Episode 257: "Best of" Series -- Our Literary Lives of 2021

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast - Episode 257: "Best of" Series -- Our Literary Lives of 2021

Release Date: December 31, 2024

In this special "Best of" episode, hosts Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks (referred to as Mr. Banks), and lifelong reader Cindy Rollins reflect on their literary journeys throughout 2021. The conversation delves into their favorite reads, least favorite books, approaches to reading challenges, and aspirations for the upcoming year. This detailed summary captures the essence of their discussions, enriched with notable quotes and insights.

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1. Reflecting on the Year in Reading

Angelina Stanford opens the discussion by sharing her reading habits for 2021. Despite her typically high reading pace, she mentions focusing on re-reading certain authors to deepen her understanding:

• "I read more than one book by the same author, so I guess I kind of parked on certain authors." [14:37]

Cindy Rollins reveals her record-breaking year, attributing her success to utilizing audiobooks at double speed, a revelation that significantly boosted her reading capacity:

• "I discovered that my brain likes audiobooks on double speed, and that will get you through some titles." [17:18]

Mr. Banks reflects on his substantial reading volume, highlighting a preference for nonfiction over fiction as he grows older:

• "I've noticed as I've gotten older, I tend to read more nonfiction than fiction." [24:23]

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2. Favorite Books and Standouts of 2021

The trio shares their standout books from the year, offering a diverse range of genres and themes:

Cindy Rollins

• "Cranford" by Elizabeth Gaskell: Cindy praises this Victorian novel for its charm and delightful characters.

  • "It was pure delight... a great cast of characters, charmingly written." [28:22]

• "The Odd Women" by George Gissing: A late Victorian novel tackling early feminism and the societal challenges faced by women.

  • "This is one of them... How do women craft a meaningful life if marriage is not in the cards for them?" [41:48]

• "Corsets and Cod" by Karen Bowman: Explores the history of fashion, shedding light on the evolution of garments like pockets.

  • "I learned a ton of interesting things about that." [45:19]

Angelina Stanford

• "The Go Between" by L.P. Hartley: A poignant novel exploring the dangers of innocence and the consequences of misunderstandings.

  • "It's a study of the danger of childish innocence... a novel that sticks with you." [33:46]

• Various Nonfiction Works: Including biographies of Oscar Wilde and Christopher Hitchens, providing deep insights into their lives and philosophies.

  • "It was strikingly solemn... an almost dour book." [35:31]

Mr. Banks

• "Hiking Through" by Paul Stutzman: A true story about finding peace and freedom on the Appalachian Trail after personal loss.

  • "It genuinely was as if I was hiking the trail. And I really lived vicariously through that book." [28:22]

• "The Warden" by Helen McInnes: A gripping narrative that captivated him with its intricate plot and engaging storytelling.

  • "That was an excellent book. It's really fun." [31:23]

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3. Least Favorite Books of 2021

Not every read resonated positively with the hosts, and they candidly discuss their disappointments:

Angelina Stanford

• Unnamed Book on Authorial Sins: An infuriating book where authors confess their "sins," criticized for its malice and lack of sophistication.
  • "It was at once like a deeply malicious book in a childishly inane one." [48:02]

Cindy Rollins

• "The Storytelling How Stories Make Us Human": Critiqued for its bleak interpretation of stories as mere coping mechanisms for death.

  • "He was a psychologist whose basic theory was stories are comforting lies we tell ourselves to cope with our impending death." [50:02]

• "Tyrant Shakespeare on Politics" by Stephen Greenblatt: Disappointed with the freudian analysis of Shakespeare's works, finding it reductive and misinterpretative.

  • "He took these speeches of Macbeth and he turned them inside out and made them mean the exact opposite that they mean." [51:33]

Mr. Banks

• "A History of Flowers": Found the book incredibly boring, struggling to engage with its content.

  • "It was so incredibly boring, I couldn't even get through the first chapter." [53:47]

• Unnamed Book Causing Personal Discomfort: Recounts reading a disturbing book that led to regret over certain scenes, choosing not to name it out of respect.

  • "I wish I could forget some scenes in that book." [55:20]

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4. Approaches to Reading Challenges

The hosts share their unique strategies for tackling reading challenges, highlighting their diverse approaches:

Cindy Rollins

• Emphasizes flexibility and following her interests without rigid planning.

  • "I go where the spirit leads. I have no plan." [73:37]

• Utilizes multitasking, such as doing puzzles while listening to audiobooks, to maintain focus:

  • "I sit at the table with my iPad on a book on high speed and just go to town on that puzzle." [63:21]

Angelina Stanford

• Integrates her reading with her teaching, often inspired by course requirements or webinar preparations.

  • "I read probably a good, a good handful, probably four or five books about World War I." [74:04]

• Prefers exploring historical contexts to enhance her understanding of literature.

  • "I want to read a history of that decade, you know, 1900 to 1910." [74:38]

Mr. Banks

• Balances a mix of fiction and nonfiction, often influenced by recommendations and personal interests.

  • "I keep going through this. I've read Trollope here and there." [75:04]

• Finds goal-setting through numbers helpful for maintaining reading discipline.

  • "The number helps me not be undisciplined in areas where I should be." [26:58]

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5. Anticipations for the New Year

Looking ahead, the hosts share their literary aspirations and areas they wish to explore:

Angelina Stanford

• Plans to delve deeper into Edwardian England history to complement her literary studies.
  • "I just bought a history of... Charles Petrie because I've been, you know..." [74:46]

Cindy Rollins

• Continues to embrace a spontaneous reading approach, allowing her interests to guide her selections.
  • "I have many, many, many books going at the same time because I teach a lot of classes..." [76:38]

Mr. Banks

• Aims to read more classics and expand his understanding of them, while maintaining his interest in both fiction and nonfiction.
  • "I'm still, I still haven't caught up with the classics, all of them, so well." [75:04]

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6. Notable Insights and Quotes

Throughout the episode, several thought-provoking quotes encapsulate the hosts' philosophies on literature and reading:

• On Literature's Nature:
  "Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience... The novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments." – Cindy Rollins [05:32]

• On Adaptability and Seasons of Life:
  "Being able to adapt to those seasons is one of life's key measures of happiness." – Mr. Banks [16:29]

• On Stories and Transformation:
  "When you read a story, you are entering into an experience, and that experience can transform you and it can transform your mind and your thoughts, but it does it through this experience of concrete images and not through an abstract argument." – Cindy Rollins [08:11]

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Conclusion

Episode 257 of The Literary Life Podcast offers a heartfelt and insightful retrospective of 2021's literary experiences for Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, and Cindy Rollins. Their diverse reading selections, candid discussions on favorite and least favorite books, and varied approaches to reading challenges provide listeners with valuable perspectives on cultivating a rich literary life. As they look forward to the new year, their enthusiasm for exploring new genres and deepening their literary understanding continues to inspire fellow book lovers.

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Note: Advertisements, promotional segments, and non-content discussions were omitted to focus solely on the meaningful conversations and literary reflections of the episode.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.

[Cindy Rollins]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast, where your hosts, Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins, explore a life share shaped by books, stories, and poetry. Each week, we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Hello, and welcome back to this very final episode of 2021 of the Literary Life Podcast. Today to discuss our year in reading, the literary lives of us are my partners in crime, including one who is my partner in life? Such a lame opening. With me are the mysterious Mr. Banks. Hello. How are you?

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm doing very well. And yourself, Ms. Stanford?

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm doing well. You just literally taught your last class, so you are feeling happy. And I taught mine yesterday, so we are feeling really good. And the third member of this triumvirate, Cindy the Blonde Bombshell Rollins. Cindy, how are you?

[Mr. Banks]

I'm doing very well.

[Cindy Rollins]

You feeling better? You came back.

[Mr. Banks]

I'm not 100% better. I get these weird coughs every once in a while, but. So my voice might sound a little raspy, but I feel. I feel great. Life is good. I'm happy. There's chocolate, there's cookies, there's children at home, there's music. All is well.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that. That's very good. That's very good. And then I guess your. Your Advent book is doing really, really well.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes, it is doing well. And it is so gratifying for me to see, like, I've seen several times where people say they went to their first concert of Handel's Messiah ever because of the book and took their family and their kids were excited because they knew the music. And honestly, I can't even talk about it without getting a little bit weepy that God would just take this little simple idea and turn it into something like that. It's just. It's just very wonderful for me to have a small part in that.

[Cindy Rollins]

And folks can find that on Amazon blueskydavies.net I'm sure you have a link to it on your own website, morningtime for moms.com yes.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah, you can find it in pretty much any bookstore. That online bookstore that you that you like.

[Cindy Rollins]

And Our very own Mr. Banks wrote not only an essay for the book, but also a poem.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes, his poem is very good and his essay is very good.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, well, thank you very much.

[Cindy Rollins]

It was a family affair. I've got a blurb on the back. We all, we all got in there.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah, yeah, it's quite, it's quite a lit life endeavor.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, we also have a few things going on at House of Humane Letters. We have a huge Christmas sale. So you want to check that out. We have 15% off. You can go to our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and you can get the coupon code right there off the homepage. You look like you're about to jump on this mic. What do you want to say?

[Angelina Stanford]

I was just about to say that we should also thank the many people who have bought things already because it turned out to be, well, kind of an inspired idea on Ms. Stanford's part. I was not thinking of doing, I was thinking of charging double price actually over the Christmas garden. But no thanks to everyone who has helped us along with that.

