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Welcome back to Hardcore Literature. Your favourite book club deep dives into the greatest books ever written. Provocative poems, evocative epics and life changing literary analyses. We don't just read the great books, we live them together. We'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more. We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age. Join us as and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy on the Reading adventure of a lifetime with Hardcore Literature. Hello and welcome back. How are you doing today? I hope you're keeping well and I hope your reading is going well. And indeed, if you've been reading with us at the Hardcore Literature Book Club, then I know your reading has been going incredibly well because at time of recording we have just worked through our first big read of the Year three. Together we rode through the sweeping saga that is Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. And not only that, but we've also recently been enjoying a curated appreciation of ancient Greek tragedy, pitting the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, against one another at patreon.com hardcoreliterature and at time of recording, the next leg of our reading journey. Our great adventure is going to be a really profound one and it's going to offer us some unique challenges and some unique rewards because we're just about to scale some serious mountains. We've got Dostoevsky's the Idiot on the horizon. We'll be kicking that big read off this coming weekend with our introductory how to Read video. And then the week after that, we've got a deep dive into Sun Tzu's the Art of War, exclusively at Patreon. And in the same month, the month of March, we're also kicking off an appreciation of the poetry of William Blake. So I thought it would be a good idea for us to catch our breath and have a little decompress and go back to the basics and talk about the art of reading, the how and the why of deep reading great literature. How do you consistently reap great rewards from your rich reading over the years? And I'm structuring today's talk as a five way dialogue with you, me and three great writers whose short essays on the art of reading I assigned book club readers very recently. We're going to be pulling apart an essay from Italo Calvino and an essay from Virginia Woolf and a short meditation on reading from Henry David Thoreau. Now don't worry if you've not read These essays, I'm going to be pulling them apart with you in real time today. And we're going to be talking about reading goals, my personal long term reading goals. We're going to talk about how to stay motivated when you're reading challenging literature. We're going to talk about life changing habits. We're going to reflect on some of the most profound books ever penned. And today I also want to have a special focus on how to teach your children to read. And I want to do that for two reasons. One, everything that applies to teach, teaching children applies equally and fully to our own learning and reading. The mindsets are the same. And two, this is on my mind a lot at the moment, children's education, because as you may know, I very recently became a father for the first time and my daughter is now more than four months old. And wow, what a transformative journey it has been. The great books have kept me company and they have armed me on this new life stage. So I know whatever you're going through in life, the good and the bad, the ups and the downs, the transformative journeys we're all on, the great books can help you. This is why I'm such an advocate for deep reading and sustained reading of classic literature. And so I've been finding myself thinking deeply and frequently about how I would like to teach my daughter to read as she grows up. So I've compounded some of the best lessons I've learned from my many years of reading and also teaching the great books. And I hope this discussion gives you some life affirming ideas for your reading. Whether you are a newcomer to classic literature or a battle scarred veteran of the great books, whether you've started the year strong and want to keep it going, or whether you're jumping into reading for the very first time. Let's launch right in today and let's begin with a little refresher on what exactly a classic book is and why we should even read them. Helping us is the great Italian writer Italo Calvino. I adore his works so much, who has an excellent essay called why Read the Classics? This essay can be found at the very beginning of the Penguin edition that has the same title, which collates many of his appreciations and literary criticisms on the great books together. It is the opening essay and although it is only seven pages long, it is absolutely stuffed with gems. It's filter bursting with insights, and he has 14 points in his examination on what classic literature is and why we should even read it. What I love is Italo Calvino begins his essay by getting really Aristotelian. He defines his terms. Let us begin by putting forward some definitions. He says his first definition of classic literature goes like the classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying, I'm re reading, never I'm reading. At least this is the case with those people whom one presumes are well read. It does not apply to the young, since they are at an age when their contact with the world and with the classics, which are part of that world, is important precisely because it is their first such contact. Italo Calvino goes on to talk about how no matter how well read you are, there are of course always going to be many more books that you have not read than those you have read. And we come into contact with these great books often in school. But when we say we're rereading something which we read at school, what we'll find in adulthood is that the book is actually quite different. Calvino goes on to stress that when it comes to the classic books, even if you have not read them already in youth, coming to them for the very first time as an adult gives you a very special kind of pleasure, an extraordinary pleasure. And he takes an anecdote of a teacher who became so tired of students asking him about Emile Zola, great realist or naturalist, French novelist. He became so tired of his students asking him about Zola, whom he had never, that he made up his mind to read the whole cycle of Rugon Makar novels. So Sola was incredibly prolific. He developed his craft in the wake of Flaubert and Balzac, and he wrote a very long, connected series of novels. They work on two levels. You can read the novels individually as standalones, but they're all taking place in the same world. And this teacher then discovered, after reading all of Zola's novels, that his works were entirely different from how he had imagined them. It turned out to be a fabulous mythological genealogy and cosmogony. Now, I've seen this time and again when it comes to the great titans of literature and readers coming to them for the very first time, readers cannot help, even if they've never read them firsthand. Readers cannot help but come to writers like Homer, Shakespeare and Tolstoy with great expectations, great preloaded notions of what these writers are. But then your actual personal, intimate contact with them them is so frequently very different. Calvino continues, and he delineates the difference between reading in youth and reading in maturity. Youth endows every reading as it does every experience, with a unique flavour and significance, whereas at a mature age one appreciates, or should appreciate many more details, levels and meanings. I've certainly found this to be true. When I was young, many of the books that I fell in love with important precisely because they were giving me the experience that I lacked. But returning to the great books in maturity, you return hopefully with experience. Chaucer's Wife of Bath would begin her prologue in the Canterbury Tales fabulously and iconically, with a great cry of reverence for experience over octorite or authority. Don't take wisdom. Secondhand wisdom arises from pain and painful experience. And all of literature tells us this. The Greek tragedians knew this, the great philosopher Nietzsche knew this, that we learn from painful experience. And so returning to the great books and rereading the great books is quite an experience. And the older you get, the more you're able to access the many levels that they contain. Let's take the example of Dante. To read Dante's Divine Comedy on the surface level alone is to let the bulk of the Divina Commedia go at least 90% if not fully unapprehended. You read Dante and you have to read into the allegorical and the symbolic, where one thing stands in for another. Meaning is teased out via interpretation. We would do well to imitate the methods of the biblical exegetes, those who try to decipher the meaning of scripture by talking and re reading and comparing and explicating. But you read Dante, and of course his work, his epic, is filled with abstractions personified. We have an epic, but we also have medieval cosmology, we have theology, we have philosophy. It's also a medieval work of science. We have historical record in there. The Divina Commedia is also a very intimate, personal autobiography of Dante's soul. There are elements of courtly love poetry riven throughout. And not only that, but the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso is a riveting tripartite work of worship and scriptural wisdom. Literature, the great translator Robert Hollander would say. Each of us reads his own commedia, which makes perfect sense. Most of the time. It's only when we try to explain poem to someone else that the trouble starts. There's a good lifelong reading exercise there for you. Reread Dante every few years, and when you do try to explain what you got from the experience to another, you need to live in order to apprehend Dante. Why? Because Dante, the pilgrim's descent into Hel, which is of course merely preface to ascent, he needs to go down in order to rise up. The Inferno. Dante's Inferno is a moral inventory. It's a backwards looking over the course of his life. It's him considering how he's lived. It's a purging of past transgressions. Dante opens up when you've lived a little bit, because that poem is really born out of an existential midlife crisis. You get to the age that Dante the pilgrim was in the poem, and of course you're going to start to think, what has my life been thus far? And where do I go from here? Midlife crises offer us an opportunity to be reborn if we take them. So Dante was in his mid-30s, and the Inferno begins midway on our life's journey. I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight path had been lost. You come to this poem, and if you read it as a straightforward narrative of someone just waking up alone in the woods, then you've lost almost all of it. It is metaphor. It's figurative on the deepest level. But the same is true for so many of the great books. I consider this when it comes to Homer's Odyssey. Now, I've reread Homer over and over again across the course of my life to the point where I don't really tell people I'm re reading Homer. I just say I'm reading Homer because you can never get to the end of him. The re reading the prefix should be taken for granted. But I read Homer's Odyssey again very recently at the hardcore Literature Book Club. Of course, we went through both of his epics almost back to back over the course of summer last year, and lectures are still available. And it was a really profound experience. I know many readers said that was their favorite reading project from last year, but I was reading Homer's Odyssey specifically right in the lead up to the birth of my daughter. Just as we finished the Odyssey and went on to our next read, my little one came into the world. And my goodness, because of all the previous readings I'd had of Homer, it really showed me just how much explodes out of the great books. When you've lived a little bit, read Homer just like Shakespeare every year if you can. Now, when you're rereading, you don't have to go from A to B, although you might like to. You might wish to drop in to your favorite scenes and just hang out a little bit. But you can reread Homer every few years, and I would say every time you do, pick a new translation, because then you will unlock a little more of that Nuance, the multiple levels of meaning. I think when it comes to the great books, if something's truly great, it is of course worth of a rereading. And if it's worthy of a rereading, you don't want to wait more than three years. Three year blocks are very, very good because my goodness, so much changes over the course of three years. It can be that if you take just the unit of a single year, maybe not too much will change. Take three years and things should change. Your journey is going to be different every time you