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Eddie Hood
I want to share with you a few books that I've been reading lately that I think will really help you, hopefully to get more out of the fiction that you're reading. I've been diving into Less by Andrew Sean Greer and Artemis by Andy Weir. Now here's the concept of this week's episode. I always give every book 50 pages before I make a decision as to whether it's worth reading all the way through because I don't have time to read every book and I want to make sure that I read books that absolutely move me. One of these books is absolutely moved me and I'll tell you why. And the other one just did not. And I'll tell you why. Let's get into it. Welcome to this week's episode of the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating foreign welcome back to the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and this is the 99th episode of the show. I'm so honored to be here with you and I'm just so pleased that the community is growing and that we're talking about books that matter, that sort of help us feel more connected to life and who we are as human beings. That's why we're reading these books. Well, I get asked all the time why I will put a book down, because a lot of people feel like once they start a book, they have to finish it. And I talk all the time on the show about my 50 page rule. Some people have a 10% rule, whatever it might be. Once you get to a specific point in a book, you really do benefit by making a judgment about whether that book is worth continuing to read. There are millions of books out there and your life is a finite amount of time. And so it really is a good idea to find your way into the books that will make a difference for you. Not all of them will. Right. So I picked up and I'm behind the times on this one, but this is less. It's a story about Arthur Les. This is his picture here on the COVID It's a man in a blue suit. His blue suit is actually quite famous in the story and he is falling down through the sky on the COVID of this book and he's writing. So Arthur Les, the main character, the protagonist, is a gay author who is trying to avoid the marriage of his lover who is now getting married to somebody else. And he's so emotionally upset about this that he turns to his inbox and. And goes and accepts every invitation to speaking engagements, to conventions, no matter how humiliating, around the world, just so that he can avoid going to this wedding and have an excuse. Now, that might sound like a weird premise for a story, but I'll get back to you in just a moment about how I felt about this book and what it meant to me. The other book is Artemis. Artemis is written by Andy Weir. He is the author of the Martian. So if you've seen that really great movie with Matt Damon in it where he gets stuck, you know, on Mars or whatever and has to find his way back, that book, the Martian is just a fantastic, high concept, really well written book. And so Andy Weir's second book, Artemis, really caught a lot of eyes, a lot of attention. Because the idea with this book is that there is sort of a heist, a big sort of not a bank robbery kind of thing, but a big heist that takes place on the moon. It's action packed. It's got this female protagonist who's gritty and intelligent and strong and on and on. And I'll tell you about what I thought about this book, but before I sort of render my judgment on how I felt, I want to point out that you might feel differently about these books than I do. How you experience your fiction relates to who you are, where you come from, what you value and so on. But I want to share with you something that I feel is pretty universal because whether you relate to characters or not, or whether the plot makes sense to you, again, that that has a lot to do with who you are. But I think we all share a few similar traits. At our core, we are human beings and we want to read stories that entertain us. But it's not enough to be entertained with big, high concept ideas like car crashes or fast plot driven novels or just action, action, action, action, action. Those books that are just action can often make us feel a little empty when we read them because they're lacking the human experience, that connection that makes us go, huh? That's what it means to be living this weird and crazy life. And so it's wild to me that you can read a book that would seem absolutely boring, but just has you turning pages because it's written from the human perspective. This can be in any genre, from Western to romance to thriller to memoir, right? If it comes at you with that human experience, you will turn the pages because it's helping you better understand yourself. That's the point of a good book. One, to entertain. But two, as you read it, the goal is to help you, as the reader, think, would I do that? Would I feel that way? Would I be impacted that way? Or how would I respond? If you never have those questions, if the book's not written in a way to make you ask those questions, it's just action, action, action, car bomb, explosion, whatever. It gets a little boring and old. And you would think that those big explosive moments would keep you entertained. But often they don't, right? Often they don't. So let's talk about these books and why they worked or did not work for me. So Less by Andrew Sean Greer. This is. This won the Pulitzer Prize in, I believe, 2012. Again, it's the story of an author traveling the world. And there are no, no major action focused events in this. And I was absolutely riveted. I loved Less by Anderson Greer. Now, here's why. The protagonist, his name's Arthur Less, is a guy who's about to turn 50 years old. And as he's going through this experience of trying to avoid the wedding of the man that he has loved for years and years and years by plunging himself into distraction, that's something many of us can relate to. We have been in love, we've had our hearts broken. We've tried to distract ourselves and pretend like things we care about aren't happening so that we don't have to experience that pain. And to give you an example of this, there are many moments in this book that should be low concept. For example, there's a point in the book where Les is just like in a bathtub. And he's just laying there and. And he's sort of like just experiencing his body. And he's getting older and he's processing what it means to be getting closer and closer to 50 years old. Now, it's pointed out that at 50, you're not old, but you are definitely not 20 anymore. And so Les is trying to grapple with this concept of how he lost his youth and why his body's changing and how he feels about