[Cindy Rollins]

So we did. Everything in the store is 15% off. This doesn't apply to year long classes, but we have lots and lots of mini classes and webinars. So if you've had your eye on, especially the mini classes, which can be a little bit more expensive. If you have your eye on there, now's the chance to get it for a much deeply discounted price. And a lot of people have been taking advantage of that. We also have gift cards. For the first time ever, we, we heard your request and that has been so much fun to see people gift gift cards and realizing we're going to be under someone's Christmas tree. That's a lot of fun. That's a lot of fun. So, yes, we've got all that going on. We've got our Advent bundle, We've got an Advent poetry webinar. We've got our Charles Dickens Christmas Carol mini class that Mr. Banks and I taught together. So we've got all kinds of goodies for you to check out over there. All right, gang, here we go. Our last commonplace quotes of the year. This is a lot of pressure. We got to go out in a bang. Not a whimper, but a bang.

[Angelina Stanford]

You should start us off then, Ms. Tinker.

[Cindy Rollins]

I create the pressure and then you make me feel it. All right, so I think this will come as a surprise to no one. I decided to end the year with an orthop fry quote. I wanted something that would Kind of say something about stories. So here's one. Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he uses abstract ideas. The novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments. And that is from his book, the Educated Imagination. Yes. Thank you for saying, ooh, Cindy.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah, I like that.

[Cindy Rollins]

You know, one of the things that I talk about in my early modern lit class, as we, you know, explore the shift from the medieval world to the modern world, you know, brought about by the Enlightenment, you see a huge change in the way that we think about stories and art in general. And it's not surprising. And one of the things that happens is, you know, so this is why fairy tales fell out of fashion, allegories fell out of fashion. All the good stories fell out of fashion, but they started to see stories entirely differently than they had ever been perceived before. And now for them, stories were philosophy delivery systems. And so they start looking for what's the message, what's the philosophy being delivered in this story and breaking it apart, looking for that. And we are still very much caught up in that idea that that is what we're supposed to be doing as readers. And we try so hard on this podcast to push back against that idea. And, of course, in my classes, we really learn what they are, if they're not philosophy delivery systems. But that's one of the reasons why I liked this quote so much. As he points out, no, literature is not abstract. It doesn't exist in the realm of abstract ideas. It's actually very concrete. Right? We're going to go on an experience in this book through concrete images, right? This is a cave. This is a mountain. This is. Those are images. It's not ideas. And I saw, of course, I love that he says, the novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments. And this is completely true. And it is hard for us to have that paradigm shift. But when my students, especially my adult students, finally have that paradigm shift, it is so exciting to see how much more meaning, ironically, they're able to get out of a story when they're no longer parsing it, looking for the hidden message. And that really is how it works. The meaning does not come to us through a bunch of ideas and propositions and arguments. It comes to us through images. Anyway, that's a whole other spiel, but I like that. Just another reminder as we close the year that we are not taking apart stories to find philosophy. We are having to UCS Lewis's terms When you read a story, you are entering into an experience, and that experience can transform you and it can transform your mind and your thoughts, but it does it through this experience of concrete images and not through an abstract argument. All right, enough about that.

[Mr. Banks]

Well, I'm really looking forward. I'm hoping next year will be my Year of the Northrop Fry book. I have several on my shelf, but I've not read any of them yet.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, the Educated Imagination is a fabulous place to start. He's very accessible there.

[Mr. Banks]

Well, I would like to start at a fabulous place.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, some of his books, you can easily get discouraged because you're like, whoa, what does he talk? This is. This is hard stuff. But I think the. The Educated Imagination is just a much easier entryway. It's not. It's very short and it's not getting bogged down. And some of the more technical aspects of his theory of how stories work. And he's talking more in general about imagination. I think you're gonna. I think you're gonna love it, Cindy. And you're gonna be like, Lindsay. I think you're gonna be messaging me the whole time saying, this is just what Charlotte Mason says.

[Mr. Banks]

Well, hopefully I'll get to that. I'm. I have great hopes for next year.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, excellent. We're going to talk today about our hopes for our 2020 reading. 2022 reading. All right, who wants to go next?

[Angelina Stanford]

Cindy, do you want to go?

[Mr. Banks]

Okay, I have. This is kind of an end of the year wrap up quotes and also have, you know, just kind of stretching a little bit to make it pretend like it's about our reading list for the year and the way we wax and wane. But the moon. This is Malcolm Guy from Faith, Hope and Poetry. The moon is the only one of the heavenly bodies that, whilst rising resplendently like the other luminaries, nevertheless changes and waxes and wanes as we do.

[Angelina Stanford]

I like that.

[Mr. Banks]

That's really pretty. I'm a big moon fan. I don't know if anybody's picked up on that yet.

[Cindy Rollins]

Cynthia, goddess of the moon.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes, I really am drawn to the moon. And I. And I had a great. I was awesome last night. I saw the moon. We had a really cloudy night. And I had this second where I'm like, oh, I've got to get out on the back porch. And I went on the back porch and there was a little crescent moon. And it was only there for like a second. And then the rest of the night it clouded over and it was gone. But I Just always feel so blessed when those moments happen where, you know, the moon's only out for a second, but I get to see it.

[Cindy Rollins]

It revealed itself to you. I love that.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

I love that. Yeah. You're inspiring me to maybe tackle some Malcolm Guy. You and a few people over in the Patreon Forum are working their way through some essays that are very intriguing to me.

[Angelina Stanford]

I read his new book of poetry inspired by the Psalms this year and mostly liked it. It was not the first thing of his I'd read, but it was. Yeah, he set scripture to poetry in a way that is really, really hard to do. And it's hard to diversify the Psalms, but he does an impressive job of it.

[Cindy Rollins]

What's the name of that one? That's not the seasonal soundings ones.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, it's, I think, Liar of David or David's Liar.

[Mr. Banks]

Well, you know, Charlotte Mason did that. She also said the scripture to poetry. I think most of the scripture.

[Cindy Rollins]

Did she really?

[Mr. Banks]

Yes. She has a book available, and my brain just went blank. I had the title in my head. But anyway, yes. And Malcolm Guide. I really love his. The way he handles poetry. And I really went into reading his books very skeptically because I'm often disappointed in modern writers when they start talking about poetry. And not so with Malcolm Guy. I have loved everything he has said. He's very respectful of poetry and he doesn't get weird at all over it. It keeps it very real.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, good to know. Good to know. All right, Mr. Banks, what you got for us?

[Angelina Stanford]

So I have a quotation from Lord Byron. He's talking about the human tendency to, I guess, our habit of showing only one side of ourself to certain people and other sides of ourselves to other people. And he writes, I almost think that the same skin for one without has two or three within.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay. That is the same level of sauciness as that quote I've been using. There's a Agatha Christie book, the Mirror Cracked or the Cracked Mirror.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

They made a movie of it with Elizabeth Taylor, and we watched it the other night. Elizabeth Taylor delivers this saucy line to her rival in the book, her frenemy. And she says, I only dislike two things about you. Or maybe she said, hey, I only hate two things about you. She says, what's that? She said, your face. Commonplace. That's it exactly. There's two things I hate about you. Your face.

[Mr. Banks]

But there's also a sense where we change in life. So, like, in one. In one life, man plays many parts and. But obviously, Anyway, but I read somewhere, like, when you're married, you're married to, like, five different people if you stay married to one person over a long period of time.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mr. Banks is married to five different people in the first five minutes. I'm way more than five, I think. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Who would have thought I would have become a polygamist by accident?

[Cindy Rollins]

The accidental polygamy.

[Mr. Banks]

He tiptoes out each morning. Who's here.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is very, very true. He gets lots of variety in this monogamous relationship.

[Angelina Stanford]

A veritable harem, as it were.

[Cindy Rollins]

All right, on that happy note, we are here to discuss our literary lives of 2021. So if y'all could see this mug look on my husband's face right now. He's quite pleased with himself for his harem joke.

[Mr. Banks]

He's like, well, maybe this is a better deal than I thought.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, no comment about that. Let me move on here. So my first question to you guys is, do you have any thoughts or reflections on your year in reading? Like, how did it go? Did it go in some unexpected places? Did you accidentally park in one spot? Did you unintentionally. Theme. What are your thoughts about your year in reading?

[Angelina Stanford]

I read more than one book by the same author, so I guess I kind of parked on certain authors. But I don't think there was a theme, really. I mean, I think I checked all the boxes. I think I got all the boxes for this year checked by the beginning of maybe last month.

[Cindy Rollins]

The reading challenge. You talked.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, the reading challenge for 2021. But, no, I can't say that anything there was really, like, any determinative center to my reading apart from that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Did you have a good reading year?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I mean, I think I probably read about 55 books or so, or 60, which. I mean, that's not my record, but it's a fine number. You know, I'm satisfied with it.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is a very low number for you. I'm shocked.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it's. I mean, you know, a lot of it is. I think. I think I read parts of a lot of books and kind of. I mean, you've seen me, like, if you see me around the house, I kind of dip into a thing for a bit, but don't necessarily finish it. But, yeah, I think I was finishing an average of one book a week and sometimes a little bit more than that. But, yeah, I don't. I certainly don't think I read so many as 60.

[Cindy Rollins]

Now, those of you listening at home saying, man, she.

[Mr. Banks]

She's.

[Cindy Rollins]

She's scolding. Him for his low number. No, that's not it. It's just when we met, he told me that he has read two books a week since he was 18 years old. And then that after he met me, I plummeted his reading life. So. And he meant that as a compliment.