reread Homer. And so for me, spending time with Odysseus really put me in mind of my own journey. Readers pointed out, really beautifull, that my Ithaca or my returning home was when my daughter was born. That's what I was striving towards. Then of course, she comes into the world and her journey began too. All of our journeys, all of our lives intersect and we love stories of homecoming. Homecoming is the universal story. The Greeks would refer to the return of Odysseus as his. His nostos. This is where we get the term nostalgia from. It's like neuralgia, but for nostos, nostos alga, it's like a painful longing for the past. But our lives are a grand narrative in which we are trying to return. And so you read an epic like Homer's Odyssey and you see that the hero is both an everyman figure and a no man at the same time. This is a universal story. We read Homer, we read also Ovid's Metamorphoses. That's a good one to return to year after year, particularly in Arthur Golding's divine English translation that inspired Shakespeare. If you cannot access the original Latin, Ovid teaches us that all of life is transformation. It's flux, it's change. The world is a grand tapestry. And although we are the hero of our lives, our story is but a thread in a large myth. Calvino goes on and gives another definition of the classics, saying that the classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them. But they remain just as rich in experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them. The fact of the matter is, he says, the reading we do when young can often be of little value. Because we're impatient, we cannot concentrate, we lack expertise in how to read, or because we lack experience of life. And yet this youthful reading at the same time can be the most formative and literally so, because it gives a form or shape to our future experiences and provides us with models, ways of dealing with life, terms of comparison, schemes for categorizing life's experiences. These books give us scales of value and paradigms of beauty, all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread such a great book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms, though we have forgotten where they came from. These books leave a seed behind in us and we forget about it. But when we return to it, we say, oh, that's the tree that I have become, or look at that, that's the limb that has sprung up over the course of my life. Reading in you is so, so important. Does it matter that we have little experience in youth? No, absolutely not. You need to read when you're young, if you can. When you're young, it's all about volume. Inhale your books. Be voracious, because fluid intelligence develops right until your mid-20s. And then after that, as you get older, it's all about consolidation. Now we're dealing with crystallized intelligence. And as you get older, the things you read in your youth suddenly make sense. And you also realize how much you missed originally due to the life unlived. So reading the great books necessitates living fully too. That's why I say live the great books. And so Calvino is absolutely right. These books form our lives even without us realizing. Here's another definition from Italo Calvino on what a classic is. The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individuals or the collective unconscious. For this reason, there ought to be a time in one's adult life which is dedicated to rediscovering the most important readings of our youth. And when we come back to them, we find that because we have changed so significantly that this re encounter with the Great Book is now completely new. So I love that word influence. When I hear readers talk of influence, I cannot help but hear that word in a Bloomian key. That's Harold Bloom, who spoke about the anxiety of influence. There should be a time where you systematically return to the books that you were taught in school. The thing is, schools. Schools can't teach great books. Life teaches them. But the schools are doing important work by putting great books in the hands of young students. Because you need that initial introduction. You need that touch point. That's got to come at some point now. In my teenage years, one of the most significant first experiences was with Shakespeare and with the tragedy of King Lear, which overwhelmed me. That really did change my life. And I had a really formative experience in the classroom discussing with one of the several great English teachers that I was blessed to have had. I was very lucky to have had multiple English teachers who really helped form me when I was younger. Now we had a discussion on King Lear and this great teacher, he was trying to tease out points that I was trying to make, but would need many, many, many more years in order to come to the surface. I had a point that was just on the tip of a my tongue or the tip of my consciousness. And so I was trying to make a point. I remember this quite starkly about binaries when it comes to morality. And you can't have good without bad or good without evil. And if you've read King Lear, you'll know why this was a point of fascination because you can delineate the characters in that tragedy. They're either wholly good or wholly bad. And I was trying so desperately to make this point and I was getting very close and I remember using all of my mental energy, all of my faculties and feeling like there was a block, like I came up against a wall and I just couldn't get past it. Of course I was going to need to live a little bit before I could get past it. Now that great teacher sent me to the great critic or literary appreciator, the great bardoliter G. Wilson Knight, and a volume called the Wheel of Fire. And I read it and re read it and covered it in notes. And then after that I went to this teacher after school and I asked him what his favourite work was. I didn't just want to read what was on the syllabus. Give me extra homework. This is what you should do. Give yourself homework by asking those you respect for their favorite books, pick up the book and read it and you'll learn something about them in the process. And he told me that his favourite work was Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. And I spent that very night reading it all the way through. It took hours to read it through. And later when I went to university, I ended up doing my second year dissertation on works of Joseph Conrad. I read everything Conrad produced in my younger years thanks to this same great teacher. I fell in love with Charles Dickens and Great Expectations because we performed it in class. We really accessed the grotesque humor and also the feeling of longing for home in that book. But the thing is, even that book which moved me so much, coming back to it when I had grown up, up versus reading it for the first time when I was in the process of growing up, was a completely different experience. Now, this can go in two ways. You can fall in love with a book even before you understand what you love about it or why. But you can also detest a book. You can despise and hate a book because of the teacher and also because you don't have access to the life experiences that might facilitate a very different experience. One example for me was Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Sadly, I didn't have a very good teacher for Jane Austen. In fact, she made reading Jane very exclusionary. She read Pride and Prejudice through an exclusionary lens. The class was all girls, and I was the only male in the class. And she said to me, you are a man, so you cannot have an opinion on Jane Austen. And I hated Jane Austen for years. It took years to undo the damage that this teacher did, which is such a shame. My goodness, what a disservice. So frequently it is the rule not to the exception. That school makes us detest the great writers. In Russia it will be Tolstoy. In France, it may be Hugo. In England it's Shakespeare. Or in my case, Jane Austen. What a shame, because Jane went on to be in my divine tetrad four writers who mean the most to me. It's Jane Austen, it's Shakespeare, it's Thomas Hardy, and it's Charles Dickens among the English writers. Now I reread Pride and Prejudice endlessly. I'll read it back to back, over and over and over again. I read through her entire ouvre and I watch adaptations endlessly without any break. I discovered that that teacher was wrong. Jane Austen is not a women's writer. She heals the rift between men and women. She heals the rift between the sexes. What else did I read in my youth that I didn't understand immediately? Well, when I was young, I would stay up all night because I had terrible insomnia. And I would devour Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and Hemingway and Blake. This is the outsider reading list. But what did I know of any many of them at such a young age? When I was young, I picked up the complete works of Shakespeare from the local library, a big dusty volume, because my grandmother would talk of characters like Rosalind from As yous like it, as though she were an old and dear friend. And I read the plays and I did not understand them, but I felt something. I felt meaning there, and I felt the power of it. And in my youth, I read like my life depended on it, because indeed it did. I was depressed. I felt trapped in a small town and I had emotions like. Could not articulate. My reading was a lifeline. The great writers kept me company. Proust kept me company through many formative experiences. I would carry my copy of his works around with me when I did my work experience in London. And I realized that carrying a book around is an invitation for human connection because people would talk to me. They would see what I was reading and want to talk to me about it. And Proust helped me through many difficult times through the deaths of family members and illnesses in the family. But the more I re read and the more I lived and the more he stayed a steady companion, the more I found came out of the pages from my own mind. You unlock the power of a book when you unlock the power of your mind through experience. I think of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. One poem in particular goes, the house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book. That is my imperative to you. Become the book. In another great poem by Stevens, he would say, out of my mind the golden ointment reigned, and my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. And James Joyce, he would teach us something very profound in Ulysses. He would tell us that every life is in many days. Day after day we walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives widows, brothers in love, but always meeting ourselves. This is true in life and it's true in literature. Read Proust, rejoice, read Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, and meet yourself in every single character. And what is the self? Well, your self will be revealed across time. If we're being Aristotelian here, we might consider that character is actions that are consistent across time. And so you never need time to become more fully yourself. Literature gives us that time to develop, to grow, to become who we are. And speaking of growth, growth is painful. And this is something to consider when it comes to children's education. Let's talk about how I plan to get my children to read in the future. Here is a paradigm to live by and understand when it comes to children's education and also your education on everything. Consider the zone of proximal development. What does that mean? It read just over your head. Viktor Frankl would say that if you take man as he is, you degrade him, you make him worse. But if you take him as he could truly be, you promote him, you make him better. You've got your zone of comfort and then you've got that wonderful zone just outside the comfort zone. That's the zone of proximal development. And then of course, you've got a zone beyond that that's like the shadowy part, part of the map in the game we're playing. We can't get there just yet, but we will get there on a long enough time frame if we just give ourselves just enough to grow. It's like with weightlifting, you want just the right dose to break those muscle fibers down. And then you want to rest and feed yourself and grow. And you do that on a long enough time frame and you'll be transformed from one year to the next, and then definitely on a three year period. But the zone of proximal development is a concept from the psychology of education developed by Lev Vygotsky. And it's basically the Goldilocks zone. Essentially you want to do what you can do. You want to do what you could do with a little prompting, with a patient guide, with some time and belief, and then you've got what you can't do just yet. As a parent, you always want to let your child do what they are capable of doing. Don't do things for them that they can do. And we might consider this with reading. You've