themselves so as to avoid fighting from a position of strength. For Western readers, the difficulty is going to be in needing to learn an entire new set of paradigms. But once you crack open the Art of War, its wisdom is quite readily apparent. Know yourself, know your enemy and you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles. That's a piece of wisdom from Sun Tzu. We're also told that victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and seek to win. That can be applied to anything in our lives. Many have wondered how to break into the great works of Eastern literature. This is something we discussed when we read the Tale of Genji with the book club. Well, when it comes to Chinese literature, this is a great avenue into it. Sun Tzu is under many of the most powerful works of historical literature in the Chinese tradition. It's like a bedrock text. Next up, our big read, taking us from winter through to early spring. By this point in the year, we'll be feeling a profound sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. We'll have a big book under our belts and we'll have appreciated some classical drama. So now it's time to crank up the aesthetic and cognitive challenge by returning to an old book club friend. And we're going to be reading an intensely visionary and deeply philosophical novel from the vintage decade of the 1860s. Together, we're going to be appreciating Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1868 masterpiece, the Idiot. Now, many years before penning this astonishing work, a young Dostoevsky was arrested for belonging to a literary group that discussed and planned to distribute banned subversive books critical of Russia and the tsarist regime, a regime built on the backs of oppression and serfdom. And Dostoevsky was sentenced to. To death by firing squad. He and his fellow prisoners were taken outside on a cold winter morning and their crimes were read out. They were tied to stakes upon a scaffold and the soldiers aimed their rifles at their heads as drumbeats filled the air. And at the very last moment, just before the triggers were pulled, a note came in, a note from the Tsar, pardoning them and commuting their death sentence to hard labour in the penal colonies of Siberia. It had all been an elaborate show to demonstrate just how merciful the great Tsar was. Now, of course, Dostoevsky, as we do, did not take this as an act of mercy, but quite the opposite. This was an act of. Of intense cruelty. The trauma of this event was so intense that Dostoevsky would develop severe epileptic seizures that would afflict him over the course of his life. He was to learn, however, that wisdom and insight arises from great pain. And he would channel this trauma, along with the trauma of losing several loved ones, into his novels. His novels, which became his ground for exploring the kind of intense, visionary philosophy we had hardly seen in prose before. When it comes to sinking into this profoundly influential Russian thinker's works, the quartet to focus on would be, in order of composition, Crime and Punishment, the Idiot, Demons and the Brothers Karamazov. Of course, you can throw his shorter works, his novellas, in there too. No, from underground, the Gambler, they're all amazing. And at the hardcore literature book club we have already read Crime and Punishment and the Brothers Karamazov and lectures are still available. And so now I would love to explore another novel that gifts us a truly unique literary experience. Biographer Joseph Frank was right to say that the Idiot may not be the very best of Dostoevsky's four masterpieces, but it absolutely was the most personal of his novels. In this work we see the effect that being dragged before the firing squad had upon his psyche. We see that in one of the most compelling arguments against the death penalty I have ever encountered. Dostoevsky, in what he thought would be his final moments, tried to make the few minutes he had left. He tried to make them into an age and appreciate everything. And of course, when he returned to life, he resolved to make every single minute count. He did not want to waste a single moment. We get this philosophy come through profoundly in this gift of a novel. We see one of the most profound protagonists ever penned with the character of Prince Myishkin. We also get one of his most resonant women protagonists with Nastasia Philipovna. At the beginning we meet Prince Myishkin and we see that he is re entering St. Petersburg society with no money to his name, having just spent many years in a Swiss sanatorium to try to treat his epilepsy. And with Myishkin we find a character that Dostoevsky forged to be perfectly beautiful. He wanted to render a successful Christ embodiment. Dostoevsky knew that this had been attempted, but most successfully, he would say, with Cervantes, Don Quixote, to a lesser extent with Dickens, Mr. Pickwick, and of course we might also think immediately of Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean. And we've met several of these characters together at the book club. But the intense difficulty when it comes to rendering such a perfect figure is that they inevitably become a subject of ridicule in their eminent goodness. And to render a perfect human in literature is an impossible and quixotic endeavour because they will always fall short of the ideal set and personified in Christ. Not only that, but it's difficult just on a dramatic level, because we desire to read about characters who are complex and conflicted, morally torn protagonists who have some good in them, some redeeming qualities, but are warring with the bad side of their nature too. It's very hard to make a truly pure and good hearted character to be fascinating. But in my opinion, Dostoevsky was successful in doing exactly that with Prince Myshkin. Prince Myshkin is every bit as fascinating as the Ivan Karamazovs or the Raskolnikovs of the world. Beauty will save the world. That's one of the most complex ideas posed in this work. And this is an implicit philosophy of many evangelists where they disseminate the word of the Gospels via beautiful structures. We're talking stained glass windows in beautiful cathedrals, we're talking the choir music of Bach or the paintings of Caravaggio. Great works of art have the power to move us to peak transcendental spiritual experience. Beauty can put us in touch with the divine. But here's the thing. What happens when someone who is totally and completely pure and kind hearted and virtuous, what happens when he must move through a society that is absolutely not a society that is corrupt and reprehensible and driven by self interest? Does a figure like Prince Myishkin seem to us to be perfectly good? Or do we ultimately, as many characters in the novel do, do we ultimately take him to be nothing but an idiot? We will have an examination of the holy fool type and we will also probe into the preoccupation of the Russian soul as we talk about Dostoevsky. And if you've ever struggled with nihilism, reckoning with the absurdity of life, existential angst, or if you've struggled with preserving innocence in a corrupt and violent society, if you've ever struggled with the meaning of love and all its different manifestations, then this is the book for you. And the thing I love about Dostoevsky, like so many of the great writers, is every novel he gives us is different. Yes, we have the familiar Dostoevsky and aesthetic. Yes, we have the grotesque. And we have a discordant clash of voices, a cacophony. And the Dostoevskian concerns are still there. This book's about idealization and virtue and redemption and society. And we have that familiar Dostoevskian attempt to go beyond realism. This is realism, Dostoevsky would say, of his idealistic work, only deeper, proving himself to be the eminent psychologist of Russian literature. Yes, all of that's here. But what we get is an intensely unique experience for those who are already familiar with Dostoevsky and for newcomers to the great writer alike. If you've read the Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment or any of his other works, how you feel about them is no indication of how you might feel about this book. It's quite unique. And Dostoevsky himself thought so. He said that he had a very special place in his heart for readers who loved the Idiot. Interestingly enough, this was actually Marcel Proust's favourite book. So we're going to be talking about the Idiot and along the way we'll be exploring complementary rabbit holes and making use of the non fiction of Tolstoy. We'll recommend some plays from Chekhov, we'll look at some poetry from Pushkin, we'll appreciate the influence of Gogol and we'll pair some short stories from Turgenev. And we'll also think