Episode 307: "Best of" – Our Year in Reading, Ep. 31

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Literary Life Podcast – Episode 307

"Best of" – Our Year in Reading, Ep. 31

Release Date: December 16, 2025
Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, Cindy Rollins

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Episode Overview

This “Best of” episode revisits a beloved conversation from the Literary Life Podcast’s archives, originally recorded as a special New Year's Eve celebration. Hosts Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, and Cindy Rollins reflect on their reading journeys from a previous year, sharing standout titles, insights on literary trends, and launching their now-classic “20 for 2020” Reading Challenge. The trio dives deep into not only recommending books but also exploring the philosophy of reading—revealing why stories matter, offering practical encouragement for building a rich reading life, and dispelling common reading anxieties.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Commonplace Quotes & Reflections

• Mary Oliver’s Poetry and Loving the World
  Cindy shares a resonant quote by Mary Oliver:

  “Thus we sit, myself thinking how grateful I am for the moon's perfect beauty, and also, oh, how rich it is to love the world.”
  (02:00)
  This prompts a discussion about embracing the natural world and the rightful place of beauty and physicality in faith and literature.

• Hazlitt on the Decline of the Mythic in Modern Drama
  Thomas offers a quote from William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare:

  “The progress of manners and knowledge has an influence on the stage, and will in time destroy both tragedy and comedy. The ghosts in Shakespeare will become obsolete.”
  (06:13)
  This observation launches a discussion on the cultural drift away from the mythic and supernatural and the modern resurgence of mythic storytelling (e.g., superhero movies, fairy tales).

• Fairy Tales and Modern Realism
  Angelina breaks her “only dead authors” rule to share a passage from Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, championing the legitimacy and delight of stories that blend reality and myth:

  “In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”
  (10:53)

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2. Yearly Reading Habits and Standout Books

• Reading Goals, Tools & Reflections
  Cindy explains her use of Goodreads’ yearly goals—not as a competition, but as personal accountability:

  “It’s not about the numbers... it’s just about me having a goal to hit so that I do make better choices when I have the choice.”
  (13:24)
  She notes her most popular read was Huckleberry Finn, and least was The Faerie Queene, Book Four.

• Diverse Literary Tastes and Surprising Finds

  • Cindy highlights Kristin Lavransdatter, Yeats’s Complete Poems, Tolkien’s Letters From Father Christmas and Leaf by Niggle, and Sharon K. Penman’s historical novels.
  • Thomas delved into Russian novelist Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, Home of the Gentry) and praised their accessibility and psychological depth.
  • Angelina had a “year of the minor author,” discovering treasures like Hugh Walpole’s Killer and the Slain, E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (a favorite of Dorothy Sayers), Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Notable Memorable Moments

• Cindy’s comic hymn confusion and preference for original verses (04:10).
• Running joke about Cindy having read every obscure author:

  “Of course, of course... Well, I’m really old.” – Cindy (25:03, 25:29)

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3. Launching the “20 for 2020” Reading Challenge

Challenge Goal:

Twenty open-ended categories designed to stretch, inspire, and encourage individual and communal reading, while allowing for flexibility and personal tailoring. Some categories can be doubled for “easier” completion; others can be layered for more ambitious readers.

Categories & Recommendations:

Each host highlights a few favorites, resources, and strategies:

• Shakespeare Play – Suggest starting with comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare audiobooks and performance videos are readily available. (43:49)
• Classic Detective Novel – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Father Brown. Cindy recommends The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham. (50:36)
• Classic Children’s Book – Victorian/Golden Age classics (Alice in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables). Thomas mentions The Crane Wife (a Japanese tale). (52:05)
• Contemporary Novel – Angelina endorses The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey; Cindy mentions Susan Hill and Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. (55:46)
• Historical Fiction – Options from Sharon K. Penman, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company, and Tolstoy. (59:25)
• Ancient Greek Play – Oedipus Rex, or The Bacchae by Euripides (Thomas’s recommendation). (61:23)
• Short Stories Collection – Flannery O’Connor, Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter stories. Visit used bookstores for surprises. (63:39)
• Biography/Memoir – A.N. Wilson’s biography of Prince Albert; Hilaire Belloc’s Marie Antoinette; Madeleine L’Engle’s A Circle of Quiet. (64:45)
• Devotional Work – Broadly defined, from Proverbs to church commentary to modern devotionals. (66:32)
• Book About Books – Angelina’s pick: A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland; others: How the Heather Looks, Rod Dreher’s How Dante Saved My Life. (67:07)
• Foreign Non-Western Book – Cry, the Beloved Country (South Africa), Things Fall Apart (Nigeria), Silence by Shusaku Endo (Japan). (70:57)

Other categories include: guilty pleasure, intimidating book, satire, a complete poetry volume, a minor author, a classic female author, essays, reread from high school, and a book out of your comfort zone; each incites laughter, confessions, and great recommendations.

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4. Reading Life Philosophies and Encouragement

• Flexibility & Customization:

  “You can double up or triple up, so you don’t actually have to read 20 books... You can choose the level of difficulty that you want.” - Angelina (41:31)

• On Making the Most of Your Reading Life:

  “A really good children’s book is definitely enjoyable and worthy of the time of an adult.” – Angelina (51:23)

• About Book Guilt and Reading Honesty:
  Conversation about Goodreads transparency, owning your "guilty pleasure" reads (from celebrity memoirs to rock band biographies):

  “Even the man here who reads Latin commentaries... we have our slum reading, too. It’s not all highbrow.” – Angelina (76:34)

• Encouragement to Engage with Different Perspectives:

  “I don’t think we should be so fragile in our beliefs that we’re scared of reading books that challenge us. Sometimes... seeing through the eyes of others is helpful.” – Angelina (98:49)

• On Revisiting the Past:

  “So many books we read when we’re too young... That’s why I always say, don’t rush your kids ahead...” – Cindy (92:33)

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5. Community Spirit & Memorable Quotes

• “To be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality.” (00:40, quoting Stratford Caldecott)

• “Dead poets never disappoint.” – Angelina (09:25)

• “The Faerie Queene is the most influential book that no one's read.” – Angelina (14:48)

• “If you really learn how to read one Shakespeare play well, you then have learned how to read the others.” – Angelina (47:45)

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Notable Timestamps

• 02:00 – Cindy’s Mary Oliver quotation & discussion
• 06:13 – Hazlitt and the loss of mythic storytelling
• 10:53 – Passage from The Snow Child (Eowyn Ivey)
• 14:34 – Goodreads stats; most/least read books of the year
• 17:52 – Lighthearted banter about reading pace and languages
• 18:22 – Thomas on Turgenev and Russian novels
• 25:57 – Discussion of Trent’s Last Case and the origin of detective fiction
• 43:49 – Announcing the 20 for 2020 Reading Challenge
• 61:23 – Greek tragedy recommendations
• 73:24 – “Guilty pleasure” books confessionals
• 77:06 – “Intimidating book” category discussion
• 92:33 – Importance of revisiting books at the right age
• 104:49 – Episode closes with Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells”

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Final Thoughts & Closing

The hosts sign off with warm wishes for the new year, gratitude for their listeners, and an invitation to join the Literary Life community by sharing and discussing their reading lives. The episode closes with Thomas Banks’s moving reading of Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells.”

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Listen for…

• Nostalgic camaraderie and encouragement for all readers, regardless of their pace or prior experience.
• Dozens of book recommendations spanning poetry, detective fiction, historical novels, and more.
• Deep insights into how and why to read well—the skill, the art, and the soul-shaping power of story.

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For more:

• Download the "20 for 2020" Challenge at theliterarylife.com
• Join the Literary Life Facebook discussion group
• Support the show on Patreon
• Explore sister podcasts: The Well Read Poem

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Happy Reading!

Transcript

[A]

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.

[B]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast, where your hosts, Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins, explore a life 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 to this very special New Year's Eve episode of the Literary Life Podcast. I'm here with the blonde bombshell herself, Cindy Rollins, and the mysterious Mr. Banks. Happy New Year, everybody.

[A]

Happy New Year.

[C]

Happy New Year.

[B]

We are here today to very excitedly talk about our favorite thing, books. Today we're going to talk about our year in reading. Just sort of recap the highlights, maybe throw out some titles for you. So get those notepads handy because you're. Or those Amazon links handy because you're going to probably want to explore some of the books we talk about. And we're also going to introduce something we're very excited about, the literary life podcast 20 for 2020 reading challenge. And we're going to tell you all about that and how you can plan for your best reading year ever with us today. But before we do that, we're going to start off with some commonplace quotes that we have pulled from some of our favorite reading this year. Cindy, you want to go first?

[C]

Well, this year I read Mary Oliver's, one of her books of poems, and I really enjoyed it. It was the first time I'd ever read her poems. And this was called Winter Hours. But a friend of mine sent me this quote because she knew how much I liked the moon from Mary Oliver. And it isn't actually from Winter Hours, but I like the quote so much. And she sent me a little beautiful card with a beautiful picture with this quote on it, but it says, thus we sit, myself thinking how grateful I am for the moon's perfect beauty, and also, oh, how rich it is to love the world.

[B]

Oh, I like that.

[A]

That's very nice. I read some Mary Oliver in college, but I've never read an entire book of hers. What was the title of the one you just read from?

[C]

So she has a book, winter Hours, which is this. I don't Know what this is from? I looked it up, but it looks like it's a poem about dog. I'm not entirely sure because I couldn't find the exact quote, but which would make sense, because she says, thus we sit, myself thinking how grateful I am for the moon's perfect beauty. And I could just see, you know, sitting with Max, looking at the moon.

[B]

She died this last year, right?

[C]

Yes, she did.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And that adds to the pathos of this poem because it says, you know, it reminds you, oh, how rich it is to love the world. And you think, you know, her opportunity to love the world is now past. And I don't think she means love the world in the way that the Bible speaks against, but loving the world as God has made it to be enjoyed.

[B]

That's right. We're not Gnostics. Right? I mean, here we are, Christmas season, the incarnation. That's why the creation has meaning, because God has a body.

[C]

Yeah. The moon is just. To me, the moon is in the. In the song. I didn't. Is it. What is it? Thou moon with what is that all creature is that. No, that's not. All creatures of our God or king fair. It's not fairest. Lord Jesus. Well, I've just totally messed this up. But there's the hymn, which the young people will remember, where it says, it talks about the moon being fair than the sun. And I love that line. But I noticed in a remaking of that hymn, they changed that line so that it doesn't say that the moon has a fairer beam than the sun. And I thought, well, I'm gonna go with the original. I like to sing the original words better than the new words.

[B]

When in doubt, always go with the original. That's my life motto.

[C]

Yes. So anyway, I thought this was a great quote, and she sent it to me, and it was beautiful. And I had read Mary Oliver, so. Mary Oliver. I also read last year her rules for the dance, which you guys would probably like, which are her rules for writing poetry. And that was a quick, easy read. And it was. I enjoyed it very much.

[B]

What were you gonna say, Mr. Banks?

[A]

Oh, I was just gonna say, per Cindy's comment about the changing of hymns, it seems that a lot of really, really good old hymns do get ruined that way. Someone of our time who thinks that here, I'm gonna take this Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley classic and do it right for, you know, now.

[B]

And by right, they mean less poetic and more hit you over the head.

[C]

Yeah. Nobody knows what that means. So instead of Having our brains all stretched towards the hymn. We have it, you know, handed to us on a silver platter, and it's just not very much fun.