got those books that are really, really easy and really, really comfortable. Then you've got those books that are dense to the point of incomprehension. And then you've got this beautiful sweet spot where you have to concentrate, where you might need a little bit of silence, where you might need a pen, where you might need to move your lips as you read. There's a very unfair stigma about people moving their lips when they are reading. People think that's only people who can't read. I would contest that when we begin reading, yes, we move our lips and that's a sign that we're not super well read. And then we start to read silently. And then when we're advanced as a reader, we move our lips again. It's only relatively recently, historically speaking, that we became solitary readers reading in our minds. Even when we were alone. A hundred years ago, 150 years ago, people would read aloud. Literature for the longest time has been oral, oral storytelling. And reading aloud unlocks the meaning. What I'm going to do with my, my children is, to the best of my ability, try to live with great intentionality and awareness when it comes to the screen, being very careful and curated when it comes to consuming media that way. I'm talking about the television and the Internet and not relying on it as much as possible. I would like to try to get the sort of atmosphere that we enjoyed even just a couple of decades ago. I do not want endless scrolling or endless access or overstimulation. Overstimulation via the little lit up screen that we carry around with us everywhere can really impact our development and our attention span. I found this myself. I found myself getting very addicted to scrolling, very addicted to watching nonsense. It's something that I've had to work on as a parent. I want to have have full awareness of what my children are seeing and accessing now. I love television, I love films, I love all that. So we will of course have some television and we'll have it as a little reward. And there are some very good shows that are educational and whimsical and studies show that there is a place for watching these kinds of things together. But we'll have a lot of screen free times, we'll have dedicated times. We can't just have full on endless all you can eat access to the screen and Internet and endless entertainment. But there's a lot of joy in cross pollinating your media. So if you're reading a great book, watch a film adaptation as a reward and think about what kind of job the director and actors have done with it. Indeed, take trips to the theatre that maybe you can make into a real event that you prepare for in advance. So maybe you read the play together and talk about it before you go. Another thing that I really want, want to do, and in fact am already doing, is I want to own my own media. That means own your books, own your films, have the physical copy, the DVD or the Blu ray or whatever. Own your games, own your music, cassette tapes and vinyls. The analogue revolution is upon us. Although this might sound materialistic, there's so much freedom in the analogue we think we're free, but really with our entertainment choices we are given the illusion of of endless choice. But endless choice is no choice at all. There's great power in cultivation and curation. Attention spans are an all time low and people don't watch films fully anymore. Even though you've got all the films you could possibly want at your fingertips because it's not special anymore. You end up kind of half watching them or not really, or just re watching old stuff whilst doing something else. I've got a real hybrid approach because the Internet is a wonderful thing. It gives you access to documentaries and lectures and all sorts of really cool stuff, audiobooks. And there is something deeply satisfying about being able to carry around a personal, intentionally cultivated library of hand picked media with you wherever you go. I love it, but I'm really blending the analog into my own entertainment and information diet. I recently got a haul of audio tapes, cassettes, and I also got the Walkman that I used to have before the age of the ipod. And I got a CD player that also takes cassettes. It's nice to have that on in the background and know that you can just play it whilst doing other things and not be interrupted by adverts, really annoying adverts. You can also control what you consume and what your children consume if you go back to the analog. Another thing that I'm trying really hard even at this early stage in parenthood, is to make a real ritual around reading. And how do you adopt new rituals and habits? You hook them onto pre existing daily habits. Right now we have a little story after my daughter's bath time. And this was such a monumental and game changing decision to actually have a bedtime bath time story routine. It really helped her sleeping. And it's amazing at such a young age just how quickly they know the routines coming. They look forward to it even at that young age. So one thing I'm going to do as she gets older is build some excitement into the routine. Yeah, so you've got the routine, the reliable something that is familiar, that you're looking forward to, that you can rely on. But you want some excitement within those parameters. Something to consider if you're gonna raise reckless boys. Boys are always gonna get into trouble. Do you want them getting into trouble with you or without you? Might be a good idea as a parent to have controlled chaos. But as part of the daily reading routine, as my little one gets older, we're gonna make a thing about going to the shelf. There's gonna be a beautiful bookshelf filled with books. Not too many, but a curation. And then we're gonna choose a book, we're gonna talk about it, we're gonna get it down, we're gonna get settled in and all comfortable and it's gonna be all real reliable routine. Now what are we reading at the moment? My daughter's at a very, very young age, but that does not mean you shouldn't read great books. I read to her when she was in the womb and I read to her the very first day we came home after she was born. At this young age, reading is all about your voice, your presence and establishing the routine. Because of course, when they're really young, they don't understand what's happening in the narrative. So this means you should pick books that you want to read, because then you will look forward to it and you will stay consistent. And if you stay consistent from a young age and you enjoy it and you look forward to it, your children will grow up never knowing a time when they didn't have story time. Very hard to introduce a new habit when they're older. Much easier to keep one going. That's always been for me, this means that my little one has heard me read the Window in the Willows, which, yes, is a children's book, but that's definitely more for me than her at this age. My goodness. Children's literature used to be so dark, and it's not hard to see why. They were preparing them for a very difficult and confronting world. And later this year in the summer season, we're going to be talking about the Wind in the Willows together. Coming to the Wind in the Willows again. I think of that C.S. lewis idea. He said one day you'll be be old enough to read fairy tales again. This is true for Myths and Legends and all the books we may have enjoyed in youth, they take on a new meaning in older age. But I've also been reading the Lord of the Rings to my little one. I've been reading Finnegan's Wake again. We're going to be talking about that later this year. People joked, are you reading Finnegan's Wake? And I thought, why not? You read it, you read it aloud and you can unlock meaning. But it also is a real mishmash of interesting and vibrant sounds. Sounds like nonsense literature, but of course not. Literature has a weight of wisdom and meaning beneath it. And she enjoys Finnegan's Wake. We've also been reading the poetry of Coleridge, the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Ballads are great for bedtime because they're sing song now. Of course, we've got some other more pragmatic choices too. We've been reading Goodnight Moon, which is very, very good for lulling her to sleep. But right now, my reading to my little one is my time to use it as some practice for narration. In the future, I'm going to be narrating some of my favorite books. I really, really want to do that. Other parents have suggested that I make up my own stories too, which I have started to do. I've started to sing songs that just come to me in the moment. That's fun. But keep in mind when you're reading to children or to your partner or to anybody, what is reading? It's storytelling. You tell the story. Reading isn't just about physically scanning the page with your eyes. Yes, you've got the pragmatics of recognizing letters, and that's something that you will get into with children when they're old enough. But remember that reading has long been communal and performative and interactive, from the days of Homer through to the days of the medieval ballads. Use your reading as a preterm for human connection. Reading itself is spending time with others because you're spending time with the author and the characters, but you're also spending time with people that you're reading the book with. Reading offers us a real great bonding experience. We have this at the Hardcore Literature Book Club. There's something really beautiful about knowing that many other people are reading the same book on roughly the same time frame as we are. And we get to look forward to seeing different people's opinions checking in. You feel like you're not seeing so alone, and things are often a pretense for something else. At the book club, we might be gossiping about the latest installment in the riveting narrative that's on the schedule. But whilst we're doing that, what we're really doing is learning how to live and we're communicating. And when it comes to children's literature, you're inevitably going to want to choose books that make your child better. And so you might start to think, well, I should choose books that make me better too. Reading bad books does nothing for your soul. And it's really interesting. In Plato's Republic, Socrates banished Homer from his ideal society for many reasons. One of the reasons was because the heroes weren't exactly admirable. Now, I would definitely not banish Homer from my ideal society, but it's an interesting point. Stories offer us vicarious experience and learning by proxy or role modeling. We shouldn't underestimate the power of character, especially during one's formative years. But at any, any point, we role model when we learn. So if you want your child to read, they should see you reading it shouldn't be do as I say, not as I do. The best way, I think, to get someone doing something is to have them see you doing it yourself. Bandura would talk of social learning theory, and his studies would tell us that we learn by watching others. We know this so intuitively that it's really deeply embedded in our mythologies and our religions. I recently reread a letter From Seneca the Great Stoic the other day, letter 12. And he spoke about the importance of having a model to emulate. Take someone, a figure that you really respect and hold them in your mind's eye and act as though they are watching and surveying you as you go through your life. Would you do what you're doing if they were watching? And for Christians, this figure is Christ. If you go to the east, many keep Buddha in their minds. If you are secular, you might pick a figure like Seneca himself, or you might pick Marcus Aurelius. Imagine that the great emperor is watching you as you do what you do. What would your day look like if that were true? But anyway, we want to have some good role models in the literature we read to our children. I think it's really important as well to balance things out in tone and motif, in thematics. Also balance out the gloom. A lot of great books can be quite gloomy and doomy and depressing and deeply philosophical. It's very good to balance that out with some comedy. Bear in mind that we are who we associate with. So when we're spending time in a great book, we're actually spending time with those characters. And you really should flex your powers of imagination and visualize yourself as though you are there in the narrative. And this is true for your life too. Not just in literature, but literature gives you an exercise, a training ground. You should visualize the life you want before you live it. In the lead up to the birth of my child, do you know what I did every day? It was 10 minutes every day. I had a dedicated time each day I'll do some breathing meditation and I would visualize in my mind's eye everything. I'd visualize going to the hospital when the time was due. I'd visualize holding her for the first time. I'd visualize taking her home and looking after her. I'd visualize doing all the parental things