about the Servantine and Dickensian influence upon Dostoevsky and how Dostoevsky influenced Nietzsche. And also the existentialists of the 20th century like Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre will experience this phenomenal novel across the course of March and April. And because Dostoevsky is a visionary novelist, it only makes sense to pair him with a visionary poet who also offers enormous cognitive challenge. Another writer who is a religion of one and who very much needs some mediation, who needs a guide. As we move into spring, we're going to be alternating with Dostoevsky and the epic myth making poetry of the English Romantic poet William Blake. It's William Blake who almost single handedly got me into literature. When I first started reading, it was the English romantics like Blake and it was the French Symbolists and the Russian heavyweights and of course Shakespeare and Dickens. If you've read Homer and Ovid and Milton with us at the hardcore Literature Literature book club and you're now looking to step up the difficulty level, then William Blake is for you. Although we will be designing these talks as a blank slate, I will be assuming no background knowledge and you absolutely can use Blake as your entrance into the river of great literature. Now, Blake iconically asserted, I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. And this was his guiding ethos for his prophetic works, which are dense, elusive, layered and laden with meaning. As a child, Blake saw visions of angels and demons. He conversed with God and the dearly departed. And in adulthood he would create an incredibly complex mythology to encode his spiritual, political and moral ideas. A mythology in which angels are often corrupt and demons can be morally upstanding. All religions are one and all deities reside in the human breast. That's what Blake taught us. What else did he teach us? He taught us that if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. And we can cleanse our doors of perception and learn to see more truly and more strangely, to quote Wallace Stevens, by learning to assimilate the poetry of Blake. Blake's poetry burst out of the bloody and violent revolutions in America and France. And he penned these apocalyptic prophecies that carried biblical and universal weight and would apply across time and all over the world. He hit upon the eternal truths of the human condition, the truths that one finds at the heart of the Gospel, the Vedic texts and the Icelandic Eddas, the truths we find in Homer, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. In his so called Orc cycle, we encounter some of the most sublime and towering mythic creatures ever committed to the page figures of Chaucerian and Homeric stature. Though what we'll be doing is we're going to approach his mythology like a chanted closet drama. We will stage these myths in the theatre of our imagination. We'll see it all and feel the resonance of Blake's mythology. And we're also going to see that we cannot appreciate Blake away from his engravings. He was relatively unknown in his lifetime, just like many of my favourite visionary writers like Nietzsche and Emily Dickinson. But he was relatively known as an engraver and an elite illuminator before he was known as a poet. And he would engrave his apocalyptic poems straight from his mind down onto the copper. We're going to appreciate his artwork. We're going to penetrate to the heart of his Miltonic and biblical influence and see how he swerved so sublimely and grandly from it. And so we're going to bring in Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence. So we're going to bring in the criticism of Northrop Fry and his Mythos of the Seasons. We'll see without Blake, there's no pre Raphaelite movement, there's no WB Yeats, there's no Benjamin Britton and Vaughan Williams, there's no Aldous Huxley. And there's also a substantial loss to Freudian and Jungian thought. Indeed, we might say there's no rock and roll, there's no 1960s rock and roll as we know it from the light of the Dawes and Bob Dylan. Indeed, there's no His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman's trilogy, which was very influenced by Blakeian mythology. And in exploring Blake, we'll be learning, of course, about Romanticism and the movement. But Blake, although he's thrown in with the Romantics, he's more of a pre Romantic because he is very different from Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron and Keith and Coleridge. So we'll be bringing these great poets in to hold Blake up against them. And we'll be learning about the era that shaped the poetry. And in orienting ourselves through Blake's poetry, we'll be firing up our own imaginations and reconnecting with our own sense of purpose and mission in life. We're going to learn what it means to slay dragons, the dragons of our life. We're going to learn how to die and be reborn, and we're going to learn how monster and the man who slays it are both ultimately always one. So bring me my bow of burning gold. Bring me my arrows of desire. Bring me my spears, O clouds unfold. Bring me my chariot of fire. Our engagement with the myth making of William Blake will teach us how to see the world in a grain of sand, how to see heaven in a wild flower, how to hold infinity in the palm of our hands, and eternity in an hour. Now it's time to talk about our next quarterly foundational thought series. And we are going to complement our appreciation of the visionary writings of Blake and Dostoevsky by spending some time with a powerful work of Hindu scripture and a work of wisdom literature that I personally, personally return to every single year. And together we're going to be reading the Bhagavad Gita, which literally means God's song. Whilst Slim, the Bhagavad Gita actually forms a small part of one of the great sprawling Hindu epic poems, the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is about a war of succession between two groups of princely cousins, and it is one of the sublime peaks of the written word. Now, the Mahabharata is incredibly long, and it's considered very wise and a spiritually nourishing thing to do to sustain a long, continued reading of that epic over time. It's also said that anything and everything in the world is in the Mahabharata. But how do we best break into such a sublime behemoth? After all, reading the Mahabharata makes reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey back to back seem easy. Well, we do that by starting with the Bhagavad Gita, which is just 80 or so pages, but I find this to be deeply instructive and spiritually nourishing. The Gita is a dialogue between Krishna and the archer warrior Arjuna. Right at the start of the Kurukshetra war, two enormous armies have gathered and they are readying themselves to obliterate one another. Now, Arjuna, being driven in his chariot to the centre of the battlefield, sees that on the enemy side are many of his relatives, his friends, his teachers, his loved ones. And this makes his heart heave and what we have here is the crux of any civil war. And indeed, we might say that all wars are ultimately civil wars, brother against brother, because we're all one another's brother and sister. And indeed, civil wars are of course, not very civil. In despair, Arjuna asks, how is he supposed to fight to the death, the ones he loves and respects so much? And Krishna answers him. And what we're gifted with. This is one of the most moving meditations and instructions on duty, knowledge, devotion, karma, identity, fate, how to deal with a crisis, the self. We get a sublime meditation on how life is a cycling between death and rebirth. And we get great advice on how to act harmoniously in the face of chaos. The Bhagavad Gita contains rousing words of encouragement that speak to the attention eternal world beyond this temporal and corporeal realm. We must bear in mind that this is a spiritual text for well over a billion people today, so we will approach this work with reverence and we'll be keeping that in mind. But as many Hindu scholars have taught us, one does not need to be a Hindu to appreciate the Bhagavad Gita. And yes, it is a religious text, but it's so much more than just a religious text. It is a guidebook for how to live a moral life. And for Western readers, it gives us a fascinating insight into an enormous and beautiful part of the world. And once you read it, you'll see it's been an incredible influence upon so many of your favourite Western poets, thinkers and artists. Now, as we trace the arc of the seasons, moving from spring across summer, we're going to want a really satisfying reading project, a long reading project that will take advantage of the increased hours of daylight, the longer