[B]

All right, so Mary Oliver. That is someone that our listeners can check out this year. Although I will confess that I. All because I'm a Cajun, I always read her name as Mary Olivier.

[C]

Oh, really?

[B]

It's such a common.

[D]

Olivier.

[B]

Such a common name where I'm from. And just my brain automatically adds that extra I. So I had to train myself. Mary Oliver, not Mary olivier. All right, Mr. Banks, do you have a quote from your reading this year? I can't. In English, please.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

My husband reads so much foreign language.

[A]

Books, so one of the books I read last year was William Hazlitt's book about Shakespeare's characters. And he had an interesting and kind of a. To me anyway, sort of poignant observation that he drops in the middle of one of his essays. He says, the progress of manners and knowledge has an influence on the stage and will in time destroy both tragedy and comedy. The ghosts in Shakespeare will become obsolete. And that occurs in a place where he's talking about how it would be difficult in his day, that is Hazlitt's day, the early 19th century, to introduce supernatural occurrences, ghosts, fairies, Titania, Pock, all that onto the stage and expect an audience to suspend their disbelief. And I was thinking, you know, probably how much more applies to that observation. And it's one way of limiting the drama to allow, no, I guess you could say mythic properties into it. And I think that's interesting and kind of sad.

[B]

I love that, though. That speaks to so many of the things we've talked about on this podcast about rationalism versus the imagination.

[C]

I think there's a resurgence of that mythic quality in. I don't know about. In theater, because I don't go to the theater very much, but I do think in stories. I'm not saying it's as well done, but because we're bringing to it a lot of garbage. But.

[B]

My book's gonna be an example of that. But please continue.

[C]

Yeah, but I just. I do believe there is an attempt by many people to return to that. I don't know how successful their attempts.

[B]

No, I think that's absolutely true. I think with the resurgence of the superhero movies and sci fi and fairytale retellings, I think we're seeing a lot more of that. I think we reached the tipping point of rationalism, and our souls are craving for something beyond the senses, something mysterious. Lewis talks about how we have to remythologize the world, meaning reintroduced mystery. I think that's really good. Mr. Biggs, do you recommend that Shakespeare commentary. So many of our listeners are looking.

[A]

For help with reading Shakespeare. I mean, of course, the best way to meet any author is not to read books about them, but just to read them. But yeah, if you're looking for supplemental reading about Shakespeare's plays, I think William Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare is a really fine place to start, I think.

[B]

And available free probably on the Internet. Archive.org oh, yeah, you could, you could.

[A]

Find it on archive or Gutenberg or one of those. One of those other. There's another one. It's the other big one, faded page, I think has a lot of that stuff. But yeah, William Hazlitt, characters of Shakespeare's plays. If you're looking for commentary, just very intelligent running commentary by Hazlett, who was not a professional critic, but just a general newspaperman reporter, we would say today, who wrote intelligently about a lot of different things.

[B]

Oh, excellent. All right, so my quote comes from, well, an unexpected place for me. So if any of you guys have been listening to me for a while, you know that I don't read living authors. One of my mottos is dead poets never disappoint. So I don't waste my time with people who are still breathing. But my mother in law, for my birthday sent me a contemporary novel which was very intriguing to me because it had a lot of fairytale elements. And I actually just finished reading it this week and was so excited to be able to talk about it on the podcast today. When I had announced on Facebook that I was going to be reading this book, a lot of people commented, wait, did the author die? No, no, she's still alive. So the novel is the Snow Child by Eowyn Ivy. She is an Alaskan writer who's still living. And this is kind of a, I think the genre, I would call it like magical realism or fairy tale realism. It is a retelling of a fairy tale, the Snow Child. It's a Russian fair folktale, but set in the Alaskan wilderness in the 1920s. So it's all this realism, but it's also fantastical and it was just delightful. It was so up my alley because it treats a fairy tale as if it's real. And there was a quote, there were so many good quotes in here, but one is from a letter that one of the characters writes to another character. And I just thought it summed up so much of what I believe and we believe in this podcast believes. And I also highly recommend this book. Just, just it was absolutely delightful. Along with your interest in the tale of the Snow Maiden, I am reminded of the time you spent as a child chasing fairies in the woods near our home. As I recall, you slept more than one night in those great oak trees, and when mother found you the next morning, you would swear you had seen fairies that flew like butterflies and lit up the night like lightning bugs. I remember with some shame that the rest of us teased you about seeing such spirits. But now my own grandchildren chase similar fancies, and I do not discourage them. In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees. That's a delightful.

[C]

I hope not.

[B]

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. That's just wonderful. I highly recommend it.

[A]

The the author, Eowyn Ivy, is she American or European?

[B]

I think she's an Alaskan author.

[A]

Alaskan, okay.

[B]

Writing about what she knows about. And honestly, Alaska is kind of like the perfect setting because it's pretty, pretty magical itself.

[C]

Well, it makes you think of the Russians. They're always. The Russians are so good at that fairy tale. Sure.

[B]

And it is a Russian fairy tale. And it, and it felt in a lot of ways like what you're talking about. That Russian element, that line between realism and the fairy world is not so harsh, harshly drawn as it is with us. I quite like that. So I think it was a fun year for reading for me and I'm sure for you guys as well. I'm not going to ask for numbers because I will definitely lose against Cindy and Thomas Banks. I will definitely hard last. So I'm not going to shame myself. I would just admit I'm in last place here. Well, Cindy, how do you approach your yearly reading? So we're about to have a new year. Like, do you set out with a plan or you just kind of go where the spirit takes you? How would you describe your year in reading?

[C]

Well, I don't use a plan. Usually I am. This year I'll use our thing. But I think that'll work that. I love that it's going to be so flexible. I can take, you know, as a matter of fact, I probably could go through all my last year's reading and almost have hit most of those categories. But interestingly enough, I like to have a goal. It really helps me push myself when I'd rather Just sit there and watch Netflix. So I will. My goal will loom over my head.

[B]

And so like a numerical goal.

[C]

Yeah, because Goodreads gives you a chance to have a goal every year of how many books you're going to read. So for the last, I'd say eight years, I've done that. And the cool thing was they sent me an email today and they said, go and see what you've done. Now I'm two books short of my goal for the year. And it's not about the numbers for me at all. It's just about me having a goal to hit so that I do make better choices when I have the choice. Interestingly enough, it tells me this thing they sent me today really has something I think our listeners will find interesting. So the most popular book I read this year was Huckleberry Finn. That. That's very interesting. Now you will never guess with you. Of all the books I read, some, probably hardly anybody even knows. The least popular book that I read was the Fairy Queen, Book four, actually. So I guess if I'd had the whole Fairy Queen in there, I was trying to give myself a little extra boost in my reading by putting those in one at a time.

[B]

They're the length of a novel, each one. I think you're totally justified in doing that.

[C]

Yeah, they had them in there that way. And it was easier for me to say what the story was about. So. But anyway, I thought, well, that's pretty sad that the least popular book was the Fairy Queen.

[B]

Well, I always say the Fairy Queen is the most influential book that no one's read. Yes, everybody's based on it.

[C]

Yeah. So even though I have a numerical goal, it's really not. I don't feel like people get upset about it, like, oh, I wouldn't do that. And also the whole Goodreads thing, it's not a brag thing at all. It's really, for me, a self thing. How do I keep myself accountable? And when someone says, have you read Miracles by C.S. lewis? Like someone recently said to me, and I'm like, oh, that's on my to be read list. Let me go see. Oh, no, I did read that. I mean, you know, after a while, C.S. lewis kind of all runs together. He could have said that in Miracles. He could have said that.

[B]

Oh, that is very true. That's my classic problem of pain. Lewis said somewhere in one of his.

[C]

Things, yeah, it's really hard to figure out if you've read it. So I realized I had read Miracles. And anyway, it helps Me as I get older.

[B]

Were there some standout books for you this year?

[C]

I read a lot of really good books this year. I had a lot of reading. It was fun. I look over my list, and I did a lot of reading with my student last year, so I won't have that this year. I won't. We read Kristin, Laverne's daughter. A lot of the standout books I have used for our commonplace quotes. So that was a very good book. I read all of Yeats's poems, every one of them, and I found that they're a very uneven quality. Some are amazing, and some are just. He's just. He's just a human. I thought he was, like, beyond that. I just read Tolkien's Letters From Father Christmas, which I'd never read before. Absolutely adored those. Took them to my grandkids. We read them again. We got the book. I got the book, which is beautiful. And I listened to the audio with one of those British guys, Brother Cadfell.

[A]

The guy who plays Derek Jacoby.

[C]

Yes, yes. Beautifully read by Derek Jacoby. So. And then my shortest book I read was another Tolkien book, Leaf by Niggle, which was. We should read that this summer. That's such a good story.

[B]

Oh, I'd be down for that. I've never read that.

[C]

Yeah, that is an amazing story. It will hit all our buttons. And I read it. The longest book I read was a Sharon K. Penman book about Eleanor of Aquitaine.

[B]

Wait, that was longer than Kristin Lavin's daughter?

[C]

Well, Kristin is knocked down to three books among us.

[B]

Oh, I see.

[D]

Okay.

[C]

Okay, I did it. The Bridal Wreath, the Wife of and the Cross.

[B]

Very good.

[C]

And it was three. I mean, technically, it is actually three books.

[B]

That's true. It is a trilogy. It is a trilogy.

[C]

What about you guys?

[B]

I mean, well, before I talk, I'm going to put my husband on the spot here and say that since he was 18 years old, he has read two books a week. I know. Just makes me want to punch him in the face. Many of these are in Latin.

[D]

It's ridiculous.

[B]

But, you know, he had a rough year last year. He fell in love and dropped his whole life and moved.

[C]

This is a sad story.

[B]

He disrupted his reading. So I don't know. I feel like I'm putting him on the spot here, but I don't know. I think you've done all right. How would you describe your year in reading?

[A]

I think, actually, I think I had a very good year in reading, and I read more fiction this year than I had read for, well, I don't know exactly how long, but for a number of years.

[B]

Oh, please, let me pretend that's my influence.

[A]

Yes, actually, I think in some ways it probably is. I read. I think probably I read more novels than anything else I read. Let me see here. One Russian author whom I had read a little bit of before, but not very much, Ivan Turgenev, who's best known for his novel Fathers and Sons, which is about. It's kind of. Fathers and Sons, which was the first of his books I read is about. It deals with the question of how generations cease to sympathize with each other and kind of grow intellectually and spiritually alienated from one another. So you have these two young men, one of whom is an anarchist, who come home from university to spend time on the family farm where everything is old fashioned and kind of set in its ways and the tensions that arise from that encounter. And it climaxes with. With a duel. And that's a very fine book and one I just read by the same author. Turgenev, the Home of the Gentry also deals with some of these questions. How.

[B]

And I can vouch for the fact that he seriously could not put that book down. I mean, he absolutely flew through it.

[A]

Yeah, it was quite good. I mean, it's one of those stories where I would recommend it, I will say the story itself is not very eventful, but it's. And it has kind of a pleasant bittersweetness to it. And it's about a Russian who has been sort of raised to be a Spartan, sort of a Spartan superman by his father, his sort of embittered and eccentric father. Then he finds himself in the middle of the 19th century in Russia, where the need for the sort of proud, heroic Spartan qualities he had been raised to practice the really isn't a need for them anymore. And he kind of feels that he's been born without a vocation. So he goes back to the old family estate to plow the land. He falls in love. There's sort of a love triangle because the woman he's in love with is being courted by this obnoxious bureaucrat who actually is almost a spitting image of. It's like a Russianized version of Wickham. So it's like the antagonist is a Russian Wickham. Anyway, it's a very, very splendid novel. Ivan Turgemev.