that terrified me. And what happened is many people, including the doctors and nurses, they couldn't believe that this was my first child. It's because I had rehearsed it for close to a year in my mind's eye, over and over and over again. I think a lot of life changes can be shocking and disorienting to people because they haven't considered it deeply enough in the lead up. And I'm prone to doing this too. With big events. I'll push them to the back of my mind and deal with them when they come up. But I have found that if I mentally rehearse it takes away some of the pain of the actual experience because it kind of feels like you've been there before. Ultimately, however, how you read is also really, really important. And how you do anything is really, really important. Consider that you cannot mess things up too badly if you do what you do with true love and deep faith that it will be alright. But we want to consider the kinds of books we're reading, the kinds of characters we encounter, and we want to expose our children to a wide variety of variety voices. Consider that if you have boys, they should read books for girls. They should read Anne of Green Gables or books that are classically considered for girls, and vice versa. Girls should read books that have stereotypically been for boys, like the stories of King Arthur. You should read folklore from your tradition. Where do your family come from? For me, it's Ireland. So we're going to learn about Ireland. So our reading will be a chance to, to get in touch with where we came from, but also read from various traditions around the world and allow your children to travel the world in their books. Now, as my little one gets older, we're also going to be working on memorization and recall. There is a phenomenon known as the primacy and recency effect. We remember things that are stacked at the beginning of a learning session and at the end. And when we read, what I will do is I will ask her, where did we leave off last time? We'll have a little recap, just like with classic TV shows. We'll go over what happened last time and that will train our recall. And then later on we'll test the knowledge by subtly engaging in conversation and bringing ideas from the books and events from the books into conversation. This is spaced repetition. What else do I want to do with my daughter? And hopefully if I have more children with them too? Well, I want to incentivize their reading. So we'll set goals together. What books are we going to read this month? Or how many chapters will we enjoy this week? Or if we don't want to use page quantity as the measure, we could say, for example, that we're going to try to spend some time with our current book on the go five days out of the week. And that would be a win. And I'd also love to have us both giving little book reports to each other, like our monthly book review. And you incentivize reading when you make a big deal out of it, and you should make a big deal out of it because not enough people read. And it's a very Good thing to do. When your children finished a book, let them know that they've accomplished something great. Reward them with something fun. Give some recognition of their efforts that's tied to the behavior you want to reinforce. In this case, reading. And hey, you could even devise some sort of points system if that works for you. You could use stickers or something. You could build points towards a game or a toy or something that's a bit of a treat that they want. And they can get that by clocking some books. Build a tangible sense of progress into that reading program. We all need a little bit of accountability. And I even get books for my family members. And they know that when I see them next, I'm going to ask them about that book. So they steadily chip their way through so that they can enjoy talking about it. Now, people might criticize this idea and say, well, you want to encourage the love of reading for an enjoyment in and of itself rather than leading to anything else. The journey is the reward, and that's true. But never underestimate the power of positive reinforcement. One of the most impactful books I ever read was when I first got my German shepherd, Sascha. It was a book on how to train dogs, but it was a book on how to essentially train absolutely anybody and anything, any creature, even humans. It was about positive reinforcement. You do not punish behavior you don't want. It doesn't work as a learning tool. They just find a way to do it and get around the punishment. What you want to do is reinforce behavior that you like. So if you've got a dog and they do something that you're happy about and you want them to do more of it, you reward them. A lot of people, a lot of dog owners, for example, they'll do nothing when the dog presents the good behavior they will want. They'll just assume, oh yes, they did great, they did the thing that I wanted. But they don't reinforce the behavior. And then they wonder why their dog isn't better behaved. You have to teach them by rewarding them. Link strong, beneficial, positive actions to rewards. What else should you do? Whether you're teaching your children to read or just getting yourself excited to keep reading, I would encourage you to go on side quests during the journey. I do this with myself and my personal reading all of the time. I give myself challenges and missions and homework and tasks to complete. Very recently, myself and many members of the book club completed a multi year quest through the complete works of Shakespeare. I know many readers are embarking on that quest as we speak. And the culmination of that journey for me was in a grand ranking of all of Shakespeare. It was so rewarding. One quest that I'm working on at the moment is I'm reading a thousand short stories. Originally I thought I might be able to do that in a year, but I think it's going to take a lot longer than that. But the ultimate aim is then sharing with you the top 50 that I've ever read. So we're going to have some great short stories. I was gifted, very kindly, a beautiful collection of short stories from the entire world from a reader, and I've been working my way through them and I try to read a short story per day. Now, when life gets busy, I don't chastise myself, I don't hold myself to it. But I love doing the Bradbury Trio. Every few years I return to the Bradbury Trio. What's the Bradbury Trio? Well, Ray Bradbury advised budding writers, but this is brilliant as an exercise for anybody to read every night before they go to bed. One poem, one essay and one short story, because your head will be stuffed with ideas. Another challenge that I worked on on recently was ranking the best novel from every decade from the 19th century through to the 20th century. And my goodness, that's a marker of your reading right there. And you can also see at a glance what years are the vintage years. The 1860s and the 1920s are two vintage years. That's a really fun exercise to do and I'll make a video on this in the near future. Another exercise that I'm always doing is I collect my favourite passages from great literature and I keep them in a commonplace book. And when you do this, you start to notice commonalities and you learn about yourself. I noticed that a lot of my favorite passages were to do with stars and the night sky. I noticed this when I read Hardy or Whitman. There's something about the journey of the stars or our journey through the stars that really captures me. I've noticed across time that one of my favourite themes in literature is friendship. That's a commonality with the books that I adore the most. You also notice that your taste for different tones might change over the course of the years. When I was younger, I used to need the tragic in my life. Now that I'm older, I love comedy. I need comedy in my in my life. Give yourself little writing routines to look forward to. I have a Sunday writing routine every two weeks. I don't do this weekly because I don't have the time, but I do this fortnightly. I write around a topic or a quote or a theme and I'll just free write. So for example, you could read Lonesome Dove over the course of several months. And then at the end of your reading, ask yourself, what is friendship? Put that at the top of the page, friendship. Then write from your gut and see what you've learned. Because writing is thinking. Or you might read Dostoevsky's the Idiot with us over the course of spring. And then when you get to the end, you write, can beauty save the world? You ask yourself that question and then you endeavor to answer it. Set 15 minutes on the clock, eliminate distractions. This could be Sunday morning, nice big cup of coffee. And then write like your life depends on it. Or you might read the poetry of Blake and then ask yourself if it is true that all deities reside in the human breast. We used to do this at Oxford. That was what the example papers were like. That's how they were structured. You would get a quote. Often these quotes were really, really dense. Like ridiculously dense. And then it would just say discuss. Dense quote, discuss, discuss, discuss. And then you had to discuss against the clock. We're always discussing against the clock. Another thing to do to keep yourself excited is to have a dedicated long term reading project. And I've got some ideas for this. Now this long term reading project will be different from your current reading. So you would have a book that you're reading in real time. For example, we read Lonesome Dove across the course of January and February at the book club. But your long term reading project will be much slower. It'll be a sort of scriptural reading. You'll have your rereading baked in. You might read aloud. You might share it with others. You'll cross pollinate. You'll follow up related side avenues. You might listen to an audiobook and read simultaneously. But the point of a longtime reading project is the slow pace. A great long term reading project is a reminder that we're not clocking books just to say we've read them. We embrace the process. I think you should pick a long term reading project each and every year to run alongside your more intense dedicated reading. Here are some. Have A Year of War and Peace by Tolstoy. Oh, that sounds really daunting. It's not. You can read a chapter a day and the chapters are very short. And there are almost the same amount of chapters as there are days in the year. A chapter day of Tolstoy keeps the doctor away or you might have a year of Genji. Genji Monogatari. You could read three pages per day or you could read Moby Dick a page per day. That's a grand prose poem. To inhale Moby Dick is to cheat yourself of a lot of the rewards. Just read a page. One page. Everybody can read a page. One page of Moby Dick. Treat it like a poem. Here's another long term reading project to keep you excited. Read the complete works of Shakespeare. I love projects that sound ridiculous. Oh, you're going to read the complete works of Shakespeare. Okay. You can break it down and you can make it very achievable. You could read one play every weekend or every other weekend. That's not too daunting. And you might follow a chronological approach as we did at the book club. We have lectures for every single Shakespeare play in the back catalogue@patreon.com hardcoreliterature or do what I'm doing right now, which is the First Folio approach and you read by genre. I'm reading Measure for Measure because I'm on the comedies at the moment. What's another long term reading project? You could read the Bible in a year. Work your way through. In each session, you'd work your way through two chapters from the Old Testament, a chapter from the New Testament and a psalm. You could have a few years of Proust. You could give yourself five to ten pages of Proust per day. Or you could read ten pages per day of the Chinese classic, the Story of the Stone or Dream of the Red Chamber. Or you could go on an epic Homeric quest. Read one book of the Iliad and the Odyssey per week and you'll get through both of those epics in a year. You might read steadily over the long term, the great works from Balzac's Human Comedy or Zola's Rugon Makar cycle. Or here's another one that I've done recently. Read Samuel Richardson's Clarissa in real time over the course of the year. It's an epistolary narrative, which means letters. And you can actually read the letters on the day that they take place. People have done this with Dracula by Bram Stoker too. Essentially, what is important is to understand that paradise is imperfect. You want to have an exciting year or so in front of you, but you also want to have some space for serendipity. So you want to have a general idea of what your reading is going to look like in the next year ahead. You might want some longer term goals, three year goals, for example, you might want some exciting big books on the horizon where you think, do you know what? In the next 10 years, which is a ludicrous