[Mr. Banks]

You being at least five different people. I mean, it's no wonder I'm amazed. He read six books. 60 books.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. So when I'm shocked at the low number, I'm feeling guilty. I've destroyed my husband's reading life. He spends all this time talking to me now where he used to just read books. You've been reading the book of me. There are many chapters.

[Mr. Banks]

Seasons in life are very important, and being able to. I'm sorry. Here's my lecture for you guys.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, Sydney, please make us feel better.

[Mr. Banks]

Being able to adapt to those seasons is one of life's key measures of happiness. So I think it's great that his. This season in his life is different than the last season. It would be weird if it wasn't, so.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is very. It would be weird. I'm glad I'm more entertaining the book. So, yes, getting married plummeted his reading life. Getting married actually improved my reading life, but it plummeted, plummeting my gym life. Y'all, I have not gone to the gym once since we got married.

[Angelina Stanford]

That. No, you've been.

[Cindy Rollins]

You've been to yoga. They closed it down a little bit. No, that's true.

[Angelina Stanford]

And it was. Right, so it was only Covid. It's Covid's fault.

[Cindy Rollins]

All right, but see, I used to go in the evenings after class. I would go to the gym, and now I like my evenings at home with my husband, so I don't go anymore.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

So basically, we're out of shape and illiterate now, but married life is so good.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Mr. Banks]

Well, there also is a season to take in, but after you've taken in and taken in there, it's important to put out there. So, you know, Thomas has now had opportunities to teach other people. And, you know, it's. It is a good season, too. But you have to. Obviously, he. He's continuing to grow and learn, but just not at the level that he was before.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, that's true. That's true. Well, okay, so I'll talk about my year in reading then. So this will sound weird because I'm on a record pace. I've already beat my previous record. I don't know what it'll be. This is. So we're still at the beginning of December, recording this. And I still have quite a few books going. But the reason why I'm hitting records the last two years is because I discovered that my brain likes audiobooks on double speed, and that will get you through some titles. And Mr. Banks is always shocked. He'll come in the room and you just. It's like the chipmunks in the background. And I'll look up and I'll be like. And he's always shocked that I can say something so intelligent.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, no, I'm always thinking, did the Kentucky Derby come early this year? Because it sounds like a, like, racehorse announcer or something.

[Cindy Rollins]

So, I mean, you may have picked up on this podcast. I have raging adhd, and for my entire life, I could not listen to audiobooks, and I didn't understand how anybody could. And then I was studying ADHD and ran across the tip that the problem with audiobooks was that they were too slow for my very, very fast brain, and if I sped them up, that it would be easier to pay attention. So the irony is, if I listen at one, at speed, one. My. It's too much. It takes them too long to say a sentence. And my mind is often wondering. But if you speed it up double time, I am in my happy place. I can understand it. He walks in, and I'll stop and I'll, you know, talk to him about what I'm reading, and he'll say something like, you got all of that out of a book. You're listening to that fast.

[Angelina Stanford]

And this is. This is actually adorable. But I've noticed that when you have been listening to something on Speed it up, you talk fast yourself. It's hilarious.

[Mr. Banks]

So, you know, funny.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Mr. Banks]

She already talked fast, so that's so funny.

[Cindy Rollins]

I do. He's giving me the cutest look. Yeah, I. I guess I can see that that happens on voxer. Sometimes when I am. I pick up my. My iPad, and I realize I have a whole bunch of messages I miss. I put them on really fast to get through them, and then when I go to leave the message in accidentally am talking triple time fast. Sorry about that, Cindy.

[Mr. Banks]

I have not noticed that. So I guess it's okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

It is reassuring, too, because if this teaching thing falls through for both of us, you can put together a living for the family as an auctioneer or something like that.

[Cindy Rollins]

All right, so I had. I've had a great year, thanks to audiobooks and I. And other books. But. Yeah. So thoughts about my year. I. I sort of. So I looked over my list a little while ago and had to laugh that I had an unintentional Anthony Horowitz year. We talked about him on the previous podcast. He's a writer for Foyles War. He writes the Alex Rider series. And Cindy got me into his modern detective books. And I realized I read not three books, friends, three complete series of books that Anthony Horowitz wrote three different detective series. So the Sherlock Holmes series, the ones in which he wrote himself into the book, and the Magpie Murders book, which I'm waiting for the next one to come out in that series, the third one. So, yeah, I accidentally did that, but they were just so entertaining, so I had a really good time with that. And the other thing I accidentally did, I had a year of a lot of Victorian novels, and that really surprised me. So some of you might know, my master's degree is actually in Victorian literature. That was my first love. But then, you know, over the years, I've pursued other loves. I got really into medieval literature and spent a lot of time reading about how stories work. And I had. I have sort of abandoned the Victorian novel. I mean, not on purpose. It's just other things had my interest. And then last year, Mr. Banks, well, he's teaching a Victorian lit class, and I kept overhearing him teach Thomas Hardy's Four for the Madding Crowd, which I've read a lot of Thomas Hardy, but I had not read that one. And I was so inspired by it. I got the audiobook and listened to it in triple speed and loved it. I mean, just loved it, loved it in a way that has been a long time since I loved a book that hard. And that was the highlight of last year, actually, was the best book I read last year. So that inspired me to keep going this year. So I listened to quite a few Victorian novels and really, really enjoyed them. And we can talk about some of those in our next question. But, yeah, I think that's it. I had a lot of. I had a lot of fun reads, which I'm really trying to be more deliberate about. People at home probably think, oh, we just read all these, you know, esoteric, heady books all the time. That's not true. I. I find that because I. I read so many books for teaching and so many books about books for teaching, and I. I mean, I usually have a stack of scholarly books I'm working through is that I like to get in my car and have a detective novel going. I like to balance it with something a little lighter, which I'm sure Our listeners can relate to, maybe be encouraged by. So, yeah, I also had a lot of nonfiction like I usually do, and we'll talk about that later. But yeah, that was it. My accidental Anthony Horowitz here and a lot of Victorian novels. How about you, Cindy? Thoughts about your year?

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah, my year was I had a very good reading year. I was looking over my books and I'll be at, you know, I'll be over 100. I have, I think I'm about halfway through about 10 books right now that I will probably, Lord willing, finish by the end of the year. And as I was looking over the titles and I was looking for, you know, you said top five we were going to talk about. And I, I thought, wow, I'm really going to have a hard time.

[Cindy Rollins]

You give a top 10 if you.

[Mr. Banks]

If the spirit and even top 10. I had a very good reading year. I read some excellent books. But in looking over the list, I was surprised that, and I've noticed this as I've gotten older, I tend to read more nonfiction than fiction. I think fiction might have beat nonfiction because I whip through a fiction book is easy to keep their page turners, whereas nonfiction books are not necessarily page turners. And I purposely read them slower. I try to keep myself to a chapter a day on a lot of books because the point isn't to get through them. But if I'm reading a murder mystery, then the point is to find out.

[Cindy Rollins]

Very easy to go quickly through those books. Yes.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah. So I was surprised at how many nonfiction books I read. And I just felt like it was a very high quality reading year, very little fluff. And maybe it's just as I'm getting older, I don't have time, I don't have time left for fluff. So there, there was some fluff in there. You know, you start series, murder series or this, you know, something, you think it's going to be good. Somebody gives a recommendation, it turns out not to be your thing. But for the most part, I had a very good reading year. I felt like it was excellent, an excellent year. I enjoyed it very much and I hope next year is as good as this year was.

[Cindy Rollins]

You don't have to give a number, Cindy, but you regularly hit triple digits. You triple digiting this year?

[Mr. Banks]

Oh, yeah. I'm at 96 right now. And I was actually on track to really be way up there. I the, my first part of my year, like January, I read 12 books and by the end of February I'd read 28 books. So I was oh, no, that was the end of March. The end of March. Anyway, the end of March I had read 30 books. So I really started out with a lot of strong reading. And then some things came into my life that kind of shook it up. So I'm just on par for where I normally am. I'll be over 100, maybe 110 if I'm. If I'm not knowing what life is going to bring in the next three weeks. But yeah, so it was a good reading year and I read some excellent books. I read some very long books. I actually feel like talking to you about the Fairy Queen. I thought I probably should get like five books for the Boswell because I think it was released and it's so many volumes.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm not sure that you should count that as more than one book. That was huge.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah. So. But I read, you know, a few of the books I read. I don't, I don't worry about the number. Like I'm. The number just helps me keep on pace. And when I feel like watching something, you know, just knowing I'm not on track and reading helps me to say, no, I'm not going to watch them tonight, I'm going to read. And that is why I like the number thing. I know a lot of people feel like, you know, having goal number goals is kind of crass, and I get that. But for me, it helps me not be undisciplined in areas where I should be.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, that makes sense. And I don't. I don't think anybody should be so concerned with a number that they are only reading short books.

[Mr. Banks]

Oh, no, Right. No, you know, exactly. You're.

[Cindy Rollins]

You're absolutely right. Yeah. No, I. The number thing has really helped me. I've been encouraged. I used to not. And then I would hear. I would always hear you saying you had read over 100 books. And I'd think, how is she doing that? How is she doing that? Of course, now I know that my.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah, the audiobooks do help.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And now that I understand. Right, right now I understand. Now that I understand my adhd, it totally makes sense why I struggled the way that I did. And I mean, I was only hitting, you know, 50 or 60 books a year was a good year for me. And now this will be my second year in triple digits, thanks to audiobooks. I hit. I hit triple digits in November. So I'm. Yeah, this is a record year for me. And I read some long things. I finally read Kristen Laverin's dad or thanks for the reading challenge. We'll talk about that when we get.