it. And if this kind of scene is written poorly, it can be just like emotional baggage. But Andrew Sean Greer is a phenomenal writer, and he does it in such a way that makes you feel as though you're in that bathtub and you're assessing your own life. And so it's this really beautiful thing to read this book and feel like you're walking along with Arthur Les, the Protagonist. And you're asking yourself these similar questions. So the questions this book explores are, one, how do I feel about my own personal life as I arc through my time on this earth? Right. Me, personally, I'm about to turn 45. So maybe that's also why this book is very meaningful to me, because I'm at a similar time in my life. I'm not quite 50 yet, but I'm getting there. And with how fast time goes, it will be here soon. So I often feel the same things Arthur felt. As I see my body change, as I process my emotions about what's important, what's not important, as I try to get deeper into my relationships with the people that I care about. These questions are really sort of central to what it means to live an examined, beautiful, well, life. So I loved it. It was just a wonderful book. And I got to page 50 and I just. I just kept going. I couldn't put it down. I absolutely loved it. Now, my mantra here is to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. I really did my best to read this book slowly and try to feel what Arthur was feeling, experience the pain, the joy, the wonder, the heartache, all of that stuff. I can honestly tell you I've got this giant beanbag in my office. When I closed the COVID of the book, I just held it in my hands and I literally fell into the beanbag and just like laid there for 10 minutes trying to process what I had just gone through. Somebody left a really great comment for me on my YouTube channel talking about how she goes through what she calls a book hangover, which is that at the end of a book, she needs time to process what she's read before she goes into the next book. These emotions sort of hang over her and she has to work through them. Definitely had to do that with Andrew Shan Greer's book Less. Now there is a sequel with our protagonist, Arthur Less. I am so excited to get into that next. Yeah, very, very good book. Now let's move on to Artemis by Andy Weir. I think again, Andy had a huge amount of success with the Martian, but Artemis just didn't do it for me. I got about halfway through and I'm really struggling to finish it. And I want to tell you why. I got to the 50 page mark. I decided to keep going because I had faith in the Martian and where that had gone, but I couldn't connect with this book. There were lots of things happening in Artemis that should make it interesting. The setting is on the moon. We have this really sort of strong, gritty, intellectually driven protagonist that is this woman who just can think on her feet in ways most humans can't. And she's caught up in this heist on the moon to win a million. It's not dollars. There's its own currency on Artemis. That Artemis is the base on the moon, by the way, but they have their own currency and she's about to get rich if she can pull off this heist. So it's a really high concept novel. It should be a page turner, right? But for me, it's not. And the reason why is because the main character, the protagonist, her name's Jazz J A Z Z. That's at least her nickname. Her full name is Jasmine. She is so gritty and she is so. It's like listening to locker room talk for teenage boys in the junior high. She's very, very much like a teenage boy. There's no feminine energy in her at all. This is really hard to connect with her. And she doesn't do anything good or kind that I've been able to see yet. So she's not a super likable character outside of her intelligence. Right. But from what I can tell, her main motivation is she just wants money. She wants to get rich. And there's a lot of sex in the book related to her body and her physicality and stuff. So she's very sexualized. Again, this is not a knock on the book itself. What I'm trying to point out is that if we could build into this story the sense of what it means to be human, right? To somehow connect with how Jaz is processing these feelings and what it means to be a woman on this base and having to deal with things and so on would have been a really powerful leap for this book. But instead it's just action, action, action, action, along with her sort of locker room talk and sexual activity in the background. So I just couldn't connect with it. Absolutely couldn't connect with it. And I've decided that I'm not going to finish that book. So that's how I process reading fiction. I at 50 pages, I know whether I like the protagonist enough to stick with his or her story for the next 200 to 300 or 400 pages. Look, it takes what, 10, 20 hours, depending on how quickly you read or how slowly you read, to enjoy a book. Now, I'm not reading quickly to get through it. I want to enjoy it. So I'm going to slow down. That means I'm going to spend time with people like Arthur Less or Jazz. And I really like to spend time with people that I like. And if I'm in a room with people that I don't feel comfortable around, I tend to find ways to get out of that room quickly and find my people. So that's the nice thing about fiction. Fiction is a chance for you to meet new people. And every book is the same on page one. It's like meeting a new person in the elevator. You don't know anything about that person. You don't know where they come from. And it is a giant mystery. Have you ever done that? Have you ever. Have you ever walked down the street and thought about all these random people walking past you and wondered what their story is, who they are, who they've loved, how they've been hurt, what they're going through right now, what excites them, what scares them, how they're living financially and so on. Everybody has a unique world that they're living in, and we get stuck in our own world so often that we fail to remember that there are just billions of other worlds right now walking past us on a day to day basis. That's the beauty of fiction. We get to jump into one of those worlds and see life from a different perspective. So I highly recommend Anderson Greer's Lesson. I think you'll really enjoy going through the experience of being human with the beautiful and fun protagonist, Arthur Less. It is a great book. So that's it. That's my spiel for today. I hope you enjoy fiction as much as I do. And until next time, as always, remember to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. I'll see you next time. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well podcast.