time frame to plan anything. You might think, in 10 years I would like to have read X, Y and Z. But ultimately you want to have fun and treat the tradition like a grand banquet. Aeschylus spoke of his stories, his tragedies, as being slices from the banquet of Homer. Treat all of literature like a banquet and tuck in. Don't worry if you get it wrong or don't get it perfect, or you miss a day, or you don't hit your quota for the day. Just keep going. And don't underestimate what you can do in bite sized chunks on the daily over the course of the long term. Small and steady, slow and consistent will look really impressive over the course of three years. You can do so much in three years that you couldn't do in three months. Another thing that I love to do to keep myself excited is each year I will invest in some rare books. So book collecting. And I'll appreciate them. And there's a double value there because they appreciate in value, but I appreciate them and I get value from them. I buy rare books. I recently bought the complete works of Sir Walter Scott from the early 19th century. I like to collect first editions of Dickens. I read them. People might be horrified. Oh, you shouldn't read them, just put them on display. No, I read them and I get so much out of them. Best form of investment is buying the things that you enjoy. They'll always pay off then because you're always going to get something out of them. But when it comes to children's education, I really like the philosophy of Charlotte Mason, the educator Charlotte Mason. And it applies to us as well as our children too. Charlotte Mason, whose syllabuses are absolutely incredible. She would see the child as a person and would tell us that we must educate the whole being, not just the mind. Education is an atmosphere, she said, a discipline, a life. She was really big into holistic education. So live the great books. Education is an ongoing conversation and you should engage with the world around you. She put a real big emphasis on healthy habits and cultivating a home conducive to curiosity. How do you do that? Have art around you, play good music in the evening, put some jazz on or some classical music or, or whatever you like, or go into the garden, pick some flowers or plant some flowers, be cooking things and talk to your children about what you're doing, what you're cooking, what you're planting as you do it. Let them grow their curiosity. And the same is true for us too. Cross pollinate your loves art, music, film. Let your interests and passions be manifold. Develop a passion for everything. You can tell my recent passions by my current hot bookshelf. I have a hot bookshelf that is always getting its little volumes cheap checked out. I have history books on the Second World War, a really great encyclopedic collection that was put together not too long after the war. I've developed a passion for history that cannot be sated. Indeed, I've got biographies of the kings and queens of England too, because biography is history and that's a really fascinating avenue into the law of your land. A future rankings video project of mine will be to reverse rank all of the monarchs from the worst to the best. Or you might look to my shelf and you'll see that I have Bible commentary. So I'm really excited about working through the Bible again. I have encyclopedias on birds. I recently got this really great illustrated encyclopedias of birds from the British Isles, and I try to learn about one new bird each day and then slip that into conversation. We have vinyl records lying about. We've got the Ring Cycle from Wagner, we've got books on Opera, we've got DVDs from the Criterion Collection. I try to watch one each week and I'll take some notes on my impressions in a journal. And when you're teaching, be attentive to your child's developing interests and you are there to foster it. The teacher is a guide for what's already inside Plato. Socrates would say that the great teacher is like a midway Virgil in the Divina Commedia. He was the guide to Dante for the journey that only Dante himself could take and bring himself to. And there's a lot of wisdom in picking the right teacher, the right coach, the right consigliere, who is your Virgil? And I'm big into active learning. It's not about dictating to another, it's about encouraging and inspiring. And I think of Stephen Fry's dedication to one of his favorite teachers at the opening of the ode Less Travelled. He would say, the mediocre teacher tells, the good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates, and the great teacher inspires. And ultimately, to teach, you must always learn. The Rolling Stones, one of my favourite bands. They're fans of music first, before they're great musicians, great writers read. And they're fans of the stories of others before they write their own. Great filmmakers are film fans first, so to Teach another. You must learn, and you must do a lot of self work and be receptive to always learning. Charlotte Mason would warn us that we inherit the problems that we deal with our entire lives from our parents in early childhood. So be really careful about how you raise your children when they're very, very young. What you do matters because you're shaping an entire life. And Mason would ask us what ideas rule your life because they'll manifest in your children. They're like mirrors. But returning to Italo Calvino and talking again about what a classic is, he would say that a classic is a book which, with each rereading, offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading. Now this is so true, and I actually think the subsequent readings of a great book are even more profound than the first reading. The first reading is just the initial touch point. The reason why re readings are so important. It's not just because of lived experience, but it's because of all the other books that you've been reading too. There's an interplay. It really is a great conversation. As Mortimer Adler would say, try re reading mode Moby Dick, having also continuously read the foundational works of the Western tradition, the Bible, Shakespeare and Milton. If you've read Moby Dick several years ago, and between now and then, you've read Genesis, Exodus, the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes and Jonah. And if you've also been reading steadily the works of the tragic procession from Shakespeare, we're talking works like Macbeth and King Lear. If you've also read Paradise Lost, then returning to Mobil Dick, you find a whole new book and you think, wow. And you see that it's a conversation with other books. Here's another rewarding ebb and flow that you can take over the years. You read Homer's Odyssey, then you read James Joyce's Ulysses, then you read Homer's Odyssey, then you read Joyce's Ulysses again, back and forth and back and forth. When you first read Don Quixote by Cervantes, your first layer of appreciation might be on the farcical level. I have a real child sense of humor. I find all the scatological stuff in Don Quixote hilarious. I love farce. And your first reading, you might appreciate that you might not. But your second reading, just say you read Cervantes again several years later, but between your first and second reading, you've now gone on and read a bunch of picaresque romances, the very romances that Cervantes was parodying. You read Amadis de Gaulle, you read Lazarilla de Tormes. Then you suddenly see a new book again. And let's say you read Don Quixote again, but between your second and third reading, you've also read many rioters who came in the wake of Cervantes. You've read, for example, Charles Dickens, the Pickwick Papers, or the works of Alexandre Dumas. And then you come back to Cervantes. Well, now it's a conversation. Now we're cooking. And the characters come alive and speak. Now Don Quixote will speak with Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean, who speaks with Mr. Pickwick, who speaks with Prince Myshkin from Dostoevsky's the Idiot. It is another definition of a classic from Italo Calvino. He says, when you read a classic work, you have the sense of having read it before, even if it's your first time. We've all read Shakespeare, even if we haven't. There's that joke, that anecdote of someone going to see Hamlet for the first time and his companion to the theatre asked him after the show, what did you make of it? And he said it was okay, but it was filled with cliches. Yeah, that's where the cliches came from. Emerson would tell us that when we come to great literature, we see our own rejected thoughts in another, and we must take them from another. They come back to us with a certain alienating majesty. This is the thing we do feel like we've read Tolstoy and Chekhov and Austen than Dickens before, because they reflect life. Their characters feel like people we know or circumstances we've been in, or conversations we've had. Another definition of a classic is a work that never exhausts all it has to say to its readers. A.C. bradley, talking about the tragedies of Shakespeare, would speak of his inexhaustible characters. We might think of Cleopatra, who is described as having infinite variety. Two great markers of great literature are that they feel inevitable. So you read the poem and you cannot see it having been phrased any other way. And they're inexhaustible. That means you can never come to the end of them. Mortimer Adler would tell us that most books you just read once and you will never need to read them again. Many more books than that, you don't even need to read them once. And then there are a special hundred or so, if you're lucky, maybe not even. Even a hundred that you can never get to the end of. So forge your own library, like the library of Abb Faria. The library that formed Edmond Dantes. My personal library, my little shelf is stuffed with the book club reads, the hardcore literature book club reads. And these books, oh my goodness, their spines are cracked, the pages are dog eared, they're falling apart and they're covered with notes and the marginalia is an imprint of my soul as certain moment in time. So returning to them is like dialoguing with my old self. And you can see the growth now. Another definition of a classic, as Italo Calvino tells us is that it bears the aura of previous interpretations. You cannot forget all the things that the adventures of Odysseus have come to mean. This is so true. You come to Homer's Odyssey in the wake not to only of Homer, but Aeschylus and Virgil and Dante and Milton. Indeed Dante put Odysseus or Ulysses down in hell. And then Alfred Lord Tennyson would write a poem about Dante's Ulysses, not Homer's Odysseus. But all of this is fragmentary and all of it is in our minds whether we know it or not. Percy Bysshe Shelley would say really profoundly the devil owes everything to Milton's Satan. What does that mean? It means when you go to the Bible maybe you go for the first significant time you're expecting to see a devil that is Milton's Satan, but you don't find it. You go to Genesis and you see a devil that's not even qualified as Satan. It's just the serpent. And that devil is different from the has Satan the accuser of Job in that book. Satan is God's right hand man. And then you get a different devil again when you come to the one who tempts Christ in the wilderness. Now they're all meant to be an embodiment of evil but they're all different from Milton's Satan. We've come to expect his Satan and his Satan from Paradise Lost is actually a pre Byronic repackaging of Shakespeare's Iago. Italo Calvino has a really great example when it comes to Kafka. We have read several of the short stories of Kafka at the book club and those lectures are available in the back catalogue. Calvino says that when he reads Kafka he finds himself approving of or rejecting the legitimacy of the adjective Kafkaesque. That's so true. We're trying to see are these stories really Kafkaesque? And it's really interesting to read backwards and discover the Kafka Kafka esque. In his precursors we see Kafka developed out of Dostoevsky and Dickens. As Calvino would say, all of these characters are reincarnated. There aren't that many characters. There are a whole bunch of types and story is character. Chaucer tells us this. Who we are speaks most loudly in the tales we tell to pass the time. But how many stories are there really when we we get down to it? Kurt Vonnegut would say there are two stories. Man gets in a hole, then gets out of it. Or boy meets girl. Steinbeck would say there's one story, good versus evil. James Joyce would say there's one story, the story of the Fall. Calvino also tells us that it's very, very important that we have a first hand reading of the text that is indispensable. No book discussing another can say more than the original. My lectures are very very long, but they are not exhaustive. They're long because I can't stop talking about them. And yet, even though I can't shut up, I cannot say everything there