days. We're going to want a really good read for this. By this point in the year, we will be applauding ourselves for having wrangled with the intense challenges of Dusk, Air and Blake. And so we're going to want to lighten things up aesthetically, but not thematically, and give us some incredibly immersive contemporary fiction to read. And we're going to add a fun challenge and a book club first, by binging an entire series of novels across the course of the summer season. We're going to read all four volumes of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, otherwise known as My Brilliant Friend, across the course of seven to eight weeks. I should clarify that whilst these novels were published individually, one after the other as a series from 2011 to 2014, that was really just a matter of pragmatics when it came to publishing. The author herself intended this to be one solitary saga. And the reward that arises from the Neapolitan quartet comes when you read the entire thing. Ferrante considers these four books to be one single novel, and so do I. And I consider what Ferrante has achieved here to be akin to a postmodern Proust or Charles Dickens. And who is Elena Ferrante? Ah, well, that is a question that readers have been scratching their heads about ever since her debut in 1992, because Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for an Italian novelist whose identity, whose true identity has been kept secret. In interview with the Paris Review, Ferrante expressed her belief that books once written have no need of their author. And so we're going to need to bring in the literary theory of Roland Barthes and the death of the author as we're discussing this saga. Despite her identity being unknown. Time magazine names Elena Ferrante as one of the 100 most influential people not too long back and it's not hard to see why. This series has sold over to 10 million copies in 40 countries around the world. And it was even made into a powerful HBO drama, which I will be encouraging you to watch. Although to be honest, it's quite hard to say that we don't know Elena Ferrante, because who she truly is is right here. It's in her fiction. She has laid her deepest, most personal and in most self bare in this work. And perhaps it's due to her keeping her identity a secret. Perhaps that's the reason why she's been able to be so raw, vulnerable and honest in this story. What we have here is a four part Bildungsroman. It's a semi autobiographical coming of age saga that follows the lives of two young girls as they grow up into women and we grow up alongside them. And these two protagonists are some of the most phenomenal and complex and compelling in all of contemporary literature. And this work is set against the rich backdrop of a poor violent neighbourhood on the outskirts of the crime ridden mob run post war Naples, which becomes a character unto itself in these books. This work gifts us one of the most realistic portrayals of female friendship ever written. This is something that we've considered before in the book club with the short stories of Alice Munro. Ferrante captures the complexities and contradictions of friendship between women with great wisdom, profundity, delicacy, anger, sadness and love like I have never seen before. We get to wrangle with jealousy in all its kinds and degrees. Intellectual jealousy, sexual jealousy. We get to learn about competition versus admiration in friendship. We get to learn about dependency versus codependency and being independent. And what we have in these books is very far from sentimental or idealistic. In fact, it's painfully sincere and truthful, capturing the experience of growing up from a young girl into womanhood. We get to see all of the challenges of class that affronted women like these characters. We get to see relationships and marriage and motherhood, all explored without rose tinted glasses, with brutal and painful realism. And as a man, I have never found myself to relate so powerfully to a central protagonist whose individual experiences, by virtue of her sex and time, necessarily differ from my own. I don't have these same experiences as these characters, and yet I feel them, I understand them. And I think that is a sign of Elena Ferrante's universal power. She speaks beyond the divide. You can see behind me that we've got the entire series compiled in one hefty volume. So you can either get them all in one place and enjoy reading through that. It's written in very contemporary language, so it makes for a very swift and inhalable read, so there's no difficulty there. The difficulty is thematic, or you might want to get the individual volumes. There's something very satisfying about tearing through a volume and then feverishly going on to the next. The feeling of completion is incredibly satisfying. And what we will find together as we read this saga is we'll find a story that is stitched out of the threads of philosophy from the likes of Rousseau and Simone de Beauvoir. We will find Virgilian prowess in there. And we'll see that there's more than a touch of Euripides and Sophocles and Homer in this work, will find sublimity worthy of Goethe, will find existential questioning worthy of Samuel Beckett, will find the great love and influence of works of women's literature like Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. We'll be pulling these influences into our discussion. We'll see how Elena continues the tradition of Virginia Woolf and Dr. Dostoevsky and Flaubert. We'll be talking about Neapolitan dialect literature, urban oral storytelling, European realism and psychological fiction. And we'll be appreciating a saga that gives us some of the most tragic portrayals of domestic life, but also some of the most beautiful set pieces in all of literature. And we'll be appreciating the literature of the 21st century. Now, to balance out some of the tragic intensity. We're going to have another special standalone discussion during the summer season and we'll be discussing one of the books that I am most excited about at the moment. We will be reading the splendid Edwardian work of children's literature, the Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham. If you're a member of the hardcore Literature book club, you'll know that I very recently became a father for the first time. I became a father to a beautiful, healthy daughter called Evie or Evelyn. And fatherhood has been proving to be the most rewarding experience of my life. And of course, as you may have guessed, one of the things that I'm loving most is reading her bedtime stories. We've made a little bedtime routine where we get a great work of literature and we read it through together. Now, of course, she's at an age right now where she can't understand the actual sense of the story, but she likes the rhythm, the sway, the lilt of great literature and she loves the routine. And again, like with all great works of literature, it's a pretense for spending time with the ones you love. That's why I'm such a huge advocate for reading books as a community. What I really appreciate about this is it gives me an opportunity to visit the classics I did not read as a child because I didn't really read as a child. I was maybe 10 years old before I finally started reading. And I have my grandmother to thank for giving me Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolkien. I have my father to thank for taking me to the theatre. But as a young child, I didn't read the great works of children's literature, and now I am rectifying that. And we're reading Alice in Wonderland, we're reading the Hobbit and the Narnia series, the Earthsea series, Winnie the Pooh, and I'm loving it. And the Wind in the Willows has to be one of the best books I have ever read. What's fascinating is you can see each of the chapters are designed to lull you to sleep. The wonderful characters all end up getting into bed by the end of the story and thinking about the day they've had. And. And it's so therapeutic, it's so relaxing. We spend time with these delightful little animal creatures, Mole, ratty, badger and Mr. Toad. And as is the case with pretty much all the greatest works of children's literature, this originated from the author telling bedtime stories to his own child. His son Alastair was born premature, so he was very, very small and he was blind in one eye and he had awful health problems and they nicknamed him Mouse. And from the age of four, Kenneth Graham would make up stories about these wonderful animal friends who are enjoying racing motor cars and going on boating holidays together. And it's just so delightful. The thing about children's literature that always impresses me is when I consider that it has to be the most difficult literature to do well. Children