[Mr. Banks]

That could be three books. Really? That.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And I mean, the Victorian novels, of course, are long.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

But. Yeah, no, I had a really good year. All right, so with having said that. What? I won't put a number. Top five was just like. Just to say, what were the standouts? Cindy, you want to start us? What were your standouts? And you don't have to limit yourself to 5. I think people listen to this episode to get titles. So tell us.

[Mr. Banks]

Well, I read a book. One of the standouts that really captured my imagination this year was a book that I just. I don't even know where I found it. I think I found it on scribed, but it was audiobook by a guy named Paul Stutzman. It was called Hiking through, and it was Finding Peace and Freedom on the Appalachian Trail. Well, we live really close to the Appalachian Trail. And I'd read A Walk in the woods with Bill Bryson before, which I loved. And I have this imaginary life where I hike a lot and I go on these long hikes. So that was a vacation for me. This book, this guy, his wife dies, it's a true story. And he ends up to get over it. He quits his job, quits everything, and takes off hiking the Appalachian Trail. And he's just this regular guy. And so the whole time I'm reading it, I'm like, I could do this. I could do this. And it genuinely was as if I was hiking the trail. And I really lived vicariously through that book. So that was a fun book for me. And then afterwards, of course, I'm like, looking up how to do it and, can I take, you know, you need $10,000 and some time off and all these things. And then I said something to my son, and he said, where would you go to the restroom? And I was like, all right, I'm not going on that. They didn't cover that in the book very well. And it was like, okay, all dreams, Dash. Thank you, son, for that little moment of reality for me. So. But anyway, that was a fun book for me. Another book that I really. I talked a lot. And maybe both of these books are kind of a theme. The other book that I liked a lot and a lot, other people read it and did not connect with it as much as I did. But I read last winter, first book of the year was Wintering by Catherine May, and it was a book about winter. And since we've moved to our house where we live now, I just love winter I have always been someone who hated.

[Cindy Rollins]

You're the beach girl.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah. Winter was not my thing, but when we moved up here, this is the time of year we see the sunrise and the sunset. We have so many trees, we can't see them the rest of the year. And it's, it's. It's cold, but it's not so cold. And that book had a huge effect on me and I. I'm absolutely probably going to read it again. Another book that I think affected all of us was the two, the Alan Jacobs books, the Narnian and. What was the other one?

[Cindy Rollins]

1943.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah. The year of Our Lord. Those books really were huge, huge books for me. But those are all. I've named all nonfiction books here. But in fiction, I read some Elizabeth Gouge and I read. I'm trying to think what was the best book I read. Oh, I read a Helen McInnes book assignment and Brittany, we did it for our book club because I had suggested.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's a very famous one.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes. That was an excellent book. It's a lot. It's really fun book. I thoroughly enjoyed that. Yes, you will enjoy that book. And it doesn't take a minute to read it. So that was an excellent book. I also read a memoir of Dodie.

[Cindy Rollins]

Smith, of, oh, I Captured the Castle.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes. Of I Captured the castle fame and 101 Dalmatians fame.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes.

[Mr. Banks]

I always forget that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Every single time.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes. She wrote this book called Look Back With Love that was so much fun to read for me. It was really fun because she was this little girl. She grew up in a house of uncles and just her. Her love for her family and their quirkiness and how strange they were and just so many things that happened in the book were. I just very much enjoyed the Dodie Smith book. So those are some of the highlights. And I read. I mean, I have so many great books on this list and I feel bad, just even said, you know, pulling out those five. What about y'all?

[Cindy Rollins]

How about you, Mr. Banks?

[Angelina Stanford]

I would have a hard time choosing five, but I know that my favorite fiction book that I had not read before this year was the go between by L.P. hartley, who's, I don't think, very well known English novelist, at least not very well known in this country. I had never read anything by him before. But the Go between is a novel which the main character is a boy of about middle school age who is the poor guest of a wealthy family at their country estate. And he develops kind of a calf love crush on the high school age daughter of the family. And she, taking advantage of this, uses him to deliver messages to the man whom she is actually in love with. And the boy doesn't really understand the. The content of these messages and actually everything that is signified, some of which is very, very important and consequential. And it's kind of a study of the. The danger of childish innocence. And I won't say how it ends, but it's. Yeah, it's a novel that. That sticks with you. The ending is very memorable, I'll just say that much.

[Cindy Rollins]

This book was the inspiration for Atonement.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. I think that Atonement by Ian. Ian McEwen. Yeah. Was partially inspired by this book. They're very. Both of them. Both of them deal with children who see things or hear things that they don't understand the significance of kids dealing in adult matters.

[Cindy Rollins]

I've read Atonement, so.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So if you like Atonement or the movie. The. Yeah, the movie with Keira Knightley. We're bringing her in again.

[Cindy Rollins]

Sorry. I knew it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Keira Knightley. Yeah. I think the Go between might be a book for you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Was there a standout nonfiction?

[Angelina Stanford]

Several. I. Let me see, I was reading the. I read a lot of the. One of the Bloomsbury group figures, Desmond McCarthy, who wrote some just sort of literary journalism and some. Some critical studies. I enjoyed him a lot. I enjoyed a David Cecil book I wrote. I read about Thomas Hardy, kind of.

[Cindy Rollins]

A low key inkling.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. David Cecilia, kind of one of the. Exactly. An outer ring inkling and man and literary critic. So you read his literary critic? Yeah. Oh, and a book of letters I read by Christopher Hitchens called Letters to a Young Contrarian, which. Don't give that book to your kids because it's lessons on how to. Lessons on how to be disagreeable, basically. But it's very clever and made me sort of, you know, regret that Christopher Hitchens sort of died too soon. And, you know, I could. I do enjoy his books now and again.

[Cindy Rollins]

Now, I noticed you carrying around a lot of biographies this year, though. Any of those stand out for you?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, let me see here. I read. Oh, geez, let me think here. I read a biography of Oscar Wilde by a Dutch author whose name I've. I forget some rather longish Dutch name. But it was. It was strikingly solemn. It was like I was sort of expecting a lighter, you know, sort of, you know, ironic, witty, I mean, at least in like the form of quotations from Wilde himself. But no, it was like A very. An almost dour book.

[Mr. Banks]

It was.

[Angelina Stanford]

It was a well written biography. But yeah, it was. It was almost like Oscar Wilde, you know, the account of his life as written by a man with the mind of an undertaker or something like that. I liked it, but it was the.

[Cindy Rollins]

World'S greatest off putting.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

It was told by someone who has no sense of humor.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sure.

[Mr. Banks]

Isn't it true that the wits are often gloomy people underneath? You know?

[Cindy Rollins]

That is true.

[Mr. Banks]

Think about that. Comedians.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is true. Yeah. And like sort of odds and ends books. Like actually an obscure. This wasn't one of our categories this year, but an obscure book by a well known author. This would have fit last year's, but I read H.G. wells treatment of the feminist movement or the suffragette movement in England. Ann Veronica, which was. I'll just say H.G. wells didn't really write. He didn't really write of romance, the tender matters of the heart very well, but sort of as a. I hadn't. I didn't really know much about the suffragette movement before I picked that book up. And it was actually kind of. Kind of interesting from that perspective. The last, the tender chapters though are a little bit unintentionally comical.

[Mr. Banks]

Is it a nonfiction or fiction?

[Angelina Stanford]

It's a fiction book. It's written about a young woman from kind of a old fashioned family who decides she wants to, you know, fight for the vote.

[Cindy Rollins]

Is it Edwardian?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah. 1905 or thereabouts, I think. Yeah, yeah. He went through this weird phase. Well, weird phase. I mean, H.G. wells wrote science fiction, made himself famous doing that. And then he decided he wanted to be a realist for like about 10 years. And he wrote some. Some, some. Some of them are better than others. But the history of Mr. Paulie and Love and Mr. Lewis and Ann Veronica and a few others which like don't really seem wellsy at all until you pulled them out.

[Cindy Rollins]

I had no idea.

[Mr. Banks]

I just finished Chesterton's the Everlasting man and apparently that's his answer to Wells in some ways.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, somebody looking to pose two books together for the reading challenge could do Chesterton.

[Mr. Banks]

Well, that is true. I think it's outlines of history which he is taking.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. That was a. That was a big kind of atheistic, nihilistic history. Right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. H.G. wells.

[Mr. Banks]

That would be a perfect outlines of history as opposed to the Everlasting Man. I think those would go very well, well together.

[Cindy Rollins]

Very nice, Very nice. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

The Inklings and GK Chesterton and All those guys, like, all of them had a bone to pick with Wells, even though they. I think he kind of inspired all of them in one way or another.