is to be said about them. It's not possible. But ultimately the best guide is your attentive feeling response to the work itself. Ezra Pound and the ABC of reading would say that if you want to learn about art, you have to go to the art gallery and actually look the paintings. He would talk about reading reviews of music, classical music, and he would say that the reviews of the works that he had not listened to meant absolutely nothing. He only got something from the ones where he had had a first hand experience of the work. Calvino tells us that a classic does not necessarily teach us something that we did not know already, but we find our own thoughts there. How many times have you had a thought that you believe to be original to yourself only to discover that many others had said it before you, hundreds or thousands of years before you were even born? I feel like I came to the discovery of I Think Therefore I Am by Rene Descartes. I did not. I was beaten to it. I thought I came to the discovery of Pascal's Wager and then I read his Pensee and thought hey, I thought that. What else does Calvino say about the classics? He says that the more we think we know about the these works through hearsay, the greater surprise we have when we actually read them. And he would say yes, school introduces us to classics out of duty, but it's through love that we come to recognize our own books. And he, like many great writers and myself, would implore forming your own personal canon. The more you read, the more you discover that yes, there is something of the objective when it comes to art. A lot of people don't like that. They think it's purely subjective. No, there is objectivity, but no, we also don't like tables that mark out the objectivity. Think about the beginning of Dead Poets Society, where they tear out that preface that says, you can chart a poem's poignancy on this graph. Yeah, no, reading poetry shouldn't be like that. But there is objectivity. But subjectivity is important too. So there are those books that you will recognize as truly great, and then there are those books that are your books. And we hope that there's some confluence and some overlap. But the really exciting thing about being a reader among other readers is that our benchmarks are all different. Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian poet, he had a great essay in which he spoke about his touchstones for greatness. Put together your own touchstones. For me, it's Shakespeare, and for Harold Bloom, it's Shakespeare. In the ABC of Reading, £ said, everything that you could possibly find is in Homer. Indian readers will say that everything that can be contained is in the Mahabharata. And d' Ocalvino would tell us that we should be on the lookout for a work that we come to a total identification with. And this might not be the greatest of great works. He would speak about his friend and colleague, for whom his book was the Pickwick Papers. I love the Pickwick Papers. Is it the best Dickens novel? No, I objectively not. Is it one of my favourites, though? Absolutely. Definitely vying for top spot. So you want to be on the lookout for what book is your book? Note how often your thoughts and speech return to specific works. For me it must be Hamlet, although it's very hard to choose. I've returned to Don Quixote a lot too. Italo Calvino would also say that you can have an author as your author, for whom you cannot help argue, arguing with. You love them, but you want to argue with them. You know who I love dearly? Tolstoy. Do you know who I argue with in the margins of his nonfiction? Tolstoy. You want to use these books as dialogues. Dostoevsky's novels, they are philosophical dialogues, dialogues with himself, but also with us. They look like a string of monologues, but he's inviting us to discourse with him. And embrace your loves and embrace your hates. Both alike will be instructive. Calvino ultimately implores us to spend time with the classics, because the classics relegate the noise of the present to a background hum. Literature has a great power to help us perspectives. But he also implores us to put together our own ideal library of classics. As you read, you your library expands. And the perfect library, the perfect personal library, consists of books, half of which mean something to us. So imagine your big bookshelf, half of the books on there you've already read and you've read them to bits and you adore them. And then another half of the books on the shelf are unread. But these are books that could mean something to us. There are some chance discoveries there. And it's absolutely a truism that a well read man or woman's library has more books that they haven't read than those they have. You might know a little bit about different authors and their works and have them on the shelves to look forward to waiting. There's always something to look forward to when you have a library of books, but ultimately you're looking for the ones that affect you the most. Now, let's talk about Virginia Woolf, because she had a great essay on reading too, called How Should One Read a Book? Woolf was one of the great essays, essayists and novelists of the 20th century. She celebrates the common reader. Now, very sadly, we see that her reading really was keeping her alive, but could only do so for so long. She suffered from intense depression throughout her life. And you may know that she very sadly took her life during the time of the Second World War. Her house was blown apart and it was all too much to bear. And she left us with some incredibly profound works of literature that came out of the depths of her pain. Great literature is so often great pain sublimated. We would not have Hamlet if it were not for the loss of Shakespeare's son and the pain that caused. I recently, before bed, started reading or rereading A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. And his author preface really punched me in the gut. He opens and he says, this book was written in Paris, France, keyword, West Florida, Pigott, Arkansas, Kansas City, Missouri, Sheridan, Wyoming. And the first draft of it was finished near Bighorn in Wyoming. It was begun in the first winter months of 1928, and it was finished in September of that year. During the time I was writing the first draft, my second son, Patrick, was delivered in Kansas City by Caesarean section. And while I was rewriting, my father killed himself in Oak Park, Illinois. I was not quite 30 years old when I finished the book, and the day it was published was the day the stock market crashed. I always thought my father might have waited for this event. But perhaps he was hurried then, too. I do not like to make judgments, since I loved my father very much. I remember all of these things happening and the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year, but much more vividly. I remember living in the book and making up what happened to in it every day, making the country and the people and the things that happened. I was happier than I had ever been each day I read the book through from the beginning to the point where I went on writing. And each day I stopped when I was still going good and when I knew what would happen next. The fact the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy, since I believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could have only one end. But finding you were able to make something up, to create truly enough so that it made you happy to read it, and to do this every day you worked was something that gave me a greater pleasure than I had ever known. Beside it, nothing else mattered. Now this punches me in the gut, hearing him talk of the loss of his father. Of course, you may know that Hemingway took his own life. Clearly his writing helped him through some really difficult times, times that were objectively raging on in the world around him. It was a world at war in his personal life, his son, it was a very, very difficult delivery. But also he lost his father. And yet writing in this fabricated world that could point to truth, because fiction is a lie that speaks to truth, gave him some company. As Guy de Maupassant would say, when we are alone in solitude, we people the void with phantoms. This same pleasure and joy that Hemingway gets out of writing is one. What I get from reading, I find it sustains us. Now, Virginia Woolf would tell us at the beginning of her great essay, the most important bit of advice to begin this essay is take no advice. Follow your own instincts and reason and come to your own conclusions. Now that we've got that out of the way, we can broach the topic. And she would encourage her readers to be at liberty to essentially embrace. Embrace the advice that works, but not feel fettered by what doesn't. Having a reading practice is like having a physical practice. You can learn about nutrition and training, but ultimately along the way, you're learning about your body and your aims, and so you're going to make it tailored to you. Along the way, Woolf would tell us that having a sense of self reliance was the most important trait a reader can cultivate. That's what we're doing because. Because reading fiction is an embracing of subjectivity over facts. And she would say, the battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day. But is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. Here's a side quest for you. Watch both of those plays or read them year after year, and each and every year decide which is better. For me, it was Lear. For the longest time, that was the greatest play. But very recently, Hamlet won the agon. In my mind, Hamlet became my number one. Whilst you're comparing plays or works or poems, so many other things are coming into place. Your reasoning, your powers of reasoning, your empathy, your intelligence and empathy, or emotional intelligence and rational thought is linked. So exercising your imagination is a valuable thing to do. Woolf would say, where are we to begin? When we go into a library, we find a huddle of confusion and nothing but a conglomeration. Poems and novels and histories and memoirs, dictionaries in all languages by men and women, written by people of all tempers, races and ages jostling on the shelf. How do we bring order into this multitudinous chaos to get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read? I like that qualification deep and wide. I found that the Oxford English Literature education really embraced this entire ethos. Self direction within a scope. So you've got your program, you've got your plan, you've got your syllabus, but then within that you are encouraged to take initiative and follow your gut and develop your own freedom to explore. And they would encourage us to have a T shaped education. That means you go broad. Imagine the letter T. You go broad so you get a real sense of the sweep of time and place. But then go deep into what interests you. And if you're reading with the hardcore literature book club over the year or over the years, we're going to make some friends along the way. You're not going to love every single author, but you're going to be exposed to authors where in each year one of them you're going to absolutely adore. Maybe two. What do you do when you meet these authors? It might be Dostoevsky, it might be Austin, it might be Le Guin, it could be anybody. Well, you carry on with the program, but you also go deep. You continue going wide and then you go deep where your heart pulls you. Virginia Woolf Word tell us to banish all preconceptions coming to a work about what it should give you. If you come to a work with preconceptions, you'll only have your own prejudices. This is reinforced. And you see this so often in the book world or the reader world, where divisive and vehement opinions are often formed by those who have not read the book or have failed to read it. You see this frequently with modern or postmodern works. Finnegan's Wake, Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow. People make their mind up without coming to the end of the book. Do not dictate to your author, Woolf tells us. Try to become him. I think of an exercise from Helen Wendler, Absolutely, absolutely brilliant critic, sadly no longer with us. She would memorize the poetry that she was going to teach, whether it was Shakespeare or Keats or Emily Dickinson, by writing out the poems by hand and becoming the poet in the act of choosing the words and deliberating over each word before she imprinted it. And understanding why they chose it unlocked it and led to some incredible exegetical analysis. Virginia Woolf says, be his fellow worker and accomplice, the writer. If you hang back and reserve and criticize, at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, this will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find find that your author is giving you or attempting to give you something far more definite. Mortimer Adler would tell us that we can ask a series of