[B]

The nice thing about Ivan Turgemev, I always said Turgenev, but you're saying it all fancy, so I'm just gonna swallow it and act Like, I can pronounce it too. But the nice thing about him is he's very short for a Russian. So if you're. If you're been wanting to tackle a Russian novel, but you feel like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy might take 10 years, these are all, like, under 200 pages.

[C]

Oh, really? I did not.

[B]

Oh, yeah. Fathers and Sons. They're all very short.

[C]

Oh, interesting, because I've read a lot of the Russians, but I've never read him at all.

[B]

Yeah, he might be a great place for people to start if they're looking for an easier, more accessible Russian novel. And I enjoyed Fathers and Sons.

[A]

Yeah. If your idea of, like, the Russian novel is Dostoevsky, I would say Turgenev. He's not a spiritual genius in the way that Dostoevsky was, but he's also much less strange. And if. If your knowledge of the novel is basically formed on, you know, like, most of ours are on English or American lines, Turgenev is, I think, a little bit easier to approach than. Yeah, Dostoevsky is just, again, genius. Also just really, really weird.

[C]

How about. Where do they come in time with each other? How is he after or before Dostoevsky?

[A]

They're roughly contemporary. So those two and Tolstoy all live roughly at the same time. I think Dostoevsky and Turgenev Both died around 1880, and then Tolstoy maybe 20.

[C]

Because I was wondering if. Cause Fathers and Sons almost sounds like his version of the Brothers Karamazkov.

[A]

Yeah. Fathers and Sons, I'm gonna say, is written probably in the 1860s. One of the characters is an anarchist. So it's, I guess, late enough that you kind of see signs of this sort of person who would become a Russian revolutionary a couple generations later. Some of those fe present in it. But, yeah, it's a fascinating book. And Turgenev and Tolstoy. I heard there was this one of the great almosts in Russian literary history. They almost fought a duel because one of them had felt insulted by the other, and it was only with difficulty that their friends prevented this. So, like, you know, one of them might have been killed if this had happened. So we might not have had War and Peace or Fathers and Sons anyway.

[C]

Okay. Like Burr and Hamilton. We lost one of those guys.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, that's very interesting. So my. Okay, so my year in reading is always strange because I read professionally. I teach eight classes this year, plus the podcast, so a great deal. The majority, 90% of my reading is work reading. Right. The classics that I'm teaching And then of course, I also read a great deal of books about books. More than anything, that's what, that's what I read. So, you know, whatever I'm teaching, even if I've taught it 20 times, I always try to have a fresh commentary going for each thing that I'm reading so that I can have new eyes and learn something new. So I read a lot of books about books. It probably would surprise people to realize the majority of my reading typically is nonfiction because I spend so much time reading commentaries and books about books. And so when I do, you know, try to carve out a little bit of what I call my fun reading and it's hit or miss with me, I don't always succeed in that. Well, first of all, I think writing books about books is fun. So it's all blurry in my mind, but you know what I mean? Like a non work related book.

[C]

Right. I don't have to read this for any reason.

[B]

Right, right. Just. Yeah, so just strictly for fun, I kind of just go where the spirit moves. And this year the spirit moved in that I have a husband who's really, really knowledgeable and excited about minor authors and kept buying me books by minor authors and I kept reading them. So this ended up sort of accidentally being the year of the minor author. And I had some such a good time with that. So some of the standouts of that were when we talked about a couple of weeks ago, Hugh Walpole. I read the Killer and the Slain, which was a lot of fun, very like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Heidi. Very gothic. It's short, it was fun, really good voice. I really enjoyed Hugh Walpole a lot. And we've talked about how you and you and Tom both really enjoy Hugh Walpole. I still, I laughed for like a week after that. I kept telling Mr. Banks, of course Cindy knew Hugh Walpole. And he said, you know, at this point I should just be ceased to be surprised by anything Cindy has read.

[C]

Well, I'm really old.

[B]

But no, but he had told me when we first met that like, you know, he tracks down Hugh Walpole books in every little Hole in the Wall bookstore and had never met anybody else who knew Hugh Walpole. So he was very excited when you, you said that. Oh, well, good, Another standout. And again, and this was another one that my husband recommended to me was, okay, let's see if Cindy's heard of this because I had not. Trent's last case by E.C. bentley.

[C]

Oh, yes, I've read that book. Yes, of course, of course. Well, that's.

[B]

I mean, we almost got that as a Christmas gift, Sydney, So I'm really glad we went a different direction.

[C]

Well, it's like one of the very first murder mysteries, right? Like in the classic. Of the classic genre. Yes.

[B]

And Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christine, all those guys were huge fans of this book. And, yeah, it kind of set the standard. And so actually, this was really fun. This was in July. We were about to go on a plane. I was speaking at a conference. We were going together, and I turned to him and said, tell me what I should put on my Kindle for this, Tripp. And without hesitation, he said, trent's last case by E.C. bentley. And not knowing anything about it, I downloaded it, got on the plane, and read it like gangbusters. It was fantastic. And then after I finished it, I read about. It was like, wait, Dorothy Sayers.

[C]

Love this.

[B]

And Agatha Christie. And so, yes, it's kind of like the first. And it's gonna get like the amateur detective, you know, just kind of the prototype that you see the amateur detective figuring things out.

[C]

Yes. And he's so likable in that book. Yes.

[B]

Oh, I just thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was so delightful. And I'm really laughing right now at how close you came to getting that as a Christmas.

[C]

Well, I would have loved it, because I don't know if I even have it on my bookshelf anymore. My bookshelves are so sadly depleted. And I feel good about that sometimes, but sometimes I feel sad about it. I mean, if you saw my house before, when we lived in, you know, we had this huge farmhouse, and every place had books, and there was a charm in that, but also, it also becomes a kind of insanity. So now I try to only keep the very, very best books or give them to people who I think will really love the books that I'm getting rid of. Anyway, it makes me sad sometimes, but there it is.

[A]

Going back to E.C. bentley, was he a member of the Detection Club?

[B]

I believe that he was.

[A]

And Ronald Knox in gkt.

[C]

Yeah, I was gonna say Ronald Knox. I think so. I mean, he started. I mean, that was pre. Almost all of their books, I believe. Yes.

[B]

And they were.

[A]

They loved it, and they collaborated on it. Makes actually kind of funny reading. It's a short document. It's written in the style of the Ten Commandments of. Do either of you know what I mean? Like, thou shalt not. Oh, actually, one of them is really good. Thou shalt not Allow the detective to come across any clue that he doesn't share with his audience.

[B]

That's exactly right. And that's why they thought Sherlock Holmes was not a true detective story, because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle always holds back information from the reader. That's right. The Detection Club wanted it to be a true puzzle that the reader could solve, so that the real skill of the author there is to literally give you everything you need to figure it out, but do it in such a way that you don't realize that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They had a few other. There are some other things on the list, too, that are like. To avoid certain cliches, like, you know, the butler can't have done it. No Chinaman can show up and suddenly.

[C]

Be, well, what is the book where the butler did do it? That. That's not Trent's last case, is it?

[B]

No, no, no.

[C]

That's one of the very early ones. The butler actually did do it. Staircase. Is that Agatha Christie or.

[B]

It wasn't the Dark and Stormy Night book, was it?

[C]

No, no, it's. I would know the name if I heard it, but.

[A]

Is it a Wilkie Collins?

[C]

It's not a Wilkie Collins. No, it's one of these early.

[B]

I know what you're talking about.

[C]

Yeah. And the book, I read it at the same time as I read Tren Case. So they're all mixed up in my mind. I'll find it someday and I'll. I'll say it out loud. Somebody. I'm sure somebody listening is like.

[B]

Actually, I think Dorothy Sayers mentions it in her essay on the evolution of the detective story. It's in a collection of essays I have called the Art of Murder.

[C]

His middle name is Clara Hugh. The C is Clara Hugh, and he is the inventor of the Clara Hue, which is an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. This is from Wikipedia.

[A]

Oh, wow. Yes. He and Chesterton would mix them up on the spot because since it's irregular, it's not. So I think the game with eclair, Hugh, is it rhymes, but it doesn't have a meter. So it's one of those things, like a limerick. It just sounds fun.

[C]

Okay. Like there once was a man from somewhere, but okay. On by. A humorous verse. Yeah.

[A]

What I remember is the people of Spain think Cervantes worth 100,000 Dantes. An opinion resented quite bitterly by the people of Italy. Yeah, it's just one of those kind of jingly, funny things.

[B]

He's available for your cocktail party. Reserve him now. That's fantastic.

[C]

Well, maybe we should have a Claire Hugh throwdown on the literary Life podcast discussion.

[B]

I would not win that.

[C]

All right. Thomas would be the winner of that, I'm pretty sure.

[B]

I read a few others, but the standouts were Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, which Banks bought me. We've talked about her, I think, on the podcast before. She's kind of the Jane Austen of the post World War II generation. And that book was a lot of fun, too. And then on another recent plane ride, Mr. Banks gave me a book to read, and I read it in one sitting on the plane. It was so fabulous. And this is a Scottish Gothic novel by James hoag from the 1700s called the Confessions of a Justified Sinner. And it was fantastic. It's definitely a prototype for another Scottish book, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So you have definitely the split personality thing, and it's dealing with, is it mental illness or is it a demon?

[C]

Ah.

[B]

And so it is kind of appearance versus reality kind of stuff, but just fantastic. And, like, what happens if somebody takes these Calvinist doctrines to their ultimate extreme and maybe they're not right in the head?

[C]

Well, I'm sure if you. I'm actually the lone Calvinist here, but I'm sure I still can imagine this scenario.

[D]

Oh.

[B]

I mean, it's. Well, so, you know, once he decides that he's elect, then he thinks he's justified in whatever he does.

[C]

Yes, yes, absolutely.

[B]

And so he constantly is saying, well, I was. I was chosen by God before the earth was hung in space. So I guess what I'm about to do is. Okay. Because I'm a justified sinner. Anyway, it was really well written, really creepy. It felt. It did not at all feel like a novel from the 1700s. It's very short. It was, like, quick. It was. The style was brief. There was, like all this brevity. It was to the point.

[C]

Yeah. Because it sounds like this really.

[B]

Like it's a psychological thriller.

[C]

It doesn't sound like that at all. It sounds like it's gonna be this. I mean, the title is off putting, really, because I know it was.

[B]

I enjoyed it so much, I found myself laughing out loud. I mean, I was a Calvinist for 31 years, so I was like, you.

[C]

Get all the jokes, I get all the jokes.

[B]

And I was laughing. I was laughing really hard at it. And I just thought it was delightful. And it was just really. What struck, because I do read older books, is that it did not read like an older book. Kind of like how when you read Wilkie Collins, you're like, how is this guy a Victorian? How is he best friends with Charles Dickens because he's a page turner. It's a thriller. Wilkie Collins was the original first page turner thriller.

[C]

Oh, absolutely.