are the best audience because they have a vivid imagination, but they're also very, very demanding. It is quite a challenge to capture their attention and then keep it and hold it. And another thing that fascinates me about some of the older classics of children's literature is just how complex and dark they used to be. Indeed, there is a chapter in the Wind and the Willows that was so dark and macabre that it had to be removed. So we'll be talking about that. But what's absolutely astonishing to find is that syntactically and lexically, the writing style, the prose is poetic. It's labyrinthine in a way that would make Marcel Proust proud. It's very, very complex. So it's an aesthetic challenge on top of the darker, more mature themes. I would personally like to make it a yearly tradition in the book club going forward that we read one great work of children's literature together. And it has been amazing to hear from so many book club readers who are parents. They're either new parents or long established parents. There are so many grandparents reading with us who are reading with their children. But there are also so many readers who, even if they do not have children, would like the opportunity, like myself, to revisit those works of children's literature, or maybe come to them for the first time and get that opportunity to appreciate them. Because these works are not just works for children, they're works for all of us, for all ages. And as Christopher Robin would say, who was the son and inspiration for AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories? He would talk of rereading this one over and over again. At the end, Child, he would tell us that the book is actually two separate books in one. On the one hand, you've got chapters concerned with the adventures of Toad, but on the other hand, you've got chapters that explore the human emotions of fear and nostalgia, awe and wanderlust. So this is going to be a really fun experience. With this lyrical, humorous and timeless tale. We're going to find out what it means to have a great adventure. What does it mean to be a good friend. What does home mean? We're going to learn how to deal with the fear of change. And we're going to learn how to find comfort and joy in the little things in life, the daily routines that we all indulge in. How can we appreciate the hearty food we eat? How can we appreciate outings through the countryside? Bonus points if you take this work out into nature with you. This this is a cozy little retreat that will warm you and comfort you and give you a beautiful escape, no matter your age. And it will prove that we are all ultimately young at heart. Now let's turn to another special summer standalone discussion, which opens magnificently Riverrun Past Eve and Adams. From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to health, castle and environs. Having mentioned just recently becoming a new father, book club readers will know that in order for me to be there for the birth of my child and to have a little bit of paternity time, I needed to take one of our discussions out this year gone. And as James Joyce was a father himself, feeling that he would not hold it against me, that ended up being Finnegan's Wake. But I have reallocated this discussion for 2026, and so we will be discussing the masterpiece that is Finnegan's Wake during the summertime together, too. Finnegan's Wake has absolutely earned its reputation as the most difficult book ever written. And whilst Joyce has given me the most intense challenge with this book, Finnegan's Wake has also given me a great deal of wisdom, a great deal of comfort, and an unparalleled amount of joy, too, to the overwhelming majority of people, rather than seeing Finnegan's Wake as a towering aesthetic accomplishment, most will see the Wake as incomprehensible drivel, as utter nonsense. But together, we're going to learn to unlock what it is exactly that makes this work a masterpiece. In fact, it competes with Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Joyce's Ulysses, which we've read together for the greatest novel of the 20th century. This is a work that pushed our language, and indeed many languages, to its absolute breaking point. This is one that you must read aloud, and you must read very, very slowly. You must savour it like poetry, appreciating the multiple, nearly endless levels of meaning for every single word. Because this Irish polyglot, this genius James Joyce, gifted us a linguistic fireworks display that lights up the night sky. And if Ulysses was Joyce's daytime work, in which he blew one day up to epic Homeric proportions, then this is his nighttime vision, a masterpiece of the darkest night and the deepest recesses of our collective unconscious. Joyce took Homer's Odyssey for the backbone of Ulysses, and for this work he took Gianbattista Vico's theory of the cyclicality of history. This isn't a series. This is a special, exclusive, standalone advanced Appreciation. And if you haven't picked up James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake already, then when you pick it up, and when we get to it, you'll understand why. Indeed, there are entire clubs that are rather niche, that are committed to reading the Wake, and only the Wake over the long term. In fact, there's one community that took 20 years just for their first read through. This isn't a book that you read A to B. Many have seen it as a puzzle, and many, as I said, have seen it as a sublime procession of poetical musings. But there is a backbone, there is a story, there are characters, and there are some extraordinary thematic concerns. What I will be doing in this special class is teaching you how to enter it and giving you a roadmap for appreciating it. We'll be talking about how to read it and how to experience it, and indeed how to. How to derive great joy from it, because you're supposed to. It's meant to be funny. The partner of James Joyce, Nora, would talk about how Jim used to keep her up all night laughing as he composed Finnegan's Wake. We'll see that this isn't just a drunken wind up, though you may need a Guinness to get through even a page at a time. But as we make it more accessible, you'll find that there is something very, very profound here. And I want to give you the confidence to begin your own lifelong reading of the Wake. Now, coming off our binge through of Eleanor Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, we're going to want to continue making use of the increased daylight over the course of summer. And before summer comes to a close, we're going to want to embark on our next very special read through. And we're going to be returning to an old friend. A favourite and a much requested read. This is something that will prove to be very complimentary and thought provoking after the Neapolitan Quartet, as what we have with our next read through will give us another semi autobiographical outpouring and will give us a satisfying whack of pages to get through and we are going to be spending some time with a panoply of vibrant characters that are every bit as psychologically complex and resonant as those of Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens. And though we will be digging into another doorstopper, we're also going to experience some much needed humour and some delightful comedy. This next work is one that sits on a very special shelf in my heart. And this is one of those works that I can reread endlessly and always discover something fresh, exciting, moving and profound. I place it right alongside the King James version of the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare and Chaucer, the novels of Austen and Dickens and the tale of Genji. Together we're going to read and discuss the first two volumes of the work that won the Guinness World Record for the longest novel, clocking in at four and a half thousand pages. And that of course is Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. We're going to be reading Swann's Way and within a budding grove. This read through is not the same thing as the Proust Project, which was a series of very close reading exercises a few years back, making use of Proust and his masterpiece. Instead, we're covering the entirety of volumes one and two over the course of seven to eight weeks. And thus we'll be striking a balance between clocking a sizable portion of this work and indeed, the opening volume is often appreciated as a standalone in its own right. But we'll be doing that whilst also honouring the fact that Proust does benefit from a slow pace of reading and requires re reading along the way. To quote his brother, the sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time. Well, we're seizing the opportunity now by cracking