questions when it comes to great literature. One, what is being said? Two, how is it being said? And then you can ask, is it true and do I like it, or do I agree? You mustn't pass judgment until you can explain what the author is getting at. If you can't sum up what they're actually getting at and how they're doing it, then one's opinions might not be fully formed or informed. What experience is the author trying to give you and are they successful at it? Once you've got that, once you figure out what they're trying to do, it all comes down to a matter of taste. I like the explain like I'm five exercise. Can you take a book and tell somebody who doesn't read, who's not a reader at all, who's not in the reading world, can you tell them very swiftly what it's about, and can you entice them to pick it up? Can you make them interested? Always try to teach your books. Tell your family, your loved ones about what you're reading. Slip it into conversation. Be stealthy about it. Slip it in. So Virginia Woolf tells us to abandon our preconceived notions. And Harold Bloom would say this too, in his fantastic how to Read and why. He would say, clear your mind of cant or academic cant. What's cant? It means jargon or vernacular. And very often this vernacular or slang or jargon does not signify. Using big words one does not understand is the quickest way to sound unintelligent. You want to speak so everyone can understand you. Harold Bloom would also urge us to read with overt urgency, like Bible readers. Readers of Shakespeare, he said, are questing after the same thing, and both kinds of reader are doing so. The at against the clock. How you read and what you read matters because our time on earth is finite. And Bloom, quoting Francis Bacon, would say, read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. It really is easier said than done because very often just the name of an author, just a mere impression, impression of them, can bring some preloaded connotations into our reading. We don't want to go into a reading with our boxing gloves already on, nor do we want to go into a reading reverentially, already ready to agree with them. Go in tabula rasa, a blank slate. And Bloom would quote Ralph Waldo Emerson and say, the best books impress us with the conviction that the one nature that wrote is the same. Same that reads. Now back to Woolf. Virginia Woolf would say, when it comes to reading novels, for example, the quickest way to understand what a novelist is doing is not just to read, but to write. Make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. And she would encourage us to recall an event that left a distinct impression on you and try to sum it up in words and capture the truth of it. You do find when you read enough, you do naturally start to feel that inclination to put pen to paper yourself and test it out. I think again of Ezra Pounds, A, B, C of reading. Pounds as an individual with his personal opinions, was absolutely abhorrent on so many levels. But I do find his ABC of reading is a good one to return to every few years, and you can use it as a yardstick to see how your opinions and life experiences have changed and forged you. But he would give us an anecdote or a parable, the Parable of the Sunfish, in which he would favour the empirical approach for learning about art. And he would talk about this famous biologist called Louis Agassiz and how he taught his students. Pound would tell us that the proper method for studying poetry is the method of contemporary biologists. That means careful first hand example, examination of the matter and continual comparison of one slide or specimen with another. He would tell the story of a postgraduate student going to this biologist, equipped with all of his honours and diplomas and wanting to receive the finishing touches of his education. Agassiz offered the student a small fish and told him to describe it. That's only a sunfish, they said. I know, write a description of it, the teacher said. After. After a few minutes the student returns with the description of the Ichthys heliodipolochatus or whatever term is used to conceal the creature from vulgar knowledge found in textbooks. The teacher again told him to describe the fish. The student produced a four page essay. He told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition. But the student knew something about it. We want to really look at the specimens or slides and then compare them. You can't compare Shakespeare with something lesser. You need something as great, not in the same kind, but in the same degree. So comparing Shakespeare with his fellow Elizabethans and Jacobeans, that's not a fair fight. It's not a fair comparison. It's not very illuminating. But comparing Shakespeare beer with Dante, now we're cooking. Compare the titans from the traditions. Homer, Lady Murasaki, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce. There's another anecdote of learning to see from Gustave Flaubert. He would give an exercise to his disciple Zola, Emile Zola. And he would tell him to describe someone of his choice in such a way that he could easily pick that person out in a busy restaurant and not mistake them for someone else. Now, if you want some writing exercises, there's a great book called Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark. You could follow those exercises for fun every now and then, or you could use the questions at the end of the weekly lectures at the Hardcore Literature Book Club as journal prompts. But essentially you go to the work and look at it, describe it. Now, Virginia Woolf would say, recall an impression from a formative event and and try to reconstruct it in words. And you'll find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions and you will likely lose grasp on the emotion itself. Then you can turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist. Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you'll be able to appreciate their mastery. And it's not merely that we're in the presence of a different person, whether It's Dafoe or Austin or Hardy, but the that we are living in a different world. We go from the island of Robinson Crusoe to the drawing room of Austin's characters to the moors of Hardy. And going from author to author gives us such a distinct shift that it feels like we're being thrown this way and that. And to read a novel, she says, is a difficult and complex art, because you must be capable of great boldness of imagination in order to make use of of all the novelist gives you. Now, Virginia Woolf would give us a really important warning. And she would say, how far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer's life? How far is it safe to let the man interpret the writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that the man himself rouses in us? We are lucky to not know that much about Shakespeare, the man, because biographical readings can intrude upon the work. We were warned against biographical readings back in college because, as Oscar Wilde knew, the lowest, as the highest form of art criticism is a form of autobiography. What you make of a writer often says a lot more about yourself and where you are in life than the writer. Woolf would encourage us to access the artist within us as we read. She would say, when it comes to poetry, that the time to read poetry is when we are almost able to write it ourselves. And you can tell a great poet from a bad poet because the poem is hard and direct, and for that moment that we read it, there's no other sensation except the poem itself. The world melts away. When you read a bad book, you can look out the window, you can daydream, you can create. When you read something great, you're there. And past and future melt away. And the endless present spreads before us because the poet is always our contemporary. Virginia Woolf would break down the processes of reading and say that the first process is, of course, reading it, scanning your eyes across the page. And that is only half the process of reading. The book must be completed if we're to get the whole impression from it. And then if we are able to compare it with another. The process of reading is a process of comparing. We don't read in isolation desolation. We read always up against the other books we've come into contact with. And she would say, don't allow our fleeting impressions to be mistaken for hard and lasting ones. Once you've read a book all the way through, you must wait for the dust of reading to settle, for the Conflict and the questioning to die down. Walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep, and then nature will aid us and book will return, floating to our mind as a whole. The book as a whole is a very different thing than the book when received in separate phases. So chapter by chapter, or per reading session, we want to consider the whole. Once we finished the book and allowed some time to pass, we can see the total structure, and it might be a barn or a pigsty or a cathedral. Montaigne. When he finished a book, he would date it. He would date the time he completed it, and he would very quickly write down his impressions, and then he'd put it away. Over the course of the year at the Hardcore Literature Book Club, we will recall books that we've read earlier in the year. As we progress through, we're going to be putting these writers in conversation, and that's because these writers are friends. But Virginia Woolf would say that the act of comparing books means we are no longer the friends of the writer, but we become his judges. And just as we cannot be too sympathetic as friends, so as judges, we cannot be too severe. Though at the same time, she encourages us to be ruthless and leave the worthless books behind. Read books of great worth, because the time is short. Now, Virginia Woolf would say the most difficult stage of reading is continuing to read without the book in front of you. We always say, I'm reading a book because we always are, even if we. We aren't actually reading it. You're reading it in your mind, you're recalling it. And not only that, but you're holding one shadow shape against another. You're comparing it with every other book that you've read. And the more you read, the more illuminating your reading becomes, because the wider you go, the more frames of reference, the more interplay you get. And you need to, with every book that you read, continue to cultivate your imagination and look for insights and continue learning how to learn. And she would end her wonderful essay. How should one read a book with a really wonderful little passage saying not to allow the critics, the gowned authorities of the library, to decide a book's worth, you should decide it. And ultimately, if a writer knew that beyond the erratic gunfire of the press, that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading slowly and unprofessionally and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? So we have an obligation to be loving readers, kind readers, unprofessional Readers read with great sympathy and great discernment. We have a duty. If there are great readers, there will be great writers. And I like to talk about literary appreciation rather than criticism. I don't like the term criticism. Who am I to criticize? But I can appreciate, because my appreciation is from my gut. I'm the authority on what I appreciate. And talking of the aim of reading, Virginia Woolf would say that she had a dream that when the day of judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards, the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy, when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, look. These need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading. I love that. Grab the pleasures before you. Heaven is a place on earth and it's contained on the page. Now, before I close off today, I do want to bring some ideas into the conversation from Henry David Thoreau. I love Thoreau. Here's a little American Transcendentalist starter pack for you. Emerson. Whitman. Thoreau. Read the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, read the poetry of Whitman, and read Walden by Thoreau. I reread Walden every year in the autumn time, going towards the end of the year into the new year. And I do this as a refreshing tonic. This year gone, I was reading Walden at 5 in the morning with my newborn daughter in my arms. And I also had Henry Fielding's Tom Jones beside me too. And I will treasure this reading experience for the rest of my life. The most impactful readings and life experiences and memories are those where I was passing time with a good book. In 1845-1847, Thoreau went to the woods. Because he went, wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life and see if he could not learn what life had to teach. He wanted to get away from the crowd and from materialistic, shallow society. So he made a cabin on some land owned by Emerson. In fact, he grew his own food. He wrote, he