[B]

He's not like Dickens where he takes 400 pages just to introduce all the characters. So it was kind of that kind of experience. But James Hoag, even more brief, even shorter, more compact, very intense psychologically. I kept double checking the date when it was written. I couldn't believe it was as old as it was. It's very different and I super liked it. So that's another weird minor author that my husband has introduced me to that I just adored. And last one I'm going to mention I haven't read yet. It's my book I'm going to read for this year for 2020. And it will fill out the category that we have on the reading challenge for a minor author. This is what I will be reading to. Check off that box and watch. I'm about to think I'm going to say something cool and Cindy's going to be like, oh, I read that 25 years ago. So go ahead, Cindy, pop my bubble. But this is another book Husband bought me because it was Dorothy Sayers favorite contemporary novel. And, and it's called, it's called the Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy.

[C]

No, I've heard of that, but I have not read that book. I don't think I've read it. It doesn't.

[B]

I haven't heard of it.

[C]

Yeah, no, I've heard of The Constant Nymph, 1925.

[B]

And he bought me a 1925 copy, a little hardback copy. And so I am gonna get to read a book that Dorothy Sayers was absolutely nuts about. And I very excited about that.

[C]

Well, that does sound very good. I'm gonna have to look that up and see. Yes, I'm really. Some of these categories are super like, oh, good, this will be easy. And some are, oh boy.

[B]

Especially, yes, I'm gonna be challenged by the reading challenge myself.

[C]

Yeah, some are gonna be a challenge.

[D]

I. I hope you're enjoying this best of episode of the Literary Life podcast. The episode you're listening to was recorded several years ago. So I thought I'd let you know about some of the stuff we've got going on right now at the House of Humane Letters.

[B]

The biggest thing on the list is.

[D]

Right now is our annual Christmas sale where everything in our [e-mail] is 20% off. All those classes and webinars and mini classes and past conferences that you've been eyeing. You can catch them right now at a great discount. So head on over to the store and start perusing all of our items. We also, for the first time this year, we went ahead and put all of my conference talks available for individual purchase. Many of you have reached out to us to say that you wanted to share these talks with other people and wanted to have the option of just sharing one talk instead of a whole conference, and so we made that available for you. Speaking of conferences, we moved the date of the annual Literary Life Conference this year. It is going to be in January again, in response to something you guys asked for. So right when we're in that sort of, you know, midwinter doldrums, it's almost February. This I hope will be a great pick me up as we face the second semester of school. So this year's conference will be from January 23rd to January 30th. It's much, much longer. It's got more things, but it's the same low price.

[B]

And the theme of the conference is.

[D]

The letter Killeth and the Spirit Quickeneth Reading Like a Human I think this is going to be a very, very timely conference, an important conference as we face so many challenges right now in our culture. Here's what I wrote for the Description Our culture is obsessed with literacy. We track literacy statistics and data schools, hire literacy coaches and specialists. Literature class has been replaced by literacy class, but has this obsession resulted in greater understanding of the written word?

[B]

Quite the opposite.

[D]

All around us is the evidence that we are existing in an almost post literate age. The popularity of AI tools to summarize reading into talking points for us is simply one small example of our inability to decipher the written word. We need machines to read for us because we can no longer read like humans. To understand how we got here, we have to cast our eyes to the other side of what C.S. lewis calls the Great Divide, the invisible curtain that separates us from the past. For the seeds of our current crisis were planted a long time ago and the path of renewal starts in the same place. Looking back before the machine age, we can learn to recover a more human way to read and therefore to live live. So this conference will have talks by Dr. Jason Baxter, who is our keynote speaker. I'll be speaking, Thomas Banks will be speaking, Dr. Ann Phillips will be speaking and Jen Rogers will be speaking. And we will be exploring what it means to read like a human.

[B]

We're also going to include this year.

[D]

A student panel who will be sharing their experiences of what it has meant to them to learn to read and live like a human. So let me just tell you about these conference talk titles. I'm so I'm just very hyped about this.

[B]

I think this is going to be really important. Dr. Jason Baxter is going to kick.

[D]

Us off with a talk called Deep Reading in the Age of Hypertexts. I'll be following up with a talk called the Great Divide Overcoming Modern Illiteracy. Jen Rogers is up next with On Norman Keeps and the Two Towers of All Souls. Words come alive in JRR Tolkien's the Notion Club papers. Mr. Banks is next with St Paul and his Reading, a lecture on the mind of an apostle and his use of writings, sacred and secular. And Dr. Ann Phillips is batting cleanup with how to Read a Greek Tragedy or How Greek Tragedy Teaches Us how to Read. Then we'll have our student panel on Friday night, followed by closing remarks from me. So please join us for that live or January 23rd through 30th. And while you're perusing in the store, signing up for the conference and picking up all of our on sale items, which by the way, our Christmas sale doesn't stop at Christmas. It goes all the way to the end of the year, December 31st.

[B]

But you want to pick up a live registration.

[D]

Dr. Ann Phillips is going to give us a fantastic webinar on December 29 called Abiding in the Field, Spenser, Milton and the Pastoral Poetic Tradition. She is going to be tracing the world of shepherds as it appears in the nativity narrative, in the Gospels and in classical poetry and trace its influence on works such as Edmund Spencer's Shepherd's Calendar and William Shakespeare's pastoral plays such as as yous Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream and A Winter's Tale.

[B]

That's going to be fabulous. So join us for that. And lastly, don't forget that the amazing, wonderful Dr. Michael Drought, his brand new.

[D]

Book published on Tolkien, published by Norton.

[B]

Of all things, is rising to the.

[D]

Top of the charts. I still pinch myself that he wants to be involved with us here and he will be sharing his expertise next semester in a 16 week class called Viking and Old Norse Culture. Guys, this is your chance chance to take an actual college class with a world class professor for a fraction of the cost. So join us for all of that fun stuff we've got coming up and I hope to see you guys at the conference in January. Now back to our program.

[B]

So we have set up for you guys something I think it's going to be a lot of fun. This is the 20 for 2020 reading challenge. And if you go on our website, we have a graphic made up that you can share on social media. We also have a printable PDF of this checklist. You can head on over to our Facebook discussion group, the Literary Life Podcast Description Group, where you can also find the graphic and the printable PDF and a lot of fun conversation as people are trying to figure out how they're going to approach this challenge. So how it works is we've got 20 categories of books and some of which will be covered on this podcast. So if you're reading along with us, you're going to be check, check, checking away, but we're going to go through these one by one. But the reading challenge was crafted in a way that it's sort of open to interpretation, which means that you can choose the level of difficulty that you want. So for some people, the idea of reading 20 books is overwhelming. And no way. I'm a mom to a bunch of kids. I've got too much going on. There's no way I could read 20 books. Books. Well, if that's the case, you can double up on some of these. So for example, if you listen to the Winter's Tale podcast and you've been really kind of scared by Shakespeare, if you listen to that podcast, you can actually check off two of the of the categories, a Shakespeare play and an intimidating book you've put off. So you can double up or triple up so you don't actually have to read 20 books if that feels too overwhelming. So they're designed in a way that they can be doubled up. But somebody else who wants more challenge could say, no, I'm going to read 20 books and I'm going to read 20 hard books in each category, or I'm going to read 20 books that are not covered by the podcast. So there's any number of ways you can increase or decrease the level of difficulty, depending on what you want. So let's go through the categories and give some recommendations. Again, like I said, you can get this whole list over at our website, the Literary Life. We've got it both in a social media graphic that you can share and as a printable PDF. It's available on our Patreon, it's available on our Facebook group. Alright, so the first category we've got is a Shakespeare play. And as I said, we're going to be doing a Shakespeare play in January, A Winter's Tale. And so you can follow along with Us and check that off. But if you're looking for another Shakespeare recommendation, Cindy, I feel like you are the most Shakespeare well read of all of us. Because I fully admit I have not read all of them and you have. So what would you recommend to somebody who wants to get their feet wet with Shakespeare?

[C]

Well, interestingly enough, I'm going to be. I have this thing I do where there was a list a few years ago on the Internet of read through Shakespeare in a year. So I took that list and I read through all the plays, and it took me longer than a year for everybody's information. And that's. I'm really good at taking things that are supposed to take a year and just doing them until I'm done with them instead of quitting, like in March, because I see I'm failing miserably. I just keep going. So I read through all of his plays, and then I thought, I'm gonna do that list again with audiobook. So then I did it again. It took me about three years to go through all of. First of all, because I had to get my husband to pay for all these Audible books that are now free on the Internet. By the way, you can get all the Archangel recordings of Shakespeare's plays free on the Internet.

[B]

Yes. Somebody put a link to that in our group. Yes, I saw that.

[C]

Yeah. So. But if you. So I'm gonna do this again. This time I'm gonna do it the easy way. My new plan is to re watch each one of these plays in the order that they were written. It's kind of fun to read Shakespeare in the order that. That he wrote the plays because. And I'll put that list up on the Literary Life, that little graphic. But it's fun to read them in the order he wrote them because you can see a little bit of the Chron life. When things were happy, when things were sad, when he reached maturity. Sometimes you think he's rewriting the play that he wrote earlier, and he thinks he's got it worked out a little better in his mind. He wants to try it a different way. So it's kind of fun to read him chronologically. But if you aren't ever going to read all of Shakespeare's plays, then, you know, it's always great to start with some of the more popular ones. A Midsummer Night's Dream. I always think that's a great place to start with kids because it's funny and they understand, you know, a little romance, a little comedy. I mean, most of his plays are very accessible A few of them. You know, I wouldn't start with Pericles. I wouldn't start with Time.

[B]

Yeah, you'd want to start with one of the major plays. Not a month.

[C]

No. Yeah, you definitely want to start somewhere. Much Ado About Nothing Else is really almost a perfect start.

[B]

I would also recommend starting with a comedy over a tragedy.

[C]

Yes, yes, absolutely. I mean, when you get to. You don't. I mean, obviously Hamlet is a not to be missed Shakespearean play. You eventually want to read Hamlet, Macbeth, but Hamlet, of all the books, all the plays that Shakespeare has written, I think that has gotten the most. It comes in handy to know Hamlet. It really. You'll see it over and over and over again and other literary works and movies and plays and all sorts of things. But you don't want to. You might not want to start with Hamlet. No, I definitely think a comedy is a great place to start.

[B]

And they're shorter. Hamlet's very long. King Lear is very long.

[C]

Oh, yeah. Anthony and Cleopatra. Do not start with Antony and Cleopatra. That is the longest of Shakespeare's plays. And you really feel it when you're reading it.

[B]

Yeah, I would agree with all that. Go ahead.

[A]

Also, the most interesting bit of history of that one, one of the most difficult to stage because of the. I think it's like the fourth act that has 11 different scene changes or something like that in the. Some scenes that are like three lines. Line. It's. Yeah, it's one of those.

[B]

Take that Aristotle.

[A]

I guess.

[C]

So, yeah, you're going back and forth, back and forth. You don't even know where you are. Are you on this ship or are you on this. That ship? Are you in this room? Are you in that room? Yeah, it's very hard to keep track of what you're doing, I think.

[B]

Yeah. So. All right, so of course, the obvious answer here is, just read A Winter's Tale with us. Yes, we will lead you by the hand through that. And honestly, my feeling is when you really learn how to read one Shakespeare play, well, you then have learned how to read the others. And we'll be talking a lot about how to approach that and Elizabethan cosmology and how to make sense of the metaphors that Shakespeare's.

[C]

Oh, and Thomas may be very good at helping us even hear how they say those words where, you know, there's a way just to hear it in your head. That's very helpful. So, yeah, we could. We better just move on here because.