into it together. We're giving Proust the big read treatment he deserves and I assume absolutely no background reading or prior knowledge when it comes to to this masterpiece. We'll be starting from page one, which begins, for a long time I used to go to bed early. And we'll be covering around a thousand pages together to make this really easy to conceptualise. Both of those volumes are contained in Volume 1 of the Penguin paperback edition. So you'll be reading this entire thing and by the time you get to the end of this, you will know whether you want to continue across the course of this, that's the entire work, or if you're more of a hardback fan, then you'll be reading this single volume from the Everyman's library. So that's what it looks like. And as we read through this absolute masterpiece, I want us to try and reconnect with the first readers. The Way by Swan Swan Zwei was initially rejected by publishers and that meant Proust had to self publish. It came out in 1913 to mixed or if we're being honest, very critical, harsh and negative reviews. Which makes sense. If you read that first part combrai, you see that you get this gorgeous, resplendent, memory searching overture to what would unfold into an unbelievably capacious work that would take years of Marcel Proust's life and all of his soul. But nothing much happens. Everything that happens is interior, it's internal. And you get these long unwinding, labyrinthine sentences that often span multiple pages. And we see this author going down memory lane, memories upon memories. And in this first volume we of course get one of the most iconic scenes in all of 20th century literature, in which a madeleine, a cake dipped in a cup of tea is the sensational and involuntary trigger for a catalyst of memories, ultimately leading across the course of the saga to this great work's artistic philosophy and some truly life changing insights. Insights we're going to explore the idea that the self and the world cannot be understood directly through rational thought because our everyday consciousness is obscured by habit and social performance. Our social personalities are the creation of the thoughts of other people. To quote Marcel. Truth comes instead through unexpected involuntary memories in which moments from the past surge back to us with great intensity. This is a form of peak experience which fiction can transport us to. And this is what we live for. In these privileged moments, these epiphanies, time collapses, it melts away and the true eternal self is revealed, giving us access to reality as it truly is. Proust was seeking what Blake and Dostoevsky sought. And as we said, the Idiot by Dostoevsky was actually Proust's favorite novel. Proust saw art as possessing redemptive power because life becomes meaningful only when it's transformed into art. Because it's art that captures the essence of life, it preserves time and it gives form to ephemeral sensations. And it also reveals the constant of experience. On top of his meditations on time, art and meaning, Proust might just be the greatest writer to ever tackle the pains of romantic love and the jealousy inherent in it. And as a writer, it is absolutely astonishing how he percepts deceptively and satirically and so truthfully captured the theatre of our social lives. In total, there are seven volumes to this compendious experience. And if you love our reading of the first two, we'll get through the entire thing together over the long term. And though contemporary critics were initially scornful and rejected that first volume, as the work progressed, they discovered that what was being penned was nothing short of an era defining masterpiece. The second volume was scheduled to come out the year following the first, in 1914. But the outbreak of the First World War meant it had to be delayed until 1919, what with the publishers and pretty much everyone being drafted into military service. So during that time, Proust. Proust wrote on and the work grew in scope and depth and complexity and would gift us a cast of 400 distinct characters. And the second volume was awarded the highest honour in France in all of literature, the Pri Goncourt. Sadly, Proust would not live long enough to see his entire work published as he passed away in 1922. And the 1920s are another view vintage decade in literature. For me it's the 1860s and the 1920s. We'll talk about that. But his publishers and family saw to it that we got the rest of it. And they also saw to it that Proust would continue to live. He lives on and we keep him alive when we engage with this phenomenal masterpiece. Now, who else are we going to be meeting and appreciating around this time? Well, we've been engaging with. With some very long works, so we're going to enjoy some shorter fiction around this time. And we're going to appreciate some incredible short works from the postmodern Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Born to a Jewish family In Ukraine in 1920, Clarice's family escaped the pogroms committed during the Russian Civil War and they fled to Brazil when she was still an infant. Clarice would go through law school in Rio de Janeiro and then become one of the most renowned and influential journalists of the country, interviewing some of the most important people of the day. And she became an icon. She was glamorous, she was instantly recognizable. But she also very swiftly became one of the nation's most cherished, revered and revolutionary writers. She's studied today alongside the greats of Brazilian literature like the 19th century Machado, Jassis, who I love dearly and will be bringing into the conversation. We will be exploring great short stories like the Smallest Woman in the World, Via Crucis and Amor, or Love, to name just a few. But we'll also have a special appreciation for her novella Hour of the Star. And we'll also Talk about the themes that you'll encounter in some of her longer works as well. Clarice Lispector's stories are mythical, dreamlike, lyrical, and they give us glimpses into the extraordinary and the profound lurking in the ostensibly ordinary moments of everyday life. Lispector has been likened to Virginia Woolf crossed with Franz Kafka, and we've read both of those together at the book club, so you will be able to tell me if the comparison holds up. What we have in her stories is a hypnotic existentialism, and we get phenomenological, philosophical and feminist strains running through her works. A friend of Lispector's warned readers to be careful with her prose, stating that it's not literature, it's witchcraft. And her works are both a translator's dream and their greatest challenge, as what she does with the Portuguese language is like alchemy. She creates this really uncanny, estranging feel under a facade of normality. Her stories pose a real challenge as they are very postmodern. We get stream of consciousness and we get a very abstract expressionist aesthetic. Clarice brought the same intensity that she poured into her paintings because she was an artist too. And we see her admiration of the abstract and we see how her stories are like cubist paintings infused with Kierkegaardian philosophy. She brought that to the short story form and revolutionized it. Her works have the power to astonish you and to take your breath away if you work for it. And such is the profound wisdom and beauty of her short fiction that in reading her many have found themselves heard and seen. Her themes are universal. She talks about loneliness, she explores love, she thinks about identity and the self. And reading her stories is like having these little revelations unfolding before you, just packaged up. Nothing much happens on the surface in her fiction, but below the surface, my goodness, there is so much there. Her works are all about transformation, in which a seemingly trivial moment in her characters lives leads to a life changing epiphany. Clarice Lispector is a visionary writer and she deserves the monumental acclaim that she has. But for many, her works are still a discovery that is waiting for them and they so I want to take a moment this year to put some of her shorter works, which are the best avenue, into her work generally into your hands and let's appreciate some brilliant Brazilian literature together. Now let's talk about our next quarterly discussion, our foundational thought, our civilizational cornerstones discussion. What are we going to be discussing for that during the summer season? Well, given the confessional and autobiographical tone of our summer reads and their probing into memory and meaning. Let's go back to what we take to be the first autobiography in Western literature and one of the most studied and influential texts in the early Christian tradition. And