[Mr. Banks]

I mean, Chesterton says nice things about Wells. I mean, he refutes him, but he also, you know, gives credit to him for his talent.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I had quite a few books as a standout. I'm gonna try to not talk too much about the ones that I did for the reading challenge, because we'll get to the reading challenge in a minute. But okay. So I said that I read a bunch of Victorian novels, so I have two that I think really stood out. One, I have read a ton of Elizabeth Gaskell in my life, but I had never read Cranford. And so I finally got around reading that and it was pure delight. Like, there's not a lot of Victorian novels. You would say this is pure delight. It was pure delight. It was so light hearted. I. I laughed so many times because I knew going into it it was one of Charles Dickens favorite novels again, so reading challenge category. And that he had actually written Hard Times as his attempt to copy Cranford. And the whole time I was listening to it, I was like, I could so see why Dickens like this, because there was like this old school character who constantly quoted Samuel Johnson and the younger people were like, no, no, no, Pickwick. This guy writing the Pickwick Papers is great. And so it was just, it was Jenkins. It was just so delightful. Just a great cast of characters, charmingly written. I promise you. Charming is not a word that I ever use to describe a book, but that's the word that comes to mind. Charming and delightful. It's also short. So for a Victorian novel, it's very short. And then the completely other direction, I read an author who's been on my radar forever. In grad school, he was on a syllabus of a class I took on Women's Victorian Women's literature, and he got bumped because we ran out of time. So I've always owned this book but never got around to reading it. So I finally did. It's written in 1892. It's George Gissing's the Odd Women. Now I was going nuts about how much I enjoyed this book. And Mr. Banks told me that Gissing was a huge favorite of Orwell's, that he was actually trying to write a biography of George Gissing when he died.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah, there's one of those, one of those, you know, pie in the sky books that he never lived to write.

[Cindy Rollins]

So this book, the Odd Women. I loved it. Loved it. So my master's degree was on the woman, what was called the woman question in Victorian England. And I'm always fascinated with books that are dealing with the woman question. And this is one of them. So this is a late Victorian novel and it's dealing with early feminism. The title, the Odd Women, refers to the fact that they have a conversation in the book about the fact that women greatly outnumber men. And so if everyone pairs up and gets married, there's going to be a certain number of odd women who won't have partners and what are they supposed to do? And, I mean, I just absolutely loved it. It reminded me in many ways of Barbara Pym's excellent Women. Same kind of idea.

[Mr. Banks]

I was thinking when you said that. That's so funny.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yep, yep, same. It's the same premise. The. The women after World War II, there's just no men. There's. So there's gonna be all these. She calls them excellent women who are not going to be able to marry. And there were very similar questions being asked that. This isn't a. This isn't a. We hate marriage in the family. This is a. Let's be real. There aren't enough men to go around. What are women supposed to do? How do women craft a meaningful life if marriage is not in the cards for them? And it was also really good. I think. How do I want to phrase this in our modern day. I think we are maybe hyper aware of some of the excesses of feminism, maybe where it's gone too far and caused some trouble, maybe even unintentionally. And we tend to then lump every feminist concern altogether as problematic. And I really enjoyed going back and listening to this conversation from, What, a hundred. 120 years ago? 130 years ago. 130 years ago. And. And realizing that the. The early feminists were responding to genuine problems. This was. This was not a revolt against God's order. This was. The reality is that not every woman can get married. And if she's not educated and able to get a job, what is she supposed to do with herself? It's kind of like a hundred years after Jane Austen had to deal with this question in her own life. I'm not married. How do I make a meaningful life? And she had to live on the charity of her family, which was very difficult. And of course, not all women by the late Victorian age would have had that ability. And so it was really interesting to see them encouraging women to go to secretarial colleges. And, you know, try to establish a life for themselves. Anyway, I really, really liked it, so that was a highlight. And nonfiction, I always read a lot. I like to listen to nonfiction in my car. And so I had some nonfiction books that really stood out. So I think I've been raving all year about the Jane Austen biography. I listen to, Jane at Home by Lucy Worsley. So I won't continue to go on to that. But I read a second book by her, which I really enjoyed, which is called Let Me Find It. It was right up my alley, if Walls Could Talk. An Intimate History of the Home. And she goes through each room in the house and starts at the very beginning of history and how that's changed over time.

[Mr. Banks]

It's.

[Cindy Rollins]

It was. So I now know why a drawing room is called a drawing room. I just learned so many things from the outhouse becoming an in house to how people lived who didn't have private bedrooms and when the invention of the bedroom door was, and how that radically changed everything that people had privacy in their bedrooms. Yeah. I felt like I understood books so much better after really understanding how these. Because, I mean, of course, I mean, Jane Austen books are all set inside a home. Right. And this really helps me to understand all that was going on in there. So I really, really liked that. And another kind of odd book that I really enjoyed. You guys will laugh. So I've mentioned on the show before, I like historical fashion. I like to understand how these things changed over time. And, you know, what's the proper part for a Jane Austen novel? And all that hair part.

[Mr. Banks]

I mean.

[Cindy Rollins]

So I read this book, Corsets and Cod, A History of Outrageous Fashion from Roman Times to the Modern Era by Karen Bowman. And that was fabulous. I kept stopping to tell Mr. Banks over and over what was going on. For example, I learned that a purse was originally called a pocket. So women. Women have been complaining since the dawn of time that their dresses didn't have pockets. Right. So the pocket was an external pocket that was sewn, and then it had, like, a shoulder strap. So it was what we would now call a purse. But it was a pocket. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was going to add, actually, our word pocket comes from the French poche, P O C H E, which I think can be a pouch or a pocket.

[Cindy Rollins]

Very interesting. Okay. And so in the evolution of, you know, you go pocket to pocket, book to purse, and some people still call it purse, a pocketbook. But what I realized reading this book was pickpockets were purse snatchers. That's what they were historically. So the whole, like, now we think of it as somebody taking your wallet out of your back pocket. Pickpockets originally actually picked your pocket. They snatched your purse and ran off.

[Mr. Banks]

That reminds me of a nursery rhyme. Lucy Lockett lost her pocket. Kitty Fisher found it. And there any was there in it, except the something rounded.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that's very good.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is very good.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't think I ever heard that one in my childhood.

[Cindy Rollins]

So I've learned a ton of interesting things about that. So, yeah, those were some really fun books that stood out for me. All right, now we're gonna go the opposite direction. Oh, what? Cindy?

[Mr. Banks]

Oh, no, I was just saying that was really interesting. I enjoyed that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Now, there's some other books that stood out for me that I read for the reading challenge, but we'll get to that in a second. But I'm going to go the other direction and ask, what was the worst thing you read this year?

[Angelina Stanford]

Cindy, do you want to go first?

[Mr. Banks]

Oh, man, let me. I gotta think. Do you know Thomas?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, see, I do, but I wonder if Angelina and I don't have the same least favorite book.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, I have a different one.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, you know what I'm gonna say.

[Cindy Rollins]

I figured you were gonna say that. Go ahead.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. So I read. Well, probably is bad luck to say it, you know, I. But I read a study, a recent study of several. Several childhood favorite authors of, you know, the person who wrote this book. And in this book, she has them confess their authorial sins to her. I think that's not an unfair description.

[Cindy Rollins]

Not at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

Of their, I don't know, their lack of an enlightened attitude about various classes of human being today. And it was. It was. It was an infuriating book. And it was written in this kind of. I don't know, just sort of cloying, nursery ish style. So it was at once like a deeply malicious book in a childishly inane one. And that's. That's actually hard to do. Maybe that's kind of an accomplishment in.

[Cindy Rollins]

Itself, but perfectly sad.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it was. It was. I, Angelina, and I mean, we both get angry at a book from time to time. This is the first time in our marriage when we've been angry at the same book, though. So, I mean, we should thank the author. It brought us closer together.

[Cindy Rollins]

It did bring us closer together.

[Angelina Stanford]

We hate the same things.

[Cindy Rollins]

We raged about how much we.

[Angelina Stanford]

So if we ever meet this author, we'll have to thank her and say, my gosh, we hated your book so much.

[Cindy Rollins]

That was a page we liked the introduction in which she said, stories obviously teach us morals and. Or I forget exactly how she put it, but she had it. She believes that stories are very didactic.

[Angelina Stanford]

And, and that in their nature, like whether the author wants them to be or not, it's.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, but she said it very offhandedly, like, we all know that stories, we read stories to teach us lessons.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

It was one of thought, whoa, we don't all know this. Some of us firmly disagree with this.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. That was just a terrible book.

[Cindy Rollins]

She very much believed what I said earlier that books are philosophy delivery systems.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. And it was, it was amazing. It was one of those books that got blurbed positively by some. You know, again, we won't name names. We won't name names, but, you know, people who. Yeah, maybe, you know, should be. Should be better than that.

[Cindy Rollins]

I don't.

[Angelina Stanford]

It was, it was just exactly flabbergasting.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so along those same lines, the worst book I read this year and it was so disappointing. It was a book which, the title you would think I would love. It's called the Storytelling How Stories Make Us Human.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's almost. That's reminds me of Harold Bloom's How Shakespeare Invented the Human Race.

[Cindy Rollins]

So I was curious and I read it and it was horrible. It was. He was a psychologist whose basic theory was stories are comforting lies we tell ourselves to cope with our impending death. And I was like, that is seriously the most depressing and sad thing I have ever heard. And I would never ever devote my entire life to stories if all I thought they were was a coping mechanism for death. I'd be like, just go out and buy some wine. It's way cheaper. It's much less work. Like he, he thought he was writing this very rah, rah, I'm going to show everybody how stories will save the world. And it was the most just discouraging, disheartening book about stories ever.

[Angelina Stanford]

It seems that would be a very poor schematic for explaining depressing stories because, I mean, if you're just distracting yourself, you'd think that every story would be like a light, happy comedy. But I mean, why would we read Sam's. Yeah. Why would Dostoevsky have written anything? I mean. Yeah, that just doesn't.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. That's not an escape from life's misery. That's head first right into it. Mud piece.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

Pushy face. And it was just so bizarre. He just kept saying happy endings aren't real. But, you know, we lie to ourselves he just kept saying, it's the lie. It's the happy little lie we tell ourselves. Okay, okay. Yeah. That was. Yeah, yeah. Anybody who thinks stories is the happy little lie we tell ourselves to cope with our death.