[B]

Oh, yeah, we could spend the whole time on the. But we've got a lot of fun things coming up with A Winter's Tale, including a special guest who is an expert in Renaissance literature who's going to come and help us unpack all of that. So we got a lot of exciting things.

[C]

I think A Winter's Tale is a great, fun play. I think everybody will.

[B]

I'm really excited to read it because, you know what? I've never read it. I am super excited about this. I'm very pleased about that. So, one thing I wanted to mention, I was glad you brought up reading with your children. Another thing that we did with this particular reading challenge is crafted in the way that a lot of your family read alouds could count as the reading challenge because we've shaped it in a way. So again, that's the Shakespeare play category. All right, so the second of our 20 is a classic detective novel. Of course, you knew with Cindy and I on here, we were going to try to nudge you guys into reading that. We will be doing a classic detective novel on the podcast. In October, we will be doing Agatha Christie's the Death on the Nile, which is a fabulous book. And we're doing it because in October, the new Kenneth Branagh, the Death on the Nile, is coming out. And we thought it'd be a lot of fun. Read it and watch the movie and talk about it. But obviously, you know, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, anything in that classic detective genre. You could even try some of the Father Brown stories, Sherlock Holmes, if you want to, you know, start with something smaller. Now, Mr. Banks, I know this is. This is a little out of your comfort zone, the detective novel.

[C]

It is.

[A]

I am definitely going to give one of these a shot. In many ways, I have no excuse for not having read more detective novels, given that I'm married to the queen.

[C]

You really have no excuse.

[A]

My mother is. My mother is another queen.

[B]

Yes, his mother loves Dorothy Sayers.

[A]

So, yeah, my mother has. I think my mother has read every Agatha Christie book ever written, but I think she could probably sign off on that. So I have some catching up to do, and I plan to jump in and check that box off.

[B]

And if you're looking for some other suggestions of classic detective novels, I would suggest you re listen to an early episode that we did on this podcast called the Importance of the Detective Novel, where we talk about how to approach it and think about it and why you should read it. And we also recommend a great many of the golden age authors. So, yeah, that's that. Now, next.

[C]

Oh, yeah, let me recommend one that I think everybody will really enjoy. There's one Albert campion. It's number 14. So if you get freaked out about doing one out of order, it's kind of hard to hit all of the detectives in order. But the Tiger in the Smoke is a very good detective novel by Marjorie Allingham. Oh, yeah.

[B]

She's one of the golden age, so.

[C]

That would be a great one. If you just want to, you know, dip your toe in something like that. That's a great one.

[B]

Yeah. And that's going to be a fun read. So after that, we've got a classic children's book, and we are also going to be doing a classic children's book on this podcast. I confess that my own upbringing, I did not read classic children's books. I read obsessively fairy tales and myths. I read probably every Nancy Drew that there was. And also, I used to tell people in the second grade that my favorite authors were Carolyn Keene and Beverly Cleary. I did not read a single classic children's book until I homeschooled my children. And I feel like that might be a lot of people's story. And so I'm excited about the category of a classic children's book because I have a lot to make up for in my own reading. And as Lewis says, a book is not a quality book if it can only be read by a child. So a really good children's book is definitely enjoyable and worthy of the time of an adult.

[C]

Yeah. My husband's still catching up on books he didn't read with us, but he wanted to read, so he reads those all the time.

[B]

I guess we should define it. So a classic children's book. We're talking about, you know, not what.

[C]

I can't even think of something like Treasure island or.

[B]

Yeah, stuff in the golden age of children's literature, which is the Victorian period. So Alice in Wonderland and Anne of Green Gables and Pinocchio and all that kind of stuff. Like, not. I was trying to think of a modern children's book that's popular, like Captain Underpants. Like, that's not a classic children's book.

[C]

No, no, we don't. We really don't. You know, there are a lot of new books out that are great, but we're not talking about those. We're not going to count those.

[B]

Right. Something that would be considered in the classic literature category.

[A]

I was going to say one children's book that I want to go back to. One my mother did read to us when we were growing up. It's A Japanese children's book called the Crane Wife. Have either of you heard of this one?

[B]

No.

[C]

The Crane Wife.

[A]

The Crane Wife, yeah. So it's about this weaver. It's set in feudal Japan. I think this story was written probably in the early 20th century. So there's this weaver who lives a humble existence. He's poor and one day he rescues a crane. And then a few days later a woman mysteriously shows up in his life. He marries her and she can weave with an almost magical skill and quickness. And anyway, it's kind of. It's a strange, mysterious and kind of haunting Japanese children's story. And anyway, the Crane Wife. I cannot remember the author's name for the life.

[B]

But that would also fit another category that we have further down, which is read a book by a foreign non western author.

[C]

Well, actually, is it by Patrick Ness or is that a retelling of it? I see the Crane Wife on.

[B]

I don't remember.

[C]

Yeah, but then it sounds like that's a classic story that people have. You know, classic.

[B]

It might be a fairy tale.

[A]

I get the impression it was a folk tale that. Yeah.

[C]

Yes, because there are albums out called the Crane Wife also. So anyway, check that out.

[B]

I'm remiss in my. In my Eastern tales, but I have students who are really well versed in it and are always making such interesting connections in class.

[C]

My list, the Literature of Honor for Boys that I have, has a lot of classic books, children's books listed.

[B]

Oh, yes. Where can people find that, Cindy?

[C]

Well, I'll put that up on the Literary Life page. That's where they can find it.

[B]

Alright, next on the list we've got a contemporary novel. And by that we mean the author is still alive. It's contemporary to our own times. And I put this on here, actually for myself because I suffer from what I like to call reverse chronological snobbery. Lewis calls it chronological snobbery that we only like to read modern books and we don't read old books. And. And we despise old things. I'm the opposite way. I despise living authors, which I realize creates quite a conundrum because who do I think wrote these books? Dead poets don't write things. But. So I have to resist my urge to reject everything just because it's new. So Lewis gives us the rule. This isn't an essay he wrote on reading old books, which is part of his preface to Athanasius on the Incarnation. And he says something like, what's the rule he gives us for every.

[C]

Is it Two, three, Read two old books.

[D]

Two old books.

[B]

It's something like that. He gives us a formula, which I ignore because I read all old books. But. But it's. In other words, balance your reading, okay? So make sure you're reading old books and new books. So I got convicted by that and realized that I was making the opposite mistake and I was only reading old books. And I was completely dismissive of contemporary novels. And we've talked before on this show about how little time we have in life and we don't need to be wasting it on books that maybe are not that good. But that doesn't mean that really good quality books are not still being written, however rare that may be. And if someone recommends something to me and I trust them, like I did with the Snow Child, it's definitely worth my time. So that would be my recommendation for a contemporary novel. I think everyone should just read the Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. I just. I might have to read it again just so I can check that box off twice. But, Cindy, what would you recommend for, like, a high quality, worthy of your time, contemporary novel?

[C]

Well, that's tough. I really. One of my favorite contemporary authors is Susan Hill. I just like the way she writes. So she has a murder series, like a. Ian Surreylor is her. I mean, no, Simon Sarelor is her. Is her detective. So she has some detective novels. But she also has. She also writes kind of some spooky stories like the Woman in Black and that sort of thing. But she's just a genuinely great author. So I like Susan Hill a lot. But she also has a couple of books which I'll mention later that fall into the category of books about books which are really, really good. But as far as living authors, I feel like she is someone who I totally. I would have said PD James, but now she has passed away as another modern book. I really get so disappointed. I'm looking over last year's reading and thinking, was there anybody? I did read a couple modern books and they were not my favorite and I don't want to recommend them. And I get so disappointed in the books that I read that everybody says, oh, this is the greatest book. You've got to read it. I read a book with. I will probably. Let me throw this. Oh, I did read a really good book, book called Crow Lake. I enjoyed that book very much by Mary Lawson. Somebody recommended that, maybe Mary Jo Tate on the Literary Life page. And it was a very hauntingly beautiful book.

[B]

I would throw out Wendell Berry's name yes, he's always good and most of his novels are pretty short and approachable.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. Amor Tolles, the Gentleman from Moscow and he has a couple other books.

[B]

I read his. The Rules of Civility.

[C]

Mm.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So there's some goods and, and we will be also talking more about these categories throughout the year in the podcast as we sort of track our reading. Alright, the time is getting away from us so I'm going to speed it up a little bit. The next in the category is a historical fiction novel. And so this is would be a novel that is set in a historical time period. So again, it's open to interpretation. Maybe some books you're reading out loud to your kids are historical fiction. There are modern books set in olden times. So like I think the Gentleman of Moscow would be historical fiction. But then there are older books that are historical fiction as well. George MacDonald actually has a ton of historical fiction about the English Civil War.

[C]

Yeah, that girl, Sharon K. Penman, she has a lot of books about different kings of England and their novels about, you know, some of them, they're not romances but they're very much fictional stories of history. Like she's trying her best to figure out how they would have really lived.

[B]

Oh, some of them are very well done.

[A]

One older historical fiction which I would throw out there, Arthur Conan Doyle's the White Company. That is absolutely a fabulous medieval novel. It was, I think his favorite book of everything he wrote because I mean, famously he was not really that excited to be condemned to a lifetime of writing Sherlock Holmes stories. And he liked the, you know, the things he wrote on the side. So the White Company, which is set during, I think it's the Hundred Years War.

[C]

Yes. That book is one of my husband's all time favorite books. And he goes, and you can go on to read a couple more. He had some short stories, some other stories about the characters in the White Company. It is hard. It is a great book for boys. It is a great book to read aloud. I mean it's not easy to read aloud but it's a beautiful story and it's so full of everything you want a book to do without in our hearts, without being heavy handed. I think it just.

[B]

Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up. And this is a total aside and we'll have to do a whole separate episode on this. But once again I'm struck with the connection between people, the detective novelists and medievalists. There's something similar at its heart there that each of those books are Trying to.

[C]

To do.

[B]

All right, moving on the next. Okay, so so far you're probably nodding your head like, okay, this doesn't sound too hard. Okay, so here's your first real challenge. Read an ancient Greek play. So I'm going to turn to our handy little classmate here. Where would you recommend someone jump in in an ancient Greek. And good news, they're very short.

[A]

Okay. Yes. So like Angelina said, there are no ancient Greek plays, comedies, or tragedies that are more than, you know, 75 or 100 pages. Everyone will tell you to start with Oedipus Rex. And Oedipus Rex is really great. It does everything with the ironic twists in the plot that you kind of think characteristically a Greek tragedy does. I would say, however, my personal favorite Greek tragedy is the Bacchae by Euripides. And the Bacchae is the story of the God Dionysus coming in disguise to the city of Thebes where he was born and where he is not yet worshipped as a God and by very, very violent means revealing himself to be divine to the young king of Thebes, named Pentheus. And so it's scary, it's very violent. In some ways, you might say it's almost like a Greek horror story, but it's really, really good. So the Bacchae by Euripides, which is written about 410 BC that's what I will read.

[B]

I've read a bunch of Greek tragedies, but I haven't read that. That's exciting. I would also recommend. And again, this was a Mr. Banks pick. He had me read the Trojan Women, which is also Euripides.

[C]

Correct?

[A]

Also Euripides.