together we are going to discuss St. Augustine's confession. This book was written in Latin between 397 and 400 AD, so we've got our ancient Greek in there. Let's get some Latin literature in there. This year we engaged with Ovid, so we're going to be building upon that. Prior to Augustine, writers penned histories, legends, stories, but no one examined their inner life with as much raw vulnerability, honest and psychological depth as Augustine does here. It wouldn't be until we get to Michel de Montaigne in the 16th century, who was very much inspired by Augustine and Seneca and Plutarch. It wouldn't be until Montaigne that we get such relentless internal examination. Augustine covers his life from early childhood and his schooling all the way up to his 40s. And he. He really captures his evolution as a human and his grappling with his spiritual faith. This masterpiece of introspection really captures the sentiment of he who is the greatest saint has often been the greatest sinner. And you can read Augustine's Confessions as a tender emotional memoir. You can read it as an extended prayer, and you can read it as a theological discourse. All monologues are ultimately dialogues with something higher and greater, beyond us and beyond time. And anyone, no matter their background, no matter their belief, anyone who has struggled with the crisis of being flung into the world and needing to discover meaning, will find this book intensely relatable. Without all Augustine, there's no Thomas Aquinas, there's no Aquinas as we know him. He's like a compounding of Augustine and Aristotle outside of Scripture. It's Augustine that Aquinas most frequently quotes, and he sees him as the greatest of the Latin fathers. Without Augustine, we don't have Dante's Divina Commedia as we know it, with its meditations on the psychology of love and free will and sin. We also feel the impact of Augustine in the philosophy of Kierkegaard, who spoke about us needing to take a leap of faith. We find that Augustinian introspection anticipates the grand declaration of Rene Descartes, I think, therefore I am. And we feel his influence in Pascal's Pensee. Not only that, but Augustine is the central authority for church reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin. So to a really tangible degree, after the Bible after the Gospels and the letters of St. Paul, it's Augustine, with his Confessions and the City of God, who is the most influential upon the Christian tradition, which is the backbone of the Western tradition. And in the same way that you can utilize the Bhagavad Gita as an entrance into the Mahabharata, you can utilize Augustine's Confessions to gain entrance into the Bible very frequently when the work demands it. We appreciate complementary and influential biblical literature. In the book club. We've spoken about the Book of Job. We dived into the Book of Jonah when we read Melville's Moby Dick, when we read Dostoevsky, The Christian paradigms inevitably need to take center stage, and this will offer us a nice opportunity to do that a little further. And so our discussion of Augustine will be a discussion on how to read the Bible as great literature, too, something that people of all backgrounds have expressed interest to me about. And what's really fascinating with Augustine's Confessions is we're going to practically utilize his suggested hermeneutics, his method of improving biblical exegesis. Essentially, how do you explicate the great scriptural texts? How do you take what's implicit, hidden, covered up and make it explicit? Which sounds a lot like literary appreciation, doesn't it? So we'll be taking his model and applying it to the great books. Now, as we move into the autumn season, we're going to want our reads to reflect the darkening of the days and keeping the revelations and insights that came to us during our reading of Proust, we're going to segue into our next work, which is specially chosen for the Halloween season. In previous years, we have enjoyed discussions on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That was this year's Halloween read. Dracula, Frankenstein, the Turn of the Screw and the Lost Stradivarius. And keeping with the late Victorian Gothic horror vibe, we're going to appreciate a classic from one of my personal favourite writers. And we're reading the Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. To quote Morrissey, Keats and Yeats are on your side, while Wilde is on mine. Wilde is one of the wittiest writers in the English language. Leave it to an Irishman to win that accolade. And he wrote novellas and stage plays. We've spoken about the importance of being Earnest before he wrote wrote poetry. And as excellent and enduring as his works are, Wilde, alongside Lord Byron and Ernest Hemingway, is one of those writers in the tradition whose reputation as a public figure is just as striking and memorable as the works he gifted us. He had A flamboyant personality. And we're going to explore so many anecdotes of him moving through society. We're gonna learn about his biting satirical social criticism, which is perennial. And we're gonna learn about aestheticism, because Oscar Wilde was a key figure, along with Pater and Ruskin, who influenced him, he was a key figure in the fin de siecle aestheticism movement, which takes art for art's sake to be its ethos. And indeed, at the start of the Picture of Dorian Gray, we get this iconic and ironic preface, which is like Oscar Wilde's aesthetic manifesto. And this is a preface that you can mull over endlessly, in which he tells us that the highest, as the lowest form of literary criticism is a mode of autobiography. And he tells us that those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. And profoundly, he would tell us that there's no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. This particular maxim takes on tragic force when we learn about the life of Oscar Wilde. Not too long after the writing of the Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde would be put on trial for gross indecency as homosexual acts were criminalised in England at this time, and evidence of his sexual relations with men would be brought into the courtroom. And during the trial, it was this book, the Picture of Dorian Gray. This book was actually used, used as evidence itself, against him. The novel, as you likely know, follows a stunningly beautiful young man who becomes the muse of an artist who paints a portrait of him. And young Dorian meets a darkly influential and hedonistic friend, the charismatic and aristocratic Lord Wotton, who fills his head with notions of desire and pleasure and beauty above all else. Fearing he will grow old whilst the portrait remains young, Dorian wishes he could remain youthful forever and have the marks of age transferred to the painting instead, and bear the marks of a life of vice and moral corruption and destructive behaviour and the relentless indulgence of sensuality. The themes of vice and hidden pleasures and immorality were seen by the prosecutors as a reflection of Wilde's own life and one of the philosophies in the book. The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it, was seen as being his. Oscar Wilde was cross examined on all of this, the book, the preface, and he was tragically found guilty and sentenced to two years of hard labour, which ultimately broke his soul. Oscar Wilde was a poet. He was a prose stylist, he was a seer and he was prophetic in his witticisms, and he spoke the perennial truths of the human condition. Not only will we be sinking our teeth into some of the most sumptuous prose ever committed to the page, but we'll also be bringing some of his political essays, like the Soul of Man Under Socialism and his breathtaking confessional De Profundus, which was written during his imprisonment, to bear upon this read. We'll be talking about some of the poetry that inspired Oscar Wilde. Like Charles Baudelaire's controversial the Flowers of Evil, we'll be bringing Edgar Allan Poe into the discussion, and we will ultimately confront the weightiest assertion of Oscar Wilde's preface, the famous idea that all art is quite useless. As we read through the Picture of Dorian Gray, we will see that the experience of great art is anything but useless, as we will come to better know ourselves, our deepest inmost selves and society. Now, as we move deeper into the heart of autumn and the days grow darker and the nights fill up with menace, we will be appreciating some old English epic poetry with one of the most enduring monster stories and one of the most breathtaking works of heroic legend. With Beowulf, we're going to be reclaiming the storytelling tradition of our Anglo Saxon forefathers, who would have heard this tale brought to