[Mr. Banks]

Oh, my goodness. What a complete understanding of everything.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, right. Talk about. Yeah, no, exactly. There were a lot of problems. He had no concept of transcendental anything. Everything was just a psychological process. Everything was, you know, this. This fires up your dopamine receptors in your brain, and so that's why we read it. But then, of course, Mr. Banks's point about, I don't think.

[Angelina Stanford]

Notes to the Underground. I didn't, you know, start skipping down the street, whistling cheerfully.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, you know, I love the feel good feeling of Macbeth.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sure, right.

[Cindy Rollins]

He doesn't love that we hold hands.

[Mr. Banks]

Well, I mean, there's one guy left. I'm so chee.

[Cindy Rollins]

Shakespeare's tragedies are always good when you want that happy little lie. All right. Yeah, that was definitely the worst. All right, Cindy, you've had some time.

[Mr. Banks]

Okay. I did think so. I had a couple books I didn't finish. I actually have one book that was just awful, and I did finish it. I hate. I hate to stop reading books. But our book club this year. And so as someone who writes books and also, you know, people review your books and that there is nothing worse than reading a review of your own work, even if it's a good review, it's so scary. You just don't know what's going to happen. And I just can't even tell you how frightening it is to read a review. And then when you know it's a bad review, like how the stars are bad, it probably should be a growing experience, but instead it's just more like a, I'm going to bed with some ice cream and leave me alone. But so I'm very careful. I try to be careful not to be too critical of living authors. And so I'm not even going to name the books that I hated. But I do have a funny story about it. Our book club this year. So we have a local book club and we try to concentrate on classics. But this year, for some reason, we picked. There were about three books we picked that we all struggled to get through. And being that I was so busy this year, I didn't make it through. One was like A History of Flowers. It sounded like it was going to be a really good book. And then it was so incredibly boring, I couldn't even get through the first chapter. And I just thought I'M not going to make it. Everybody who had gotten ahead had said, oh, no, you're not going to make it. So that was one. That was one of the worst books, and it was just bad because it was boring. It didn't have any terrible thing in it. And I read another book that I would say was, I really don't want to recommend or let people know I read it, because after I read it, I realized, wow, I wish I could forget some scenes in that book. And so I'm not even going to mention it. So. So there. How's that for nothing? That.

[Cindy Rollins]

There you go. There you go. Yeah. I just realized as you were talking that actually just last week, I returned a book from the library without finishing it because I was so angry with it. And, yeah, it was a book on Shakespeare. It's a popular book on Shakespeare. And it was so horribly wrong. Every word out of this man's mouth was wrong.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not by Harold Bloom, but a disciple of Harold Bloom will be unnamed.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, we can name him Steven Greenblatt. Burn his books. The book was called no, he was horrible. I ranted about this to my class this week. It's called Tyrant Shakespeare on politics. And he was looking at Macbeth and Richard III and King Lear and all the tyrants, Right? Oh, my gosh. This guy cannot read his way out of a wet paper bag. If the direction said, don't put this plastic bag on your head, he would die because he doesn't know how to read. He would be looking for the Freudian interpretation. You have no idea. Everything for. Okay, he actually states, in Shakespeare, we learn that tyrants are the product of sexual impotence. Yeah, thank you. Exactly. Exactly. So he read every one of those. It's just this guy's sexually frustrated and he feels powerless, so he takes out power in tyranny. He just gutted. So the play, the Shakespeare play I know the best because I've taught it the most is Macbeth. I know that play inside and out. And to listen to the chapter on Macbeth is where I finally said, I'm not listening to another word this guy says. And I did not finish the book, which is a big deal to me, because I wanted to add that number to my list. But he had just. He took these speeches of Macbeth and he turned them inside out and made them mean the exact opposite that they mean. I mean, it was just insane. For example, okay, in the play, Lady Macbeth is very upset that Macbeth is starting to chicken out about the king. And so she basically says, you need a man up and I'm more of a man than you are. And so she says, unsafe sex. Me, right? In other words, don't make me a woman. Make me a man so I can do a man's job, because you're not man enough. And she's really poking at his manhood, right? And she's like, if I was a man, I'd be man enough to do whatever. I promise I'd keep my word, even if it was hard. If I said that I was going to kill my baby, I would pull it off my chest while I was, you know, giving suck to it, and I'd smash its head in. It's like this really intense, violent speech, because the whole speech is manna. Macbeth, don't be a wuss, right? And then he responds in shock at how violently she's spoken, and he says, bring forth male children only.

[Mr. Banks]

Right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Like, whoa, no. No girl can come from you. You're too. You're so masculine. You're only going to have male children, right? That is what that speech means. According to Stephen Greenblatt. Macbeth saying bring forth male children only shows how concerned he is about the succession and heirs and wanting to establish his kingdom for the future.

[Mr. Banks]

Wow. They're an infertile couple.

[Cindy Rollins]

You just said they're an infertile couple three pages earlier. And that's why. And you say that's because Macbeth's impotent and. But also some. And his impotency has made him become a tyrant, but somehow also, he's very concerned about the succession and having children and just. Oh, stop. Yeah, it was really bad. It was really bad. So that was two Freudian readings of stories and the Freudian Simple. They can't. They can't grasp it. That was. Okay, so let me see if I could change gears now. I need, like, a palette cleanser here. We need some, you know, a moosh bouche to come cleanse.

[Mr. Banks]

We shouldn't have had that category. What do we hate?

[Cindy Rollins]

I should have put that at the end and then just been like. And goodbye, everybody. So how about. Did everybody finish the reading challenge? And you have any thoughts about your reading?

[Mr. Banks]

With the.

[Cindy Rollins]

With the reading challenge?

[Angelina Stanford]

My reading. I think over this next year, I'll probably try to branch out into.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, no, no. That's gonna be the last question. The previous reading challenge, did you finish this last.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes, absolutely. Yes. I. And it was. Yeah, I'm. I'm. I read a lot of books. I read more books that I enjoyed this year than that I didn't enjoy. Honestly, The. The one I mentioned already apart from that, I mean. And then I reviewed one or two books, which, you know, that's not the reading I enjoy the most. But, no, I was very satisfied with my personal readings.

[Cindy Rollins]

Anything stood out from you as something you read in the reading challenge that maybe you wouldn't have read otherwise?

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, one. I. It was kind of two birds with one stone. It's a book I'm reviewing, but also one that's kind of out of the way for me. I read a manifesto. I do not read Mini man political manifesto by actually a writer I've named Michael Warren Davis, who's. I should. He's an editor who had accepted some of my stuff before. And I, you know, I have nothing but good to say about him as a man. But, yeah, I don't read manifestos. And it reminded me that I don't need to read another one for a while. I guess I'm not a manifesto guy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Maybe that's my genre. Maybe I should write a manifesto.

[Angelina Stanford]

Nothing against the book itself, but, you know.

[Cindy Rollins]

What did you read as your regional book?

[Angelina Stanford]

I read a history of. It was a short history. I mean, it was kind of history. Travel in North Carolina, book by an author. I don't remember back at the back at the beginning of the year. It was. I, you know, I have a hard time interesting myself in local history wherever I live. I don't know why, but that's. That's a shortcoming with me.

[Cindy Rollins]

Your father would change.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, no, he would be. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Because at our wedding he flew into town and immediately went and bought books on the history of our town. Gave it to us at the.

[Angelina Stanford]

I've leafed through those and I. Yeah. And of course, like the Civil War, like things that involve North Carolina. Of course, certainly. But I mean, just North Carolina itself is. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it's much more interesting than my home state, Idaho. Idaho history is just boring, I think, objectively, you know. You know, you know, Lewis and Clark come through and, you know, there's potatoes and whatnot. But no, I'm sorry to anyone who still lives in Idaho. And I. I have nothing but fond things to say about my fellow Idahoans. But. Yeah, our state has no. No history worth reading. Not even slightly.

[Cindy Rollins]

How about you, Cindy? What. What are your thoughts about the reading challenge? I'm presuming you completed it and have that.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes, I did complete it and I. My regional book, that was a hard category because, you know, we all had a limited amount of people we could ask about it, but Our book club did read a book called as the Indians Left it by a local naturalist who wrote it. It was really the history of the nature center that we visit a lot. And part of it was very good. This family had grown up in this cabin and I enjoyed it. And then he became this naturalist who ended up starting all this stuff in the 1940s and 50s, this Audubon nature Preserve. So it took me a long time to get through that book. So it wasn't a five star book, but I did make it through and otherwise the, that was a book I would probably not have read. That book I mentioned already, the hiking through, I read that as the travel book and it kind of forced me. I really looked hard for which book to read and I think I just finally said I'm going to read that. And I'm so glad I did. And most of my other books in the challenge I've kind of talked about. We, you know, 84 Charing Crossroad. I read three Shakespeare's plays. I did this year I did Love's Labor's Lost, King John and Romeo and Juliet, which I really should have read more. But after we got Covid last year in March and my Shakespeare reading kind of fell off at that point, I, I, I'm always like in on a roll and then if something stops it, then I'm usually done for the year. So, yeah, I'm ready to get back. Yeah. So, so anyway, what about you? What, how did your, how did you feel about your.

[Cindy Rollins]

So I, I completed the reading challenge and thanks to the reading challenge, I finally read Kristen Labran's Daughter, which you have been talking about forever and ever and ever. And it was my book I've avoided. And I had avoided it before because everyone said it was very emotionally intense. And so I just kept thinking, do I really, really want to spend 12, you know, 1200 pages?