[B]

And it was after I had read the Iliad. So if you've read the Iliad and you're kind of invested in these female characters and you're wondering what happened to all these Trojan women. Euripides picks up the story, and it's fabulous. And it's got such a good speech from Andromacha telling off the Greeks when they try to kill her baby. And she's just screaming, are you scared of a baby? Oh, it's just fantastic. And you just get the sense that these are some tough broads. Like they are. The men are all dead, but these Trojan women are going to carry on and again, read it in an afternoon. And so if you've read the Iliad and you're sort of invested in these characters, that's another option. Okay, then we've got a collection of short stories. So this would be a full. It could be by a single author. So, like, you read a Flannery o' Connor collection or, you know, a collection of Chesterton's Father Brown short stories.

[C]

Yeah, there's a lot of ways to interpret. Yeah. Shakespeare. Sherlock Holmes has some collections of short stories. Lord Peter. There's a lot of collections of Lord Peter stories.

[B]

Sure. Or it could be a collection of stories that are not by a single author. So you have a collection of the best American short stories or the best female short stories or something like that. So just pick up something and jump in. And you can also head back to our old episodes from last summer where we went through how to read a short story, and that that'll give you some ideas about how to intern. What you're supposed to be looking for. Short story operates a little bit differently than a novel, but anyway, that's an opportunity for.

[C]

I would actually, this would be a great opportunity to go to, like, a used bookstore and look around and see what they have. McKay's has a great section of short stories, and you could find something unexpected rather than getting online and trying to pick one out.

[B]

All right, our next one after this is a biography or a memoir. And I confess I'm not a big biography reader, but my husband definitely is. What would you recommend?

[A]

Let me see here. Biography. I'm going to read this, I guess, is also a contemporary book.

[C]

A.N.

[A]

Wilson, who's an English sort of polymathic man of letters. He writes fiction, he writes nonfiction, he writes everything. He has a new biography of Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, that just came out a few months ago. And I. I have read nothing but good reviews of it so far and wanted to pick that one up because I find Albert and Victoria both kind of interesting, and I would like to know more about them.

[B]

And reading a biography of an author or a particularly big person in a time period can really open up that period to you and help you to have a lot of insight into what the art of the time is trying to accomplish.

[A]

Oh, actually, to chime in again, one Angelina got for me that I It was a book I read before, but reread with pleasure was Hilaire Belloc's biography of Marie Antoinette, which is.

[C]

That was the one I was thinking, because I have that on my shelf, but I've never read it.

[B]

Oh, yay.

[A]

You end up. It kind of dispels the notion that she was just frivolous and selfish and you feel like you know her more intimately and sympathetically at the end of it. And it's a fine Book. It's a very fine book.

[B]

So this is gonna be one of these categories that'll stretch me. So I'm not sure yet what I'm gonna pick. Probably a literary biography. Well, I've got a stack of biographies here on the Romantics I need to read in preparation.

[C]

Well, the Madeleine Lengle series of books that we've talked about many times. They would fall into that.

[B]

You're right. Yes. I love the Circle of Quiet and the Madeline. I loved those books. I loved that. That's a. Yeah. I would highly recommend those. Cindy, you have anything to add to that?

[C]

No, I think we. I think we probably covered that. I mean, I don't think that's gonna be a hard category for people. People.

[B]

All right, so next we've got a devotional work, and that is intentionally vague how you want to interpret that. So. So, again, this could be anything from the book of Proverbs to a commentary to a modern devotional. I mean, if you really want to go Hogwall, you can be like my husband, who reads ancient church commentaries in Latin every morning. So you could. You could define devotional work in any number of ways. And again, I don't think that'll be a hard one after that. We've got a category that Cindy picked and was so. I was so excited because it's very close to my heart. Read a book about books.

[C]

Yeah, that's my favorite.

[B]

This is open to interpretation. Everything from the Shakespeare commentaries that Mr. Banks was mentioning. C.S. lewis is an experiment in criticism. If you want to go back and listen to the old podcast episodes of that, that's a book about books. I often recommend commentaries. So Goddard's commentaries on Shakespeare. If you like, pick up a Peter Leithart commentary. He's got commentaries on Shakespeare. He's got commentaries on the epics. Any of those would qualify as books about books. But if you're looking for something that maybe is not a commentary on specific books, something a little more general, I do have a recommendation. So, first, there was a book that kind of made the rounds in the last couple of years, like Gangbusters was How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster. That crazily became a best seller, which was exciting to me. People want to learn how to read. So that's just kind of a basic overview approaching different genres. And it's a mixed bag. Some people really liked it, and some people didn't. But anyway, that one kind of made the rounds and was popular. And that's a book about books. The book I'm Going to recommend, though, is a book I've been. I picked up on a whim and it just turned out to be delightful. This is put out by Yale University Press and the author is an English professor named John Sutherland and the book is called A Little History of Literature and it's part of that series they have. What's his name? Ian Gombrich's Little History.

[C]

Yeah, I was wondering about that. Okay.

[B]

Which I really enjoyed that too. So it's part of that series. So this is a book, again, highly recommend. It. It's an introductory look at the different time periods of literature. It goes through the whole history of literature from the very beginning to now and kind of just marks out what each time period was trying to do in terms of. Terms of form and the development of form, the themes and ideas that they were going to. Again, it's introductory that, you know, certainly there's more to be said about each of these things, but just in terms of a nice, brief, easily accessible, easily. I mean, super easy to read. Now this. This does not require a literature professor to read. This is for the general public. And it was a lot of fun and just really light and delightful and he had a really nice overview. If you're trying to figure out how all these books sort of fit together, this book will do that for you. So this is a little different than, say, a commentary, but it is a book about books. A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland.

[C]

If you've never read how the Heather Looks, and you've read a lot of books out loud to your children, British literature, British children's literature, then you don't want to miss how the Heather Looks. It's about a family who takes a trip to England and they go to all the places where the books take place. The Wind in the Willows, the Arthurian book, the Th. What is the. What is TH White. Yeah, TH White. His books. It just goes through all of these and they go from place to place. Narnia and Oxford and different Beatrix Potter country. And they take their children on this trip and it's absolutely wonderful. And also there's. Oh, sorry, go ahead, keep going, keep going. And then there's another author you can look for in this called Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. There are a couple that own bookstores and they've written several books about their life as bookstore owners.

[B]

Oh, right. And see, now that you mentioned it, yeah, there are these kind of genre bending books. So I'm thinking of like Rod Dreier's How Dante Saved My Life that is like half book about books and half memoir and it's about half. Reading this book sort of transformed him. I really enjoyed that book. So there are books like that too. So again, it's a wide variety there. The next on the list. And this is going to be a challenging one. A foreign book. Non Western.

[C]

Yeah, that non Western.

[B]

Really this is going to push us a little out of our comfort zone. So not just a French novel or a German novel, but something to push us. So possibly one of those Russian novels or a Japanese author or Chinese or African American.

[C]

Ah, silence. That would be. Wouldn't that be a non western book.

[B]

By Endo, what's his name?

[C]

Yeah, that guy.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

You know, I'm not gonna come up with the name or if you're looking.

[B]

For like a short, a short book, Things Fall Apart by the Ugandan author Chinhua Achebe. Chinwa Akabe.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

I read that years and years ago and really liked it. Very short. So just I think this will be a fun opportunity to sort of introduce us to some new perspectives and push us a little, stretch our can in just a bit.

[A]

This is by a South African author. It's a book I read in college, Cry the Beloved Country.

[C]

Oh, that's a wonderful book. That's a wonderful book.

[A]

That really is a wonderful book. It's about racial prejudice and reconciliation and it's also sort of a murder trial story and. And it's a lot of things. I guess I would say it's like imagine if Harper Lee had set the Mockingbird in apartheid era South Africa. Yeah, absolutely. A stunning book. And it's one I want to go back to again.

[C]

That book and To Kill a Mockingbird and Cry the Beloved were two books that, you know, I didn't want you to grow up and get out of my house without reading. Although I think Alex did, but he didn't.

[B]

Well, that's a huge recommendation I'm gonna have. I haven't read that. I own it. I'm gonna have to put that on my list. It's not very long either. I'm excited to see what our listeners are gonna choose for that category already they're having a great conversation with it over on the Facebook group. Alright, next. Now we're about halfway through the list now and if you're thinking, okay, these are hard, we threw in a fun one. The next category is a guilty pleasure book. So here's something that you just picked up and read and maybe you're a little embarrassed and it's not something you put on your Goodreads might not proudly put the picture on Facebook or Instagram. You know, next, right after you finished your Euripides play, you know, that one you'll proclaim so a guilty pleasure book. I don't know, Cindy, what kind of book are we talking about here?

[C]

Well, we just had someone on the Literary Life podcast say they had a guilty pleasure book they had written, they had read. They had read Jim Gaffin's wife's book, and he's a comedian. So they were like this. But she, she actually had a brain tumor. So it was. It didn't sound like a light reading, but she, you know, it was just her look at her life with this comedian. And I thought it sounded like a really wonderful book. But to her it was embarrassing. It was low brow. It was something that she felt guilty that she was claiming to have read. So, you know, I have, I try to do that on my Goodreads account. I try not to not put a book in because I'm embarrassed. I read it. I tried.

[B]

Do you have guilty pleasure books, Mr. Banks? I don't even.

[C]

I do.

[A]

I've read far too many books about histories or biographies of classic rock bands. So I've read. No, no, I have. I've read like three or four books about Led Zeppelin and that kind of thing. So maybe, maybe I'll revisit that. Something like that.

[B]

Okay, here's my. Here's my guilty pleasure admission. It wasn't this last year, but I read Aziz Ansari's Modern Romance and it was so good.

[C]

Like, serious.

[B]

Like the comedian and he got together with a sociologist and tried to examine modern dating and what it was like and had some fantastic conclusions just about what happens when the modern. So in our modern life, we have unlimited options. Right. And it creates this intense anxiety and paralysis. Like, can you even pick a shampoo bottle if there's 500 shampoo bottles to choose? Like, that kind of anxiety. And which is well documented. So this book looked at what happened when you apply that same model to courtship. And now you have unlimited options for a life mate and how that paralyzes you and fills you with all this intense anxiety. And it was fascinating, but again, it's not something I'd probably like proudly announce, but it was so much fun. I also read. As long as we're going with Guilty Confessions here, everyone knows I'm obsessed with the show the Office. I read both of Mindy Collings memoirs.

[C]

And did you like. Do you recommend them?

[B]

I thought they were hilarious and gave a lot of behind the scenes, office stuff. And she talked a lot about it, being a female Indian writer in Hollywood and what that was like and what her particular struggles are and how she didn't fit the Hollywood model.

[C]

So celebrity bio, that kind of thing.

[B]

Celebrity biographies, comedians on love and romance, and of course, you know, 70s and 80s rock band memoirs.

[C]

Well, Thomas, you might enjoy Dave Barry's book on bands. I forget what it's called, but it's.

[A]

I think I know the one you mean. And who's the other guy? And Chuck Klosterman, who writes a lot about growing up in the 80s in Minnesota and having nothing to do. But, yeah, listen to, you know, 80s, bad 80s metal and that kind. So, yeah, that kind of writing does appeal to me. I find, yeah, Dave Barry and Chuck Klosterman quite funny.

[C]

Yes, yes, Dave Barry is my favorite comedian.

[B]

Well, I'm hoping our. Our listeners at home are like, chuckling and breathing a sigh of relief that, yes, even we. Even the man here who reads Latin commentaries on the Bible every morning. We have our slum reading, too. I say that jokingly, but we have our guilty pleasure reads, too. It's not all highbrow. We're humans, and you can be, too. Now, of course, we're going to immediately go from guilty pleasure read to the next category. Read an intimidating book. You have a voice.

[C]

Mmm. Wow. That's gonna be tough.