life, performed dynamically and dramatically around the fire or whilst sitting on benches in the grand hall with a mug of mead in their hand, meat in their belly and bearing the scars, both physical and emotional, of many battles, battles with man and beast alike. Beowulf, whose name is a compounding of be and wolf to mean bear, is a Scandinavian hero with a reputation for impossible feats, and he travels to Denmark to assist King Hrothgar and the Danes, who are being nightly terrorized by an evil giant, a descendant of the biblical Cain, a creature of darkness who is enraged by the noise of feasting and fellowship. And so he brutally murders the king's warriors and no one can stop him. What Beowulf and the men discover, however, is that victory over this monster, monster Grendel, does not end the bloodshed, as a deeper threat awakens in the form of Grendel's mother. This is a story about heroism, the glory of it, and the high price that one pays to attain it. This is a story about the meaning of honour and mortality. It's about community and kinship and reputation, because indeed, a hero is defined by the people they protect. It's about the cyclicality of violence and how vengeance only breeds more bloodshed. And it's about the legacy we leave behind in the great deeds we do in life. Also, fascinatingly, this is a poem that sits in a really interesting cultural moment, a transitional period between the pagan and the Christian world. This is a pagan story committed to the page by Christian scribes. So we're going to see a blend of worldviews that makes the theological and philosophical texture of this poem incredibly rich and takes us to a world that is both alien and familiar. Whilst the exact time of when Beowulf was written remains unknown, scholars believe it was composed between 700 and 1000 AD with our survival surviving manuscript from 975 AD. As was the case with Homer's epics, this tale was passed down through the generations orally. Now, we've read Shakespeare and Milton and Chaucer at the book club, and all three have varying degrees of difficulty, but they can all ultimately be assimilated by speakers of modern English today. Beowulf, however, is another beast entirely when it comes to the language. And if you don't believe me, here's the opening of this astonishing Hvat ve gardena inya dagum theod kninga thrym yefrunon hu thar athelingus Ehlen Fremidon. So not particularly recognisable, but I swear, making the undergraduates studying English language and literature at the University of Oxford, making them begin their course by studying this in their first term, that is a baptism of fire. I will not be asking readers to wrestle primarily with the intense difficulty of Anglo Saxon, which is so far removed from our language today as to be an entirely different language. But instead, we're going to be enjoying some of the great translations of Beowulf, which are works of art unto themselves. There are two particular translations that are very near and dear to me. You've got the Seamus Heaney translation. This Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece. To quote the poet laureate Andrew Motion, Seamus Heaney was intoxicated by the original's poeticism, and he valiantly strove to render a modern verse version that equally begs to be read aloud. In fact, when you read it aloud, it's impossible to not dramatise it. You just get into it, you find yourself swept up in the story and you really appreciate the heft and the power of the language in your mouth. You'll see how poems like this were like the Old English world's version of our immersive cinema experience. And we'll be reading some other English Anglo Saxon works alongside this one, like the Seafarer, translated by Ezra Pound. Here's a little bit from the Heaney in off the moors, down through the mist bands God cursed, Grendel came greedily loping. The bane of the race of men roamed forth hunting for a prey in the high hall. And we see that he struck suddenly and started in. He grabbed and mauled a man on his bench, bit into his bone, lapping, bolted down his blood and gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body utterly lifeless, eaten up hand and foot. So that's Heaney. And for a masterful prose translation, we will be looking to Heaney's own favourite, which is the JRR Tolkien translation. Now, I had the great fortune to study in the very hall in which Tolkien lectured on Beowulf whilst he was composing his high epic fantasy masterpiece, the Lord of the Rings. If you took part in the Lord of the Rings discussions with the book club a couple of years back, then you will recall that we inevitably turned to Beowulf. We turned to Gawain and also the Arthurian romances. When you read this work deeply, you can see how Middle Earth developed. You'll see how Tolkien's world and language came to be. And Beowulf truly is a dream for lovers of great poetry. We're going to be learning about the Anglo Saxon alliterative tradition, which is very different from the iambic pentameter that we find in Shakespeare. We'll see how the poets composed their works to be like war drums. We're going to learn about the art of the kenning. What's a kenning? It is a destination, descriptive, metaphorical compound that brings depth and colour to the world of the poem. You might know the really famous one, right near the beginning of Beowulf, we're told of needing to cross the whale road. What's a whale road? That's a poetic figuration for the sea. And you see it, don't you? You see the leviathans among the waves. Other Kennings include ring givers, which means king bone house, to refer to the human body, and one of my personal favourites, battle sweat to mean blood. If you learn to appreciate Kenning's, you'll learn to see the world truly the way a poet sees it. Now we'll have a stretch goal with Beowulf and we'll see if we can get some of the original learn off by heart, but we're also going to appreciate the power of the story which remains fresh and relevant. And we're going to learn what it means to be a hero. We've journeyed through works from the likes of Homer and Dante and Milton together, and now we're going back to old England. That takes us to the wintry depths of Scandinavia, and we're going to find out what it means to slay monsters and dragons and how we can be the hero of our lives. Now let's talk about the last quarterly project of foundational thought for the year for autumn. Complementing some of our Victorian reading experiences, we're now going to read something a little bit different. And we're going to appreciate a work of scientific literature that would be the foundation of evolutionary biology. I've said before that the two thinkers that exerted the most profound influence across the course of imaginative literature in the 19th century were Arthur Schopenhauer with his philosophical pessimism, and Charles Darwin, with his evolutionary theory. We will be appreciating the latter with his on the Origin of species, published in 1859. This seminal work sold out on the very first day, and from there on out, we find Darwinian anxieties tinging the works of Dickens and Hardy in Stevenson and many, many more. Evolutionary theory, broadly conceptualized, is the idea that species have the traits they have today. By virtue of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution via natural selection, nature doesn't have a will, but rather the traits that are most conducive to the species surviving or members of that species reproducing in. And it's those traits that will remain and be passed down. And traits that aren't conducive to that often get weeded out, or the species will go extinct. And it's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that's most adaptable to change. Darwin first, significantly began to find evidence for his theory during his infamous Beagle expedition to the Galapagos. And it cannot be emphasized enough just how much of a seismic affront this text was to the culture. Prior to this, the widely accepted paradigm was that the world and everything that inhabits it was the direct product of a creator God. This book was like kicking a hornet's nest, but it also spoke to an increasing sense of incredulity in matters of faith. And it spoke to a developing existential crisis across the course of the century. The great books all require different approaches. How you read an autobiography or an extended prayer or a set of tactical military strategies is necessarily going to be different from how you might Read a work of scientific literature. And in bringing ourselves to Darwin, we're going to learn how to think scientifically in a way that I hope brings you to the other great scientific and also mathematical texts of the tradition. We'll learn how to form hypotheses, how to