[Mr. Banks]

Right, right.

[Cindy Rollins]

But so I, I said, well, I'm really happily married. I'm in a good place in my life, maybe I can handle it. So I listened to it on audio and did puzzles. That's another thing I've discovered with adhd. If my hands are busy while I'm listening, I, I'm, can you focus? Even better. So puzzles, coloring books, knitting, all that, just anything that keeps your hands busy. I'm giving you free life tips for our neurodiverse audience.

[Mr. Banks]

But puzzles, do you mean like jigsaw puzzles?

[Cindy Rollins]

Puzzles, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll sit at the table with my iPad on a book on high speed and just go to town on that puzzle. And it's like, I'm just in the zone. I can focus.

[Mr. Banks]

I mean, are you doing the jigsaw puzzle on your iPad or on the table?

[Cindy Rollins]

No, no, no, I'm on the table.

[Mr. Banks]

Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

I have a physical puzzle. I'm listening to my.

[Mr. Banks]

Sorry, I'm just trying to get this straight here.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So I've got my iPad propped up with the audiobook playing, and I'm working a jigsaw puzzle.

[Mr. Banks]

Oh, well, you know, I did that jigsaw puzzle earlier in the year, and I posted a picture of it on Instagram. It was Shakespeare's. A scene from, like, all. With all little people from Shakespeare's play.

[Cindy Rollins]

Shakespeare's world puzzle.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah, I had that one.

[Cindy Rollins]

There's a Jane Austen's world, too.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes. And this one was really hard. And then everybody who came. So now I've been gifted several puzzles because people who came while it ended up being on the table for forever because.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Mr. Banks]

It took so long for me to do, and I basically did it with a little help from a few other people. So now people are gifting me puzzles.

[Cindy Rollins]

Now you're the puzzle lady. Yeah.

[Mr. Banks]

So I'm gonna have to do some more.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, my daughter comes out, and she. And she likes to do the puzzles, too.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah. Alex, when he's home, he will do a puzzle with me.

[Cindy Rollins]

I bought two that were really fun this year. I think I had put pictures in the life group of them. They were. They were. They were puzzles of. Of classic book covers. That. That was. That was a. That was a lot of fun. I had one that was British classics, and another. Another that's children's classics, and the children's classics was a lot of fun to do with my daughter because we were reminiscing like, oh, remember how much he used to like this book? That was. That was fun. So, yes, I got through Kristen labransadder and I really, really liked it. And I can definitely see why you have loved it and why.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah, I'm so glad to hear that. I would have really been. It would have been hard if you had said I didn't like that. What?

[Cindy Rollins]

If I had said that was the worst book I read this year?

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah. It would have really hurt. It would have been. That would have been.

[Cindy Rollins]

Destroyed our friendship. No, no, no. I liked it. I know I liked it a lot. I had never read.

[Mr. Banks]

I get when people can't take it. Like, I get. They can't take it, but I. If they don't like it, that's different. You Know it. You do. If you're in a vulnerable time in your life, it might be a little hard to read.

[Cindy Rollins]

Another thing that stood out. So I think I've said a few times on the podcast, this last year I reread all of Jane Austen's novels. Yeah, that was one of my goals and that was a lot of fun and ups. But. But that included reading something for the first time. So my lesser known book by a well known author, I read Lady Susan by Jane Austen. I had never read that before and I loved it. Oh my goodness, I loved it. So this is a very, very early work for her. It's almost her juvenile and her irony is a lot more pointed and sassy. She's like sassy in this book. And no, I thought it was fan fantastic and I thought that the Amazon movie of it, Love and Friendship, was really good.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah, I enjoyed that movie.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So that, that was a standout. Let's see what else. Of course, I loved when we did 84 Charing Crossroad on the podcast and got all into Helene pants. And so for my travel book, I read the Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.

[Mr. Banks]

I love that book.

[Cindy Rollins]

Finally getting there. So that was a lot of fun. I actually read that one. I didn't have that one on audio of that, so that was fun. Let's see, I'm flipping through. Of course I read lots of books on literature and art and education, but I really.

[Mr. Banks]

Those are easy categories.

[Cindy Rollins]

Literary biography. So the Jane Austen at home was really good. And I also listened to Tolkien and the Great War, which was very, very good and was mostly the basis for that Tolkien movie. So we watched the movie.

[Mr. Banks]

Did you watch that movie? What did you think?

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, we loved it.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I wasn't necessarily expecting it to be as good as it was, but it was impressed.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. If we had a category that was movie we've avoided, that would have been my category because I was just afraid, you know, you just think, oh no. Yeah, yeah, so much.

[Mr. Banks]

My son insisted I watch that and it took me months to, you know, go ahead and make, make the myself do it. And then I was like, I love this movie.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, we really loved it. Great performances. And we actually watched some interviews with the actors who, who did a ton of research and really like, really knew who Tolkien was. And I mean, the guy who played Tolkien, we even saw an interview with him where he like, he went so method that he read that Tolkien drew all his own illustrations and so he tried to learn how to draw in the style of Tolkien.

[Mr. Banks]

And so oh, my goodness.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, so he, like, he was trying to inhabit the character and I. And I thought it was great. So a lot of what was in the movie, I kept thinking, oh, this is like the book that I had read. A Hobbit, a Wardrobe in a. In a World War, or something like that.

[Mr. Banks]

Right. I read that and that was really good.

[Cindy Rollins]

I kept saying, oh, it's like that. And then I realized, well, no, that book had borrowed heavily from the book Tolkien and the Great War. And that was. That was really the basis of the book. I love the movie by John Garth and I enjoyed that. I actually cried through that audiobook. Yeah, I had to pull over. I actually had to pull my car over. I was crying because, I mean, I guess there's no spoilers when it comes to the wars. His very close group of friends, just like Lewis, they don't. They don't survive the war. And so basically you're reading this book and you're reading their letters and you're watching them all drop off one at a time, and it's. It. And then you're, you know, you're reading the letters of the surviving members as they. As they cope with this loss. And, yeah, it's just heartbreaking. Just heartbreaking. But a really, really good book. Let's see, what else? Oh, so for my Otherworld book, I. Again, just like you said, Cindy, I'm always a little nervous to read something new because what if I've just wasted what short time I have left in my life to read something not good? But everybody kept talking about Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. So I got that from the library and loved it. Loved it. Like, two huge thumbs up. It starts with a little epigram by. From the Magician's Nephew. Epigram or epigraph? I always get those mixed up.

[Angelina Stanford]

Epigraph.

[Cindy Rollins]

I knew I had picked it wrong. Inside my brain, it was like a little sword fight between the P and the M. Which one are Epigraph. So it starts off with the Magician's Nephew, which of course has that, you know, world between the worlds. And the whole time I'm reading it, I won't give any spoilers, but the whole time I'm reading it, I kept thinking to myself, this is a woman who knows the tradition she's writing. There were so many nods to other. Otherworld books. There were so many nods to how stories function and that she understands how an otherworld story works. So that's very exciting to me when I find a modern author who I think, oh, this person Knows their stuff. They know their stuff. And it was just well written, a good story. So that was. That was really good. I read a bunch of Neil Gaiman this year as well. I really. I enjoy him. And then for my obscure book mentioned by Thomas Banks, I have no idea if he ever said this on the podcast or not, but he sent it to me. I live with him, so it's everything. I get lots of obscure books from. But I read a Somerset Malm book that he has been trying to get me to read since we met called the Painted Veil, and that was really good. And you a move. There's a movie of that, right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Movie with Naomi Watson, Edward Norton.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes, I did see the movie and I think I read the book.

[Cindy Rollins]

And what's the line in there? You told me this line, and that's why I read the book. It was something like duty is the place where desire.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I think it's love is the place where duty and desire.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, something like. That's right.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's a paraphrase. But yeah.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

So there are some nuns in this book, and this character is feeling torn between her duty and desire she has for some other things. I don't want to give spoilers. And this nun helps her to harmonize that, showing us that duty and desire should not be in conflict with a heart that's centered on love. Anyway, that was really good, too. So, yeah, I also read three Shakespeare plays, oddly enough. What did you read as your Shakespeare?

[Angelina Stanford]

I read one Shakespeare play this year. Honestly, this was probably the least Shakespeare I've read in a long time. I read Othello and I read, like, bits and pieces of some others. But no, I mean, I can't remember the last time I have been. So I taught a mini class, Shakespeare's Roman Place, last year. So maybe I was just kind of Shakespeare out. But yeah, I didn't read a whole lot of Shakespeare.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I mean, of the three, I read two of them I taught. So, you know, I read for classes. And then the Tempest, we did the. Read along.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

So, yep, that was really. That was really good. And the book that I finished, that I had started but didn't finish, I had started Stephen Fry's Mythos at the end of last year, and then it went into January because it's a very long audiobook. So I still can't say enough good things about the whole Stephen Fry series. Just fabulous, fabulous books. We raved and raved about them back in 2020, but. So it's still. It's still Worthwhile to bring it up again if you're saying, I don't know where to start with mythology. It's just, gosh, he just did such an amazing job and he obviously loves them so much. And they're beautiful books too. Just beautiful books. And he reads it with that kind of cheeky, dry British tongue in cheek. So, you know, you have to like that sense of humor. But yeah, I really enjoyed those. So, having said that, let's close up by talking a little bit about our reading for next year. And I want to ask each of you how you approach your reading, because I know some people are out there with charts and graphs and spreadsheets and pie charts and they plan out their whole year. And maybe people assume that's how we are. Very type A. We've got our list and we're working through it.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I'm not. I don't know about you.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, none of us. None of us. I could not be okay. Phew. None of us are that way. So how would you describe your approach to like, how are you going to think about reading in the new year?