[B]

It's gonna be very tough. I'm scared to say mine out loud because I do not want to read it this year, but any thoughts from you, too?

[C]

Well, the intimidating part is I have books that I have not gotten to yet because my, you know, life is short. But I'm trying to think of one that, like, I.

[B]

Well, the nice thing is that this is a great category to double up. If someone's been intimidated by a Russian, they could read a Russian novel. And that's. And then click off, you know, the non Western book and the intimidating book. Or if Shakespeare's been intimidating, you click off the Shakespeare and the intimidating. So this is a nice, nice one.

[C]

To double up with until we have Face. And I've read it, but a lot of people I know we're reading it in our book club this year, and a lot of people were like, yeah, I've always wanted to read that, but I'm scared to read it. And I think, you know, that would be an easier book to read. That's intimidating. But also.

[B]

But maybe an anxious Greek play has been intimidating. That could. That could be something that people have been very intimidated by. And this will be a good chance to knock that out.

[C]

Yeah. It doesn't have to be War and Peace. You don't have to pick the longest novel ever.

[B]

My personal book that I have just avoided is Moby Dick. And that's just because I don't want to waste the time on that fish.

[C]

I've avoided that also. So that might be one that I.

[B]

Don'T really want to read it this year. Another book I've avoided. And so I would say it's because I'm intimidated at the length. And that's Kristin, Laverne's daughter. Also spend six months crying. And I'm like, I can't take that kind of break from my life right now.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

I would love to be able to read that this year. That is a book I have been avoiding.

[C]

I've avoided Catcher in the Rye, but I don't want to read it.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. You do not have. It's again with Catcher in the Rye is one of those things. If you didn't read it as a teenager, like, there's really no point in reading it.

[C]

Oh, good.

[A]

That's what I. I mean, I read it and really liked it as a teenager. Tried to read it again five years later and then thought that this is.

[C]

Oh, no. I grew a little bit. Yeah.

[A]

Self obsessed and boring.

[B]

A few people on the discussion group mentioned that they might tackle Dante this year because of this category. That's been an intimidating book or maybe an epic Ovid.

[A]

Now I know what my intimidating book is. Okay. I've tried to read it more than once and fail. But Paradise Regained, the sequel to Paradise Lost.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, Christ himself is the hero. It's Christ's temptations in the wilderness. I've tried to read that more than once and it's shorter than Paradise Lost. It's actually not like a huge book.

[B]

No.

[C]

It isn't long and it definitely doesn't have the same oomph. I don't know.

[A]

Yeah, it's hard to make. I don't know, it's just hard to write about God as a character.

[B]

That's really tough.

[A]

Yeah. How do you write about omniscience and.

[D]

How do you make.

[B]

How do you make someone completely incapable of sin have any kind of tension and conflict in the story? Sure.

[A]

I mean, how do you make him believably divine and believably human? That's. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard.

[B]

Anyway, I have a feeling our listeners are. As soon as they read that category, a book came to mind. We all did. So after that, we got a lighter. Again, a satire. Now, again, you can choose your own level of difficulty for this. You can choose something big, like Gulliver's Travels. That's a satire. Or you can pick something really small, like Jonathan Swift's essay, A Swift Modest Proposal. So that's very short. Or the Battle of the Books is short. Or Northanger Abbey is a satire. What else, guys? Voltaire's Candide is a satire. That's pretty short.

[A]

Oh, well, I would say. Okay, could we count the Screwtape Letters as a satire?

[C]

Oh, yeah, let's do.

[A]

Yeah, I really.

[B]

That's honestly a satire and a devotional work.

[A]

So that's two cases. There you go. Yeah. Two birds with one stone. It's also one of Lewis's, I think, shorter books. It's a Larry novel, and it's really easy to read, and it's absolutely fascinating and quite funny, too.

[B]

That's a good one. Now, the next one was actually a recommendation from Cindy and not from the resident poet in our group. Cindy recommended that we read this year a complete volume of poetry by a single author. Cindy, tell us why you wanted that on the list.

[C]

Well, I don't think it necessarily has to be like their complete all. Everything they've ever written. But if you just pick one volume of poetry by one author, I think that sometimes is more helpful. I don't think it's always more helpful because we wouldn't have time to get around to all the great poems. But it is helpful to get to know someone really well and to start to get a feel for how they handle poetry and how they go about writing it. I think it teaches you a lot about poetry to stick with one book, one author. And you did that for a while. I did Yates last year, and I really enjoyed that a lot over the course of the year. I just read. It was like a devotional. I would get up every morning and read one of his poems, sometimes two or three. He wrote quite a lot.

[B]

This would be another great opportunity to scour used bookstores and Goodwill and thrift stores where you could find a single volume. You could do something like Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. That was a collection of poems from the two of them. They're separated. And so you get a sense of all of Wordsworth's vision there and all of Coleridge's vision in the early days, because that was what it was launching out. I know that Mr. Banks really liked Anthony Esselin's new book of poetry, that just came out.

[A]

Yes, I did the Hundredfold by Anthony Esselin, which.

[C]

Oh, I did not even know that came out.

[A]

Yeah, they came out maybe two months ago or something.

[C]

But Sally Thomas, I was just gonna.

[B]

Say, and Sally Thomas has a new collection of poetry coming out, the Motherland.

[C]

Motherland. Just Motherland, I think Motherland.

[B]

Yep. I saw the galley proofs for the, for the COVID on her Facebook. Yeah, that's another one. So this is a chance where you could again choose your level. You can go with a modern author. You can go something really old. You could do Shakespeare sonnets in any number of ways. You could go with that.

[C]

Oh, the sonnets are wonderful. That would be a good, great, great one.

[B]

That would really be. And again, you could read that aloud to your kids. A sonnet a day and you'd be done in no time. All right. Then we have again another kind of vague category, a book by a minor author. And you heard me talk about the beginning of the podcast, some of the minor authors I read. So we're talking about someone who's a high quality. This is literature, but not necessarily what you'd end up like in a survey class in college. Who are the people that are not going to be covered but are still worth our time to read? And I mentioned several of mine. Tom, who's a minor author, you would suggest.

[A]

A minor author. I would say, okay, this is right off the top of my head, a book I found really funny and I want to go back to again. It's called the Autobiography of a Cad by a Scottish author named A.G. macDonell who he wrote in the 1920s and 30s. And he was, he was kind of a hard bitten World War I veteran and he wrote a story which is in the form of a diary by this self justifying, just aristocratic jerk who goes from success to success in life and is completely unselfconscious of the fact that he always supports the, the wicked cause in history. And he always does the, he always does like, well, the caddish thing. And it's, yeah, it's a great sort of comic study of narcissistic pride, I guess, told from the point of view of someone who is proud of all the bad things he has done and doesn't really see them as bad things. So the Autobiography of a cad by A.G. macDonald.

[B]

That's funny. Cindy, do you have a minor author that you like?

[C]

Well, I love Elizabeth Gooch and I know a lot of our listeners, listeners love her too. She's a minor author. Ms. Reed, if you Want a short, easy, take you out of yourself book to live somewhere else? Like live in a little English village for a couple days or a couple hours? Ms. Reed is a great minor author. Those are. Those work for that Elizabeth. Yeah. Goosh. Yeah, G. Okay, that's how you say it.

[B]

Doesn't she write under a few different pins names?

[C]

I do not know.

[A]

She died maybe in the last. I mean, fairly recently, right? Or am I thinking of someone she.

[C]

May have died in, like the 1970s or 80s?

[A]

Okay, okay.

[C]

Now Ellis Peters writes under a few different.

[B]

That may be what I'm thinking of, Cindy.

[C]

Yeah, she writes under something similar. What is that? Edith?

[B]

That's right. That's exactly who I was thinking of.

[C]

Yes. Yes. And she has some excellent books under the name Edith Bargiter. I guess that's her name. Her actual name.

[B]

I think Ellis Peters is the pen name, but yes.

[C]

So she has some of those. She has some great historical fiction that she's written under the name Edith Bargainer.

[B]

Oh, wonderful. Look at that. We're just covering all these categories. This is great. So we go from minor author to our next category, a book by a class, female author. So again, I hope you'd notice with our list here, we are stretching our wings. It's not just gonna be all dead white guys here. We're gonna have some dead white girls too. And some dead non western people too. And a few living ones if I have to. So a classic female author. We just did Jane Austen, of course. So if you want a female author. The Victorians. You can't go wrong there. That's the heyday of your female writers. But you certainly can pick something older and more esoteric. Fanny Burney. I know some of you were reading Ann Radcliffe. There you go. But now Tom and I are both big, big fans of George Eliot. If you want to bite off a big challenge. Middlemarch. The Mill on the Floss, of course. Something small. Silas Mourner, which I kind of thinking I want to do on the podcast. We'll see because it's very fairytale. Ish. Of course, the Brontes, if you want a little more gothic.

[C]

Yes. I continually read. What's it called? The book. The Bronte book. Not Jane Eyre.

[B]

Wuthering Heights.

[C]

Wuthering Heights. Hoping that I'll like it this time.

[B]

I've read it five times. God bless her.

[C]

I still don't like it.

[B]

Her stuff is short. Agnes Gray and the Tenant of Wild Hill Hall.

[A]

Yeah, Agnes Gray. Actually, that's a book I read that a number of years ago and really, really liked it. It's. It's not quite as wild or terrifying as Wuthering Heights, say. It's a more domestic sort of novel. But you feel, you know all three Brontes better as a result of reading Agnes Grey, because it's actually about a governess in a not enviable situation who is employed in it by a family who does not treat her well.

[C]

But.

[A]

And that's. That's the story of the Brontes. I think all three of them were governesses at. At some point or other. And, yeah, it's almost like a biography of their common experience and it's really quite good.

[B]

All right, now, coming to the end here.

[D]

Three left.

[B]

So number 18. A book of essays. So, again, open to interpretation. It can be a collection of different sorts of essays. I have lots of books which are. Collection of essays, say, on a particular novel, which of course, would also be a book about books. Or you could pick a single author and his collected essays. So it can be topically arranged or by an author or by a time period. I know Mr. Banks loves his essays. Where would you recommend someone get started on picking up a book of essays?

[A]

I think a good general introduction is something like the Oxford Book of Essays, which you can get in paperback for 10 bucks, that has everyone from Francisco Bacon to a few contemporary writers writing today. I think Clive James is the latest author in that one. So the Oxford Book of Essays, which was edited by. I think it was edited by Joseph Epstein, actually. I would recommend that one. It has Hazlitt Lamb, Addison Coleridge and all the rest of them. So that's a great place to start. One kind of charming and whimsical book of essays, which is really not that old. I think it's written about 1995. It's called how to Travel with a Salmon and Other essays by Umberto Eco. Umberto Eco, who's famous mostly for his medieval murder mystery, the Rose. Name of the Rose. The Name of the Rose.

[C]

Oh, See, young people forget things also.

[B]

Yes, we do.

[A]

I can remember his name. I can't remember the title.

[B]

And I'm sitting here going, Christian Slater's movie. That was my contribution. There you go.

[A]

Oh, yeah, he was the mom. Right, of course. So anyway, this book, how to Travel With a Salmon, by Umberto Ego, who was. He was a professor. He studied semiotics and, like word origins. That was sort of his thing. So he was polyglot. I think he spoke something like eight languages. But this is just kind of a casual book of his. His Writing's mostly about travel and things like that.

[C]

I have a book of his called On Literature, which I started many times but have not.