weigh up evidence, how to outline a thesis. And we will bear witness to the sublime unfolding of a scientific revolution that would change the world of biology, psychology and anthropology forever. Such is the power of a single book. And by this point in the year, we're really getting into the heart of winter. So it makes sense that we should travel across the vast expanses of the galaxy to a planet called winter, as we will be reading the astonishing science fiction novel the Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, who perhaps most readers will know most readily from the Earthsea chronicles. This year gone, we've read the dystopian narratives of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. But as I believe the next great novel of our era will be in the realm of speculative fiction, and most specifically, in the realm of science fiction, an acquaintance with one of the greatest works of the genre and one of the most influential writers of the 20th century will prove to be intensely rewarding and valuable. Ursula K. Le Guin is one of those rare writers, like Dostoevsky, who makes her novels her vehicle for philosophical exploration, whilst also simultaneously offering us extraordinary escapism, because she gives us some really vivid world building. And really, that's why we read. We read to think more deeply, but we also read to get a little retreat away from our lives, to spend time in the company of others who are rather dissimilar to us. But the more we get to know them, the more we realize they're really exactly the same. So we're going to be enjoying this on multiple levels. And this novel, the Left Hand of Darkness, is set in the fictional universe of the Hanish cycle, as is her other movie masterpiece, the Dispossessed, which takes place in a future in which human beings have civilizations of planets far beyond this one. In this world, we have an alternate history as the background where humans didn't evolve and develop on Terra or Earth, but were instead the result of interstellar colonies planted in the distant past. Since then, interstellar travel had ceased for a significant whack of time. And so these humans, these disparate, displaced humans, lost contact with one another. Until now. In this book, we follow a human native of our planet, the central protagonist, Genli Ay, who is sent as a diplomatic envoy on behalf of a confederation of planets called the Ekumen. He's sent to the icy snow planet Gethen, also known as Winter, with the aim of persuading them to join the Confederacy. But here's the thing. Over time, different human races have developed new genetic traits via extensive genetic engineering. And on this planet, individuals are hermaphroditic, ambisexual and androgynous. They have no fixed sex and their sexuality is activated once per month without knowing what sex they're going to manifest as. And this cultural difference creates a barrier and a breakdown in understanding for our central protagonist. And this allows Le Guin to use her novel, which by the way, won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best site fiction novel and is consistently voted as one of the greatest sci fi novels of all time. This allows Le Guin to use her work as an anthropological, sociological and feminist thought experiment to probe deeply into how gender can influence culture. How does it influence culture, politics, our relationships, and even how we perceive the world. Le Guin is fascinated with what kinds of traditions and rituals and myths would form in a society that does not have man and woman as an organizing principle. And without those binaries, what roles come in to fill their place? How are governments constructed? What does a nation look like without that? What remains when we strip that away? So we'll be keeping the ideas that we explored earlier in the year when we read poetry, the Blake the idea of binaries. As we investigate Ursula K. Le Guin's breathtaking novel, we'll also be seeing her Eastern influences. Le Guin translated the Tao Te Ching and the tapestry of this novel is woven out of Taoist thought. If you look to the title, you'll see it comes from a proverb from the Planet Gethen that contains the philosophy of Yin and Yang. Light. Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one. Life and death lying together like lovers, like hands joined together like the end and the way. So we'll examine not only Le Guin's Eastern influences, but we'll also appreciate how she takes the tradition of Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf into the stars. We'll appreciate the socio cultural context of the time. This was an era of Cold War anxiety, the fear of nuclear annihilation, the rage of the Vietnam War. And we'll also appreciate Le Guin's interest in non violence and ecological awareness. But above all, we're going to have some fun. And we're going to savour some of the most captivating world building in all of literature, no matter the genre. And we'll see that this book is half sociological thought experiment, half adventure, romance, and totally high literature. We began the year with a work of popular fiction, with the western Lonesome Dove. And we're going to end the year. We're going to close off with some more genre fiction with a great sci fi novel that has been arousing the debate ever since it was published. A debate that recurs again and again when it comes to genre fiction. Fiction is this great literature. And so I want to give you the gift of being able to appreciate some great science fiction. I'm hoping you'll fall in love with the genre if you're not already in love with it. Along the way we'll recommend writers like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, H.G. wells, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. And I am hoping that, having run the gamut of works that are often more readily called high literature, like Dostoevsky and Blake and Greek Tragedy, I'm hoping that you will come to the conclusion that works like the Left Hand of Darkness are absolutely of their aesthetic eminence. When we get to the end of the year, we will arrive at a mainstay of the hardcore literature Book club because we end the year every single year with a great festive read and we enjoy a Charles Dickens novel together, which is kept secret until much later in the year. Charles Dickens is our long term special author project and he is perfect seasonal reading. We have clocked already some truly great stories from him. We've read Great Expectations, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, the Mystery of Edwin Drood and A Christmas Carol. Lectures are still available for all of those in the back catalogue at patreon.com hardcoreliterature and at time of record recording, we're currently reading Bleak House and at the end of 2026 we're going to have another special Dickens read, which I'm keeping secret. But just know that this is a very special Dickens to me and one that I've been yearning to discuss with you for a very long time. So we'll close the year off as we began it strong. So there we have it. That's the reading schedule for the Hardcore Literature book club for 2026. And I would like to close today by saying a huge thank you to you for watching and a huge thank you to all the book club readers@patreon.com hardcoreliterature I appreciate you all deeply and I continue to be astonished at the depth of love that you have for these great books. We're from all over the world, from all backgrounds, but we're bound together by our commonality of loving great literature with all our hearts. We have the best community in the world and there truly isn't this level or depth of literary appreciation anywhere else. So thank you so much for helping me to keep great literature alive. 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. At time of recording we have almost 700 lectures and deep dives and we have more ongoing and being added to all of the time and the discussion is always there. My recommendation for new readers is to join us on our current ongoing read which is coming out at the moment. But also follow your curiosity and pick a back catalogue read as well. And there is a downloadable printable schedule for the reading year for 2026 at the bottom of the post for this video at the book club. Once again, that's patreon.com hardcore literature thank you so much for watching today and thank you for being here with me. I'm so happy that we have so many like minded lovers of literature who have a thirst for this kind of self scholarship and a desire to partake in a deep reading program that aims at making us more fulfilled, happier, mentally robust and better thinking and 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 happy reading everybody. Bye bye for now.