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, I have done a lot of reading, not mandated by, but inspired by my classes over the last couple of years. I've read a lot about World War I as a result of teaching it because I had not ever taught World War I before I started teaching on online with Ms. Stanford. So, yeah, I read probably a good, a good handful, probably four or five books about World War I in this past year. I mean, that also is some of it in preparation for a webinar I did on the subject.

[Mr. Banks]

That's a rabbit hole that never ends.

[Angelina Stanford]

It really doesn't.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's fascinating time period.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Yeah. And yeah, I just bought a. Another book about Edwardian England by historian I like called Charles Petrie because I've been, you know, I'd read some E.M. forster, some of his. Some of his essays and stories and a little. I've read some, you know, Vita Sackville west and some of some of the other Bloomsbury people. So I know, I think I want to read a history of that decade, you know, 1900 to 1910. So.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

So you. Yeah. See, I say my approach to reading is I go where the spirit leads. I have no plan.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sure.

[Cindy Rollins]

I used to drive myself crazy having plans only to abandon them. I have no plan. I literally just go where the spirit leads.

[Angelina Stanford]

The wind bloweth where it listeth.

[Mr. Banks]

I'm always picking off a classic that I've not gotten to yet. So, you know, I'm Still, I still haven't caught up with the classics, all of them, so well.

[Cindy Rollins]

And that's how the reading challenge helps me to give my reading a bit of focus. But I mean, like Mr. Banks, I'm reading a lot for classes and reading a lot that's associated with my reading for classes. And then, but then I'm such a footnote traveler. That's why I don't have a plan, because I don't know what's going to get me excited. So, for example, I read that Jane Austen biography and then thought, oh, I feel like understanding her life. I will understand her book so much more. And then I just started. I read through the whole thing. So it's not like I started the year with, this is going to be my goal. I was just interested in it. And so I'm very much a believer in pursuing your interests. And the reading challenge definitely helps me to spread it. But I do try to, I guess, my general approach to reading as I have many, many, many, many, many books going at the same time because I teach a lot of classes and then we have podcast reading, and then I try to always have both a nonfiction and a fiction book going at the same time as my. As my extra reading. And again, a lot of times my nonfiction will be just. So I got curious about something and listened to a whole bunch of books on it. But yeah, so, I mean, I'm looking forward to the reading challenge. Yeah. And, and I. That's going to be fun to fill out, but I'm, you know, it's funny to me how everybody's so different. And I know a lot of people really enjoyed getting out their lists and asking for suggestions and writing out a plan. I could not be more different. I. I read and I log my reading, and then at the end, I pull out the reading challenge and see what fits where.

[Mr. Banks]

Right. I think halfway through the year, I started plugging things in to see where I stood and what.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I did that too.

[Mr. Banks]

You know, what categories were going to be a little more challenging, difficult to find. And so that's generally how I do. Or if someone suggests a book, then I buy it on my Kindle and start reading it. Sometimes if it's a book, I'm at the point in life where I collect. I still collect really good books, but for the most part, I don't want any more books in my house than what I have. So I get new books, old books. Something has to go. And I'm not trying to collect a library. I have kids. I can get Books, too. And it's not a problem. My son gave me his list for Christmas, his Christmas list book. And I had bought a few sets of these books, and they. I hadn't put them out yet, and they were. They. I had no shelf for them. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna wrap this up for him. He doesn't even know I've already bought these books.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's the way to go. And then, of course, the three of us, we often recommend books to each other.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah, definitely.

[Cindy Rollins]

I mean, you and I, all the time. I'll read what you're reading and, you know, vice versa.

[Mr. Banks]

Or Mr. Banks, I have a Thomas Recommended book I have by my bedside that I haven't. I keep falling asleep before I read my paragraph or two of it each night. But I'm still working on it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So, I mean. Yeah, personal recommendations, footnotes, things I get curious about. You know, we'll. We'll see. I do have, like, a kind of a couple of general ideas. When we put together the reading challenge, I thought, oh, yeah, I could. I could reread Jane Eyre and do a webinar. But, you know, then again, I might get interested in something else and think, no, I need to reread all of, you know, all Thomas Hardy or something. You know, you just never know what's going to flip the switch.

[Mr. Banks]

Right. I just keep going through this. I've. I've read Trollop, like, here and there, and. And I keep thinking I need to have a year of Trollop. And. But I just don't know. I'm still. I get stuck at George McDonald a lot of times, so it's hard to. It's. It's hard to not have enough time to read all these things. I need to try that.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was going to say, I read two Trollope books this last year, and like, both of them. One of them I read while I was. I think I read both of them in the summer. And one of them is a rare Anthony Trollope novel which is not set in England. It was called Nina Valatka, and it's set in Bohemia. It's. It's a love story. It's a love story, you know, involving, you know, income disparities, which is sort of, you know, where every Trollop novel heads eventually. It was a nice little book. It was. It was, I think, about 200 and some odd pages. So one of his shorter ones. And I. Yeah, there was a side of him I had not known before. And I've read probably not as much as Cindy, but a pretty good deal of Trollop.

[Cindy Rollins]

And yeah, I also read a Trollop novel this year, so I had only ever read the Eustace Diamonds, which I had loved. And you kept talking about the Warden as one of your favorite books, so I read that.

[Mr. Banks]

Yes, I like the Warden.

[Cindy Rollins]

And yeah, I liked it. That was good. Yeah.

[Mr. Banks]

So I also watched where we. I'm reading a. Chris, our book club is doing Trollope for Christmas. We finished all of Dickens's Christmas stories. Each year we read a story. So this year we. We are doing a little volume of Trollope's Christmas stories.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, fun. I didn't know he wrote any of those.

[Cindy Rollins]

I didn't either.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah, I did not know that either, but he did. And I don't think they're pulled out of other books, but they might have been. They seem like they're short stories in themselves.

[Cindy Rollins]

Trollope and Dickens are probably the two most prolific of the Victorians, aren't they? This guy just wrote.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's a. Yeah, that would be a hard contest to win because they have. You're just old.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, I just. I'm too old to even consider, though. Oh, yeah. Dickens. There's too many.

[Angelina Stanford]

I am.

[Cindy Rollins]

You know, I've read a lot. I'm not even going to try to read them all.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was. I was going to say Trollop, actually. One of the secrets to his productivity was he paid for the. For the privilege or whatever you want to call it. He would pay a neighbor to knock on his door at 6:00 or something every morning so that, I mean, you know, he would get up and give the shilling to the neighbor, and then he had a reason to stay up, because otherwise, if he doesn't stay up and write, it's a shilling wasted. So, yeah, maybe if I. If I paid our neighbor to remind me to write a poem or something, I could begin this hugely prolific poem.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so that's a very different approach than. Is it Dostoyevsky or Dumas who. Who would take their clothes off and give it to their wife and she'd hide them?

[Angelina Stanford]

That was Victor Hugo. That was also brilliant. Yeah, so, like, he would set himself in an isolated room in like, his underwear, basically, and all his other clothes would be in the keeping of his wife, so he couldn't leave the room, like. And he would say that. Don't come into the room, like, no matter if you hear me screaming for mercy or something, for five hours or something like that. So. And again, that's. Victor Hugo's. You collected works fill A couple of shelves. So I guess. I guess it worked.

[Cindy Rollins]

I guess it worked. So the modern equivalent, because I'm not going to hide your clothes from you. Maybe just, like, turn off the WI fi.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Cindy Rollins]

You get no WI fi until you've written five chapters. You might have to do that for me. Well, this has been a good. This has been a good conversation. I've had a really good year. Reading the podcast has had a very, very, very successful year. And we thank you guys so much for listening with us. And we've been so deeply encouraged by all of your stories about how reading with the podcast has reinvigorated your own literary lives. So that's been just. I can't even begin to say how satisfying that is to hear your stories. And so thank you for sharing those with us. So special thanks to our Patreon. Because they pay to keep this going, we don't accept advertising because Cindy and I are too pure for that.

[Mr. Banks]

Too. It's too much angst, really.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, you see how badly we talk about books. How could we ever have advertisers? But. So, yes, thanks to our Patreon, you go to patreon.com literary life to find out about our different levels of membership and the Patreon Only forum that we've got going on, which is really great in our live events and the talks that we've got in there and all kinds of good stuff. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Thank you for being here with us. Thank you for rating, reviewing and subscribing. You can find us on Instagram. You can find us on a very active Facebook group. You can find us on our Patreon Only forums. So we hope that you will have a blessed and happy Christmas full of good books under your tree and you find some time to read and that we can all hit January. Really excited about the books that will come our way over the next year. And thanks, of course, to Mr. Banks and to Cindy for letting me just go on and on and on about books episode after episode.

[Mr. Banks]

Yeah. Merry Christmas, everyone.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Merry, merry. Come on, Tiny Tim. Merry Christmas. God bless us, everyone. On that happy note, keep crafting your literary life, because stories will save the world.

[Angelina Stanford]

The Poetry of Shakespeare by George Meredith. Picture some aisle smiling green mid the white foaming ocean Full of old woods, leafy wisdoms and frolicsome fays, passions and pageants. Sweet love, singing bird like above it. Life in all shapes, aims and fates is there, warmed by one great human heart.