[B]

I think I have that, too.

[C]

And I think that's just essays he's written over the years on literature and Wendell Berry. I am somebody who really likes Wendell Berry's nonfiction much better than I even like.

[B]

Well, that's a great suggestion. His essays are fabulous.

[C]

Yes, he really writes excellent essays. And if you. If you struggled with Wendell Berry, try his essays. I think you'll really like them.

[B]

Yeah, it's really interesting, Cindy, because you and I had completely opposite experiences. See, for me, I tried his essays and couldn't get into them until I read his novels. Then I felt like I understood his imagination and the world he lived in. And then I went back and read the essays and fell in love with them. And you. It was the opposite.

[C]

Yeah, I just love his essays. I just feel like that they're so balanced. He's trying to say some important things, but he never falls off the horse one way or the other. You know, I always tease people that I. First I fall off one way, and then I get up and fall off the other way. Oh, no, Wendell Berry is not.

[B]

Exactly. Exactly. That's gonna be a fun category. All right, now, this next one I'm really excited about. This was Mr. Banks's recommendation. Reread a book you read in high school. Now, an interesting conversation. Conversation started on the Facebook group about this, which was, well, what if you didn't read any books in high school? What if your education was just that bad? So I. And then. But they. But they solved the problem themselves, which was, let's read a book we should have read in high school. But I think the idea is here is really just reread something you read a long time ago. So, you know.

[C]

Yeah. So many books we read when we're too young to read, don't we? Like, you know, there are books that we. That's why I always say, don't rush your kids ahead because they're not gonna, like. Like Tom said, you're not gonna go back at my age and read, you know, a Catcher in the Rye. It's just silly. But if you're good, you know, if you. There might be a time when it touches you the right way. And so many people will say, oh, I did. That's why people rush to read to kill a mockingbird. 7th, 8th grade. And I think, what a waste. That is. Not the right time to read that book.

[B]

You'll be reading Children's literature in seventh grade.

[C]

Yes. And they're not gonna get every. Yes, it's gonna be a good book. And they're probably gonna say they liked it, but they're not gonna have gotten everything they could have gotten out of it. And then they're gonna say, oh, I read that. I read that.

[B]

Oh, maybe that's what I should reread. I think I read that in the eighth grade. Maybe that's what I should.

[C]

Oh, yes, yes, definitely.

[B]

I was thinking the Scarlet Letter, but I might. I might reread. I might reread that.

[C]

That's.

[B]

That's a good pick. Mr. Banks, is there one that's standing out in your mind that you haven't read since high school that you'd like to try again?

[A]

Actually, it's been mentioned already, but one I think I really do need to read again is Moby Dick, because, again, I don't think that high school kids should be assigned that Melville book necessarily. I think, honestly, that requires. I don't know. I just don't think. I think it would be a very rare student who is mentally and spiritually prepared to receive that book in a fruitful way. I certainly wasn't. I remember liking the. The action sequences and some of the technical descriptions of sailing and things like that, and all the sort of odd names that the characters had, and I guess you could say sort of the material flavor of the book. But I don't think I appreciated it allegorically at all. I just didn't understand it very well. So I think I might need to give Moby Dick another shot.

[B]

Cindy, is there one you're itching to get back to?

[C]

Not really. I mean, I have a lot of books I'm trying. I reread a lot this year. I'm really proud of that. But I don't know. I'm gonna have to think about this one for a while. I'm not gonna reread Gone with the Wind. I read it, like, five times in high school.

[B]

Yeah. So I'd say that the. The basic idea here is revisiting a book that you have not read in a really, really long time. Tina. Years, 20 years, something like that. So you don't literally have had to read it in high school, but maybe.

[C]

It would be a book like. Maybe like something like the Grapes of Wrath or, you know, something like that that maybe you didn't appreciate when you read it in high school.

[B]

Exactly. Kelly Cumby said something really interesting on the Facebook group that she was thinking about. Either Arthur Miller's Crucible or the Scarlet Letter, because she fell like when she read it in high school, she. She took it personally and took it as a personal attack against Christianity. And she was just mad at the books. And she's saying, you know, I think I'm gonna go back and give him a fair shake. I feel kind of the same way about the Scarlet Letter that I think what I think I, like, read it in the 9th or 10th grade and I was so. I mean, I had the moral universe frame. I had the moral framework of a 15 year old, and I was just like, well, adultery is wrong. Why do we even have this book? I think the nuances of what Hawthorne was trying to say was completely lost on me in the black and white universe I've lived in. I think I would really like to revisit it. It's probably gonna be a whole different book to me now. I mean, I don't think I'm gonna end it and say adultery's not wrong, but you know what I mean? Like, I don't think that was the point.

[C]

You're gonna understand why he used that theme. Yes, right.

[B]

Well, what he was trying to say about the Puritans. All right, now the last one, which is the second to last one on the graphic you have. So I'm sorry, I went out of order here. The last one is completely open to interpretation. And again, another one I'm excited about at the same time that I'm a little terrified about, and that is read an out of your comfort zone book. For me, that would be stop reading books about books. So I never read any kind of, like, science book or math or politics. I don't read anything like that. I'd have to. I'd have to pick any of those. Would be way out of my comfort zone. How about you, Cindy? What's out of your comfort zone?

[C]

Well, that's a good question.

[B]

I think you're more broadly read than I am.

[C]

I don't know. Right now I'm actually reading a book that's a little bit out of my comfort zone. I probably won't finish it before the year ends. It was given to me to review, and it's a book about Jordan Peterson. It's definitely out of my comfort zone.

[B]

Wait, it's a book about him?

[C]

Yes, it's a biography of Jordan Peterson, and I was given it as a advanced reading copy.

[B]

Oh, wow.

[C]

That is out of your comfort zone. It is. It's totally different than something I'd read, but I'm enjoying it. It's Quite well written. And I'm. I think it's called Savage Messiah or something like that. I don't want to get that wrong, but so far, so good. I'm enjoying it, but it is, you know, I don't just want to sit down and just, oh, you know, this is. I have to really say, okay, this is a job I'm doing to read this. But thankfully, every time I sit down to read it, I really enjoy it. It is a biography and a memoir, in a way. It's a biography. So, you know, those. Generally, biographies can be interesting, even if you're not comfortable with the person or you're not sure if you're comfortable.

[B]

Right. So that's an easy way to get a couple of categories in. Right. Choose a biography of somebody that you wouldn't necessarily.

[C]

Yes. Like if you weren't a fan of the Obamas. Maybe the Michelle Obama biography or something like that.

[B]

No, exactly.

[C]

That would be something I would read. That would be out of my comfort zone.

[B]

Right. So pick a political position that's not yours and read a book about it or about a person. And I actually think that's really good. You know, I don't think we should be so fragile in our beliefs that we're scared of reading books that challenge us. And sometimes really being able to sort of see through the eyes of other people is helpful to understanding.

[C]

Yeah, it really is. We need to be able to generalize. This is the problem with a fragmented culture. We're so fragmented, we have no generalizations. And when you don't have a generalization, you can't communicate. So we have to find the general places where we are and not just say, let's fragment ourselves to our very. The minutest belief we have so that we can't basically get along with anybody but ourselves.

[B]

Exactly. So an out of your comfort zone book could be a different genre than you normally read, a different time period than you normally read, a different perspective.

[C]

Yeah. Maybe you hate science fiction or, you know.

[B]

Exactly. Or old books or new books.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Mr. Banks, what would be an out of your comfort zone book?

[A]

Okay, it's out of my comfort zone, but I'm also really looking forward to it. So there is a Hungarian novelist who I've never actually read before, named Magda Djabo. S, Z A B, O. So Magda Jabo appearing in English for the first time is for. Not novel, Abigail, which is a mythic novel set in a girls school in Hungary during World War II.

[B]

Oh, this sounds so good.

[A]

So this is. I just read Like a blurb about this online and the book will be out I think in early 2020. So in a couple months here it's published by New York Review of Books Classics. And it's about a Hungarian girl who is sent away by her father while he goes off to the Eastern front to this very strict girls school I think in Budapest or outside of Budapest. And she does not fit in there. She is kind of rebellious, doesn't like to follow the rules and starts to find that the only friend she has is this mythic statue you of a woman called Abigail that comes alive. And anyway, so it was described as hints of Harry Potter, but also of Virginia Woolf. Anyways, I just read that. So Abigail by Magda Jabo. I read the blurb and I thought I have to read this book even though I don't read stuff like, oh.

[B]

No, I want to read this.

[A]

I don't read Hungarian books to begin with. I don't really know anything about hunger Hungarian literature, but this one kind of caught my eye.

[B]

That sounds really good. Alright, so that is the 20 for 2020 reading challenge. Those 20 categories. And so you can head over to our website or the Facebook page and get the graphic for this and the printable PDF. We will be coming back to this list throughout the year. We'll be shaping a lot of the podcast reading we do around these categories and we'll also be checking in with how we're doing with our reading and how you're doing with your reading as we go through the year to sort of encourage us us and keep us motivated and excited about our reading. I am really looking forward to this next year of reading and with the podcast and reading with you guys here and all and you guys at home. Cindy, you got any last thoughts to express as we close out 2019?

[C]

Well, it's been a great year for us at this podcast and we've grown as people and we've just had so much fun talking about to all of you and I cannot wait. You guys feel free to start talking about whatever you want. If you're on your book reread of the book you read in high school, go ahead and talk about it and we'll talk about it with you. Feel free to comment all along. No rules on when you can say what you want to say about which book you're reading. We'd love to all hear that and I just really appreciate all of our listeners. It's just been very gratifying to be able to talk about books and have people talk back.

[B]

Absolutely and I completely agree, 2019 has been a tremendous year for us. We are so grateful to all of you who are listening to this podcast and in this journey with us, we have absolutely loved our literary lives this year. We especially thank our Patreons, our friends and family who continue to support with their resources this podcast so we can continue talking about books which we love. Honestly, I just pinch myself every day that I get to do this for a living. So thanks so much and consider joining the Patreon to support us if you like our work here. And of course as always head on over to itunes or Stitcher or anywhere where you get your podcasts and subscribe, rate and review and we will see you next year for happy reading. Mr. Banks, any final thought for me.

[A]

This has been a very good year and I have very much appreciated being on the show. So thanks once again to both of you and thanks to all the listeners for tuning in and supporting us. This has been wonderful.

[B]

It really has. So thanks so much guys. Happy New Year. A blessed year to all of you in your reading lives. Happy reading and we will leave you with a Thomas Banks poem and we will see you next year. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[E]

Ring Out Wild Bells by Alfred Lord Tennyson Ring out wild bells to the wild sky, the flying cloud, the frosty light, the year is dying in the night Ring out wild bells and let him die Ring out the old, ring in the new Ring happy bells across the snow the year is going let him go Wring out the false, ring in the true, Ring out the grief that saps the mind for those that hear, we see no more Ring out the feud of rich and poor Ring in redress to all mankind Ring out a slowly dying cause and ancient forms of party strife Ring in the nobler modes of life with sweeter manners, purer laws Wring out the the want, the care, the sin, the faithless coldness of the times. Ring out. Ring out my mournful rhymes. But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood the civic slander and the spite. Ring in the love of truth and right. Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease. Wring out the narrowing lust of.

[A]

Of gold.

[E]

Ring out the thousand wars of old. Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free the larger heart, the kindlier hand. Ring out the darkness of the land. Ring in the Christ that is to be.