read, he reflected, with the aim of then bringing what he discovered in solitude. The result dissolve of solitude back into the crowd. Now, I often have a dream of getting away and doing a Walden or doing a Thoreau. Whenever we talk about the desert island question, like what books would you read if you were washed up on a desert island? What would you like to have washed up with you? Whenever I consider this question, I always end up longing for that solitude and for a time in which I can dedicate my life fully to reading and only reading. Now we need to realise that we're already on that island. We're already at Walden Pond in the woods, just like Thoreau, if we want to be. What do I mean? What I mean is, don't defer your dreams. Don't defer telling the ones you love, you love them. And don't defer the books you really want to read that day may never come, each even if you plan for it. So make your desert island list, make the list of books you want to read and start reading them now. If I said to you right now, what two great books would you like to have experienced by the end of this year? If you read just two books in a year, but you read them very deeply, and you do that, year after year, it will be life changing. You can spend six months with a book that's really, really great. If I asked you that question. Question. I think your gut will speak and you'll come up with some titles, even if you don't know why. You might find yourself saying War and Peace or Ulysses. And then once you say those titles, then you start considering how daunting the prospect of scaling those mountains must be. Oh, can I do that? Are those books for me? Well, if you read them, then they are for you. Buy those books immediately, Proclaim, procure your copies, whatever copies you said, by the way, it might not be Tolstoy or Joyce, but get those books that you know you want to read and get them in your possession before you put off reading them any longer. And when they arrive, then your island has arrived too. Your Walden pond has arrived. Your time has arrived. Thoreau would say in his chapter on Reading that in accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal. But in dealing with truth, we are immortal. The oldest Egyptian or Hindu philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity. And I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. This is so true. It doesn't matter. When a great book is written, whenever it's read, you and the writer co exist because what they've written is something that's a part of you. Stories of the most unforgettable individuals are ultimately everybody's story. They convey the universal. The rage of Achilles is our rage. The return home of Odysseus is our return home. The descent into hell of Dante, the pilgrim is our descent. And here's an Orienting, question, going into a great work, can you see yourself in the protagonist? Does the line of poetry before you feel inevitable? Does it feel like a law of the universe? When you read Hamlet, what is your Hamlet? Everybody has a different Hamlet because that role is designed to suit each and every one of us. Thoreau would say that his residence in the woods was more favourable not only to thought but to serious reading than a university. And he kept Homer's Iliad on his table throughout summer. But he only looked at the page now and then. Incessant labour with his hands finishing off his house and hoeing his beans made more study impossible. Here's the kicker, however. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. What book right now, even if you do not read, it can sustain you because the prospect of it, the prospect of coming to it in the future, excites you. Thoreau would tell us that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. This exercise is a way out of that desperation. Pick a book right now that you leave on your bedside, that you turn to now and again, that inspires you, that you think, I'm going to come to that in the future. I've got to keep going because I've got to come to that book. And true reading is reading with your gut and with your soul and with all of you. And you want your reading to be steady and consistent and filled with intention. But of course, there are those periods where you'll be lucky if you can read a page or two because your life is so full. If your life. Life is full to the point where you can only read one page of Moby Dick or one psalm or one chapter of War and Peace, then those small portions are going to fill you right up. You will take them into your day with you. Read like Gus McCrae from Lonesome Dove. We read this recently. What does he do every morning? He sees the sun rise and he flicks through his Bible. Nay, reads a little bit here and there. He doesn't get carried away. Just a little bit. Just enough to appreciate the sunrise. We want books forever on the horizon. We never want to have read all the books because we always want the promise of another journey. And Thoreau would say, the written word is the choicest of relics. It's more intimate and more universal at the same time than any other work of art. It's the work of art nearest to life because it. It's carved out in the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern Man's speech. And the student may read Homer or Aeschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, because it implies in some measure he emulates their heroes and consecrates morning hours to their pages. Now Thoreau would say, even if a great book is printed in the character of our mother tongue, it will always be in a language dead to degenerate times, and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line. Some will speak of the study of classics as though it is there to make way for more modern and practical studies. But the adventurous student will always study classics in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be, for what other classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man, they are the only oracles which are not decayed. If you don't read ancient books, then we might as well omit to study nature because she is old. Thoreau would say, to read well, that is to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life. To this object, books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. And it's not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written. Great books are written in the select language of literature. We read a great book the same way that we try to read the stars, the same way we try to read the movements of nature. And the works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. In Walden, Thoreau takes aim at the popular entertainment of the day, the novelist publishing in monthly parts. That was the common entertainment of the circulating library of his small town sensationalist narratives. And he would say that the proclivity to go to such easy pleasures, rather than having a very fulfilling and nourishing literary diet, would lead to dullness of sight and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. Now we might consider the modern day equivalent of this. If Thoreau were alive today, what would he take aim at? At? Well, I think the modern equivalent is not to be found in literature at all, but rather to be found in that little screen that we keep in our pockets. And the doom scroll. We have regressed. We had evolved from scroll to book and that was an evolution. But now we're back not to the scroll, but to the endless doom scroll. The codex or the book was a step up but now, now we're scrolling and there's no limit to what we can scroll through, but there's no nourishment there either. And it's never been easier to be sucked in and to find your mind claimed by what you see and to have your time robbed from you. And you feel rather hollow afterwards when you've been doom scrolling for a while, you feel empty, you feel depressed, you feel anxious. Ancient man and woman used to exist, exist in tribes of 30, 40 or 50 people. But in the space of half an hour we can see more people than our ancestors would have seen their entire lives. And we can see some very extreme things and we can run the entire gamut of our emotions whilst being completely sedentary. It's not good for us. And so Thoreau ultimately would implore us to become good readers no matter who we are. And the best books are not ready even by those who are called good readers. Even in the mid 19th century he would see that the college bred and the so called liberally educated men here and elsewhere actually have little or no acquaintance with the classics. And only the feeblest efforts are made when it comes to the ancient wisdom of the classics and of the scriptures of the world. He would say that the college educated think that reading daily newspapers is enough to keep their reading skills. But he implored us to consider that we can soar so much higher than the column of the daily paper. So Even in the 19th century there was this idea of most people not reading a book again since college. Any man, Thoreau said, will go out of his way considerably to pick up a silver dollar. But here we have golden words which the words wisest men of antiquity have uttered and we ignore them, keeping our conversation and thinking of a very low level. We've never had more access to the greatest things that have ever been written. Consider that a book is the life work of someone who's given thoughts to the most profound themes of the human condition. They've written the best things they know how in the best language. It is a compressed life. You, you are picking up a soul and you are expediting wisdom when you read a great book. But we go for easier pleasures and less nourishing diets rather than go after what Percy Bysshe Shelley called the reader's sublime. It's like the runner's high. Scaling a mountain is a good comparison. We should embrace difficult things because that gives us the true reward. We have all these authors ready to be our kinsmen, but how many are really acquainted with these great men and women, how many dialogue with them? Thoreau would tell us that there are words in these old books that are addressed to our condition exactly. Whatever we are going through, someone has gone through it before us and has left us wisdom for dealing with it. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book? Thoreau said, I find this is so true every time I go through Shakespeare's works completely all the way through marks a new era of my life. When I read Dostoevsky or reread him, it marks a new era of my life. I read all of Dostoevsky in my youth, feverishly. And then every two years or so, I'll deep dive again into one of his books. Very slowly, over the course of several months with the hardcore literature book club, Read Crime and Punishment, the Brothers Karamazov, and we're gearing up for the Idiot. And why every two years? Because I think that's the amount of time needed for each novel from Dostoevsky to sink into your soul and for you to then be ready for the next. And Dostoevsky is a great marker of our growth. Every time I come to him, I realize I missed something integral previously in his life philosophy. And then I can see where I have grown again. Do this with Homer, do this with Tolstoy. When I think of the most significant eras of my life, there are books that come attendant upon that. Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, Finnegan's Wake, Moby Dick, War and Peace, Paradise Lost, Pride and Prejudice, Tess of d', Herbervilles, Genji Monogatari, Dante's Divina Commedia. I think of all of these books and their mnemonic for my life because the very titles throw me back to a period of painful and significant growth. Thoreau would tell us that the book exists for us, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men. Not one has been omitted, and each has answered them according to his ability, by his words and his life. Thousands of years prior to us, men and women have traveled the same road and had the same experience. And so, wherever we are, grab a book, treat yourself to a deep and sustained liberal arts education. As Thoreau would say, the world should not be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever. Wherever we are, we can get our education under the skies right here, right now. And so I'm gonna leave off for today and I'd like to say thank you so much for listening today. I hope you've enjoyed that discussion. And if you want more deep discussions for the Great Books, then we've got some very exciting readings coming up at the Hardcore Literature book club@patreon.com hardcore literature this coming weekend we're kicking off our reading of Dostoevsky, which is going to be great, and We've got over 700 discussions, lectures and long form guides for the Great Books in the back catalogue too. But for now, I'd like to say thank you again for listening. Thank you for keeping the Great Books alive with me, and I'd like to wish you a very happy reading, everybody, and bye bye for now.